Update on Art & Classes
about 2 years ago – Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 06:40:18 PM

News! We've been working hard on Backer Surveys and our Pre-order store! Expect to see both in MAY!

Art Update:

We have a team of talented artists from all around the globe creating amazing art for the books! Check out some of the new arrivals!

Class Act - From Tracy:

There is an old saying popular in my family: “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” Including, apparently, the poor grammatical construction of that phrase. In Skyraiders, there were a number of things that Laura and I wanted to remodel in the system to enhance the 5e gaming experience. We could see how splitting a character’s ‘race’ into the separate concepts of ‘ancestry’ (inherited traits) and ‘culture’ (learned traits) was a positive step that would improve the options of character creation and game play. Then we liked the idea of remodeling ‘alignment’ into ‘ethos’ – a far more flexible and dynamic approach to moral viewpoint in the Skyraider’s setting. The problem with remodeling – as any initially enthusiastic homeowner will tell you – is knowing when to stop. After repeatedly taking a sledgehammer to the 5e rules – when does the whole thing collapse and no longer be recognizable as 5e at all? That was the question facing me when we came to ‘Character Class.’ ‘Class’ as a term seemed loaded with social and economic baggage. We thought, couldn’t it better be described as ‘Profession’ – but then we realized that ‘Profession’ was already a 5e term with a different application in the game. Maybe a ‘Skill’ – no, wait, ‘Skill’ also has a different meaning and use in 5e. The more we looked into remodeling the concept of ‘Class’ the more it seemed like we were just trying to change the name of ‘Class’ without improving its function – something that would be meaningless and, at best, confusing. The real root of the problem was with our new ‘class’ of Aeronaut. This is a class which none of the characters could adopt at the formation of their character. It has a set of abilities that they could only acquire AFTER the game started. So, the real problem was how to give our characters the abilities of an ‘Aeronaut Class’ without penalizing them too much for becoming dual class characters. THAT, we realized, was a problem we could address in the description of the Aeronaut class – meaning we didn’t have to remodel the entire 5e class system to make it work. So, there was no sense in fixing things that essentially were not broken. There will be new character classes included in Skyraiders ... and that’s as classy as we should make them.

App Update:

We are hard at work finishing up the foundational work for the Living Tome App, and plan to have our first info drop during the next update.  We have some very exciting things planned for the Augmented Reality portion of Skyraiders of Abarax, and we can't wait to show them to you all!

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The Art & Method of Aeroship Flight
about 2 years ago – Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 10:39:47 PM

Into the Rigging

One of my favorite movies when I was younger was 'The Sea Hawk'. Errol Flynn was the dashing captain of a group of privateers. At one point in the film, the Errol and his crew have been made slaves of the Spanish. In chains, they row the Spanish galleon back to Spain. There they escape (of course) in the middle of the night and take over a ship at anchor next to them. They soon get ready to make their escape complete, by setting sail in their captured ship back home to England.

"Into the tops, men! We're getting underway! ... Man the helm, Abbott! ... Fox, at the foresail! Matson, up with the main! ...  Mr. Pitt, the mizzen!"

"Aye, sir!"

Cue the stirring music and sail unfurl from their spars.

"Aloft there! Clear your leash line!" shouts the captain.

"Clear away your mizzen vanes!" calls out the first mate.

"Heave taut your halyard!" yells another officer.

"Slack away your true lines!" is the shout of a fourth seadog.

And with that, the entire crew breaks out in a triumphant male chorus of 'Strike for the Shores of Dover' -- a song with ridiculous lyrics but which still somehow moves me.

I am surprisingly inspired by that scene ... and haven't a clue what they were talking about!

In part, that's because sailing square-rigged ships was a set of skills dealing with a complex machine build out of ropes, wood and metal ... and where every piece of its complex parts had a specific name.  The crew was an integral part of that complex machine, so shouting orders from the deck to the crews either on deck or 'aloft' in the rigging was an essential part of making the ship function.

It's one thing to be 'in the rigging' -- climbing the ratlines and clambering along the ropes -- but an entirely different thing to be 'into the rigging', which in my mind means so deep in the technical aspects of sailing a Tall Ship that role-playing suffers and drags to a halt.

One thing that was obvious from the beginning of Skyraiders was that we would need to know how to hoist the anchor of our Aeroships and learn how to fly them. To assist those who may not be familiar with the operation of a square-sailed ship -- let alone one that floats through the sky -- we are thoughtfully including a section in the 'Skyraider's Handbook' entitled: "The Art & Method of Aeroship Flight'. These are excerpts from an ancient reference book, translated from an unpublished manuscript by Ignatius Nimbus, a Skymaster of the 'Drake's Bane' aeroship.

