River of Heaven Companion?

[Marcus Bone]

Hi Newt! Just wondering if you could give us an update on the state of the Companion? I wasn't in a position at the time of the KS to be involved at the higher level pledges... and so I was wondering its current status?

No harm and no foul, just a curious mind who is about to prep a RoH adventure to play with friends

Marcus

 

[Conrad]

One of my friends asked the same question on the D101 games Facebook page. Here was the answer. I hope it helps, Marcus. 

Edited April 26, 2018 by Conrad
No damage, no fowl (B'Kawk!) ;)

[tauther]

Thanks for the update, Conrad. I guess this means something for the summer... 

The very good news is "looking into commisioning more material"

[Newt]

Ok here's the latest on the River of Heaven Companion.

The book is currently in final editing/art commission but hasn't gone as quickly as I had hoped.

I'm away this weekend at North Star, a  new small convention dedicated to sci-fi rpgs, where I'm actually running River of Heaven, a scenario of my own devising called HOPE (which will get published at some point). 

When I'm back I'll be sticking my head down and gently pushing to get the Companion out.  I want it out by early June, and definitely, early August when I'm off to Continuum.

As for commissioning more material, that's coming to along with commissioning scenarios for both OpenQuest and The Company. I'll be making a proper announcement when I'm less busy, but if interested please drop me a line at newt@d101games.com. 

[Conrad]

Thinking about it a GM screen would come in handy. Uninjured with nil underhandedness, just an inquisitive intelligence that is running RoH right now, and enjoying it.  

[Marcus Bone]

On 4/26/2018 at 10:38 PM, Conrad said:

One of my friends asked the same question on the D101 games Facebook page. Here was the answer. I hope it helps, Marcus. 

 

Thanks Conrad!

[Marcus Bone]

On 4/27/2018 at 10:18 PM, Newt said:

Ok here's the latest on the River of Heaven Companion.

The book is currently in final editing/art commission but hasn't gone as quickly as I had hoped.

I'm away this weekend at North Star, a  new small convention dedicated to sci-fi rpgs, where I'm actually running River of Heaven, a scenario of my own devising called HOPE (which will get published at some point). 

When I'm back I'll be sticking my head down and gently pushing to get the Companion out.  I want it out by early June, and definitely, early August when I'm off to Continuum.

As for commissioning more material, that's coming to along with commissioning scenarios for both OpenQuest and The Company. I'll be making a proper announcement when I'm less busy, but if interested please drop me a line at newt@d101games.com. 

Cheers Newt! Good to hear that RoH is to get more love...  I look forward to the companion when it comes out... 

All good things take time

 

[Mankcam]

Great to see some OpenQuest action going on. Just love the simplicity of the OQ BRP mechanics, it's very easy to run, and I really think it needs to be more popular.

River of Heaven is a great little sci-fi as well, so I'm certainly looking forward to a companion volume for it.

[Prime Evil]

It's been quiet on the OpenQuest front for a while, so this is great news. And RoH is a fantastic SF setting! 

[Jakob]

Looking forward to this. I love the RoH setting - one of the few rpg settings that feel like they come straight out of the kind of sf I like to read.

[ORtrail]

Honestly, I had forgotten about the RoH Companion.  Though I have yet to run an adventure in the setting (let alone a campaign) I have no regrets about getting in on the KS for the main book.  It looks fantastic sitting on my best bookshelf. 

Is anyone here planning to get involved in Free RPG Day 2018?  Takes place June 16th this year and if any of your local gaming stores are setting up tables for playing?  Why not use it as a chance to run a more obscure RPG or two?  I ran a Fringeworthy adventure last year, and it went great.  None of the players had ever played it before, but loved the setting and exploring the alternate portals (as much as they could in a two hours anyway).  I did use a Dice Pool system rather than try and use the 1992 edition game system to keep it quick and easy.  If there was an updated Fringeworthy RPG available I think at least one of them would have bought it then and there. 

I've committed to running an adventure for the Tales From the Loop RPG this year, but maybe next year, RoH?  Getting people into a game with active support and them being able to  order a copy would be a great way to raise awareness. 

[Newt]

While I'm not taking part in FreeRPG day as a publisher, I'll have to see what I can do to support it. I've got a one hour demo on my notepad that could do with typing up ;)

I'm not going to be stopping with the Companion, which has a new punchy title (see the cover image below).  There's more support in the pipeline to get existing rulebooks out in the field off bookshelves and into play, as well as encouraging new sale bought.

 

[Mankcam]

I just love the simplicity of OQ, and RoH is a perfect sci-fi sandbox setting for it

[Marcus Bone]

All this RoH Talk has got my creative juices flowing... so I'm a few days away from a first draft of my own fan adventure...

[rsanford]

3 hours ago, Marcus Bone said:

All this RoH Talk has got my creative juices flowing... so I'm a few days away from a first draft of my own fan adventure...

Way to go Marcus!

[Newt]

Hi 

Without wanting to sound a meanie, if anyone wants to publish River of Heaven material, fan or otherwise, they need to have a chat with me beforehand.  Neither the system or setting is OGL and while I'm not adverse to having fan material out there, I don't have an established public fan policy for RoH so need to look at everything on a case by case basis.

