Announcement from Free League Publishing

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

I have to admit to being a sucker for the marketing too. I want the deluxe edition in the tin box because... umm... because... "reasons"...

Ha ha! Me too. I showed my wife the deluxe box set, and the $40 price difference, and her response was, "so the only difference is the metal box?"

I stammered, "Um, yeah, doesn't it look cool? And it's sturdier!"

She was behind me but I could almost feel her eyes roll.

[sellanraa]

Sheesh, you all are making me want to upgrade to the metal box!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

And I'll tell you, the desire to buy it has not diminished. Talking with other people who have been long term fans of certain GDW RPGs, they want the deluxe set as well.

SO...
I'm not just a victim of marketing, it seems I'll be a victim of peer group pressure as well haha!

[kcdusk]

Has anyone used the Alien RPG rules set, thoughts?

[Raellus]

I splurged on the deluxe box. My thinking is that it won't be available after the Kickstarter closes, so now's the time or I'm going to miss out. Most of my regrets in life -thankfully, not a long list- are things I haven't done. Is a metal box worth $40 more than a cardboard one? Probably not, but it's cooler, and a bit more special, so I just thought, "why not treat yo' self"? I can always pick up the regular box set later, but the same isn't true of the deluxe edition.

Next stretch goal is an expanded gear list; I really hope it gets unlocked. After that, it's base-building rules. Color me intrigued.

-

[Olefin]

went in on the kickstarter too - now lets see if they will add some of things Raellus and I published as sourcebooks for V4 as add ons

I'm actually gonna down grade from the metal tin and get two sets of the regular RPG, plus Ref screen. Extra maps, tokens, another player's manual to hand out, and more dice, seem like they will be very useful when it comes time to run an actual F2F game (once this COVID thing is sorted out).

Most of my D&D 5e players haven't played TW2K, so having an extra boxed set to kick things off and help get TW2K into the rotation will be good. Once they play a few sessions and get into it, they can order a set for themselves if they want.

I've run two 5e campaigns for new 'don't even own a PHB' interested D&D players and the first few sessions require lots of PHB passing, dice sharing, and token/avatar imagination (so your PC is the green six sided die and Bob's PC is the Red d8, correct?)...

After the third session, things typically shift with shiny new PHBs, Wyrmwood dice towers, D&D Beyond on iPads, and Hero Forge minis suddenly in abundance...

Speaking of Hero Forged miniatures - have they mentioned what scale the maps will be?

[wolffhound79]

I finally know what to give to myself for my birthday today!!! Im excited to see the base guide and various items. Im debating between the tin or not. LOL

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Originally Posted by kcdusk

Has anyone used the Alien RPG rules set, thoughts?

My gaming group is not a fan of the Year Zero rules, mostly because they're a bit too lightweight for some of the games we enjoy. Plus most of us are not fans of gimmicky dice sets (of which, Year Zero makes us of).
One of the group is a mad Alien fanboy, has been since the first time he saw the first movie. Bought the first Alien RPG, didn't like the Phoenix Command rules system it used so he made his own rules system inspired by some other games he'd played.

He wanted the Free League edition of Alien from the moment he heard about it, so much so that he got the special version or whatever it was.
When it finally arrived, he phoned me to talk about it because he was dead keen on running an Aliens game.
He told me the book was gorgeous to look at but the rules... the rules system was... lacklustre... he described them as "a hot mess".
He decided to run a Call of Cthulhu game instead.

[Tekrat04]

Found this on the comments from the Kickstarter.

Originally Posted by Victory Condition Games

Do you have questions about the edition of Twlight:2000? Join me tomorrow at 1PM EDT/10 AM PDT as I chat with Tomas from Free League and answer viewer questions! https://youtu.be/gq8aXbdMHtI
(This is will be available for viewing after if you can’t join us live.)

[Raellus]

Pleased to see the Expanded Gear stretch goal was unlocked. I'm curious to see what the Base Building rules look like. It seems like something that doesn't really require rules, per se, but I'd like to see what they come up with.

[comped]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Pleased to see the Expanded Gear stretch goal was unlocked. I'm curious to see what the Base Building rules look like. It seems like something that doesn't really require rules, per se, but I'd like to see what they come up with.

Considering they need a little bit over $35,000 more, and they have well over two weeks left oh, I suspect that they definitely will hit that goal. Now if they smash through the remaining goal is anyone's guess, but given the amount of money they continue to get per day I don't think it's out of the question.

[Olefin]

Question will be will they start to engage people like me and Alf to write or adapt our modules for the new system so they will have some quick releases to add to what has already been promised with what has been raised. And will the extra gear be a new book or added to existing base information release?

