This month has been a big boost of progress on Helm of Echoes Solo Adventure. We managed to run plenty of playtests with friends at Discord, Cosmo finished up all the artwork and editing, and it's been sent off for the first print run!
Helm of Echoes Cover art
This little stretch goal that's going to be included in the encounter kit turned into something really special and bigger than we thought, from what we originally believed was going to be around a small 20 page minigame turned into a full 84 page book chock full of content and prompts you could run a full one-shot for and plenty of encounters you could bring to a full game as well.
Because it's a heftier book than we anticipated, we decided it's only going to be included in the encounter kit for this Backerkit only, and afterwards it'll be sold separately, and/or increase the overall cost of the encounter kit. That means you guys will be getting the best deal when you supported us through the project. Thank you all so much!
We'd also like to take a moment to highlight our guest artist for this gorgeous Inner cover of the book:
Lunydoobles!
Inner Cover by Lunydoobles
Luny is a dear friend of ours that has played many tabletop games with us over the years, and was part of our first Arcton campaign. We were excited to have him playtest the game as a bumbling skeleton man with many rat friends, and make us a cover based on his playtest run- and he totally knocked it out of the park!
Luny is a fantastic artist and storyteller, and if you're a fan of fantasy settings with unique and fleshed out magic systems, nuanced politics and colonial themes, stylish action and characters brimming with life, I can't recommend it enough.
The characters in the story are very dear to us as we've been able to meet them throughout tabletop games. And if you're familiar with out feisty Hulsian plague doctor Mortimer Mycovelli, he even makes a cameo in the comic as Snowy's personal doctor friend and wingman. (wait no, full bird)
That's all for now. We're very close to reaching the stage we can start setting up pledge managers and get ready for fulfillment. We'll update you all once we're at a closer stage. Thank you guys so much for your patience and we're excited to have these books in your hands!
Apologies for the scarcer updates. After Sekaijucon, Cosmo and I got the con crud and were fighting it on top of work and two more weekends of back to back tabling! Luckily, we managed to do plenty of work for the Backerkit in the meantime.
During Cosmo's rest days, they got to work on the Hulse booklet stretch goal... and what was supposed to be a 20~ pager booklet has turned into a potential 80+ pager to rival the Arcton overview book. But that wasn't exactly the plan, oops!
So what we're going to be doing is editing down a Hulse booklet as it is for a short supplementary material for this campaign, and all the extra content we have written up for Hulse... perhaps that could very well be a full on book expansion alongside any future Arcton books? Hint hint?
But we're not quite ready to dedicate a post to that yet. What we are ready to share however is....
The Helm of Echoes Playtest
We have a playtest version of The Helm of Echoes Solo game ready to get tested by backers! We already had a couple of close friends give it a spin, but the more the merrier. We'd love to see your thoughts and feedback as we keep editing and finalizing the game before release. If you're a backer, go check out the Discord!
(The Arcton Discord link is on the Backer only content further below this post! If you're reading this on email, click on the post on backerkit directly so you can check the link!)
The playtest is currently 24 pages, with just the barebones mechanics without the story and roleplay flavor the final game will include, but the finalized game is looking to be an approximate 60 pages to include a bunch of character prompts, questions and story lore to increase character exploration. We're using the Carta system by Cat McDonald for Peach Garden Games, using a standard deck of playing cards to generate a map and the prompts that follow so you can solo play without a DM, but we're also looking to explore versions where a DM can narrate it for a single player, and maybe playtest more players with some tweaking of the rules. We're very excited to show you the final game with all the bells and whistles though- Cosmo's having a ton of fun adding cutscenes and plenty of intrigue to bite into!
See you on the Discord!
That's about it for the updates! We're going back to the mines. In the meantime, check below for the Discord link to join us in more lore brainrotting and discussions and maybe give the game a spin!
But what's this? How about more character previews? I'll include a look at Valefor's officer, Murmur "The Hammer of Irongate" as an extra preview for backers!
Today's backer preview bring the third lich of our lineup!
But before moving to that, we'd like to show something off. We brought Arcton to a local convention for the first time since Backerkit! Thank you to everyone that stopped by to talk tabletop and support us!
Arcton Booth at Sekaijucon! (thats me, stellar, behind the booth!)
Here we offered the book and the first postcard prints of the liches, the emblem sticker sheet, as well as the option to get the Arcton map and the Arcton coin ahead of time.
Rest assured however, Backers will get first dibs on a revised edition of the book, as well as plenty more finalized goodies besides the ones we brought here, so hang on tight!
Blurry pics because backerkit wont let me put a video...
squint and imagine the high resolution
Have a closer look at the table... you might be able to catch a sneak preview of all the liches that we'll be talking about on the backer exclusive previews!
We have a few more local cons we'll be bringing Arcton to this month, but we're still hard at work during the week with the Encounter kit. Building up the community has been very helpful for feedback, and we'd love to count on our backers for first looks at the Solo campaign and booklets before we release them officially! Let's keep going!
Cosmo is hard at work finishing up the illustrations for Weymiss the Merciful's Officers and is nearly done with the Arcton Character Cards. After that, it's full speed ahead to finish cards for the Hulse Booklet and other stretch goals like the Solo campaign: The Helm of Echoes (Which I'm helping write!)
Before we show you any sneak peek of those, we'll be continuing to post previews of the next 6 liches through the month leading up to the spooky month of October- which is the current estimate of when we finish up everything for fulfillment.
In the meantime, we wrap up the week to give our backers a preview of Fraye, the capital of Arcton, where Hakon, Tarantella and Ceilli reign.
Next week, we'll show off our next Lich! (Hint hint, this next one is going to have more combat potential!)
Today we'd like to open up the doors to our humble Discord server for our backers, where we hope to post the weekly previews we have lined up of new content including the new character cards of the Encounter kit we're putting together among other previews that simply wouldn't fit in just these update posts!
We'd also love to talk tabletop games with you all, worldbuilding brainstorms as well as hearing your own thoughts about the project! Check out the exclusive content for backers in today's post to join in!
Speaking of previews, today we bring you a exclusive sneak peek at Hakon's Officer and celebrity superstar of Fraye Tarantella and his student and backup musician Ceili. Yes, we have bard necromancers here in Arcton.
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