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Hello all, and welcome to our update!
Gen Con is next weekend (August 1st - 4th) and we’re hyped!
We’ll be at booth #420 this year slinging games and showing off Act 2 +3 in the flesh, as well as all the miniatures from Wave 2! We’ll make sure to post pictures to our socials while we’re there and then we’ll do a proper update on Act 2 + 3 when we’re back the following week.
Definitely come say hi if you’re going to be there. We’ll have a lot to see and get excited about.
One of our designers/writers (Kris) has finished up his duties on Wave 2 and has been moving on to some new projects, one of the finished items is a small Bounty Pack called Fury of Nature.
During Gen Con, we will be running events for this Bounty Pack! And you’ll get a special prize for playing!
Just to note, no products we make will ever be exclusive to any convention and will be offered to everyone later on.
Fury of Nature is a Mundane Tier Bounty and includes a 36 page book, one Intelligent Combatant card, one new Item card, and one Initiative card. It requires Act 1 to play.
We thought it would be fun to give those attending Gen Con something new and fun to try out while they’re waiting for Wave 2 to deliver.
You can also view the full PDF from home by joining our beta channel on Discord !
We hope to offer these sorts of regular releases once Wave 2 delivers to add more value to existing core products.
Just to recap, we will be running a final pre-fulfillment preorder on everything Wave 2 later this summer. Our plan is to time the preorder right as we’re wrapping up playtesting so that once it concludes, we immediately enter mass-production.
Sign up for the newsletter here to be reminded when we launch.
And just to be clear, the most time-consuming aspect of mass production, the plastics molds, are already done.
Beyond that, we are actively proofing the products we already have completed on this campaign to expedite production.
All the meticulous quality control and playtesting we are doing right now is to ensure that proofing and production goes smoothly and the game you receive is the best it can be, free from future update packs!
These kits are starting to fulfill! Some of you have probably even received them.
USA orders have begun shipping out and probably have another week or two before they’re all done. Canadian orders will begin shipping this weekend.
AUS and Asia orders are on the boat headed to their local warehouses.
EU orders are waiting to be picked up from the states.
We estimate that all the Lupercalia 2022 orders will be fulfilled by the end of August.
With these resin kits finally fulfilled, that will conclude all the outstanding resin kits! We are committed to ensuring that any future resin kits are manufactured and prepared before selling in them in the future. This means that any resin kits we do moving forward will have a limited quantity, but turn around times will be immediate.
The Aeonian Codex is a collection of lore we are building upon starting today. For those interested, the Aeonian Codex is a deep dive into Middara Lore and all the nitty gritty that surrounds it.
We've got so much lore for this game that isn't organized or public. We're talking well over 100k worth of semi-organized ADHD fueled thoughts and notes jotted down over the last decade. Now that some members on our team have finished their outstanding duties, we're going to finally work through some of this stack of madness by organizing the notes into something digestible.
Together, Brooklynn and Kris will be working to bring cohesion to our existing lore documents and prepare to share them in a digestible format. These pieces of fiction will be shared through what we are called the Aeonian Codex and can be found on our website.
Today, it is bare bones. But as we continue regular updates every week, we will be expanding the Aeonian Codex section of our website to include more and more relevant information. That means as time goes on, we will be expanding and beautifying these sections and articles.
Below you can find a link to the first handful of topics on the Aeonian Codex.
Woe to the word count and those who fear it.
Brooklynn here!
We've been developing cards, sharing them with the community, and implementing feedback we get daily! With every item card developed at this point, I’m focusing my efforts on combatant cards. Sharing these finished designs through Kickstarter is a great way for me to put myself in a different creative headspace and see the designs from a new perspective.
It seems we forgot to upload a card on the last update. Also—more importantly, we forgot to update the banner for the combatant in question. So I’ve reposted the Mana Seducer in the section below!
Beyond that goof, I wanted to talk about a few agents who are part of a secretive private security group called L.U.R.I.D.
In the world of Middara, human life is precious, if only because you’ll live forever if you don’t get ganked. For that reason, we don’t typically see combatants that are (non-corrupted) humans in Middara. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any. On the contrary, human opponents represent some of the hardest things to kill in the setting. We like to play into that lore by ensuring that anytime humans are being fought as opponents, there is a good reason to be fighting them. That way, we don’t set up waves of human cannon fodder to be slain like this is some kind of Dynasty Warrior game.
On one hand, this is to add gravity to fighting humans. On the other hand, the truth still remains that despite immortality as a viable option, humans are more than capable of violence towards each other—perhaps more so than ever on Middara.