[comped]

Originally Posted by Olefin

Question will be will they start to engage people like me and Alf to write or adapt our modules for the new system so they will have some quick releases to add to what has already been promised with what has been raised. And will the extra gear be a new book or added to existing base information release?

From what they said about the gear, it's going to be simply added to the base book. As for their plans with the system... I can't answer because I don't know the answer. But they seem to have not a hell of a lot of material for their previous books, even years after they publish the core. I doubt they have much of a plan to release additional material immediately, although it would be nice if it was. With their plans to make this version of Twilight able to have community-written and sold modules and expansions for money, I suppose that might be a more cost-effective way to do so.

[Olefin]

I know he is open to fan releases but the question is would those be considered canon that others could build on? Or are they only planning to release the original material for print and after that the only releases would be pdf's written by fans - which could make things a little chaotic to say the least.

i.e. so you would have a baseline timeline - and after that its up for grabs

[Olefin]

Ok just got told the community releases wouldnt be canon - i.e. so fan releases or stuff released on the community boards arent canon - and that the only canon release so far besides the box and its contents is the ANZAC Sourcebook that Legbreaker is working on

I hope they get to work on more than that - i.e. one thing that made the game such a hit when it was originally released was how the world kept expanding with new canon releases that you could build on logically for a campaign

Thats why I could release my book the way I did - it builds on previous canon and is a logical part of the earlier "Iran" modules and cites the material released for the French in V2.2.

But in many ways it may not matter - frankly what Raellus has released even though its not "official canon" is just as good as anything ever canon released - and if there is anything you could build whole campaigns on and more releases on its his Korean Sourcebook

[Raellus]

Although it's disappointing on a personal level (I have a bit of skin in the game), crowd-sourcing content for T2k is a brilliant strategy by Free League. They don't have to lift a finger but they still get a cut of the profits. To be fair, this is fast becoming a standard industry practice, so they're just getting ahead of the curve.

A bigger, more general concern, though, is quality control. Are they seriously going to carefully vet every single fan-generated submission? Even if they do, the signal-to-noise ratio could make it difficult to sort the good stuff from the bad.

-

[Olefin]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Although it's disappointing on a personal level (I have a bit of skin in the game), crowd-sourcing content for T2k is a brilliant strategy by Free League. They don't have to lift a finger but they still get a cut of the profits. To be fair, this is fast becoming a standard industry practice, so they're just getting ahead of the curve.

A bigger, more general concern, though, is quality control. Are they seriously going to carefully vet every single fan-generated submission? Even if they do, the signal-to-noise ratio could make it difficult to sort the good stuff from the bad.

-

I share your concern Raellus - especially since fan generated submissions could very well end up contradicting each other - a point in fact would be the Kenya submission you did in the original fanzine versus what I released later - or the fan content for the 7th Engineers that is on several fan canon modules on the Facebook groups. Its great work but the actual Engineering unit for the 7th Light Inf is the 13th Engineers - the 7th was assigned to the 5th in Poland - i.e. it was part of what got destroyed at Kalisz and was never in Korea - so you could easily get very contradictory releases

[comped]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Although it's disappointing on a personal level (I have a bit of skin in the game), crowd-sourcing content for T2k is a brilliant strategy by Free League. They don't have to lift a finger but they still get a cut of the profits. To be fair, this is fast becoming a standard industry practice, so they're just getting ahead of the curve.

A bigger, more general concern, though, is quality control. Are they seriously going to carefully vet every single fan-generated submission? Even if they do, the signal-to-noise ratio could make it difficult to sort the good stuff from the bad.

That's the main issue with all community driven content sources - quality is often lacking to an extreme degree in comparison to official material.

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by comped

That's the main issue with all community driven content sources - quality is often lacking to an extreme degree in comparison to official material.

There's less of an excuse for that now than there was in the early days of fan pages (B.J. Zanzibar, anyone?) and zines before them. Spell checkers are mature technology, grammar checkers are getting better every year, and the monthly licensing for Adobe Creative Cloud has put professional-grade desktop publishing software within the reach of almost any hobbyist. The tools can't replace professional training and experience, but past a certain point, low quality is the mark of a sloppy work ethic, inattention to detail, a fundamental failure to master high school language arts, or someone who just doesn't have very good ideas.

- C.

[comped]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

There's less of an excuse for that now than there was in the early days of fan pages (B.J. Zanzibar, anyone?) and zines before them. Spell checkers are mature technology, grammar checkers are getting better every year, and the monthly licensing for Adobe Creative Cloud has put professional-grade desktop publishing software within the reach of almost any hobbyist. The tools can't replace professional training and experience, but past a certain point, low quality is the mark of a sloppy work ethic, inattention to detail, a fundamental failure to master high school language arts, or someone who just doesn't have very good ideas.

