November Update!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 05:42:14 PM

Backer Villains Update

We've been hard at work the last month on bringing the backer submitted villains to life, and today I'd like to share some of the art and writing samples from that effort! We'll start with art, because I've heard the picture-to-word exchange rate is particularly good right now. That's one of my favorite jokes.

Artwork!

The Ashen King (from the Rogue's Gallery submissions!) in his true form! We wanted the primary illustration of this guy to feature him at full power, as a disguised demon doesn't make for eye-catching artwork, but he's much more cunning than the fire-wielding poses here might imply! 

A backer who prefers to be known as Baltar submitted a very unusual villain idea. I touched on it in the last update, but now you can see a few ideas we have for how to visually represent such an abstract villain.

From the Queen of Air and Darkness (our other villain from the Rogue's Gallery!), this ancient tree was the site of a ritual long ago and plays a very significant role in the Queen's banishment from the fey realm. It may also be the key to her powers. Will the party burn this tree to the ground to weaken the Queen if the cost is that she gains access to her home once again? Decisions, decisions.

Finally, Damon has finished up the two page spread for the Kitsune and it looks incredible. Take a look:

Now that's some gorgeous art right there.

Writing!

There's no doubt that the Kitsune villain has been one of the most enjoyable villains to write thus far. I've quickly learned that Archvillains are tricky to get right. They need to be powerful and interesting combatants in their own right and have powerful resources at their disposal that push the plot forward in meaningful ways. The Kitsune, Purgos, and The Queen of Air and Darkness are the Archvillains of Tyrants & Hellions, and while they've all been... we'll say interesting challenges to write, they are also the ones I'm most proud of. 

There's one villain not mentioned in the art update here, but I assure you that Salister Krane is not forgotten! I love designing custom magic items, and the many cursed items of Mr. Krane have been a delight to work on. 

One that may or may not make the cut into the final product (but I love too much to not share it) is perdition, a specially enchanted crossbow for the do-gooder who can't bear to kill even the most evil creature. In addition to a moderate bonus to attack and damage rolls, living creatures reduced to 0 hit points by perdition are knocked unconscious and stable, at no risk of dying. When they awaken, they are affected by a geas spell that compels them to seek out Salister Krane and join his faith. In reality, they just pledge themselves to his service, but that part gets left out of the sales pitch. The party assuages their guilty conscience, and the villain gains free recruits. Win-win!

As the Mastermind backer's villains get finished up in the next week or two, expect to hear from us with some samples of the writing to get your feedback! 

The Road Ahead

November is going to be a very busy month, but I'm confident we can get through to the other side with our development timeline intact! Aside from the usual business that comes from Thanksgiving, 2CGaming is attending PAX: Unplugged in Philadelphia in just a few weeks! It's going to be an awesome time, and if you're coming, swing by the booth! 

Our goal for the end of November is to have the first draft of every villain finished. Then we'll begin the review process in December (which mostly involves Jon and Valerie, our editor extraordinaires), while I'm simultaneously working on the rest of the book's content: the villainous workshop, new player archetypes, and a plethora of plot hooks. If all goes to plan, writing will be done by end of December, allowing us to spend the new year making final edits, finishing up artwork, and formatting the book! We'll be in touch if we expect any delays, but so far it's looking good! 

Epic Legacy

In other 2CGaming news, we just launched another Kickstarter! This one is Ryan's baby, Epic Legacy, and it's been in development for over two years. I'm not very involved in the writing of Epic Legacy, but I've helped out with a lot of the playtesting, and it's a very cool project. In short, it adds level 21-30 to 5th Edition. If you liked 3rd Edition's Epic Level Handbook or the Epic Destiny system in 4e, you should check it out. I think Ryan and the rest of the Epic Legacy team have achieved something truly impressive. You can find the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2cgaming/epic-legacy-core-rulebook-5th-edition-beyond-20th

That's it for the November update! Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, comments, or concerns! Operators are standing by. I'll see you all in December!