Every faith that wishes to survive must do one of two things: evangelize or reproduce. On earth there’s a heavy emphasis on the latter—the young are impressionable, and will accept almost anything their parents teach. Whether that turns them into upstanding citizens or mad cultists in the service of a dark goddess is really just a matter of perspective.
Even those who have only recently stepped through the portal know that they can have no children while on Middara. Scholars and priests have not reached a consensus about why, but here at least it’s an advantage. Can you imagine what kind of parents the Dark Mother’s coven would produce?
Returning to earth to reproduce is a dangerous thing for all Middarans. But at least those who mostly resemble humans can make the trip in relative safety. Witches of the Dark Mother have become so twisted by the Path of Alteration that they would probably be discovered and executed by angels soon after arriving. And when their culture is all about seeking pleasure, raising kids rarely enters into the equation anyway.
That means the coven needs a way to spread the doctrine. The Dark Mother needs more worshipers, and an endless supply of disposable men to give themselves to the witches in service. Those who accomplish this task are the Mana Seducers.
Within the ranks of the coven, they are near the very bottom, just above the Acolytes who barely understand the Mother’s unholy magic, but not yet full witches. We still don’t know exactly why they make the determinations they do—perhaps elevation to which requires a young woman to bring a number of worshipers under the Mother’s thrall first.
Maybe it’s just cultural, and witches nominate themselves when they have a passion for spreading the good word. No one really knows why the cult makes any of the decisions it does.
What we do know is that the Dark Mother Divine sends out her servants with the tools to bring in recruits. The Mana Seducers are refused entry by every nation that embraces Faulkism, such as the Brahamian Empire. Even open-minded states like Elenia usually receive them with a cold welcome at best.
Yet no matter how strictly nations work to keep them out, they always seem to find a way inside. There’s no barrier that can keep them out for long, be it physical, political, or social.
No matter how loudly nations proclaim their purity from the Mother’s corruption, the truth is that all humans feel desire. Everyone has little cracks in their soul, things they desperately want to have or do that society will not permit. The Manna Seducer offer’s the Dark Mother’s own tantalizing gospel—there is no desire too dark to fulfill, and no change that can’t be achieved in her worship.
– 2022, The Lands of Elenia: Musings and Monsters, Shayliss Arsen
The Mana Seducer is the last dangerous foe that makes up the trio of these threats. You’ll find the three paired together—making your encounters rife with positional challenges. She is the Beldame, the caster, and representative of a common devotee within the Dark Mother’s coterie.
Her first Passive grants her resistance to magic damage and the ability to cast spells at a great distance. This shows her devotion to the dark arts and the guidance and protection of a greater being manifest. Provoke is listed last, representing her banner and cross-like weapon.
UwU Ministrations shakes up any encounter with a Mana Seducer nearby. It fundamentally forces adventurers to consider different tactics as any free attacks they use will generate energy tokens onto the Mana Seducer, giving her a static bonus to her rolls for each token she gains. Given how tight the math is in our game, even a +1 is significant—giving an enemy even more can quickly lead to the demise of your party. Furthermore, reckless adventurers who rely on free attacks within her SOI may even inadvertently upgrade her resistance to a full-blown immunity to magic.
Her first AI Step opens up strong with a melee attack at reach 2, and punishes players with strong conviction builds and inflicts Sedate—slowing them down and baiting out any free attacks they might be tempted to use. The Mana Seducer will then Charge, looking to base a different and distant target before Swapping places with another ally. This is to further make the positional strategy difficult for the players to reverse engineer and to also shake up the capabilities of allies who might not otherwise be able to get themselves into an advantageous position.
Then the spells get cast—her real bread and butter. Anyone within her SOI will be inflicted with magic damage and have their abilities nerfed by Stupefy. This spell and how devastating it is will depend greatly on your party's reliance on free attacks given her ability to repeat the effect for each energy token she’s earned.
After all this, you’ll find that the Mana Seducer is also a summoner—one of many within service of the Dark Mother. The amount of horrors she can summon are wide and diverse at this point in our game. We will cover those in a later update.
The Mana Seducer is simple. But she can easily shake up tried and true strategies used by players. When her, or any other of these Dark Mother devotee’s are added to an encounter in the crawl mode, you can expect the gameplay expectations to diverge greatly.
Not all who step into Middara are content to live without the luxuries they previously enjoyed. For all its faults, Earth had advantages—semiconductors, radio, artificial textiles, lifesaving pharmaceuticals—so much that the emigrant previously took for granted is now gone. Most accept this status quo and try to adapt to their new lives, but not all. Enter Sylphia.
The organization’s efforts to restore technology require the investment of considerable resources, gathered into secret laboratories and hidden factories dedicated to manufacturing this technology. After a few prominent robberies, Sylphia realized their infrastructure would require protection.
