Review and editing process kicking off!
about 5 years ago – Wed, Oct 02, 2019 at 03:07:34 AM

Hey folks! Maggie here and a happy first day of October to all of you! This update will cover where we are in the editing and review process, where we are with art, something new and exciting from our digital partners at Handelabra Games and a look into the past with our first Spirit Spotlight! 

Review Process

This week our playtesters will receive the first of four sets of items to review. We will give them two weeks to review each set so it will take around 2 months for our playtesters to review everything because this is a HUGE expansion! :) 

Art

As of yesterday morning, 87% of the art had been commissioned. Since this expansion is enormous that is well over 100 pieces of art so far! 

The art commissioning process is tricky, but Eric provides very detailed descriptions of what idea he is trying to bring to life and then our graphic design team finds the artists capable of doing that! We have had the privilege of working with very talented artists!

Handelabra Games

Spirit Island the video game is finally coming to life! Handelabra Games has worked with us previously to create the digital format of Sentinels of the Multiverse, allowing us to share our games with thousands of fans all over the world, and now they are about to do the same thing with Spirit Island! 

Click here to sign-up for more information on their crowdfunding campaign!

Spirit Spotlight

Below is our first Spirit Spotlight where we take an in-depth look at how a spirit functions! And, in honor of October, we are kicking it off with Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares! Click below to check out the video!

See you next month!

-Maggie

A glimpse into the future...
over 5 years ago – Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 11:38:14 PM

Hey folks! Maggie here with your September update! Now that we have wrapped up all of our Spirit updates, it's time to tell you all about where we are in the process of actually making Jagged Earth!

First Round of Edits

Two weeks ago we started out initial rounds of edits! Our process takes a super long time, but it's to ensure that we have time to look over every single part of the game internally and with our playtesters. Our editing process involves five internal editors at the Greater Than Games office, three "external" editors from Eric's team, including Eric himself, and all of our playtesters! 

Currently, we are working on the first internal editing pass at the rule book, and we are expecting to provide playtesters with files to review next month! 

Sneak Peek of Finalized Art

We are still in the process of finalizing a portion of the art for Jagged Earth because there is a ton! Here is a sneak peek at some of the upcoming art for Spirit Island: Jagged Earth!

See you next month!

-Maggie

Our final Spirit update, Shroud of Silent Mist!
over 5 years ago – Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 12:34:24 AM

Hey folks! Maggie here with your monthly update! Below is the Spirit summary for Shroud of Silent Mist, but first a brief Gen Con update! 

Gen Con Update

We did it! We had another awesome Gen Con, and our 2nd annual Spirit Island tournament. Thank you to everyone who participated, players and referees! For those of you who could not participate we will have more information about it in our next monthly update. We will also have information on how our Jagged Earth Preview events went! 

Shroud of Silent Mist

Introduction

With wetlands, mountains and high-humidity jungles during the rainy season, Spirit Island has plenty of Spirits of mist and fog. Among them are Morning-Glow, a smallish Spirit that lives near a few Dahan villages and manifests as striking patterns of light in the dawn's first rays, then sleeps for most of the day and night; Tide of the Forest's Breath, a dense fog that rolls down from certain mountain peaks; a Spirit called different names on different parts of the island that rises where the sun beats down on wet sand (often near the ocean); and Shroud of Silent Mist, the mist which silently flows in, bringing quiet and slow dissolution in its wake.

(The Spirit's name is an inexact translation; the Dahan don't generally use burial-shrouds. One word being translated refers to the mist-like clouding of the eyes with age and/or death, and another word brings in association of muffling or enfolding cloth. But attempts at literal translation such as "Attenuating Death-Cataract Enfolding-Blanket" mangle the poetry of the original, and completely miss the allusions to mists and cold, so "Shroud of Silent Mist" is, all in all, a better representation.)

Shroud of Silent Mist is one of those Spirits where knowledge of its nature helps greatly in dealing with it. It doesn't (usually) kill humans quickly at all; while there are stories of those-who-travel dying overnight in a mist-shrouded dell, the reality is that the danger it brings is on the scale of months to years: the mists seep in (perhaps just at night, at first), and everyone feels a little lethargic, a little cold, a little not-quite-there, with a slightly harder time seeing or hearing or breathing as the world turns a pale silver-white. Then the mists stay - perhaps retreating for a day or two here and there, but always returning - and everyone keeps feeling a little worse, and a little worse, and a little worse, but it gets harder and harder to muster the motivation to do anything about it. 

