Free League Games

[HywelPhillips]

I know it is an old song, and I've posted to the new Feature Requests too.

But... I'd love it so much to have a wider range of Free League game system support on FGU. In my opinion they are producing some of the most consistently high quality, interesting and compelling TTRPG content out there at the moment. It is so frustrating to see every great release accompanied by a Foundry module - where FGU support has been stalled at Vaesen, Alien and Symbaroum (which was supposedly getting a revamp, no sign yet) for a couple of years now.

Particularly for the MYZ-engine games, I feel that the work involved in adapting the existing excellent Alien and Vaesen rulesets to the more recent games like Forbidden Lands and Blade Runner shouldn't be prohibitive.

But I know I don't have the time or the expertise to do it. There's a MYZ ruleset from Damned IIRC, but I don't have the time to do the data entry: I really want to just buy the modules and be good to go.

I know the devs have been super-hard at work with refactoring CoreRPG and bringing the 2.5D graphics engine to FGU, and I think that's brilliant. This is just a call for system support to get the next big push. Either directly or in terms of greatly improved and supported developer tools so that a wider range of devs could get stuck in.

I don't blame the current devs of Vaesen or Alien - they've done a splendid job. I'd just love to be able to run Forbidden Lands, Coriolis, the various MYZ games, Blade Runner, etc. too.

All the best,

Hywel

[Egheal]

Yep, Free League is, IMHO, actually the N°1 editor, with a lot of very different RPGs with a great versatile engine. Actually I use Foundry when I play Blade Runner.
It is very good (this RPG is epic, you should try it).
I hope that someday Smiteworks will do a crowdfunding for Free League like the one they did with the World of Darkness games.
Vaesen and Alien are really nicely done for FGU. I even prefer those rulesets than their counterpart from Foundry.
But let's face it, Foundry's momentum isn't about to reverse itself. I'm afraid we'll have to use this vtt for the new games from now on.

[ddavison]

There is a group that was developing the Free League content for us. While we could look to take some of these in-house, we also look at sales figures to justify the resource allocation. Rulesets traditionally have low returns the farther you get away from D&D and Pathfinder. Looking at the Free League rulesets we have released so far, I see that Alien did the best but didn't exactly blow it out of the water either. Vaesen only did 20% of what Alien has done. Symbaroum has been out even longer and in total it is now at around 20% of Alien as well. The levels of customer interest based on purchases that we see would make it untenable for anyone to build out a new ruleset for anything similar sized to Vaesen and Symbaroum, unless it was just a labor of love.

For now, the best step is to probably split those off into separate requests on the feature list and let people vote on them. If there are any that appear to be much higher in demand than others, it will make a better candidate for a future Kickstarter pitch, or a pre-order.

[HywelPhillips]

Well, that's hard to argue with, but kinda depressing! I'd rather hoped that the strength of Free League's kickstarters indicated more interest than that.

My worry is exactly what Egheal said - that Foundry becomes the go-to or worse yet the only solution for these second and third tier publisher games. Do Free League have an in-house team converting everything to Foundry on release, I wonder? They usually seem to have the Foundry conversion as a stretch goal part of their kickstarter campaign. Presumably that makes commercial sense for them, I just wish there was a way to make it as routine for them to release on FGU as on Foundry.

I'll post a bunch of suggestions for various systems - it'll be interesting to see what the support levels are!

Cheers, Hywel

[damned]

I reached out to FL regarding converting Tales From The Loop twice and never got a response from them.

[HywelPhillips]

I reached out to FL regarding converting Tales From The Loop twice and never got a response from them.

Well, darn.

The frustrating thing is that all the Year Zero engine games are sufficiently similar that to my (non-LUA proficient) gaze it just seems like a bedrock ruleset with flexibility ought to be able to handle a LOT of their games, especially since Vaesen, Alien and your MYZ systems are already done. With a solid underlying ruleset that was easy to modify it wouldn't take much to customise for each new game they launch. It feels like it is so nearly there!

Be interesting to see what interest the different systems generate on the feature list.

