Today we have everyone's favorite sort of update, one with pretty pictures! Up until now, all of the images we've shown of relics and the forge itself are my own very professional photoshop chop jobs. But perhaps you'd like to see a couple Relics laid out by professional artists:
The Ancient Tome (1P)
Bloodstone (1P)
We're still tweaking a few things, but this is close to the final presentation. As you can see, this is an entirely new template - we've added a little icon to visually distinguish each relic, and different backgrounds for the Relic abilities. No more scrolls, but with the colors matching skills and feats. Each relic has 3 abilities, always in the same order. The top one can be used during an encounter like a skill, the second before an encounter like a feat, and the third is the flare effect that happens when the forge is full.
The Relic card is designed to sit atop the Forge, which is also much shinier than before:
The two artworks are connected to show the flow of fiery lava fuel from the Relic to the Forge. The nine slots for fuel are now along the bottom edge of the card, much like the Fiends from Abyssal Depths. The text layout on the Forge card is still going through some revisions, we'll be tailoring the embers and sparks in the background so that they don't interfere with the words once that part is finalized.
What's up next? The rulebook! We'll be working on that over the next couple weeks now that things are finalized, rules-wise. We've been using the alpha implementation of Relics in the digital version of One Deck Dungeon to do lots of bonus rapid playtesting and that's allowed us to make some of the gameplay and balance tweaks with more confidence. That's our last major piece of layout work to be done before being ready to hit the factory.
Overall progress in March was slower than hoped, I was sick for most of the month but we managed to get as much as we could done, and fingers crossed that's the end of the illness for the season. Let the spring and warmth begin!
