We’ve been hard at work on a lot over the last couple months of development. The Airship Combat and Creation systems are complete and undergoing initial editing before we give it to you guys to dig into. We wrapped up our list of dev-built monsters last night and will be moving back to the all important fluff. We have some more details on each of those below along with updates on the Dice shipments and an unfortunate delay that we have run into.

But first! We have some new art for a few monsters.

First up! The Putrefact

These slow-moving, featureless creatures are considered pests by many, as they quite literally leave trails of putrid meat in their wakes. As they slowly digest whatever material is directly beneath them they convert the nutrients into a trailing flap of dermis and blood vessels. While they have little in the way of defense, their rancid odor keeps all but the most resolute attackers at bay. 

Next, the Land Kraken!

This psychic creature haunts the interconnected caves around Neroth. With its plethora of slimy tentacles the Land Kraken preys on anything that ventures too close to its domain, dragging unsuspecting prey into the darkness. Other than its mass of tentacles, none are certain of this creature's appearance. At first, the Neroth city watch thought the travellers and explorers to be insane as the creature appeared differently to each of the few survivors. However, enough people have gone missing that the city watch has taken upon itself to warn travellers and explorers to avoid sleeping in caves as this beast is a creature of opportunity. All those who have born witness to this creature remember terrible dreams the night of the attack and are permanently scarred thereafter from this horrific encounter. 

Dice! 

A couple of weeks ago we changed banks. Our previous bank began charging us a completely unnecessary sum of money for account maintenance so we saw that as an opportunity to move. (You may be wondering why we’re talking about banks instead of dice. Hang in there.) Because of that move, we are currently waiting to get the new bank card. We would have had the card sooner, but unfortunately there was a mix up with our address and the bank sent it to one that didn’t exist. 

 All that said, we expect the new card any day now, which means we can finally start shipping the dice out to those of you that ordered them. Thanks again for your patience with these. Once we get them in the mail, we’ll post another update to let everyone know. 

Book Delay :( 

Our art director was hard at work on the book layout (samples below) when he was met with some misfortune when the external hard drive that he used for his work took a tumble and was rendered unreadable. The drive has been sent to a recovery lab and we have the highest hopes that the data that was stored on it will be recovered. At the same time, we feel that it is prudent to anticipate the drive as a total loss, which would mean that the layout would have to start over from square one. For this reason, we are going to delay the book release to a late July/ early August timeframe. 

We are sorry to do this, but given the circumstances we feel that it is the best choice to hope for the best, but expect the worst. All in all, this will only further allow us to ensure the quality of the book. 

As with the dice we will keep you up to date on any developments on this front as they happen. 

 NOW ONTO DEVELOPMENT

 Airship Combat & Creation 

All of us have a deep love for the story of the rag-tag crew that is barely keeping their ship running while they get sucked into various misadventures. To that end we have built out the airship creation system to allow a degree of modularity that allows you to choose which crew facilities, guns, engines, etc. are added to your ship. 

In addition to the crafting system, we have developed a combat system specifically for airship combat. It bears many similarities to the “on foot” combat system that many of you are accustomed to, but has some unique features to account for the massive scale of airships and the three-dimensional realm that they fight in.

Our goal with airship combat was to simulate that classic bridge crew concept. Each player on an airship gets to take over an officer position on the ship. There are seven in total: Captain, Helmsman, Chief Engineer, Gunnery Master, Master-at-Arms, Sigil Master, and Squadron Ace. Each of these officers brings a number of special abilities through talent progression to the airship and its crew. But some ships are too big to be run by a mere handful of officers, which means you’ll be recruiting NPC crewmembers to man weapons, maintain systems, and treat the wounded while you bark orders from your Captain’s podium or scamper frantically about the engine compartment trying to fight fires. 

 We’ll post another update with the Airship chapters once we have completed the initial editing pass. 

Monsters 

In addition to all of the backer monsters that many of you have seen in the playtest, we have 49 monsters for a total of 75 that will make it into to core book. Expect plenty of nightmare fuel. 

Fluff and Worldbuilding 

Most of the fluff of the world is in place, but we have added a lot over the last year and need to get things organized and edited into something a bit more coherent. 

Playtest Rules 

We have had a number of adjustments over the past few months, but a major one that we want everyone to be aware of is that we have removed the fear check from the combat initiative. It came to our attention that it was too deadly, and too detrimental to the fun of the game, but we are considering implementing in another fashion for very powerful monsters. 

Thank You, 

The INDE Team