[HywelPhillips]

P.S. It's also funny how one's own gaming niche distorts one's perspectives. I'm surprised to learn that Vaesen hasn't done as well as Alien, for example. Anecdotally in the online conventions and even offline conventions my friends go to, Vaesen has been the break-out hit, taking up a lot of table space that used to be solid Call of Cthulhu. Alien is well-regarded and played for a lot of one-shots, but it's Vaesen that seems to have generated the vibrant community.

I'll finish off just by noting again that the one thing that sets the Free League titles apart from a lot of other smaller publishers is that many of their rulesets are variations on the Year Zero Engine, the second iteration of which is now public and which includes a lot of options and system features from newer games.

So the possible win from SmiteWorks' point of view I think is that a flexible Year Zero Engine rule system could support ALL of the following:
- Bladerunner
- Alien
- The Walking Dead
- Twilight 2000
- Vaesen
- Tales from the Loop
- Forbidden Lands
- Coriolis (Third Horizon)
- Coriolis (New edition)
- Mutant Year Zero
- Genlab Alpha
- Mechatron
- Elysium
- Ad Astra

with one underlying ruleset tweaked for each game. At which point the overhead becomes more like adding the content for each new game rather than developing a new ruleset from scratch each time. That's why it felt like it might be something worth tackling at SW level, leaving the implementation of the customised rulesets based on the core YZ Engine to other devs.

Cheers, Hywel

[bayne7400]

Like damned I'd love a chance to do several FL rulesets.

[ddavison]

bayne7400 and Damned,

If you had your choice, what game system from FL would you be interested in building? I am always happy to reach out to FL to see about getting a license to cover those.

[Seya]

Aliens is incredible. The chariot of the gods is one of the best RPG modules I have ever played. Everyone should play that at least once in their life

[bayne7400]

Twilight 2000

[damned]

Tales from the Loop was the one I was most interested in.
I have created functioning rulesets for Tales from the Loop and Mutant Year Zero in the forge a long time ago already.
Right now Im taking a break from making new rulesets.

[Egheal]

Blade Runner kickstarter did 1.5 million $.
Vaesen only 256 000 $.
Talls from the loop 354 000 $.
The One Ring 1.6 million $.
I would bet on The One Ring and Blade Runner for a chance of success equal to the Alien RPG ruleset.
Let's see the features list to know if there is an interest for those rulesets!

[ddavison]

Licensing for The One Ring is not possible. It isn’t able to be sub-licensed for a digital version.

[Myrddin]

My vote would be for Forbidden Lands.

[PhilAdams]

The previous suggestion(s) about a Kickstarter to fund the ruleset buildout is, IMO, the way to go. Let us fans fund the development rather than worry about whether or not it earns out post-development. Build the Year Zero Engine to be either d6 pool or die progression (same basic concept: +/-n = +/-nd6 OR +/-n die size, although the die progression is obviously a little trickier). The basic format is always the same, though: Four abilities, 12-16 skills, Talents and/or Specializations. Those should all be libraries at the front end for the developer to call. Ditto equipment dice (Coriolis, Mutant Year Zero, Forbidden Lands) or ammunition dice. Build out a bunch of libraries to support the various functionality, and even if you can't get the license for some of the systems for some reason, you could provide a front end for GMs to Frankenhack their own implementation of the excluded ruleset.

As you can see from the reactions, folks are going to be all over the place on which ruleset to support. The new Coriolis system is less than a year out (the Kickstarter is over $500K right now), which might revive interest in the old materials, yet it wasn't even mentioned.

Although it was nice to have Vaesen adapted (almost as lightweight a system as Tales from the Loop/Things from the Flood), I would much rather have seen Blade Runner, Twilight 2000, or Coriolis.

I've tried running Blade Runner and Twilight 2000 in Foundry, but the interface to Foundry is just so painfully clunky. I'd love to not have to ever use that again.

[HywelPhillips]

I agree that a Kickstarter would be a good idea. They take time and money to organise of course, so I don't know how sensible it is. But it's a good way of measuring how keen the player base of certain games is to get FGU support.

One of the problems is that in the normal course of events all I can do is to buy everything that comes out on FGU for certain systems to express my support. (Which obviously I've already done for Alien, Vaesen and Symbaroum). Indeed as a matter of principle I try to buy stuff for systems I think I might run at some point in the future, in order to encourage development.