Those that manage to leave the area of the mists recover fully, given a bit of time. This may be easier said than done: if it's just manifesting in a small hollow or river-basin, you might win free easily, but more often the fog stretches all around for a much greater distance, and it's very easy to get lost in the pall. Overall, though, the Dahan consider Shroud of Silent Mist to be a very dangerous Spirit, but not always an imminent threat, between the slow pace of its enervation and the fact that it doesn't seem to bear the Dahan any specific ill-will. It might enfold a Dahan village for a few days then depart, leaving a few dead herd animals and a scattering of smaller wildlife. (Or it might stay for months and leave only the bones of those who lived there among the trees. If it shows up and you decide to stick around, you're taking your chances.)

There are stories that it once was a Dahan, and was somehow changed into a Spirit, cursed to wander silently bringing death. Most don't give this much credence, but it does make for a good tale.

Design

Shroud of Silent Mist was one of two Spirits from the initial development of Spirit Island / Branch & Claw; the other was Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble. The names of both have changed, but the core thematic concepts have remained the same... well, mostly.

The original Mist spirit also had Disease in its bailiwick, but it just didn't quite fit in two different ways. One was mechanical: the Spirit was trying to do so many different things that it wasn't really doing any of them very well, and it couldn't be very good at any of them or it would be too powerful. The other was elemental: Shroud of Silent Mist has always been Air-Water plus Moon, and the only Disease power good for that is Infested Aquifiers, so players of Mists always had to choose whether to go Disease-heavy and abandon their innates, or focus on innates but not do much with Disease. That sort of trade-off isn't necessarily a problem, but for a Spirit that was  supposed to be sort of a Disease showcase Spirit, it wasn't so great.

So it became two Spirits: the Disease portion split off and eventually became Vengeance as a Burning Plague, leaving Shroud of Silent Mist to focus on what it did best.

The core of the design came together pretty quickly, and for a while it looked like it just needed some minor tweaking and it'd be good to go. But it always seemed like there was one rough edge after another, and the tweaks revealed a few underlying problems.

One of the rough edges (that's useful to know about for context) was that it did damage in too many different ways. They were all designed to evoke the feeling of surrounding and pervasive slow dissolving over time, but there were just too many mechanical differences to keep straight. This was pretty easy to solve; I standardized so that both unusual Damage calculations were the same: 1 Damage to a different Invader per adjacent land with your Presence. (So the more adjacent lands it's in, the more different Invaders it can ping for 1 Damage.) This had tested out as one of the most thematically evocative for "surrounding mists", was a good power-level (strictly no better than "1 Damage to each Invader"), and played into Mists' positional game quite nicely.

The first subtle dynamics problem was that its Unique Power Cards were too good. Not in an absolute sense - they were fairly costed - but all of them did exactly what the Spirit wanted, playing directly into its synergies and strengths. This isn't the norm; most Spirits have one or more Power Cards which are thematically apropos for their nature, but which don't play directly into their primary strengths (outside of elements, which are usually at least decent if not good). While not necessarily a problem, in combination with its Growth at the time, it meant players would focus on Reclaiming over gaining new Power Cards, which meant play tended to be more same-y than with other Spirits. This was mostly solved by making Power Card gain easier and a little more appealing (for reasons you'll see below). The Unique Powers did also get very slightly worse, but not by much - at one point I realized the Spirit's relationship with the Dahan wasn't really being captured by its Powers, so added in interactions on a couple of its Unique Powers, which served to make them a touch less convenient.

The second dynamics problem was that Presence loss - in particular, early flips of "lose a Presence every Invader Phase" Blight Cards - hit it disproportionately hard, due to the aforementioned Damage-reliant-on-surrounding and some other factors. This was half-solved by giving it an additional starting Presence so it was stretched less thin in early-game, and half-solved by giving it a Unique Power that could let it avoid predictable Presence destruction.

The third problem will make more sense once we've looked at the Spirit panel:

Spirit Panel sneak peek

Growth is a fairly standard "Reclaim-option / 2-Presence option / 1-Presence option" trio, though its Special Rules interact with its Growth, which is part of why the 2-Presence option is both at Range 0. For much of testing, it had a fourth option that gave it a discount on Power Cards with Air and/or Water, but that was eventually dropped.

