Things to Come

 

Welcome!

Voodoo Dolly here (that's me there on the left) with more news about the company and what they're up to.  Yesterday was a big meeting, while we all run and around and figure out who's doing what.  That's expected for a young company (or a company rising from slumber!) but it looks like an awesome team has been put together!  Expect to hear more about that in the future!

But you're all probably wondering what I'm going to talk about now, and that's about some of the projects in the work now, and some that may be coming down the pipe later.  So let's get on with it, shall we?

The Advanced Story Point System (ASPS)
This is our pride and joy.  It can be best described as a game engine which will allow you to quickly craft shells that are tailored to the game you want to run.  The premise is that the engine itself doesn't change, it remains constant, but the pieces that you choose to connect to the engine are unique to the kind of game you want to run, and the feel of the game itself.  The shell is modular, giving you as the person running the game some quick and easy choices for what you want for backgrounds, attributes, and abilities, which all plug into the engine seamlessly.  The way you do this is by putting together a character sheet.  What you plug into the character sheet dictates how the game is going to run.  If you are familiar with the game, you can construct a brand new character sheet in a few minutes, and that's the shell of your game done and ready for whatever flavour you want to add to the setting - the mechanical part is done.

Most of the games that will be coming out will be using the ASPS engine, which of course means it will be the first thing out the door.  I'll give you a few examples of future projects using ASPS so you can get a feel for just how versatile it is.

Keepsakes (ASPS and Chance System)
This was formerly known as Widdershins, but since we've handed the name Widdershins over to a very deserving game, we've decided to change the name of our game. Keepsakes is an urban fantasy game and has just a tint of horror to it.  You play animated toys, lost and forgotten by your owners, who now have a life of their own and have dedicated themselves to protecting their former owners.  The game's focus is on the toys (called Widdershin), their adventures, and the trials they face against a number of enemies such as the dangerous Hollow Ones (dark parodies of the Widdershin), Bogeys (shadow beings grown monstrous), and the Green Folk (unearthly and alien things that lurk in the woods and are never seen or remembered).

Fox Magic (ASPS)
The original Fox Magic uses the SPS engine — the precursor to the ASPS engine.  We're fleshing the game out, adding more options, greater detail, more adversaries, and expanding this game about magical Japanese foxes to step beyond Japan's borders.  The game will look at Korean foxes, Chinese shapeshifters, trickster fox spirits from Europe, and Coyote spirits from North America.

Fantasia Aternis (ASPS)
Fantasia brings with it the feel of 8-bit JRPGs, providing you the tools to create your own JRPG.  It will provide a host of abilities to create the core classes for your game, or you can allow the players to pick their own abilities and create unique classes of their own.  The focus is on getting the proper feel of the old JRPGs such as Final Fantasy VI, Lufia, and Dragon Quest.  It will come with its own setting, but you can easily shift it to whatever setting you want, from raw fantasy up to steampunk and magitech.

Trois Portes:  Wyvern (ASPS)
And finally, TP:W is the beginning of a line of books for the fictional city of Trois Portes.  Each book will focus on one of the supernatural races found in the city (which is just the focal point for the campaign setting), including a bloodline of magicians, vampires, faeries, shape shifters, and demigods.  With Wyvern, you're playing a wyvern pack - assassins, spies, and soldiers serving the ancient dragons who hide among society.  You need to balance your loyalties to your pack, to dragonkind as a whole, and to your master.

Cloak and Dagger (ASPS)
Cloak and Dagger deals with the spy business.  This supplement largely focusses on building a spy agency, and the spies who work for it.  Unlike games like Fantasy Aternis or Wyvern, this supplement is made to plug into nearly any setting you can imagine, from kingdom politics to cold war spygames to futuristic cyberpunk missions in the shadows.  The game is deliberately open ended to allow you to pick your own setting to play with.

Crossovers!
The fun thing about the ASPS engine is that you can run crossovers without having to change a thing.  Each game functions on its own shell, but since it uses the same core engine, you can simply move your character from one game or setting to the next without changing the sheet.  Yeah, you're going to have your own unique abilities, your own unique attributes, you may have races or classes or nations or any of that other stuff - but that's backdrop to detail what your character can do, and will allow you to play in any other ASPS setting almost perfectly as-is.

So, every ASPS product you get expands on your options, without having to deal with bloat.  You're not going to get a dozen new abilities or races which your players must have, but you will be given ideas and options which you can steal liberally for your own campaigns.

Like what you see?  Please consider supporting us on Patreon!  Your support will ensure we can give our creators, writers, editors, and artists proper funding.  The money goes to support our staff and our vision.  We'd love to see you there!

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