But what I can't do is to say "I want to get Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane on here so badly that I'll pay hundreds of dollars towards the dev effort".

THAT is the true benefit of a kickstarter IMO - the ability to have higher-tier pledges.

I suspect that the Free League players are fairly affluent given the high production costs of the gorgeously expensive books, so the hope is a smaller number of us might still be able to justify the development costs if there's a way for us to actually contribute!

Cheers, Hywel

[PhilAdams]

I agree that a Kickstarter would be a good idea. They take time and money to organise of course, so I don't know how sensible it is. But it's a good way of measuring how keen the player base of certain games is to get FGU support.

One of the problems is that in the normal course of events all I can do is to buy everything that comes out on FGU for certain systems to express my support. (Which obviously I've already done for Alien, Vaesen and Symbaroum). Indeed as a matter of principle I try to buy stuff for systems I think I might run at some point in the future, in order to encourage development.

But what I can't do is to say "I want to get Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane on here so badly that I'll pay hundreds of dollars towards the dev effort".

THAT is the true benefit of a kickstarter IMO - the ability to have higher-tier pledges.

I suspect that the Free League players are fairly affluent given the high production costs of the gorgeously expensive books, so the hope is a smaller number of us might still be able to justify the development costs if there's a way for us to actually contribute!

Cheers, Hywel


Bingo!

[vegaserik]

Blade Runner, Forbidden Lands and Walking Dead would be great. An update for Sybaroum would also be great as that ruleset is a bit messy especially trying to put new stuff in from other books!

[ddavison]

We are going to send out a call for votes in the newsletter for ruleset development and it will link to the ruleset request list. Please look it over and make sure that everything you want voted on is represented in the list. Thanks for the ideas.

[HywelPhillips]

Excellent! A poll should help sound out prospective support.

Happy to have raised the profile of ruleset development a bit, because I think it is one of the critical components of VTT success going forwards.

I think it was this, as much a Foundry's glossy look-and-feel and adoption of web-standard dev-friendly technologies that drove its adoption back when its 5E provision was distinctly lacking. I'll be interested to see how they tackle the increasing pile of dev-abandoned systems on there going forward.

For FGU, one of the most solid selling points for me has been the longevity of its support - witness the 4E players being listened to and hopefully having some features catered for despite the fact that 4E has got to be the deadest of dead end dev tasks for SmiteWorks. (You literally cannot buy 4E products for FGU and I doubt you ever will be able to). Likewise, the basic Chaosium BRP system still exists on FGU and is supported to a reasonable extent despite the ruleset being over a decade old.

I appreciate therefore that choosing which systems to take on for official support is not a small matter, and hope that the community can support and help fund this going forward.

Cheers, Hywel

[Elihu]

If you haven't checked it out, take a look at Dragonbane, IMO it is in the highest tier of TTRPGs. Sadly I could not find any legitimate reason to play it on FG though. If any of you know of a way to GM it on FG, please DM me.

[Ludd_G]

I'd love to play Dragonbane of FG. It's a real shame that active development of quite a few high profile new systems (and even some long established older systems - CoC7e?) seems to be not happening and it concerns me that FG is starting to lose market position.

Cheers,

Simon

[LordEntrails]

I'd love to play Dragonbane of FG. It's a real shame that active development of quite a few high profile new systems (and even some long established older systems - CoC7e?) seems to be not happening and it concerns me that FG is starting to lose market position.

Cheers,

Simon
Let Freeleague know. They are the owners and the ones responsible for what platforms they release on. If they don't know there is demand for FG versions, they won't be likely to pursue it.

That said, I don't know how big Dragonebane is, but their latest KS have 4753 backers. Compared to D&D that sells hundreds of thousands of copies of adventures, claims 18 million D&D Beyond users and over 85 million "Fans"... FGVTT needs to worry about D&D much more than Dragonbane.

[Ludd_G]

Hi LordEntrails,

I just had a read back of my post, and am scratching my head as to where you saw me say that FG shouldn't be working just as hard on D&D as they ever have?

