Song of Swords: Another Ambitious Adventure

>we're just waiting for the proper time
Ah, yeah, you want to do it in June of 2014 right?

>At this point we're almost ready to go
You can't fool us any longer with beautiful words like Kickstarter and Soon any longer, Jimbo.
I've literally learned moon runes in the time it's taken.

And Jimmy literally wrote a whole nother game. Turns out getting one's shit together can be one of the most difficult things to do.

On a related note,
You still on the wagon, Jimmy?

The more people are involved in anything, and the less professional their capacity is, the more chaos is introduced into any enterprise, that is definitely true.
But it is also true that with far fewer resources, other people have finished similar projects in less time. Our inexperience and the unusual ambition of the project have contributed to the long time, but another element of it is definitely personal. Honestly I think a project of this scale NEEDS either a prodigious writer or a team with expert management. Something to consider for the future.

Making a game is in many ways like a weld. You don't realize just how many mistake you made until you've cut off the end pieces and start polishing. Then you find out just how much shit you have to grind out and refill before you can call it done. Every slag inclusion is another hassle to deal with. Everything that comes out of a mistake has to be rewritten along with the mistake itself.

But with games, there is a silver lining, which is that you get to play them as you make them. We haven't even release yet and we've all played so much goddamn Song of Swords that my team at least had to go back to Pathfinder for a while to get the taste out of our mouths. Too much of a good thing.

But when I think about our little community here, our seventy or so comrades, and I think of the thousands we will have someday, it gives me hope. Look at what we've done with a hundred, a hundred and fifty fans. Imagine what we can do with a thousand. Ten thousand.

It'll be grand. There's a bright future awaiting us boys! The prize money's shit and the tack has weevils in it but this is our ship. We built it.

But Jimmy, YOU'RE a prodigious writer. You can whip out tons of great lore at the drop of a hat.

So... You fell off the wagon, then? I figured.

>Pathfinder
Is that really the best thing you had available that wasn't SoS?

Was he even on the wagon?

He said he was.

8/10, almost made me forget

I'll do my duty to shill when you deliver.

Which wagon are we talking about

The teetotal wagon.

Oh, of course. No, I'm all dry now, except with the occasional sip with friends. It's part of what's got me posting less than usual now. You guys count as friends, whenever I start loreposting I find myself reaching for a drink.

I'll kick that habit soon enough.

Do you still keep alcohol in the house? I haven't done so since summer and it worked a treat at curbing that kind of habit for me.

I have a rather expensive array of drinks still sitting around. I've been having friends and whatnot deplete the store but it was extensive and I haven't the heart to pour it all out. I don't buy anything new though.

Helps that it's mostly whiskey though. I once inhaled half a glass of it while laughing and spent the rest of the night vomiting and coughing painfully, ever since then just the smell makes me want to toss my cookies.

Well, anything unopened would be a good gift for a drinker you know this Christmas.

>half a glass of whisky is too much
Uh
You mean like a big ol' beer glass or something and not a tumbler, right? Because otherwise... Well, it's no wonder it takes a while to go through what you've got.

Mate if you're trying to quit you shouldn't be drinking a big ol' beer glass full of whisky.

No no, I mean I inhaled it, like it went down the wrong tube into my lungs. You ever choke on water in like the worst way? Well it's way worse with whiskey. Something about the smell just makes it so much worse.

Oh, yeah that sounds wretched.

It's what we played back in the day. We were unshakeable 3eaboos, you know. Never could shake it.

>Jimmy et al were not only one-system gamers but one-edition gamers before being rescued by John Galt and the Riddle of Steel
Truly horrifying.

Someday

Archive exploration has indicated that the Tattered Realms was originally a 3.x campaign that Galt or Jimmy ran, with orcs and everything.

What the hell is that?

Pretty cool game. Even has Pathfinder stuff for 3aboos like Jimmy

>Jimjam returns and promises a bunch of rad shit

How I wish I even had the ability to believe in this. Boat combat? My campaign needs that shit badly. The 'Final Beta Version' would make my cock so hard that I'd literally be a danger to those around me. But is it true? Alas, I cannot muster belief. Make me a liar Jimmy. Punish my impudence with the glorious hammer of your truth. Make me ashamed I did not believe.

tits or gtfo

Jimmy, how do you answer the charge that you are infact a Selkie Leopard Seal?

Has anybody been keeping track of the Ballad Lore as it drips out, or is some serious archive trawling needed to build a Laser Whale Wiki?

Archive delving is needed.

Don't think even Jimmy have saved what he has written, so it's all just collective memories of ramblings of past.

