Good evening Dead Tree Fans!
It has been a rather busy last couple of months. A lot of real life stuff happening, but also a good amount of things happening in the realm of Dead Trees, so let's jump into it.
Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades
Our newest game to get an official announcement, atleast, more than just the vague posts about it in our discord channel. Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades is a Magical Post apocalyptic role playing game set 200 years after magical nukes rained down and destroyed the land of its inhabitants. Something something friendship never changes.
If you haven't caught on yet Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades is a "Second Edition" of our first ever game: Fallout Equestria PnP. Why are we not calling it FoE PnP Second edition? Mainly for legalities reasons, FoE PnP is a rather convoluted mess of IP, legal, and Parody nightmare. While it wasn't really a big issue in the hay-day of pony fandoms, we are getting bigger, more 'official' and better established. Our end goal in all things Dead Tree is for us to do this as a day job. That becomes hard to do when we either get sued into oblivion by Hasbro/Bethesda or publishers, distributors and other industry leaders refuse to work with us due to the metaphorical legal balefire bomb in our possession. So the solution to that is Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades!
How different will it be from FoE PnP?
Well it is a "Second Edition" so the rules will be different. Taking everything we have learned from FoE, Dames, and DOLAM to make a better, well balanced and engaging game that holds the spirit of FoE. Rules wise it should feel like a good "new edition" or "sequel" to FoE. Lore wise... well thats a different question.
What's different about the lore?
A lot in the sense that we have to scrub everything trademarked from the game. For example we can't use "S.P.E.C.I.A.L." instead we will use "P.R.E.V.A.I.L." which is the same thing, just different words and a little scrambled:
So what can we expect development wise?
Realistically, Cult of the Patriarch remains our main focus. We want to get the adventure module written, do playtesting and launch the crowdfunding for it. Its a massive campaign with what is possibly going to be 10 or more books to it, so that is our biggest focus at the moment. Development wise for Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades we are going through the core mechanics, that's dice rolls, traits, races, perks etc. We are hoping to have a playable beta/demo out for April-ish. We will keep the demo open for about a year or so while we work on Cult of the Patriarch, closing the demo around the time we are crowdfunding Cult of the Patriarch, then once the adventure module has been released and delivered we will hop into the working on Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades as a main project. The hope is to do most of the art assets in house instead of contracting out like we do with dames. The reason being that our inhouse (i.e. L9's) art style fits the vibe and direction of FoE and Horseshoes and Hoofgrenades, instead of him only doing map art for the game.
How goes Cult of the Patriarch?
Despite set backs and delays due to real life, pretty well. We are maybe a quarter of the way through writing Chapter 8, maybe one third? It's hard to tell. Currently we are at 400 pages of raw manuscript across the 8 chapters we have written. This does not include any "outside the story" lore that needs to be written such as NPC backstories, relevant location lore. Just the campaign itself and the handouts. Surprisingly less than we were expecting at this point, but with what L9 has been playtesting, each chapter is sitting at 5 to 10 hours of gameplay which is what has been expected. A lot of the shorter page count chapters are higher in combat encounters so it checks out. Currently we are expecting 50 to 80 hours of playable story, though a lot of that depends on your group. there are certainly sections that went by quicker or slower based on what the players decided to do in the various playtests. We are hoping to have Chapter 8 written by the end or March or April, mostly because L9's life is going to get crazy busy again due to his work. Chapter 9 is mostly just BBEG boss fights so that should also hopefully be written by the end of April. Chapter 10 is the prologue, probably only 5 to 10 pages to account for the various endings so if all well end of May? Maybe June? Either way its the home stretch for the manuscript's first draft.
Once the Manuscript is written L9 will need to draw up some rough line art digital sketches (really just digitizing the coffee stained paper sketches he has for important maps), and then we are hoping to do some open playtests for Cult of the Patriarch. We are hoping to get a handful of GMs and do two types of playtests.
Blind Playtests: Where the GM does little to no prep-work and just reads from the manuscript.
and
Prepped Playtests: Where the GM pre-reads a chapter, takes notes and runs things a less "screw it, we ball".
If you're interested in being a play tester GM feel free to hit up L9OBL on Discord, or shoot us an email at info.deadtree@gmail.com!
Speaking of Discord
There has been a lot of news and backlash with Discord recently, as many of you know we our community is heavily on Discord, for a lot of reasons many communities are on discord. We are still in a wait and see mode on how things play out, though we are passively looking for alternatives and happy to take requests. If we do decide to grab an alternative platform to nurture our community on, we will NOT be killing the discord server. We will maintain Discord until the server fully dies out. We are currently accepting suggestions for Discord replacement platforms.
Cult of the Patriarch Cover art!
This is the most exciting news we have! The cover art for Cult of the Patriarch is finally done. Made by the amazing Ezzy Ecchi! Go check them out on Twitter/X https://x.com/EzzyEcchi !
What you see above is the official promo version of the cover art for use on banners and ads and the like. Below is what the actual front/back book cover will look like minus all the text and what not.
We also have individual renders of all the Characters used in the cover art. so let us introduce you to some of the important players in the story.
The Patriarch
Our main Antagonist, The patriarch claims to have broken Ze'Quarius' curse and been born a male. He seeks to free the Demi-Fauna people of the Curse as well as human Tyranny and Oppression. By any means possible. Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? It is up for your to decide.
Morgana
Morgana is the Patriarch's right hand. A former slave that was freed by the Patriarch, and willing to do most anything to see the Patriarch's goals complete.
Emma
The Patriarch's left hand, a cut throat master of infiltration with a past as solid as her many illusions. She is less seen than the other lieutenants, but her shadowy work is greases the cogs of the Patriarch's machination.
Emilia
The last of the Patriarch's Lieutenants, Emilia is a powerful druid with command over many chimera, including a dreaded Goose Queen. It is her who is generally tasked with wiping regions off the map.
The Player characters
Please find the pregen heroines of the story we will leave their backstory blank for now since these are pregens for player characters
Shane the Paladin
Flore the Rogue
Chalyth the Ranger
Nivelle the Cleric
Oryssia the Knight
Talimna the Mage
We hope you all enjoyed this update, we will be back when life steps out of the way for us to make some meaningful progress again!
So grab your dice and praise Ze'Quarius! Do you have what it takes to overcome impossible odds and be knighted a Dame?