- C.

And while that all may be true, if you look at the community markets for most of the major games that have them... the quality is somewhat lacking for the majority of the content up for sale. There's good, but the question is how much of it will be good?

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by comped

And while that all may be true, if you look at the community markets for most of the major games that have them... the quality is somewhat lacking for the majority of the content up for sale. There's good, but the question is how much of it will be good?

If you have to ask the question, the answer has already beaten you into resignation with comma errors, randomly-placed capitalization, sentence fragments, hoard/horde and ordnance/ordinance substitutions, and terminal inability to comprehend the difference between a possessive apostrophe-s and a plural -s.

- C.

[Olefin]

Originally Posted by comped

And while that all may be true, if you look at the community markets for most of the major games that have them... the quality is somewhat lacking for the majority of the content up for sale. There's good, but the question is how much of it will be good?

And a lot of fan content and community releases have all kinds of continuity errors

Mexican troops that are armed with Soviet tanks and armored vehicles instead of what canon releases say they are armed with (City of Angels anyone)

No fact checking that produces units that were assigned to Europe being in Korean instead

Timelines that directly contradict canon in multiple ways or are alternate timelines but not presented as such and thus you have people going huh? as they read it not realizing it was an alternate

Add in that kind of stuff and it very quickly gets to be a confusing mess about what is canon, what isnt and even what happened on what date and what unit is where and armed with what

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Olefin

No fact checking that produces units that were assigned to Europe being in Korea instead.

In their defence, plans do get altered and units reassigned as priorities shift, so it's possible a unit intended of Europe pre-war could be sent elsewhere due to a pressing need for troops or transportation limitations/requirements.

However, units which have already been described in canon sources shouldn't be messed with. Tweak them a little, have detachments on long range patrols, etc, but don't go shifting them half a continent or more.

[Raellus]

Another Kickstarter stretch goal met = base-building rules unlocked.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I really am caught on the horns of a dilemma here.
Having checked out some of the other Year Zero games, I really do not care for the rules system (I thoroughly dislike the use of gimmick dice for example) and I don't see it being suitable for the depth of gaming that I want for a post-apocalypse setting such as T2k.
However I do want to see the material they create because it's a fresh take on the world setting and it can always be converted over to a system I would prefer to use.

So I'm quite torn - support the kickstarter for a rules set I don't like and would never use or give the whole thing a miss and pass on some potentially new and great material?

And for the life of me (for reasons I cannot explain) I do actually like that metal box and want it!

[Targan]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

I really am caught on the horns of a dilemma here.
Having checked out some of the other Year Zero games, I really do not care for the rules system (I thoroughly dislike the use of gimmick dice for example) and I don't see it being suitable for the depth of gaming that I want for a post-apocalypse setting such as T2k.
However I do want to see the material they create because it's a fresh take on the world setting and it can always be converted over to a system I would prefer to use.

So I'm quite torn - support the kickstarter for a rules set I don't like and would never use or give the whole thing a miss and pass on some potentially new and great material?

And for the life of me (for reasons I cannot explain) I do actually like that metal box and want it!

I feel similarly to you, but I'm falling on the side of not going to support the kickstarter. I am interested in their take on the setting, but I'd rather pull out my fingernails with pliers than use that rules system.

[Olefin]

the more I think about that rules system and other things I have been hearing the more I am wondering just how many other changes have been made for V4 that may make it almost unrecognizeable from V1 and V2.2.

Also if this is going to be just a one shot release or an actual supported game with follow on releases that are official and not just depending on the fans to support the game

[comped]

Originally Posted by Olefin

the more I think about that rules system and other things I have been hearing the more I am wondering just how many other changes have been made for V4 that may make it almost unrecognizeable from V1 and V2.2.

Also if this is going to be just a one shot release or an actual supported game with follow on releases that are official and not just depending on the fans to support the game

Even from what is publicly available from previous settings, never mind what info they have on the kickstarter, points to the rules - at the very least - as being completely different, and far lighter, than anything we've officially seen before.

And, at least in terms of post-release support, their other games seem to have a few adventures for them, not really any traditional sourcebooks. So this might be, depending on the sales, only community supported - and officially on their marketplace, at least, depending on how long FFE lets the license last.

[Olefin]

and will be quite interesting how community content is seen by Tomas and the community as a whole - if there are few or no other canon releases after the initial set who will be the one that says what is canon and what isnt? there have been a lot of arguments on here and other boards about that over the years

or will V4 be something that is more free form and after the initial release the canon is what you make of it as to the community releases - so for instance to apply it to current releases the 173rd could be in Kenya or Europe or Central America or never even been formed for V4 - it would all depend on what version of the community content you choose to use