From Steve Albany
Just a heads up to everyone that cares… We have completed development on the Conan ruleset for Fantasy Grounds. Waiting on some business discussions to finish up before its released to Smiteworks.
The graphics can be much better… not that eye-catching as the community ones, but it is great for starters! Any idea on the price range and whether there will be discounts for people who own the printer/digital products?
I am not an artist, but I have been doing graphic designs and layout work in the past. I am not sure at what stage the ruleset is (i.e. testing my Modiphius or by Smite Works), but I believe the style can be significantly improved. Actually at some point I was having the intention to work on my own dedicated ruleset, but learning that there is one in works made me drop this project. Below are questions/suggestions, and as all design elements, subjective.
The Doom and Momentum/Fortune tokens - the current graphics are bland. As this is officially licensed product you can ask Modiphius guys to give you the source files for their tokens used in the Kickstarter.
Dice icons - you can replace the dice results of d6 and hit die with the custom style from the Conan-branded dice. Same as above, you should ask Modiphius to give you the raw files, probably will be vector-based drawing in Illustrator, but you can make it PNG for the FG purposes via Inkscape (if you don’t have the Adobe products).
Sidebar - I never liked the icon-based library where you have big square, circle or whatever icons. It is too old school and consumes a lot of space on the screen. I would go with sidebar that is using text labels for the various libraries rather than icons. A good font (not the Crom-one please!) and nice style of the button graphic will significantly improve the real estate and make the ruleset more stylish. Also it is MUCH easy to maintain this and add extra libraries. There is small .lua script that you need to implement and single graphics.
Visuals - The ruleset is based on CoreRPG which is great. I would retain the shortcut bar graphics, the current one are a bit bland. The wallpaper can have more texture, currently it is like low-res image being expanded. The chat box and window background - light parchment texture is good for the immersion, add a skull or shield here or there.
Libraries & Automation - in the screenshot above, I see short list of libraries. For example I don’t see Vehicles/Ships, which leads me to believe you have no plans to implement ship/vehicle combat in the system and combat tracker, therefore no way if I play sea campaign to get the benefit of the table’s automation. Same goes for Talents - how players are browsing and adding/removing talents to their characters? Where are the spells?
Character Sheet & Automation - The most critical fro players. I want to see screenshot of each tab How you have implemented the character sheet and what level of automation is there? Drag and drop items, do you automatically create rollable attacks and etc? How you will cast spells and apply effects
Conditions/Wounds/Effects on the CT - What kind of effects/conditions are implemented? If we have wound, is the wound level and its penalty taken as part of the roll when you click one of the DC buttons below the chat box or we have to take this into account manually?
I will stop here. Obviously Conan is one of my favourite RPGs and having licensed ruleset is very exciting, but as I already have working extension and books uploaded in FG I what to know what will be the benefit compared to the current community work.
I am extremely excited As I said, Conan 2d20 is in the top 3 of roleplaying games I run and strongly advertise in the communities I participate. Had several runs on conventions and having official ruleset to back all up is great.
I will PM you. Any preliminary information on the pricing of the core ruleset and following modules?
I have read on FG forums that the agreement is now in place, ruleset submission for review pending.
While we wait for this, is there a way to get more screenshots form the ruleset?
Currently the FG ruleset is going into testing.
I’ve spoken with Sam and he had informed me that currently we have no set release date for the FG ruleset. We want to avoid giving ballpark dates or estimates, once we have a set date, we’ll make an announcement.
I’m not directly aware of what changes have been made since those images were posted, as mentioned in the thread some have been made but we currently do not have any new images to update with. When we have any updates, anymore news or previews, we’ll make an official announcement or update in the Kickstarter updates. Our newsletters and the Kickstarter updates are the best place to check for future updates and news on the FG ruleset.
Thank you. That gives me a better idea of a time frame. Looks like we’ll go back to a different system for a while. Rest assured, I’ll still be here when it drops…