I am worried that I hardly ever see FG listed as a VTT on many new systems, where as I do see all their major competitors listed. This happens ALOT. And it means that new groups are likely to start their journey with VTTs using one of theses others programs, and unfortunately I have found that groups tend to stick with a VTT. I would just like that VTT to be FG. I don't think i'm the only one with this impression.

Cheers,

Simon

[LordEntrails]

I did not mean to imply you had said such. Only mentioned it to make sure it's in perspective. A lot of times I think folks forget about scale. (I even am challenged by this with my new love of FrontierSpace RPG, I mean why isn't everyone playing it?)

I agree about the concerns with FG not seeming to be involved with many of the new/niche RPGs as Foundry and some other VTTs. I believe with nost of the other VTTs these 'conversions' are done by the community and not the VTT developers themselves. This is the same way FG does it. I don't image Foundry et al has better community developers, but there obviously is a different culture among them than us. I'm not sure why that is, but I think this community culture shows up on third party RPGs as well as on social media where I see much more participation from Foundry et al fans than I do FG fans. Perhaps for some reason FG fans are more introverted than average :)

edit: and I forgot to re-iterate. Most of these third party publishers are only tangentially aware of the various VTTs. It's really up to the fans of each VTT to let them know what VTTs are worth investing their time with. Yes SmiteWorks can facilitate and make this process easier, but again it really comes down to the fans building hype and interest to get things on FG.

[Redemption77]

Is there perhaps a difficulty curve involved? Is FG harder to develop for than Foundry? Im not sure of the backend on Foundry, but I know that FG is more difficult to put things together for, it seems sometimes, than its worth. It is true though, Foundry has people willing to develop everything under the sun for it.

[MrDDT]

Is there perhaps a difficulty curve involved? Is FG harder to develop for than Foundry? Im not sure of the backend on Foundry, but I know that FG is more difficult to put things together for, it seems sometimes, than its worth. It is true though, Foundry has people willing to develop everything under the sun for it.

I've found because it's a larger market on FVTT than FGVTT. It's not all that hard to convert for FGVTT vs FVTT. But if you have more users and more converters you will see more people wanting to convert for that platform.
Roll20 by far has the most users and converters and it's not all that easy to convert for that (it is now because people know what they are doing and good guides) it's really all about the same amount of work.

[srbongo]

Is there perhaps a difficulty curve involved? Is FG harder to develop for than Foundry? Im not sure of the backend on Foundry, but I know that FG is more difficult to put things together for, it seems sometimes, than its worth. It is true though, Foundry has people willing to develop everything under the sun for it.

One large benefit that Foundry has for their development is it uses a programing language that is far more known that FGU's. This alone means that people with less experience programming may have enough experience to dabble in it. FGU on the other hand, while it doesn't have a higher learning curve, may have a higher learning commitment.

That being said, I am working on a MYZ SRD ruleset, which may apply here but at this point even I'm confused as to which of FreeLeague's games use which parts of the MYZ system.

[LordEntrails]

One thing I don't think gets enough appreciation is Ruleset Wizard. Yes you can't use it for FG Store rulesets and extensions, but for community and Forge stuff it really works well for those of us that are not programmers/coders. Yes you can do things with it that are not best practice and can increase your maintenance in the future (and probably not any worse than what I would hack together in a text editor), but it does an awesome job of providing a GUI for developing FG rulesets and extensions. I'm not a programmer and an barely able to hack existing code, but with RSW and the help of the community here I've developed a pretty decent ruleset. Sure, it has lots of room for improvement compared to the automation FG is capable of, but it's probably better as is than 95% of Roll20 rulesets and probably on par with most Foundry ones. And that's not to brag about me, but rather that FGU is not that hard to develop for, and RSW makes it so much easier.

[Yskonyn]

One thing I don't think gets enough appreciation is Ruleset Wizard. Yes you can't use it for FG Store rulesets and extensions, but for community and Forge stuff it really works well for those of us that are not programmers/coders. Yes you can do things with it that are not best practice and can increase your maintenance in the future (and probably not any worse than what I would hack together in a text editor), but it does an awesome job of providing a GUI for developing FG rulesets and extensions. I'm not a programmer and an barely able to hack existing code, but with RSW and the help of the community here I've developed a pretty decent ruleset. Sure, it has lots of room for improvement compared to the automation FG is capable of, but it's probably better as is than 95% of Roll20 rulesets and probably on par with most Foundry ones. And that's not to brag about me, but rather that FGU is not that hard to develop for, and RSW makes it so much easier.