(The reason it had that discount option was because Shroud of Silent Mist is such a limited-Energy Spirit. It starts with very low Energy income, never gets especially high, and has no +Energy Growth choice to grab a bunch of Energy in a hurry. This is mostly for thematic reasons: Mists are insubstantial, airy, and attenuated by nature. They flow and obfuscate and terrify and dissolve, but they are not powerful the same way that many other natural phenomena are - they don't knock you over the way a rushing river or mighty wind could. However, I did want Shroud of Silent Mist to be able to stretch up to Major Powers if played in that direction. The discount Growth fulfilled that need, but became unnecessary once the Spirit acquired other paths to be able to stockpile enough energy to use mid-cost Majors on occasion.)

Its Special Rules are the heart of the Spirit, and reading downwards they get progressively more game-changing.

Gather Power from the Cool and Dark rewards Shroud of Silent Mist for taking powers that are more in line with its nature. That facet of Spirit design is usually handled via innates, but innate powers aren't great at making cards with a specific element *less* appealing. (And they way it's done here - as a one-time no-bonus - means that once you've actually taken a Power that has Fire, it works just as well for you as any other card. This is both thematically apropos and good for feel.) The rule also serves two mechanical purposes: it makes acquiring new Power Cards more attractive, and it gives the Spirit a bit of extra energy that averages less than 1 per turn, which is what testing had revealed it wanted. (1, 2, 3 was a bit too high; 0, 1, 2 was a bit too low.)

Mists Shift and Flow allows moving 1 Presence any time the Spirit uses a land-targeting Power, representing mists constantly shifting and flowing around wherever it's active. This Presence movement can be used to fulfill targeting/range requirements, which effectively gives it +1 Range with any Power that doesn't require targeting from a Sacred Site or a particular terrain. It can surround the Invaders (dealing more widespread Damage with some of its Powers), or flow out of the way of an incoming Ravage and then back in again after the danger is past.

Flowing mists are also useful for Slow and Silent Death, its last Special Rule.

"Invaders and Dahan in your lands don't heal Damage" - straightforward enough. It makes incidental Damage a lot more useful, because the Invaders won't heal. But then:

"[Each turn,] 1 Fear per land of yours with damaged Invaders" - Mists  generates Fear passively, just by leaving half-dead Invaders hanging on in its lands. This comes with some downside - Invaders will explore from damaged Towns/Cities, so carving out a safe-zone becomes harder. And if you leave Invaders alive in too many lands, Ravages can become painful. But the benefit of getting 3-5 Fear turn after turn can be immense.

"Gain 1 Energy per 3 lands of yours with damaged Invaders" - this ties into the third dynamics problem mentioned above. For a while, playtesters kept coming back and saying that Shroud of Silent Mist felt a little weak. I gave it a series of small boosts, and eventually reports were that it was balanced... and then one other tester and I each tried it and found it massively OP.

What had happened was that most playtesters saw "1 Fear per land with Damaged Invaders" as dangerous - after all, who wants to leave Invaders alive? - and decided to use it very sparingly, often generating only 0-1 Fear per turn. But the rule is actually quite powerful, and by mostly ignoring it they were handicapping themselves.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a Spirit which can be played badly, but I wanted to signpost "hey, you should pay attention to this rule": many players underestimate the value of Fear, and that crossed with the risk generated by leaving Invaders alive meant that a tentative reaction was apt to be common. The bonus Energy provides a much more tangible/immediately-usable benefit, creates an incentive to stretch a little further if you already have 1-2 lands with damaged Invaders, and signposts that yes, 3 lands with damaged Invaders is a totally reasonable thing to shoot for.

The other nice thing this does is provide a source of Energy that tends to scale up over the game, but not always, and only if you take on additional risk. This was the final change that allowed the 4th Growth option (which was always a little niche) to be cut: players who use Slow and Silent Death well and have pushed the top Presence track tend to readily accumulate enough Energy for a Major Power.

The rest of the Spirit Panel is pretty straightforward. Its Energy track improves decently swiftly for a Spirit that gets 2 Presence/turn, but doesn't boost its more-powerful first innate until the very end. Its Plays track has a long gap between 2 and 3 Plays, but then gets better quite quickly from there... if it has the energy to use all those plays.

Its first innate deals damage, and is entirely the more powerful of the two. The other can get Explorers and Dahan lost and wandering. Between its ability to deal 1 Damage and move Explorers, it can play a pretty good Explorer-control midgame if it wants to, but when it does it's not damaging Towns and Cities to generate Fear + Energy and soften them up for eventual destruction, so it may find itself gaining ground in some ways by losing it in others.

And that's the final Spirit preview! I hope you're looking forward to Jagged Earth, because I sure am. When I went to Origins in June, the number of people who expressed anticipation was wonderful, and only amped up my own!

