State of Battlegrounds

[icycalm]

State of Battlegrounds September '21
https://www.patreon.com/posts/56130732

Moreover, I've been busy adding features to the game at every level: mechanical, technical and aesthetic. Last week saw the addition of animated water, and yesterday I added day/night cycle and weather effects. Yesterday also saw the debut of the long-awaited and much-hyped seduction mechanics.

[icycalm]

It just occurred to me that we're currently running almost the entire gamut of possible D&D backdrops and general adventure types.

Ruins of Azlant is 100% wilderness. It's so wild there aren't even any shops, which is a big logistical issue throughout the campaign. Very challenging.

Rise of the Runelords is rural.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is urban.

And War for the Crown is royal/imperial (half the campaign seems to take place at noble salons and parties from what I am seeing).

Moreover Rise and Curse are the first- and second-released Pathfinder campaigns respectively. Totally serendipitously, two groups happened to choose these.

What a great start to our world, showcasing almost the entire range of adventure/backdrop possibilities. All we need is one of the groups to roll for a trip to Ravenloft, and we'll have the planes covered too. Well, demiplanes.

[icycalm]

State of Battlegrounds October '21 and the Future of Videogames
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58126033

By all that is good and holy, watch that damn video ASAP, it is the greatest videogame video you will see this year, guaranteed. It is the future of videogames. It is PA RPG: exactly what I am currently working on for the Battlegrounds overworld on World Anvil, though my version is on a whole other level of complexity from his.

[icycalm]

Curse of Strahd Is Now A Videogame
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58870997

At this point, this is a full-blown videogame that’s under development and easily my most anticipated game.

[icycalm]

A quick update on what’s happening with the overworld.

Yesterday I spent all day messing with a World Anvil competitor called LegendKeeper. It has some supporters so I wanted to check it out before I commit thousands of hours to World Anvil. In the end, it was nowhere near as good, so I scrapped it. Then I did some research on another alternative, Kanka, which was even worse. There remains one tantalizing possibility: the Foundry VTT on which I wrote an introduction before [ > ]. This is so powerful it has its own overworld and wiki features that in some ways rival World Anvil’s. E.g. I think you can have autoplaying per-map overworld music just like a videogame. And you can host your own server so instead of World Anvil’s meagre 15 GB limit—even at the highest subscription tier that we have—you can have terabytes of data. And you don’t have to worry about copyright infringement. And the overworld can have animation, like water or weather effects.

So I bought the program. It’s currently on sale (no one else has to buy it, players connect for free). I plan to check it out next week if I can juggle it with my War for the Crown prep. If I can’t, the adventure takes precedence as I want to keep the game moving. In that case I will work on it right after that session.

I will try to juggle playing with backend work so that the game doesn’t get bogged down and we play at least one session per week until I’ve fully launched the overworld and have the time for more sessions.

I will also produce an article comparing the various overworld software as I am getting to be quite an expert on the subject.

[icycalm]

Foundry versus TaleSpire
https://www.patreon.com/posts/60440349

The war of the assets has begun. We have now got to a place where the very same locations from famous campaigns are available by different artists in different VTTs, and we have to choose.

[icycalm]

Big weekend for Battlegrounds coming up. I've set up two sessions to GM, 16 hours in total. I've tried doing two sessions before, and I fell ill after the first and had to cancel the second. I think this time I'll do better. If the weekend is a success, it will pave the way for running two teams per week, meaning everyone gets to play every other week: a huge step forward for the game.

That said, I'll take the next week or two off to work on the overworld and finally finish it. But after that it's plain sailing, and all the pieces will be in place to speed up the pace and start finishing campaigns and doing all the cool stuff like TaleSpire and 4X and so on.

I'll have more solid updates next week once I've evaluated how the weekend went.

Oh and another cool new thing is that all campaigns are now backed up. Up to now, my Shadow's hard drive failing would have wiped out our campaigns, but now I've backed them all up on the Battlegrounds server, and will be doing this after every session. And soon enough I'll have a second backup on an external hard drive for double redundancy. Or is that triple? You get the idea.

[icycalm]

The Sandpoint crew has unlocked the first piece of Battlegrounds web fiction, "Shalelu Be Food?": https://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=34977#p34977

It's just a couple of pages, and you can read it if you want, or ignore it if you don't (and this includes players from other teams). This particular piece is closely tied to your campaign, but many of them won't be. They will all feature characters you might meet or regions you might travel to, however, at one point or another in your Battlegrounds travels.

More to come, and more explanations of how all this will work in an upcoming Ultimate Edition chapter.

[icycalm]

State of Battlegrounds January '22
https://www.patreon.com/posts/61110305

First, I got the idea to start talking to people on Steam who've played the Owlcat CRPG adaptations of Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. I figured if I told them that there are actually 20 Pathfinder games on Steam instead of 2, I'll blow their minds, and this is what's been happening.