Archive trawling, though there's a tiny bit on the tattered realms wiki and the existing ballad wiki.

Hey, now that you did a thread yourself, does this mean you are going to show something for us? I remember you saying that you'll be making a thread when you have something to show for it, so as to not just have a thread just because.

I trust sober Jimmy even less than drunk Jimmy.

We expect results Jimmy

Just save all your good ideas for Song of Swords 2e

Of course, I'm working on it now. This is a bit of a project right here, but there is progress. I'll have something to show you soon.

I want to believe. Make it happen Jimmy, for all our sakes.

Soon as in tonight, or is this the patented Song of Swords "Soon"?

What are the historical sources that you have?

>a rare Jimmy Rome sighting

youtube.com/watch?v=NXTkOs-wg2E

That seal is cute af. I can see why Sark thought getting his girlfriend one would be a good idea.

>tfw Jimmy's expy character in the setting is the seal

>Nat Geo then
>diving with seals in Antarctica

>Nat Geo now

Why is Jimmy a leopard seal now? I thought he was a gay Roman.

I cannot blame them. The National Geographic has likely run out of eccentricities to gawk at in Africa and Australia, so they've pivoted the camera around to show us the results of dumping millions of gallons of estrogen into our own water supply for fifty years.

youtube.com/watch?v=izXAoKKHm4g&index=8&list=LLqjg1dSRqBPsudvzg6WvxpQ&t=184s

>Jimmy tells us that there's something new he has for us
>thread remains dead
Does this mean that we've finally become immune to his lies?

Being a homosexual Roman doesn't exclude him from being a leopard seal.

Yes. We've been hurt too many times in the past believing his lies.

It means that the hype is finally dead and any kickstarter launched this year or later will inevitably be a failure.

To be fair, the first ~25 posts in the thread were pretty fast. Then I guess everyone went to bed and/or realized there's still nothing new to talk about.

Jimmy, with regards to Tattered Realms naval combat, wouldn't it mostly be late galley style combat, like Lepanto? Cause from what I understand those kinds of battles tended to turn into land battles at sea on a wooden platform.

Actually, now I'm wondering what maritime tech is around. I know you've talked around Helian triremes, and other galley-type ships in the Broken Sea, but what about in the Slivers? Being more of an Aegean-style archipelago, but next to the open ocean, I feel like you'd have a more interesting mix. Or just caravels, idk.

I got drunk and watched my handegg team lose, that's my excuse.

>went to bed
>22 hours ago
Okay.

The long sleep of death

That is not dead which may eternal lie. But it's probably going to take a hell of a lot to build up a good amount of hype.

Don't be so negative bro, it's Christmas.

I'm working on it now. It's still coming along dude but it's hard to know when something is ready to release. A lot of rules to write down here and a lot of thought experiments to do.

>I'm working on it now
That doesn't tell us anything. You can work on it all night and then not finish and not work on it seriously for weeks.

I have like three different things in that category right now.

Have you fired your editor yet?

I intend to finish it sometime tonight, but it's going to be work. I've struck inspiration here, but it's still all got to be written.

That isn't my job. She's done a fine job anyway, everyone's just very busy.

Your game has been delayed for what, two years? That isn't busy, that's just not doing the job.

There have been a lot of invisible hurdles here man, just lay off it. I'm not in a position to throw stones at anybody.

I think the problem was that those hurdles remained invisible. If the editor had their parents murdered or fought off cancer or had a kid or whatever, that's fine. Shit happens, I doubt you're able to pay much, that's how shit goes. But we didn't get any sort of explanation for it. Just weeks of silence at a time. No updates for like what, a year? No explanation at all for any delays, just silence and "soon". We got Ballad, which is nice and all, but I don't give a fuck about Ballad. I signed on for Song of Swords, a medieval fantasy/historical RPG. I think it's great that people like it, and I've been getting more and more into it lately, but I still care more about the original game we were sold on. For a while it seemed like SoS was completely abandoned in favor of it, and we heard nothing but Ballad for a few months back there.

You have to fucking tell us what's going on. You have to give updates, to show you're still working on things. You have to at least post more than one post a week to show you aren't dead and still care. That's why people are upset or think you're lying, because we've been kept with almost no information for a fucking year now.

People calling for the head of the editor are doing so because they don't know what the fuck happened, and to all appearances that person help up the game alone for a super long time. Without any actual updates, who can know better?

I'm still backing the game. I'm still down with you guys. I'm running two games of SoS right now. But you've really been dropping the ball with communication and managing the community.

What's the Tattered Realms version of Christmas?