The manuscript refers to his banishment as a result of 'an unfortunate acquaintance' but nothing more is known about the reasons for his exile to Abarax. All records of his case were lost in the sacking of Termina during the Possessions War. His manuscript, however, is considered by those few who have seen it to be the most definitive work on the actual flight of Aeroships ever discovered on the Erinyes Coast.

In this section, we want to capture the feeling of sailing a square-rigged aeroship with a crew but without burdening the GM and players with overly complex game mechanics and/or constant dice rolling.

So right now, we're working on the sailing mechanics for the aeroships. We are creating a system that has the feeling and romance of sailing the ship but abstracts the action to keep that game moving.  One player takes command of the ship -- becomes the captain -- which each of the remaining players takes command of a different division of the crew. (Harpist on the Sylph Engine, First Officer setting the sails, Helm setting the ship's course as well as the Keel 'bubble', etc.) Each of these positions have a 'minigame' in front of them and the result of their play then affects the results on other player's positions as well.  Any positions not 'manned' by our players are then abstracted through the actions of the player in command. We'll show you more about this system as we get closer, but it is part of the heart of the game that is being developed right now. It reflects our general game philosophy: don't let the mechanics get in the way of a good time.

Dispatches from Abarax

Work is progressing on all fronts. The current Skyraider's Handbook (player's book) is the main focus of our work, making sure that the Ancestry and Culture systems are properly functioning in character creation. This has also brought us to define the pantheons of different faiths on Abarax which, in turn, informs crucial parts of the magic systems. Currently there are three basic forms of magic in the world: Sylph, Aether and the Divine.  More about this in our next update.

The development of the app is progressing in parallel. There are some new developments on the app front which will not only greatly expand the app's utility but your involvement in the world as well. We will let you know more about this as developments progress.

Everything is currently on schedule. See you soon with the next update.

... and about those awesome nautical phrases...

If you happen to have a nautical bent and experience, perhaps you can correct me on my interpretation of these dashing lines of dialogue.

• "Into the tops, men!" The 'tops' most likely refers to the upper sections of the masts. The names of the sails (from bottom to top) are Course, Lower Topsail, Upper Topsail, Topgallant, Royal, and Skysail (if they get up that high).
• We're getting underway!To 'get underway' is to get the ship moving. It means raising anchors, clearing any moorings, setting the sails and generally doing everything necessary to set up the ship to move.
• "Man the helm, Abbott!" Some fine sailor named Abbot is ordered to go to the position ('man') where the ship is steered -- generally either the ship's wheel or tiller that positions the rudder.
• "Fox, at the foresail! Matson, up with the main! ...  Mr. Pitt, the mizzen!" Fox, Matson and Mr. Pitt ... three officers on the deck ... are ordered to take charge respectively of the three masts which are (from front to back) Foremast, Mainmast and Mizzenmast. The captain, in his excitement, is simultaneously asking them to set the Foremast Course Sail, Mainmast Course Sail and the Mizzen Course Spanker sail -- maybe.
• "Aloft there! meaning, "Hey, you up in the rigging.'
• "Clear your leash line!" Undo the, uh ... well, near as I can tell a leash line is a rope that anchors the ship to a dock or buoy. If they have tied such a line to the boat somewhere up in the rigging, it would probably pull the ship over on its side even if it were not rigged for sea. Yeah, they should probably clear that.
• "Clear away your mizzen vanes!"The Mizzenmast is the rear most mast on a three-masted ship. I have no idea what a mizzen vane is but apparently, they want it undone.
• "Heave taut your halyard!" I love this line. It literally means 'Pull tight your rope."
• "Slack away your true lines!" I have no idea what a true line is but apparently it needs to be hanging loose rather than tight.

To the Winds, Buccaneers! To the Storm!

-- Tracy Hickman

First Update of 2022
over 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 09:49:40 PM

Vegetables before Desert

The big holidays here in the United States are over and, with the New Year, it is time to settle seriously into the work of bringing this world to life. We have quite a task ahead of us and not all that much time in which to accomplish it. Knowing that, we have carefully charted our course, tuned the Sylph Engine and set our sails to make this dream a reality for us all.

Dreams are easy but reality is hard. One of those realities is that there is a lot of grinding work that has to be done up front in the creation of a game. It's like having to eat your vegetables before your mother will allow you desert. Being 5e compatible means that we are obligated to very specific uses of the core 5e rules set. These are specifically laid out in the Open Gaming License (OGL) combined with the System Reference Document (SRD) which tells us specifically what we can use and, by omission, what we cannot use. So, one of the first tasks before us is to determine:

1. Which parts of the SRD we are going to include in the Skyraider's books.
2. If those parts need to be modified in order to function properly in our world. For example: something as basic as the spell 'Detect Evil or Good' has to be changed since Skyraiders uses an Ethos system rather than traditional alignments. The splitting of traditional 'Races' into 'Ancestries' and 'Cultures' requires considerable revision of the Character Generation rules.
3. How do we mesh the traditional systems of the SRD with the enhanced systems of Skyraiders so that everything functions smoothly and as designed?