Steven Gordon - 2CGaming Team

October - The Month of Backer Villains!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 01:07:54 AM

Aside from spooky, scary skeletons and the one night of the year everyone cosplays, October is time to focus on villains that come from you, the backers! I'll start with a quick recap on September's work, then we'll look ahead to what's coming down the pipe in October.

September Recap

September was a big month for writing! The first five villains all got a pretty substantial chunk of writing done in a bit of a zig-zag fashion. Often I would finish working on a villain, then move on to the next one and come up with a cool idea for the first one! But eventually things need to be finished, and I'm very happy with where the first set is. I'm especially pleased with Ravilvost. It took a lot of time to come up with a suitable challenge for a 17th to 20th level party, but I think a lot of DMs are going to drool (metaphorically, please) when they read her stats.

Hex and Jibblinplip, the two other stretch goal villains, were also tremendously fun to design! Hex is intensely focused on his lair, the ultimate labyrinth. Some of the traps in there are downright evil, but I promise they're all fair! Jibblinplip, on the other hand (more like a psuedopod, really), has no lair. A continental ooze doesn't hide, it simply advances. Jibblinplip almost doesn't exist as a creature, it's a natural disaster.

I could go on and on with how much fun this process has been, but we need to talk about what October holds for Tyrants & Hellions!

Next Steps

Artwork is coming in from Ambrose and Damon at a steady pace! You've just seen Damon's depiction of Ravilvost, and we have a couple more illustrations that he and Ambrose have been cooking up.

Whim, the duplicitous doppelganger! Writing hasn't begun on Whim yet, but I'm looking forward to developing the schemes of a shapechanger. The artwork for Whim is awesome, it's fun exploring a little bit of horror with a creepy villain.

Damon has been working hard on an awesome spread depicting the lieutenants and major characters for one of the backer villains... the Kitsune! The piece is still in-progress and it already looks awesome. Gary Hite submitted the Kitsune and she will also be front and center on the alternate cover available to anyone who grabbed the Deluxe version of Tyrants & Hellions.

The Kitsune is an ancient spirit who fell in battle long ago. Her minions survived and worked tirelessly to revive her, hoping her leadership will bring them the victory they desire and the freedom of their own nation. While building a nation for spirits may not sound villainous, there are only so many resources available in the world. Additionally, spirits live a long time, and many still hold grudges for how they were treated in the past. Her story can have a peaceful ending, but it will take a lot of effort from the party to make it happen!

In addition to Gary's Kitsune villain, we have two other villains coming in from backers at the Mastermind tier.

First, let's talk about Salister Krane from Chris Anderson! Salister is a runt of a devil who was banished from the Hells to the material plane. Hiding himself with magic, he slowly and steadily accumulates power in secret. When he is ready, he will launch a crusade against Hell and take his rightful place as the lord and ruler of the lower planes. Salister begins as a patron to the players, offering them quests and giving out generous rewards, including a few magic weapons! Of course, these weapons are cursed and send the souls of any creatures they kill to Salister... but how bad can that be?

Finally, we have a villain that is not yet named from a backer who prefers to be known only as Baltar. For now, I'm calling it Magnon. This villain is probably the most unusual one in the entire book. It exists as pure energy and its main influence is a powerful magnetic field. Magnon came from another plane of existence and isn't quite sure where it is. Not necessary evil, Magnon is nonetheless capable of causing some serious damage if it, for example, flings every magnetic object in a city 100 feet straight up.

October is going to be another busy month of writing and artwork! By the end of the month we'll have five more villains written: Kitsune, Salister Krane, and Magnon from the Mastermind backers and the Queen of Air and Darkness and the Ashen King from the Rogue's Gallery!

Unless something really cool happens that we have to share right away, you can expect to hear from us again in November! 

Steven Gordon - 2CGaming Team

September Update - Surging Ahead!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:23:35 PM

Hey everyone! 2CGaming is heading to Strategicon tomorrow so this update is coming at you a little early! If you're in the Los Angeles area, you should swing by the convention! We'll have a booth in the dealer's room and be running games all weekend long.