As it happened, Sylphia already had both the tools and the personnel to form their own paramilitary group. Many new arrivals to Middara desired access to Earth technology taken from them by the portals but lacked the means to pay. At the same time, Sylphia facilities were churning out advanced pseudomagical devices, many of which could be adapted for offensive purposes. Where these two resources were combined, the result was L.U.R.I.D, the Lethal Unorthodox Response and Intervention Division.
L.U.R.I.D. began as Sylphia’s solution to a practical problem. Everyone knew they had rare and valuable tech to steal, and the size of their facilities made them very difficult to hide. What cannot be hidden must be protected.
No military force of any size had ever been armed with Earth-like weapons before. The result was exemplary, a force of mercenaries that could triumph even while outnumbered. No one who fought them had ever been more meaningfully outgunned before. Soon it was clear that L.U.R.I.D.’s effective strength was far beyond anything required to keep a few factories and labs safe.
What followed was predictable—Sylphia was an organization that required enormous investment to continue its work. Yet they had this resource they could offer to anyone with the Gold to pay. What harm could there be in lending out a few soldiers when they weren’t required for other duties?
L.U.R.I.D. is not some shady criminal organization—they operate entirely within the bounds of the law, only ever in a defensive context. They’ve become so feared in underground circles that the presence of one of their plaques outside a home is usually enough to deter intruders. On the other hand, it can also indicate the property in question contains something worth protecting. Those who witness the first signs of a L.U.R.I.D. squad are advised to retreat immediately. No reward is worth the risk of a confrontation and the lethal consequences they will likely suffer.
Sylphia is an organization dedicated to bringing back technology from Earth and dedicated to the pursuit of the sciences. It may have started as an altruistic endeavor but quickly expanded beyond the research of its founders and into something much more disruptive, and to some—much more insidious. Naturally, Sylphia’s experimental endeavors and dubious goals have shaken the foundation of an old world still deeply rooted in even older ideas. This challenge to an ancient status quo has put Sylphia and their cohorts directly in opposition to powerful aristocracies with deep seeded traditions, dangerous native denizens who only stand to lose from such strides in technology at the fingertips of humans, and primordial demigods with agendas that run centuries deep.
Needless to say, those who find themselves dedicated to such experimental heresy or even adjacent to it might find themselves confronted by death often—their pursuit of what many see as bizarre ideas putting them in the path of abominations and cultists alike. But to Sylphia, that's just another opportunity. While mercenary groups are nothing new, implementation of private security through novel capitalist ideals is. Sylphia has since extended its own internal protection agency to those who can afford the premium price they demand.
The Lethal Unorthodox Response and Intervention Division (L.U.R.I.D) is a special team within Sylphia known for its defensive—yet ruthless—application of violence within the confines of local law. There is no need for obfuscation or subtle winks, Syphia utilizes whatever rights granted by whatever kingdom they work within strictly to dispatch threats made against their clients.
Nobody who can afford their services is going to argue with that.
The Posthuman Assassin is utilized primarily as an on-site offensive asset. They are there to kill and pursue threats that have been posed against those they have been paid to protect. Both a deterrent, and an active force, the Posthuman Assassin is a deadly opponent that has a myriad of tricks up her sleeve.
First, her Manic Gamble gives her a Leap, Elusive, Provoke 2, and allows her to make Counter Attacks at up to Reach 2. Combined with not provoking Break Attacks passively, and given that she gains a bonus to dodging she is a powerhouse in the mobility department.
To make her mobility even more frightening, Manic Gamble also allows her the ability to Leap towards opponents that try and attack or cast a spell at her, and fail to do so. This keeps her moving and threatening those who might otherwise be safe using such tactics.
She also ignores Poison Gas… more on that later.
Her Arcane Engineering passive lets her make a flurry of counter attacks each turn. So long as the first counter attack hits its target, she will attack again—and again.
Together, these two passive abilities not only give the Posthuman Assassin many options to escape and engage, but also deal damage and fight back while she does so.
Her first AI Step only occurs if an opponent is adjacent and is notable in that it allows her to place a Bleep Bomb on a figure she attacked. Then, she’ll leap away to distance herself from the threat and hopefully put them out of range to retaliate before throwing deadly augmented knives at the target.
To complicate your positioning even more, the Bleep Bomb will stay dormant for the round, but will eventually detonate and deal damage before spreading poison gas!
These bombs can quickly fill tight corridors up with Poison Gas if you aren’t careful!
Speaking of tight corridors, you are more likely to be navigating tight corridors when fighting threats like this, since they are private security, it’s common to run into L.U.R.I.D roaming palacios estates or sprawling manor grounds.