Every task becomes a sequence with some steps required before others and that means doing a lot of hard 'busy work' before we can get to the fun stuff. Just transferring and translating the information from the SRD into a workable format has its own challenges. The SRD, for example, is contained in a PDF document but transferring the text and especially the tables from the SRD into a format usable in our layout software requires considerable effort on our part. We automate as much of that as we can, but it still requires manual cleanup to get everything just right. However, it does mean that we are doing a lot of the writing of the book directly into the layouts which means that even if the work itself is highly repetitive most of the time -- at least it looks great when it's in place!

Kim Bourrie will be doing the actual layouts. She has been busy working up the interior art with a number of artists around the world.  And the Skymaster's Almanac -- the GMs book -- needs to have the same SRD treatment as we're giving to the Player's book.

In summary, we're pushing through the hard part, but the progress is steady and measurable. And, for a break, we take time to write something in the world that reminds us of the magic we are aiming to create.

Before the Fall: Shattered Myths

Reliable history of the world has been lost to Abarax. The fall of the Keepers and the period of chaos that followed effectively obliterated any reliable history before. Terminus was sacked by competing war parties over several years during the Possession Wars, its books either burned or sundered. Competing self-interest among the hastily jumped-up warlords necessitated constructed myths of manifest destiny and divine right.

What little had been gathered since is largely apocryphal. There has been a concerted effort by the Barong of P’tar over the last few decades to record oral traditions from numerous sources and cultures of the Erinyes Coast and to collect as many surviving records as possible from before the Gatefall. But the history of the past has remained elusively eclectic. Individual cultures on the coast tell different stories about their origins and the history of the past. Most of these histories and mythologies are contradictory.

While each of the different cultures on Abarax differs considerably regarding the details, the tales they tell of the time before the fall are along similar lines.

The Imperitor, greatest of the dominions of man, exerted its force and law over a quarter of the known world. Its influence spread with the tendrils of trade into every sovereign state of diverse ancestry and custom. Fleets of the Imperitor Aeroships filled the skies, dispensing unquestioned justice from above.

Not everyone welcomed the Pax Imperitor -- the Peace of the Empire.  Those who resisted were crushed with cold steel and an unfliching will. Its allied states -- either by choice or by necessity -- supported the Pax. If they did not actively participate, they at least did not oppose the Imperial Will. Resistance was shattered wherever it was encountered.  The few remaining shards were swept into the Aeroships and transported beyond the borders and seas to the distant isle of Abarax.

The ships descended from the clouds over the small trio of islands called the Three Sisters before catching sight to the south-west of the Abarax Coast and the grand sweep of Iron Bay. Atop a dark, crescent of cliffs streaked with cascading waterfalls, they saw Termina -- the prison city. The Aeroships crossed above the cliffs to the stone docks of the Quay. It was an encormous stone structure that looked like a colliseum with stone horns where the ships could dock. Here they were deposited -- funneled -- into its center and processed through a cathedral-like annex they came to call the Soul Mill.

Catalogued, registered, numbered and assigned to their final doom, the prisoners were loaded into cramped mariah wagons sometimes drawn by horses in the earliest of days but as time passed by other ogre and Barong prisoners. Perhaps through the small, barred openings in the stifling and unaccustomed terrible heat of that stifling isle, they might catch a glimps of the Governor’s District on the far side of the river. If they did, it would be the last image of a more civilized life that they would ever see.

Swallowed up by the rough, jungle roads, each would be left to their own thoughts. One would be resentful at a world that had conspired against them, forcing them into a life of crime. Another consumed by the hatred that had caused them to kill a former friend. Still another, a philosopher, who had published a paper questioning the policies of appeasing the empire and who was bewildered as to why they should be here at all. And another whose mind moved in circles trying in vain to think of a reason why they should be so badly treated and certain, somehow, that the mistake would be discovered and that they would certainly be freed -- perhaps with an apology and some compensation.

The reasons why they were here were as varied as the leaves of each plant they passed on their way to their dark prison cells awaiting them. There was no reason beyond that they had somehow crossed the Pax Imperitor. Whether they understood it or not, it was reason enough to separate them from their wealth, their friends, their family, and their lives.

--  from the 'Skyraider's Handbook'

All Aboard

Just a quick note on a few of our collaborators and their progress. I've personally been in touch with Larry Elmore and Matt Stawicki as well as Karl Preusser. Each of them are excited to talk about the work before us and get started.