[icycalm]

We've played 128 hours of Battlegrounds. With the upcoming three-four sessions over the coming weekend and early next week, we should easily hit 150.

On the website there'll be a counter somewhere keeping track.

Note that this is pure gaming, the interminable sound checks aren't streamed.

[icycalm]

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43jjz?Thin ... re-Info#15



Just letting you guys know that even among the ultrahardcore groups in the Paizo forum, we beat all of them. And I told him four groups, I didn’t tell him about the fifth West Marches/TaleSpire/survival-building 17-player one we have coming up.

I have no doubt we are the number 1 role-playing group in the world, and we’ve only just begun.

[icycalm]

Let me give you an idea of how much progress we have made in the setting of Pathfinder. This is the current month's AP installment (don't visit the link):

Pathfinder Adventure Path #187: The Seventh Arch (Gatewalkers 1 of 3)
https://paizo.com/products/btq02dsq?Pat ... venth-Arch

As you can see, we're at book number 187. So how far have we progressed in the Battlegrounds in these books?

Well, we're currently running 4 books simultaneously. Most of the teams are about one-third to half-finished with their books. Meaning we've played about 2 out of 187 Adventure Path books so far. That's with a playtime of about six months in total I would say. If we had been playing non-stop since we started about two years ago, we could have easily played AT LEAST 6 books by now. Maybe more, but let's say 6 to be conservative. And keep in mind that, since we're just learning the game and the VTT, we're going way slower than we'll eventually be going. Even so, 6/187 isn't a bad pace at all, considering these books started coming out a whopping 16 years ago! If we had been playing from day 1, we would almost be AHEAD of their publishing schedule and just twiddling our thumbs until the next book came out. Which means we wouldn't have been able to run more than one team. As I've said before, for a true open world with numerous possibilities, you NEED to be 100 books behind at least.

All this without counting the fact that eventually I'll have multiple GMs running multiple campaigns, speeding everything up.

To sum up, I am the Chris Roberts of roleplaying games, and my Battlegrounds is the Star Citizen of roleplaying games. Everything I've said will happen, will happen, and it will happen SOONtm and with unmatched attention to detail. Stay tuned.

[icycalm]

I have so many crazy things planned for Battlegrounds in the coming weeks that the hardest part is keeping my mouth shut until the full-impact reveals.

Everything was being held back by the damn overworld that took forever to make because I was stupid enough to think I could launch it singlehandedly with Pathfinder. It would have taken a team of dozens to do Pathfinder justice for a launch. Alien was a piece of cake in comparison. I can't believe it took TWO YEARS for me to figure this out.

ANYway, it's done now. I'll spend the entire summer pumping features and content into the game, and running the fuck out of it. You won't believe your eyes in a few weeks.

[icycalm]

Every one of our current players has played Fantasy Grounds in the last two weeks, and several of them have crossed 100 hours while several others are getting there (ysignal has the fewest hours because his character was unconscious for several sessions).

I am immensely proud of this, especially considering no one would be playing Fantasy Grounds without my Battlegrounds. I look forward to the day when it will be everyone's most played game, as it already is mine. Then TaleSpire, then Menyr.

I am especially happy with the fact everyone has played in the last two weeks. That's a good step towards my goal of everyone playing almost every week.

leccosta, SriK and Adjudicator will also be getting into the fun very soon.

[icycalm]

Alex Kierkegaard’s Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0 will be out before New Year’s and will blow your mind.

That is all.

[icycalm]

I hope to begin running Master of Combat later today. It will start very small, just with the simplest PF1 adventure ever written ran on Discord, but will quickly escalate, with Master of Heroes launching right at the conclusion of this adventure. This will be followed by a handful of very simple Master of Combat Scenarios in a small region of the world before opening up shortly after to the entire Inner Sea region and the complex tactical scenarios, and the full array of adventure and strategy mechanics. The whole process from start/tutorial to full-blown best SRPG/4X combo ever might take at most two weeks.

To say the least, I am nervous, because this is make-or-break time for my project. But then again I was also nervous when we launched the Fantasy Grounds campaigns, and those were a huge success. No one has quit those yet, and we’ve been running them on and off for years. In fact several new people have expressed interest in joining, and one even left to copy them. I don’t know how many people I have gotten into roleplaying in total, but there must be a few by now.

Logically, I expect the same level of success with this expansion to the game, and in fact even more now, because lots of people had played PF on FG before me, but no one has played what I am now releasing. It is a game that can be all-consuming if you want it to be. It is designed to provide the ultimate in let us say long-term mmersion (as opposed to Star Citizen’s short-term, zoomed-in first-person kind), and its zoomed-out 4X layer should be playable 24/7 from your phone to facilitate this.

I have the whole thing playing out in my head and it looks unbelievable, unreal, impossible.