July and August were unexpectedly busy months for me, and I didn't get as much writing done as I wanted to. Now that things are settling down, I'm back to plugging away at the book at full speed. I really want to avoid delaying delivery of the finished product, so I've cleared my schedule in September as much as possible to make room for this project. As soon as I'm back from Strategicon, it's writing time.

That said, progress is being made! Let's review how far we've come in the last month.

Art!

Black and white illustrations have started coming in for the written villains, Purgos and the Silver Knight, drawn by the talented Damon Westenhofer.

Every villain will have several sketches like this to help illustrate important items, minions, or locations. They're fun to show your players to give them a better idea of what they're seeing!

Ravilvost, Apex Dragon

We're currently working hard on designing Ravilvost. As a 17th to 20th level villain, she's a challenge to make, and hopefully an even bigger challenge to defeat! My hope is that you'll read her chapter in the book and think "I want to start a game at 17th level just so I can use this dragon." She exemplifies the Hellion part of Tyrants & Hellions.

Her core concept is inspired by a post I saw on Reddit a couple of years ago. The post suggested that dragons be given a unique resource, "Legend Points", that recharge while the dragon slumbers. When the dragon awakens, it can spend these legend points to lay waste to the world, as a rampaging dragon should. Then it must sleep again to recover them. You can read over the post in full detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3dqb6i/writing_an_adventure_about_fighting_a_dragon/

For Ravilvost, we're taking that idea and turning it up to 11. She gathers power while she slumbers, and her villainous arc begins when she gets close to waking up. The players will have a little time to gather information and prepare for her arrival. Whether they fortify nearby cities or plan a surprise attack on her, when Ravilvost wakes up, it's going to get messy. Her exact amount of starting power isn't set in stone, but it'll be a lot. We want her to start out incredibly strong, requiring the party to find ways to wear her down before they stand a chance of taking her out.

In the current draft, here are a few things she can do. For now we're calling it "Power" but it will probably get a cool name later on in development:

• Expand her breath weapon. Each point of power she spends in this way increases the length by 500 feet and the width by 100 feet. 
• Intensify her breath weapon. Each point of power spent in this way increases damage by 5 (1d10).

One of her early schemes involves spending a few dozen points on both of these abilities to lay waste to a city in a single breath. That should be a wake up call that makes even a very confident party realize she's not your average dragon.

Defeating Ravilvost requires making sacrifices. Each town she destroys and every army she devastates drains her power, eventually leaving her vulnerable. But who will the party sacrifice? Will they be willing to lay down their lives to save the world from this terror or will the "heroes" use them as bait, knowing that it will leave the dragon vulnerable? 

Either way, they're in for one tough fight.

Overall Progress

I wanted to do a "Backer Villain Spotlight" update, but that'll have to wait until next month. If all goes according to plan, by the end of September we'll have finished the first drafts of:

• Purgos
• The Silver Knight
• Ravilvost, Apex Dragon,
• Hex the Minotaur Lord
• Jibblinplip, the Contintenal Ooze

And they'll be in the hands of our capable editing team! Then I'll move on to the next set of villains from all our backers! 

Thank you again for your patience with the delays and slower than usual progress these last two months. I've had a few personal hurdles to hop over and sometimes work has to take a backseat to life.

Steven Gordon - 2CGaming Team

August Update - The First Set of Villains!
almost 7 years ago – Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 11:39:07 AM

This update is going to be a little shorter than the typical monthly update, because I just finished a cross-country move! I've been out of action for the last week and just got my computer setup today, so work will resume as usual tomorrow. I do have some cool notes to share:

• Purgos and the Silver Knight are first-draft complete! I'll be doing my own pass of edits on them, then sending them over to the rest of the 2CGaming Team for review.
• The stretch goal villains are well underway, which includes: Ravilvost, Apex Dragon; Hex, Minotaur Lord; and Jibblinplip, Continental Ooze. We might call the three of them the nickname bunch.

