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Hey folks! James and I are getting properly stuck in to the new RPG dev, there’s still Flee Mortals, and Where Evil Lives (aka the Lairs book) work to do, but RPG time is steadily increasing. We’re about to have a meeting the subject of which is “what is the difference between the Talent and the Mage?” After which, if we have a good answer, I’ll work some more on the Mage class prototype.

And there’s still one more issue of ARCADIA! Coming this month!

But, as we talked about before, that will be the last issue of ARCADIA and I want to talk about what’s next after that. Or rather, what’s not next.

First of all, I assume that at some point in the future, something like ARCADIA will return. What form it will take, I have no idea, but if our new game does well (i.e. it finds an audience, and that audience grows over time rather than shrinks!) then we hope lots of people will have ideas for articles. All the same kind of stuff you saw in ARCADIA, just for our game.

I originally thought we’d be able to keep making ARCADIA content after ARCADIA, still 5E, just one article a month instead of three. I thought that, with only one article a month, we’d be able to keep our 5E patrons happy while working on the RPG. That was going to be Tales From Arcadia.

And it seemed reasonable to me, because we gotta do all this stuff for our game anyway. The example I used was: MCDM Dwarves. We have our own take on dwarves which I think a lot of people will like! And we want our own visual design to go along with that new dwarf game design.

So I figured the first Tales From Arcadia article would be MCDM dwarves for 5E. We’d figure out how dwarves work in our game, then pay someone to convert it to 5E. And the article would show off our visual design, here’s the rules for playing an MCDM dwarf in 5E, here’s a bunch of lore, maybe some items, enemy dwarves you can fight, who knows?

Well, we had a big meeting where we talked about this first Tales From Arcadia article and it all sorta fell apart. Mostly it was Jason, our art director, who brought us back to reality. 😀

As we talked about this first article we accumulated a list of annoying questions. Like, will this first TfA article look like a regular ARCADIA article? Layout and everything? Will it have a cover? Will that cover feature our dwarves?

Well, sure, it should have a cover, even though it’s only one article. And…yeah it should feature our dwarves! Only one article, dwarves, it would be real weird if there was a cover but it had nothing to do with the subject of the article.

But that’s a problem! Only reason we were able to get ARCADIA done, and get such dope covers, was that the covers had nothing to do with the interior! So no scheduling problems where the artist can’t start working on the cover until we know what the articles are about. Also! I assumed the article would feature dwarf illustrations!

Jason argued very strongly that this was a mistake and he walked us through why. Flee, Mortals! has a lot of original visual design in it. There’s nothing special, visually, about the MCDM Griffon or Manticore or Zombie or Vampire. But the Overmind, the Voiceless Talkers, the Time Raiders, the Valok, the ORCS, all have their own unique visual design.

And I don’t know if you folks know this, some of you do because I’ve talked about this, but not a lot of companies in this space do this! Usually, when they pay for art, the art they pay for…goes in the book!

Not us!!

All those monsters, the Voiceless Talkers, the Time Raiders, all the original visual design we do, creates a whole other phase of development. The Visual Design phase where the art team brainstorms and noodles on “what do these things look like?”

There’s a lot of experimentation and dead ends. But even once we have a final visual design, where we all say “yes!” and we’re really excited, that piece of art does not go in the book. It’s not an illustration, it’s a piece of concept art designed to show our freelance artists “this is what our Orcs look like” so that they can make orc illos for the book.

None of this art is in Flee, Mortals! These are all art design exploration.

Jason often starts by sculpting in 3D clay.

Goblin idea. 

Time Raider heads!

THIS is an actual Time Raider illo from the monster book, but here you see the kind of feedback Jason gives the illustrator. 

We thought it would be cooler if, instead of Golems, we have Robots. Since Golems are, basically, robots. So we started by wondering "what did they look like when they're new?" And then the ones you meet in a dungeon are defunct, rusted, covered in dust, and resemble statues. 

But I think we liked our robot design too much to beat it up and make it look old and broke-down, so there's a good chance the MCDM RPG will have Valok and Golems!

Anyway this process…you have no idea how long it will take. It could take three days, or three weeks. Or three months! Not literally “90 days of drawing,” more like “well, we noodled on this for a few days and came up empty. Let’s put this down and work on something else and come back to this problem later with fresh eyes.”

On the Monster Book, and we think on the RPG, that’s not really a problem because there’s so much work to do. There’s always some other design or art direction to work on while you’re stuck.

This was all by way of Jason explaining…we got no idea how long it will take to figure out what MCDM Dwarves look like, Matt. Sure, one article a month is less than three, easier to do, but even at one article a month…we got no idea what MCDM Dwarves look like! And no idea when we WILL know! Could take three days or three weeks! How do we schedule out even one monthly article when we have no idea how long the art will take?

And let’s imagine the concept art takes two weeks? Well it’s only AFTER those two weeks that we can get any artists started drawing the actual article illustrations. This is not normally a problem! If an Arcadia article references dwarves? Well, all the artists we work with know what dwarves look like, they can just draw the final illo.

But here those artists need to wait for us to figure out “what do OUR dwarves look like?” And that adds a lot of time to the schedule.

I couldn’t argue with that. There was some talk of saying; ok let’s just do one regular 5e ARCADIA article each month, like we used to do.

At this point several people objected and I agreed with them. It’s not that we don’t want to make more stuff for 5E, we got a lot of ideas for our game that we think could be translated into 5E rules and be really successful for 5e players.

It’s just…we can’t get distracted. We need to focus on the RPG, we need the whole team to focus on the RPG. Under this model, producing any ARCADIA-style content is a distraction for us. Since we launched ARCADIA, there has never been a time when everyone at the company was all working on the same project, and only that project, and we are really looking forward to that.

“We should be focused on this game, it’s what we all want to do, and there’s an audience waiting for it. Let’s focus on giving those people what they want.” Ok well…hard to argue with that!

So instead of a new ARCADIA article in August featuring MCDM Dwarves, with all these rules and lore and art, we’re just going to post stuff to the $8 and $10 MCDM+ tiers when it’s done. Dwarf sketches, ancestry rules, dwarf illos, dwarf lore, all that, whenever it’s done. And then…everything else. You might get a draft of the new Tactician soon. You might get a draft of a prototype Mage soon. Whenever something’s done, we just post it here.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I think this means you’ll get a LOT of content. I feel like we’re ramping up to that right now.

So the whole point of this post is just: I know I said Tales From Arcadia and I do think something ARCADIA-like will happen eventually, but right now we all need to focus on the RPG. That’s what excites us, and we think that’s what excites a lot of YOU.

And there’s plenty there to get excited about! More RPG Posts soon!