You're right dude, we handled it poorly. We handled it poorly. There was a lot of messy stuff going on in my life too, it's just been a downer across the board and I'm sorry. We'll make this better.
And now this piece of shit computers internet is down and I have to retune this on a hoddamn phone.
The phones internet works just fine of course. Fucking pcs.

I believe in you you big lovable faggot.

Fucking finally. Jebus. What a hassle. An hour of bashing my face against this stupid edifice we call the internet but I'm back.

Let me guess. Comcast.

>but I will be attempting an expansion for Age of Sail games.
>Shanty of Sail, soon.

RELEASE SONG OF SWORDS ALREADY JIMBO YOU FUCKING HACK

Joke's on you, the 1.99 document is progressing nicely and it'll fly off into completion once I figure out why my TeXstudio Javascript ain't working

Are you putting the new weapons and combat rules in?

Speaking of which, I've yet to get merge privileges despite being listed as a contributor, so I'm just gonna keep submitting pull requests until we get that sorted out
Also I now have a decent handle on using git properly, which should help immensely in not making me cry tears of frustration

That's the plan, I see no reason to keep the old ones.
I'm also considering adding the Magic stuff (Star Vampires and whatnot), though that might require more work than I'm comfortable with before I've actually finished the main stuff.

Weapons and combat though is definitely replacing the old junk, I see no reason not to do that, since I don't have to make new sections for it.

Programanon (the guy who actually knows his stuff, whereas I am but a lowly typist monkey) has a repo up at github.com/progamanon/latexed-SOS from which you should be able to download the PDF as it's edited -- note that the current one is absolute trash as it's not yet been manipulated at all, but I'd appreciate it if you checked it out as we edit it and request whatever things you think might be neat to have (for instance, I've now made the Boons table hyperlink to its respective Boon and intend to do the same for Maneuvers when I get to that chapter)

You can find the current PDF in my fork, though it too is not really ready for "real" usage

Oh, and tables are kinda ugly (the tables I've actually constructed so far), but I expect programanon to have a solution

Hey I've been away for a while, have I missed anything notable from lore of system changes/expansion?

Also I haven't really looked into CotV but it seems like it would be a good system for a Valkyria Chronicles game. Would the space magic be useable as Valkyria powers?

Valkyria powers are all super OP, right? So it would be perfect.

Improvements to Ballad's initiative system have been incorporated into SoS by an extra update and weapons have been rebalanced a fair bit.

Breaking things off with my GF and starting to date a qt trap is how I got over my growing and rampant alcoholism.

10/10 would recommend.

>tfw no GF to break things off with
Guess I'm stuck with the alcoholism then.

Jimmy, you are such a tease

Never fucking mind, I messed up with the write access: I just hadn't accepted the invitation properly

Everything's smooth as silk now, will finish up within the week and have a usable albeit imperfect version

Have I mentioned lately that I love you?

It's not finished though. There are questions raised and problems created by the Ballad system being jammed into SoS.

Seems like a good time as any to copypaste the new updated version of the marketing advice I linked Jimmy some time (Years?) ago. It's behind a paywall of buying a book, so I'll just rip it from my pirated version:

paste2.org/937cX40h

Also, I'll copypaste the "hacking kickstarter" part of the book:

paste2.org/s629dy8n

Maybe they'll be of some use.

Hey Jimjam, I just want you to know that we only speak so harshly and roughly because we truly love this creation of yours, this work of art that produces an experience that just can't be found anywhere else.

Song of Swords is beautiful and amazing and we love it and we love you for having made it and sharing it with us, with no pretenses and nothing but shared, genuine joy at the thought of stabbing a dude in the dick

Stay great Jimmy. Despite all our rage, we're just rats in a sinking ship of lies and naval warfare coming Never™

Just saw a samurai movie called "sanjuro" which I think /sos would enjoy

It's a Kurosawa film, everyone will enjoy it.

Where's the stream, faggot?

>Know my stuff
Well, that's maybe a bit generous.

Dear Jimjam, please get a tripcode so we know if we're being trolled. I want to believe that Soon is here, but this could pretty easily be a cruel joke. Love you.

cant stream. but it is on 123movies.

>please get a tripcode
>translation: please become a huge asshole
No
Don't do that
Do the opposite of what this man says

How come the book went to some Australian instead of these guys?

>being this new
A tripcode used within the context of a single thread for identification is literally what a tripcode is for.

>being this new
A tripcode is the sign of a shitty poster you ignore. We've done fine without a trip for 3 years. Other people shouldn't change for your insecurities.

Like what?