I didn't even know there was a thing like the Ruleset Wizard at all.
Doing a quick search it seems the tool is in early development and costs about 60 euros to get access for now. There's the big reason it doesn't get mentioned a lot, I reckon.

If it does allow much easier creation of community FG assets however, it should be advertised around here much more. I think a lot of people would be interested in picking it up to make their own version of their favorite unsupported games.

[LordEntrails]

I didn't even know there was a thing like the Ruleset Wizard at all.
Doing a quick search it seems the tool is in early development and costs about 60 euros to get access for now. There's the big reason it doesn't get mentioned a lot, I reckon.

If it does allow much easier creation of community FG assets however, it should be advertised around here much more. I think a lot of people would be interested in picking it up to make their own version of their favorite unsupported games.
I wouldn't say early development, and could only speculate why the developer of RSW hasn't listed it at version 1.0 yet. To me it reached MVP a long time ago. Yes it is constantly changing, but that is mostly as FG changes it has to adapt. Perhaps from that perspective it will never be out of beta *shrugs*

[MrDDT]

I didn't even know there was a thing like the Ruleset Wizard at all.
Doing a quick search it seems the tool is in early development and costs about 60 euros to get access for now. There's the big reason it doesn't get mentioned a lot, I reckon.

If it does allow much easier creation of community FG assets however, it should be advertised around here much more. I think a lot of people would be interested in picking it up to make their own version of their favorite unsupported games.


Very few people are wanting or willing to put in this type of effort to make a custom ruleset, saying "a lot of people" in talking about making your own ruleset is not likely at all. Most people wanting to build a ruleset already know about it. It's also one of the few products listed in the wiki on making a ruleset.

[Yskonyn]

Fair point, but I think you underestimate the power of visibility. The tool is not very well visible to the general FG userbase, I feel.

A common complaint regarding FG is that people perceive it as being hard to make custom content for in relation to certain other VTT’s.

If the Ruleset Wizard does indeed make this process a fair bit easier it would be only logical to make it much more visible. Also from a marketing standpoint from SmiteWorks to promote FG better perhaps with some sort of collab deal / gig.

Maybe I am overestimating the impact of the tool, but I think if it’s easy to use (I haven’t used it yet) you’d be surprised how many people would be interested in creating stuff with it.
The price is pretty steep though.

[HywelPhillips]

For me, it's not the ruleset that's the sticking point, it is the data entry. I sadly do not have time to run my business and run multiple roleplaying games for different groups AND enter in all the game core data and all the adventures and modules and so forth.

I do homebrew stuff when I can, but I'm definitely not adding in all the core rulebooks and all the adventures by hand. It's just not a good use of my very limited hobby time. I need to be able to just purchase them on the store and get started. That's true even for relatively low crunch systems like the Free League ones. (I can't imagine how much work it must be for someone to input everything for Pathfinder!!)

This is also why I'm a fan of the Patreon idea, with patrons able to sponsor effort in return for influencing which modules and rulesets get entered first. I'd happily contribute several times the purchase price of the typical Free League modules to get some of them implemented and all the data added to FG.

Cheers, Hywel

[MrDDT]

Fair point, but I think you underestimate the power of visibility. The tool is not very well visible to the general FG userbase, I feel.

A common complaint regarding FG is that people perceive it as being hard to make custom content for in relation to certain other VTT’s.

If the Ruleset Wizard does indeed make this process a fair bit easier it would be only logical to make it much more visible. Also from a marketing standpoint from SmiteWorks to promote FG better perhaps with some sort of collab deal / gig.

Maybe I am overestimating the impact of the tool, but I think if it’s easy to use (I haven’t used it yet) you’d be surprised how many people would be interested in creating stuff with it.
The price is pretty steep though.


It would be extremely few. I would say anyone that really wants to do all the work making a custom ruleset is likely to find it. Even with the wizard, it's not super easy it takes time.