Moving onto her second and last AI Step, if there are no adjacent opponents, the Posthuman Assassin will make a very long range attack that places a Bleep Bomb on the target before engaging the target with the least armor.
Her AI Steps may be simple and short, but she is a dangerous and effective opponent when combined with other threats.
On Earth, human lives are fleeting, easily discarded. No one expects that they’ll live forever. There’s a near limitless supply of young people without the perspective of age, with emotions burning hot and a mistaken sense of immortality. As a result, it’s easy to fill the ranks of an army, to find bodyguards and soldiers willing to throw their lives away for a cause.
Middara has none of those advantages, however. Most of its citizens might look as young as the youth making up the bulk of Earth armies, but appearances lie. Imagine eternal youth with the consequences of a devastating injury. What paycheck would it take to get you to risk it all and fight anyway?
On top of that, human lives are far more valuable than on Earth. There’s no way to grow people natively—every single one needs to be retrieved at great risk from Earth. Every one costs a sum of days or weeks from a Harbinger’s immortal life, and raises the chance of an Angel tracking them down.
Even the most dangerous cities are unlikely to have more than a single murder every few years. There are places on Earth where multiple humans die every day. Such brutality is considered inconceivable to Middarans and is part of the reason that those who have spent many years living here view the humans of Earth as a lesser species. They’re brutal and uncivilized.
Still, Middarans fight wars, and rich people still have shit they want to keep from being stolen. Where more disposable nonhuman creatures can’t be employed for the task, it can be worth investing the resources to employ actual humans to fight. Much of Elenia’s navy joined as part of service contracts, humans recruited from Earth by promises of immortality and power, without relatives on Middara to miss them if they fall in battle—or too many years to mature them and make them realize how valuable their lives really are.
For those without a portal, but with plenty of gold, there’s always a well of fools to draw from. Risking your neck for a while is a dangerous gamble, but it might pay a hundred times what safe jobs would offer someone in such a lowly position.
Unfortunately, this results in a very different kind of recruit.
Like her counterpart, the Ghostslinger is an elite member of L.U.R.I.D. Many individuals working for Sylphia are given the opportunity to use experimental and often dangerous devices that meld magic with modern thinking and ideas. Those brave enough to opt into such cutting edge programs rarely come out unscathed, but are also likely to see some degree of success given how many wild opportunities for such experimentation exist on Middara.
The Ghostslinger represents one such individual.
Her passive ability gives her Nimble, a larger SOI, and Immunity to Darkness and Wilt. While not as mobile or deft as the Post Human Assassin, the Ghostslinger has a unique advantage over her teammate—the Phantom Sentry.
The Ghostslinger wields a nearly sentient domesticated entity coined the Phantom Sentry. This specter of a gun can be set up and used as a point of attack independent of her command. Its ability to ignore figures and non-Obstructing Terrain also makes avoiding its attacks and the damage it deals very difficult if you find yourself within LOS.
Her first AI Step is dedicated to this Phantom Sentry, commanding it and giving it a unique action during her turn using the Long Projectile Template. Be careful, the Phantom Sentry deals Magic Damage! Any way to have Magic Resistance will help you tremendously during many of these late game encounters.
If there isn’t a threat within range of this template, the Ghostslinger will use the step to try and warp the Phantom Sentry to a location where it is in range of an opponent. Then she’ll move on to her second step regardless of the state of her Phantom Sentry.
Her second AI Step represents her magic item, the L.U.R.I.D Lantern she carries on her hip. This arcane device will push and burn opponents in a Large Wave Template.
After torching an area in front of her, she will bash an adjacent opponent with the device. This melee attack will also inflict Burn and PUSH 3, this time, with no conviction check. Make sure to dodge that FU Attack!
After using the lantern to hit an adjacent opponent, the Ghostlinger will step away, distancing herself in an attempt to rely on her Phantom Sentries in the fight.
The third AI Step will occur so long as any opponent is within her LOS, regardless of range. If she can see an opponent, she’s going to use her own personal Phantom Sentry to attack them. If they aren’t in range, she’ll move just enough to be within range while doing her best to keep them as far away as possible.
Finally, the Ghostslinger will deploy a Phantom Sentry if the Phantom Sentry she already had deployed in the encounter setup (or diagram) was defeated.
Together, these two L.U.R.I.D Security Agents will pose a serious threat to intruders who are caught trespassing—and certainly an even bigger threat when combined with other types of combatants or even bosses!
Next week we will be at Gencon! So no update on lore. However, the weekend after, I’ll be diving into Monster Loot, the design philosophy behind it, and how you can get yourself your very own minigun from the aether! You can expect some new lore updates to the Aeonian Codex too!