My favorite trick from Purgos is her Master Ritualist ability. It allows her to cast any spell as a ritual, so she can take full advantage of long duration spells that don't require concentration. She uses a simulacrum to do most of her business, and she can monitor everything it sees through a telepathy spell. Couple it with foresight before it walks out the door, and it's a highly dangerous foe. Since her limitation is material components, not spell slots, clever parties will do well to sever her supply lines before confronting the lich in battle.

These five villains are the first set, the next set will be three villains from the Mastermind backers, plus the two from the Rogue's Gallery! Backer villain central!

With projects like Tyrants & Hellions, the work is going to start slow and speed up over time. Each initial villain is taking around 50 hours of work to create, but that's only going to get quicker as we move through the book. By the end of the project, we'll be a smooth and efficient villain creating machine!

I'd still like to do an art-centric update this month, and spend some time highlighting the Mastermind level villains, but it will have to wait for now. It's a little past 1am, and a well-rested writer is a productive writer.

Steven Gordon - 2CGaming Team

Rogue's Gallery - Final Results!
almost 7 years ago – Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 09:16:35 PM

Voting for the Rogue's Gallery closed almost a week ago, and the 2CGaming Team has been discussing which villains we want in the book. It took some doing, but we finally came to a consensus! We're taking two villains from the Rogue's Gallery: The Queen of Air and Darkness, and the Ashen King. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted villains, voted on their favorites, and posted comments! We would have taken more if we could. The villains will both undergo some changes as we adapt them for Tyrants & Hellions, and I'd like to use this update to talk about some ideas we have for expanding on the submitted ideas. These are not set in stone, and are just our first pass at developing the concepts into fully realized villains!

The Queen of Air and Darkness

Fey villains are cool. The Queen combines their deceptive trickery with some impressive raw power, and I love the core theme of "chilling beauty." We'll be playing up the environmental aspects of this villain, focusing on how she twists and distorts the material plane itself and how that influence bleeds into other planes. It can be difficult for DMs to tie in planar travel once the party is high enough level to have access to it, and the Queen provides an easy hook. 

We can also explore the politics between the Seelie and Unseelie, as the players have a strong incentive to learn the lore behind the villain as they try to find some weaknesses they can take advantage of. Her obscured history offers a lot of opportunities to tie in important NPCs, whether they're scholars and historians as usual, or more unconventional sources of knowledge like celestials, aboleths, or even the gods themselves.

The Ashen King

We spent a long time talking about how we wanted to implement the Ashen King. One of our mastermind backers helped us create a demonic-themed villain, and we don't want too much overlap, so we decided to make the Ashen King a low-level villain with the potential for a lot more. If the players stop his schemes and defeat him, his story will end around level 5. But if they fail, the Ashen King will devastate the world, providing a post-apocalyptic story arc that can keep your game going for many more sessions. We'll include some advice for how to plan for each outcome, and whether you should pick one that you want to happen and make sure that it does, or let the dice decide their fate.

We're also working on a custom disease, because everyone at 2CGaming agrees that the disease mechanic are underused in 5th Edition, that will serve as a carrier for the Ashen King. He will be able to manifest in the body of any sufficiently infected creature, which means defeating him is as much about controlling the spread of the plague as it is defeating the Ashen King in battle.

Other Updates

We'll put out another big update on August 1st with progress and plans, but we're moving along at a pretty good pace! Purgos and the Silver Knight are nearing completion, and we're getting started on artwork for more villains so we may have some new illustrations to show off next month!

Once the first set of villains is finished, I'll be focusing on backer-submitted villains, both from the Masterminds and these two from the rogue's gallery! At some point in the future we'll contact everyone who has a villain going in the book to ask how you'd like to be credited, so you can look forward to that as well.

You'll hear from us again in August. Keep rolling those dice!

Steven Gordon - 2CGaming Team