You never know I may want to publish what folk come up with. John Ossoway always intended RoH to provide other writers with a setting to work with

 

[Marcus Bone]

13 hours ago, Newt said:

Hi 

Without wanting to sound a meanie, if anyone wants to publish River of Heaven material, fan or otherwise, they need to have a chat with me beforehand.  Neither the system or setting is OGL and while I'm not adverse to having fan material out there, I don't have an established public fan policy for RoH so need to look at everything on a case by case basis.

You never know I may want to publish what folk come up with. John Ossoway always intended RoH to provide other writers with a setting to work with

 

Totally understand... no harm intended and I fully support everthing  d101 😀

Marcus

[Newt]

None taken, I understood and appreciated your excitement straight off the bat. I've been doing a lot of work with River of Heaven recently and it got me excited too, to the point where I wrote and ran a game of it at a convention at the end of last month

My post was just to point out to others, who might silently wander by and read this thread later and not understand RoH's copyright and licensing restrictions. Because OpenQuest is open gaming content in its entirety I've had issues in the past, good-natured ones easily fixed by an exchange of emails, where people have assumed that RoH and the Company are open content too (which they are not - mainly because they commercial products written by other people). 

[ORtrail]

Looking ahead to Free RPG Day 2019, maybe providing a short RoH scenario (like two hours to run) for eager GMs to run might be a thing?  Maybe provide a download a week before on a request basis?  Just throwing around ideas, but even a handful of people could generate a fair amount of interest/awareness about RoH.  Guardian Games in Portland for example provides a list of the games scheduled to be run for Free RPG Day and hundreds of people will see it. 

On a somewhat related note, having purchased all the current adventures for RoH?  It would be nice to have more printer friendly versions. 

[Newt]

One of my loftier goals is to have 1 hour demos of all my games. There's already one for Hunters of Alexandria (FATE) and one in the works for Monkey. I have got the outline for one River of Heaven - but I need to create characters and playtest it as well as write it up, lay it out etc. So it's not a priority at the moment.

In a similar vein I'm tempted to be grumpy and say "yes printer friendly (as in removing the colour background) would be nice, but its not my priority at the moment", but I've discovered a magic feature in InDesign (the layout software I use) called "Create Alternate Layout", so it might be easy peasy to create a print-friendly pdf using this.  I'm off to play , I'll let you know how I get on   

[ORtrail]

I didn't realize how cheap some of the PDF editors had gotten (under $100 for a few of them) so I picked one up.  It was easy enough to edit the background graphic in A Message From Furthermost.  I like to have hard copies of my PDF adventures as my old tablet is just too slow when flipping pages.  Plus I often add notes to the pages as inspiration strikes.  I need to buy yet another binder to create a RoH adventure resource.   

Which reminds me,  is the RoH Companion going to see a print version?  Or just PDF? 

[Newt]

Both print and pdf.

[ORtrail]

What is the approximate page count for the RoH Companion?  I would prefer a print copy, it's fun to show off books to my players when pitching campaign ideas.

Also, I really liked the plot of A Message From Furthermost.  A classic Star Trek type of adventure.  It was nice to see a planet side adventure after the first two mainly involved the classic 'lost ship exploration'.  Overall the quality of the three RoH adventures is good, just a matter of variety. 

[Newt]

The final push for the Companion is here!! I'm looking at the end of September to have it out in PDF and on pre-order in print at the D101 Games web store.

However, I've had to make a big compromise to get this thing out.  The three adventures that make the Binary Deep mini-campaign by John Ossoway we're not as complete as I had assumed, and would have required a lot of rewriting to fill out the gaps. Since writing River of Heaven, John's time has been taken up with his family and his free-lance day job as a Graphic Designer/Web Designer. So despite our best efforts, we've never been able to clear time in his schedule to get together to finish the adventures. So I've had to take the tough decision to drop Binary Deep, and in their place put two of the adventures that we've published so far (Last Witness and Message from Futhermost).

If you are wondering were Reunion is in all of this, I'm going to be putting that in a slightly revised version of the main rulebook as the introductory adventure. River of Heaven Revised should be coming out about the same time as the companion. All Kickstarter backers from the campaign that funded River of Heaven back in 2014 the will be getting coupons for at cost versions of the Revised edition - because as well as errata, and some minor rules tweaks, it will also be using DriveThru's Standard (Heavy) paper that they brought in after RoH initial release. This is a heavier grade of paper that should show RoH's colour art better.

By including Last Witness/Message from Futhermost in the companion in place of the Binary Deep arc, it means I can complete the project and move on to produce new material for River of Heaven, which I'm still committed to.

Peter Frain is currently doing art to illustrate the 40 or so pages of new content, and I'm hoping that the book will finally be available at the end of this month.

This is the rough sketch of Major Wrong, the charismatic leader of the Hell Blades Mercenary Company, who feature in the Quickstarts' article.
 

[ORtrail]

Would pushing things back another 6 months be enough to finish the Binary Deep adventures?  I'd rather have all new material versus paying for printed versions of two adventures I already have on PDF.