I can’t wait to make it real.

[icycalm]

There is amazing stuff happening in Pathfinder with the War of the Immortals plotline currently playing out (don’t google it if you’re playing with me). Multiple new Adventure Paths have been announced that cover it, a high-level standalone adventure, a novel, and I think even a board game which I plan to integrate into the Master of Heroes mechanics (I will integrate lots of board games to give the overworld insane depth, I am building a giant list of them). I plan to start reporting on all of this soon, at the same time as I update the frontpage release schedules with an enhanced focus on GMRPGs.

The only reason you’re seeing such a huge focus on Star Citizen on the frontpage currently is because that’s so much easier for me to set up and play while camping. But my heart is in my Battlegrounds and I will be moving the game to end all games forward soon. At a slow pace, until I am done with camping, but at least it won’t be frozen and there will stuff for people to play.

[icycalm]

Quick update: I will have things to reveal soon, but let me just say that this project WILL be completed no matter what, and it won’t even take the 12 years that Star Citizen has taken. It will take 5 years. It started in 2020, and in 2025 I will launch 1.0. And it will be 100x better than even Star Citizen. It’s just that good things take time, and the best things take the most.

Enough said, back to work.

[icycalm]

Here's an update on where we're at with Battlegrounds.

In short, we are really close to 1.0.

The latest plan called for the release of Master of Heroes in November (plus a couple of smaller things like the Blade Runner RPG DLC), so that I can call Alpha 2.0 finished and move on to Alpha 3.0 and Kingslayer in December so it can get 2024 GOTY. And then in January I would restart the Cult Engine 1 campaigns, at which point all the essential Ultimate Edition systems would be running, and we could call that 1.0.

But then I realized that... Master of Heroes can also get 2024 GOTY (and Master of Combat first GOTY runner-up) and then Kingslayer can be released in January and get 2025 GOTY, followed shortly after by Alex Kierkegaard's Arena Master which I teased on my Discord #offline blog a few months back and which will be the world's first versus CRPG, fully integrated into Battlegrounds and running on Cult Engine 3, which would get 2025 first GOTY runner-up. So there's no reason to kill myself to have everything out by New Year's, and in fact delaying half of these games by a couple of months will net me a couple more awards. So that's what I will do.

What will it take to count Master of Heroes as released? All it will take is SriK playing his first 7 turns. And then that's 2024 GOTY, you will see immediately. Forget about Civilization, Master of Magic, all that ancient stuff. Sell your Steam accounts and buy some heroes to play my game. Your only account that matters now is your Battlegrounds account (and as a distant second your SC one).

This is what Master of Heroes looks like:









You will be able to PRINT at home every hex as it's discovered! Across an entire multiverse!

You don't HAVE to print and paint, but you can if you want, and it looks like this:



Forget about Songs of Conquest, with its 1995 mechanics. My game is a 4X layered on top of an SRPG layered on top of a GMRPG. The developers of all these mini-games on Steam can't even PARSE my design, let alone make it. Hell, they're too dumb to even merely play it.

Master of Combat meanwhile (the SRPG layer), which is getting first GOTY runner-up for this year, has already been released. SriK completed the first level—Skeleton King's Crypt—back in February, and I plan for him to play the second level—Black Fang's Dungeon—before the end of this month. So Cult Games will have released TWO games this year.

Envious Morons: "icycalm will NEVER make a game!"

You will go to your grave knowing you are stupid while icycalm is a genius who dominated videogames (and ultimately art) critically, theoretically, and finally creatively.

Watch me make it happen. And all of it despite all the challenges I am facing in my private life, as detailed in my Discord #offine blog. The fact that I managed all this stuff at the same time is the icing on the cake. The cake itself is fun, and no game delivers more of this than Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds.

[icycalm]

Tomorrow is my birthday. January 8, 1978 is when I was born, and tomorrow I become 47. And I’ve been playing games since Pong.

Would you believe it if I told you I have never been as excited about gaming as I am now? I am about to dump the biggest upgrade gaming has ever received in its entire history. Forget about Chris Roberts. In the grand scheme of things he’s only delivering an engine—which I will appropriate and incorporate the moment it becomes viable. The real design advances are happening right here, and I get so giddy at the thought of them that I am paralyzed for whole days just daydreaming about them and not doing the work that’s needed to bring them online lol. But don’t worry, I am doing the work, and we’re basically there. It’s now just a matter of days before people start seeing what I am talking about. In a matter of weeks we will be in possession of screenshots that will blow away everyone in the gaming world who merely looks at them—with no explanations needed.

Spring 2025 is also Insomnia’s 20th anniversary. Around May if I am not mistaken; I’ll see if I can find the exact date. At that date, everyone who has ever registered an account on this site should expect an email with a link to the greatest art trailer ever.

Gaming’s future has never been brighter. And it is right now.