We'll share art in progress with you as it becomes available through our Kickstarter updates. Joe Manganiello is connected into our online materials. I'll be touching base with him in the next few weeks as well. Plus, Kim has a host of artists working on some of our historic character portraits and Joe is at work on the app. So, everyone's aboard!

Once again, it's time to fly! If you have any questions or comments, we invite you to join us in posting to our Facebook page and we'll respond as quickly as we can. It's hard work right now but it's going to be so worth it!

    To the winds, buccaneers! To the storm! Skyraider's fly!

-- Tracy & Laura Hickman

Skyraiders of Abarax - Funded at $517,565!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 06:19:26 AM

Campaign Complete!

Thank you all so much for your support, and for getting the word out on this campaign.  We funded at $517,565, unlocking numerous stretch goals along the way, and we are SO EXCITED to dig in and make this the best new 5E adventure world that we can.  

As a thank you to all of our backers, we went ahead and unlocked the final stretch goal at $515k - a new section of the Skymaster's Almanac written by Tracy & Laura Hickman filled with legends of the world as it once was.

What Now?

We will follow up with a more comprehensive update once the whirlwind subsides, but for now you can just sit back and enjoy the ride.  We are already hard at work on the book and app.  The Pledge Manager will come later, once we are closer to fulfillment and preparing to get final counts for books & add-ons.  

We pledge to be open and transparent as we move forward, together, in this adventure.  If there are any hiccups along the way, we'll let you know.  And also keep an eye on our updates as we're likely to sneak out some early content as well... 

Thanks to ALL of our backers!

- Tracy, Laura, Kim & Joe (The Skyraiders Team)

Skyraiders of Abarax - 24 Hours to Go!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 12:28:17 AM

One Day Left!

We're on the final day of this campaign, and first we would like to thank you all so much for coming with us on this journey.  The support of each and every one of our backers is setting us up to make Skyraiders into an amazing experience - and we can't wait to get it into your hands!

But it's not over yet... we are trending to almost hit our final stretch goal: a full custom film-score quality soundtrack from acclaimed composer Karl Pruesser (who also created the score for the DragonLance animated film).  With your help, we should be able to reach that goal as well.

How Can You Help?

First, you have helped so much just by being a backer.  But if you're excited to help boost this campaign further, here's a few things you can do:

• Double-check the add-ons to make sure you're not missing anything that you want.  We have added an art poster pack and a number of 3D printable files - if any of these interest you, adding them will help boost our numbers just a bit more.
• Share this campaign on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any other TTRPG communities that you're a part of.  

Given the complexities of the printing industry at this time, we cannot guarantee availability of any of these products after the Pledge Manager closes - so if you're excited to get your hands on any of these books or accessories, this campaign is the best way to ensure you get everything you want.

Skyraiders Landing Party - Celebration Stream

To celebrate the successful funding of Skyraider of Abarax, Tracy and Laura will be on stream for the final hour of the campaign, answering questions, sharing stories and counting down to the finale.

You can join in on the fun via Facebook, Twitch or YouTube during the final hour of our campaign (8:00 AM Mountain Standard Time).  We hope to see you there!

From Distant Shores: Interviews about Skyraiders

"Laura and I conducted a pair of interviews today. We had heard about these streamers from our Kickstarter subscribers. Not only were we able to arrange interviews with both of them but discovered new friends in the process.

We had a great discussion with Janet at World Anvil -- a site that I highly recommend for its world creation and writing tools. We connected so well that we're planning a dinner together at GenCon as soon as we can all arrange to be there at the same time."

"We also were able to connect with Ted on Nerd Immersion, a YouTube channel that we had heard about through our Kickstarter subscribers. We had such a great time that Ted had WAY too much video of us and had to cut it into segments. And, yes, we hope to spend more time with Ted as well!"

From the Quarterdeck: Beware This Adventure Party

"Every Wednesday evening, at 7:00 pm MDT (0200 Thursday GMT), Laura and I conduct a live stream simultaneously on Facebook, Youtube and Twitch. We gather at Mythos Games in South Jordan, Utah near our home and take over the back room with our stream. 
     We've been playing Skyraiders of Abarax ... But his last week I think our players demonstrated why they are dangerous...
     Mostly to themselves.
     I have no right to criticize, however, since I STILL cannot remember to UNMUTE the microphones and, in addition, failed to properly plug my computer into its power supply ... causing everything to crash right in the middle of the game."

Once again, it's time to fly!

If you have any questions or comments, we invite you to join us in posting to our Facebook page and we'll respond as quickly as we can. We're in the final hours now!

To the winds, buccaneers! To the storm! Skyraiders fly!