- R. Eric Reuss

Production Status Update
over 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 01:40:40 AM

Greetings Backers!

This is Paul Bender, CEO of Greater Than Games, with a quick pre-Gen Con Kickstarter update! This month's update and next month's update will both be a bit on the shorter side due to all of the work we're putting into Gen Con prep!

Development Process

The good news is that game development for Jagged Earth is proceeding very well! Here's an update from Jennifer Closson, our Creative Director:

"Our big focus in game development currently has been the rulebook. Spirit Island: Jagged Earth included Spirits that use rules and game elements from Branch and Claw and well as introducing new game mechanics. With this in mind, we're building out a Jagged Earth rulebook that fully integrates any rules from the base game and Branch and Claw that players might need to know. This means that players who don't own Branch and Claw will still be able to learn and play with the rules brought into the Spirit Island product line from that expansion. We're using color and iconography throughout the rulebook to help you know exactly what rules set you're reading rules from. This way any of you who already own or have played Branch and Claw can skip over those rules in the book. We will also be carrying this iconography onto the Spirit Panels so players know what rules knowledge is needed to play a particular Spirit. It's been a very detail-oriented process, but we're really looking forward to how it will assist with gameplay."

In addition to the rulebook work, the component layout for the spirit panels and starting powers is nearly complete. We are now working on power cards, as well as getting all of the final art pieces commissioned. We hope to have all of the art commissioned out before Gen Con.

Gen Con Excitement!

This year at Gen Con we're running another Spirit Island tournament like we did last year. The two Spirits that teams will be using from Jagged Earth include Stone's Unyielding Defiance and Shifting Memory of Ages. We're also running ticketed demos of Spirit Island using four Jagged Earth Spirits: Stone's Unyielding Defiance, Shifting Memory of Ages, Lure of the Deep Wilderness, and Volcano Looming High. Currently, all of the ticketed demos and the tournament are sold out (which is amazing and deeply humbling)! However! If you'd like to play with any of those spirits, we do need one or two demo runners (what we call "Citizens") to take on a Friday shift running that demo. You'd get to run a demo of Spirit Island and see the new spirits in action, and we'd pay you $15/hr. If you are interested, shoot an email to [email protected]. If you'll be at the show and aren't able to get into a demo, we still encourage you to check out the display case in the booth to see the panels for these Spirits on display. You can also pop into demo room 140 in the convention center and take a peak at the Spirits in demos or at the tournament.

Until next time,

~Paul

Lure of the Deep Wilderness
over 5 years ago – Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 02:09:48 AM

Introduction

Lure of the Deep Wilderness can in some ways be seen as a counterpart to Ocean's Hungry Grasp: it calls humans towards the deep centers of its power, in one case the depths of the ocean, in the other inland areas far from the shore. There the similarity ends: where Ocean's Hungry Grasp is an embodiment of the seas' hunger to consume the land and those who dwell upon it, Lure of the Deep Wilderness is an embodiment of nature's allure and danger intertwined: the desire to seek what lies further in, and the consequences of so doing. For the purposes of fighting the Invaders, most of those consequences are bad ones, but that is not an inextricable truth about it: wanderlust may lead to good things as well as bad.

A digression: Spirit Island generally presents Spirits in a way such that you see the sides of them best suited to the struggle against the Invaders. However, many Spirits have portions of their nature that aren't very relevant to the conflict, so they don't get much mechanical representation. For instance, A Spread of Rampant Green could (perhaps) cause *only* crops to grow abundantly, creating plenty of food for Invaders or Dahan. But the effect wouldn't be enough to support the Dahan the way that River Surges in Sunlight does, and wouldn't  be especially useful against the Invaders, so it doesn't have any rules associated with it. If the Spirit doubled down and hyperfocused on that part of itself, it might be able to expand / empower / better control that crop growth enough to make it relevant - perhaps entice Invaders to change where they try to settle - but in the process, other portions of itself would be neglected and become weaker. Mechanically, this tradeoff would most likely be captured in an Aspect for the Spirit. End of digression!

For its part, Lure of the Deep Wilderness likes humans, but not in a way that humans find especially comfortable. Arguably it prefers the acquisition more than the actual having (though it finds both satisfying), and while this tilt is probably a boon to those called away by waking dreams (if they survive, they're likely to break free at some point), it's still not something that makes the Dahan want to have it as a neighbor.

(There are, in the way of humans, exceptions: a scattering of families and people hope to be called on such a journey, seeing it as something of a rite of passage. Their neighbors are pretty skeptical, but hey, if it keeps Lure of the Deep Wilderness from snaring their relatives with a vision-call, they'll happily live with it. And sometimes, Lure of the Deep Wilderness will call an entire village during that village's moving-time; the Dahan tend to find this far less objectionable than individuals being lured away. Partly because it doesn't involve the painful bereavement of loved ones suddenly walking off into the jungle possibly never to return, and partly because villages called in this fashion tend to find excellent sites for their next settlement - often previously unknown ones.)

Unlike the Dahan, the Invaders have no agreements with or knowledge of the Spirits, which means from Lure of the Deep Wilderness' perspective they're entirely fair game. At first, there was no malice in its call, but as the threat the Invaders posed became clear, it began acting with more deliberation and anger.

Design

Lure of the Deep Wilderness has several different roots. The most obvious one is "if Ocean focuses on the coast, what Spirit focuses inland?", but bits of its concept grew out of a very old playtest Spirit (called Deep Heart of the Island, which largely morphed into Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island). It may or may not have had some origin in the desire to make a Spirit that used more than one type of token: with Jagged Earth I knew I could do that, but I can't recall my own motivations well enough to know whether I actively attempted to do so, or whether I just noticed that that it would be a good fit for this Spirit and then ran with it.

Initial concepts played fairly well pretty much right from the get-go, but development on the details and (especially) balance took a long time to iron out. From the early days, Lure of the Deep Wilderness has done a couple of key mechanical things: Gathered Explorers, and broken Towns/Cities up into Explorers (representing the fragmentation of society as individuals and small groups picked up and moved out). For a long time, it actively benefited from having Explorers hang out in its lands - usually through some sort of Energy boost - but this proved difficult to balance, fiddly to keep track of, and created feel-bad moments when it inevitably had to wipe out the Explorers. (While that feel-bad was admittedly somewhat thematically apropos for the Spirit, it was still a point against the mechanic.)

It's primarily a Spirit of Air (journeying, distance, whispers in the mind / on the breeze) + Moon (dreams, visions, transformation) + Plant (the wilderness, connection, greenery), with secondary elements of Animal (dangerous beasts) and Fire (action/motion, violence). Let's look at its Spirit Panel:

Spirit Panel sneak peek

Its Special Rules are pretty straightforward: its Presence can only go inland. It can also keep up to 2 Explorers per Presence from doing much of anything except Build, which give it the leeway to pile up a fair number of Explorers in its lands without undue fear of what they'll do during Ravages.

This latter is highly relevant because of its first innate, Forsake Society to Chase After Dreams, which breaks up Towns or Cities into Explorers, then optionally Gathers them into its lands. This only does Fear if there are other Towns/Cities left behind wondering what just happened; otherwise everyone involved is perfectly happy with what's going on....

...until the Spirit's more deadly side kicks in with its second innate: Never Heard From Again. The base 2-Plant level can mow down vast numbers of Explorers, though only if that area of the wilderness is particularly deadly, having Badlands, Beasts, Disease, and/or Wilds. (Lure's unique power cards are capable of adding all four of those, though Badlands and Beasts will come out most frequently.) Higher levels of the innate add Badlands, do straight-up Damage for destroying any Towns/Cities foolish enough to have built in such a location, and even allow doing the whole thing over again. Note that the levels here aren't in ascending order - the 3-Plant level comes before the 2-Plant level, so that if you add a Badlands you can use it right away to destroy Explorers.

So basically, Lure's main game-plan for dealing with major Invader settlements is "lure them piecemeal into my domain, then wipe them out with the hazards of the wilderness".

Looking at other portions of the spirit panel, its Growth isn't especially high-powered, but is very versatile: it can choose between (Power Card) and (Energy + one of 3 elements) every turn, regardless of whether it's Reclaiming or putting down Presence, and those 3 elements can often let it fill in something it needs for an innate power. Its Presence tracks offer high benefits per placement, but its placement is on the slow side (max 1 per turn, and none when reclaming), so it's only liable to come close to clearing its tracks in a very long game, or with some sort of acceleration.

Its unique power cards are outside the scope of this preview, but in brief: three of the four of them target Range 0 Inland, continuing the  focus on "Lure them to me, then destroy them". It faces a tension between making one or two highly deadly kill-zones with lots of tokens or spreading them out over more of its lands, making each less deadly but providing more versatility in targeting. Needless to say, it synergizes really well with partners that focus on Badlands / Beasts / Disease / Wilds themselves, as both can take some advantage of what the other is putting down!

That's it for now - only one Spirit left to preview!