Is there an estimated date when we can expect Princes of the Apolocalypse in FG?
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Is there an estimated date when we can expect Princes of the Apolocalypse in FG?
I would be interested in HoTDQ and RoT timing as well.
Also, are there any third party adventure modules being developed currently.
I gotta say that the LMoP module absolutely makes me want to get these other modules as well. Zero GM work to run these things over VTT now. Very well done. Also interested in what you guys can say about the time tables and what module lines you plan on adding.
My only complaint is the modules don't always have all the maps you need for every encounter, because the modules don't have these maps. It would be great if those maps were added or I'd even be willing to pay a couple bucks for a supplement add-on for these maps.
Dracones,
You may even want to take a look on some of the cartography sites, as I've seen some people on the Campaign Cartographer forums post their maps, which you could then import yourself (and granted, you'd have to mask them yourself as well).
You may also want to take a look on the Cartographers Guild site.
If you find some freely available, let me know, maybe we could work together to get them masked and in condition to use in a game.
BoomerET
For a minute there I was thinking this was a sequel to Princes of the Apocalypse.
But I guess my Princess is in a different castle.
Jeesh, there we go again hijacking threads, my apolgoies.
Soon.... I believe it is awaiting Wizards approval...
I might have mis-remembered that though so no lynching if Im wrong.
https://www.fg-con.com/wp-content/up...n-6-150-12.jpg
FG Con 6 – April 17-19th 2015 - register at www.fg-con.com for all the latest info.
Soon.... I believe it is awaiting Wizards approval...
I might have mis-remembered that though so no lynching if Im wrong.
That would be awesome, I was through Chapter's 1-4 when my computer blew up and I lost it all, so am redoing it, but if it comes out before I'm done, I will DEFINITELY be buying it.
I know WoTC mentioned not too long ago that key D&D member was serving Jury Duty and it's kind of messed them up. They're a pretty small team at this point, so if it's someone who makes a lot of the big decisions that could be one reason for the delay.
Any news here. Now that RoT is in the store. Can we get a date on PotA ?
I have no insider knowledge but probably under two weeks from now.
Seeing the title, I was hoping for some "Princess of the Apocalypse" powerful yet feminine content, perhaps recalling the artwork of the late, great Frank Frazetta.
Because, you know... I'm a dog.
What's this I see?
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store...?id=WOTC5EPOTA
Saw it on Twitter, nice!
Also worth noting is the release of the Elemental Evil Player's Companion:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store...?id=WOTC5EEEPC
I parsed half of it but couldn't buy the maps knowing that it would be released. thanks so very much
Two purchases pending some quiet time by the computer tonight! My 5E game is set for at least the next year now.
The only reason I am not buying this right now is because I just spent a month and a half OCRing the whole PotA adventure using my phone to par5e. I also bought some of the high rez maps from Mike Shelly and Seam Macdonald. However, come Out of the Abyss (assuming we are done with PotA), I am skipping par5e in favor of buying your fine pre-made module. The 100+ hours it took me to manually do everything looks awesome and all but ultimately, not worth it when you guys would have done the work for me for the pittance of $35.
Personally I don't think it's acceptable for a retail module to contain letter tokens for NPCs. It looks poor and hurts immersion.
There are many custom token sites out there, surely the company that made this module for FG could've sourced an artist with the lure of ongoing work.
It is using official Wizards material only. If the MM and the Module didnt have artwork for an Actor then it isnt included...
There are some folks on ENWorld asking people how the first few adventures played on FG. If anyone here has experiences, good or bad, that they want to share for others there, you can have an impact. The link is on the main page of ENWorld in the first few posts.
Right.
I bought it, but chucking down A's and B's onto a map looks rubbish. If it's wizards fault they need to sort their **** out, parsed books are better than theirs.
There is plenty of artwork available in the print editions that hasn't been included in these modules (MM and PotA). Expecting quality when purchasing something for the second time from a company shouldn't be something that is seen as asking too much.
Wiz should have a high quality top-down token made at the same time that they have a mini made, and I'm sure that in the fullness of time, they will. Keep in mind, though, that until a few months ago they had no digital strategy at all. Even now, Wiz only provides SmiteWorks with the digital file they sent to the printer. The actual Fantasy Grounds module is put together from the text and artwork by Zeus. Even if SmiteWorks was inclined to add high quality tokens, I would rather they hold off on that for now, since they're still catching up to the physical product releases. As long as it takes to get Wiz to sign off on the finished module now, I would hate to see how much extra time it would take for them to approve every monster token.
These WotC products are being improved and tweaked, with updates rolled out regularly. While there is room for improvement, we're in a much better place with 5e support than we were last year.
What I'm really looking forward to is the inevitable tool that lets you build a token using an interface like a CRPG character creator.
I'd rather content was released in a finished state rather than the common practice of "we'll patch it in later". I didn't buy the module (that I have also already bought in book form previously) to play it at some later date when tokens are added and it's actually complete. I'm buying it to play now.
Anyone reading other gaming forums should've seen by now the single biggest complaint people have about these official modules on FG is that they've already paid for the print versions, imagine the reaction of these people when finally convinced to purchase a product only to find out the product was rushed, full of errors (did WotC even read it?), and incomplete.
Yeah we can fix it on the fly, but we paid for it (twice) - should we have to then do a repair job?
So what do you use for your tokens when you did your parsed version for something like the assassin token? When you bought the physical version, are you mad that it didn't come with physical miniatures for every NPC and with sufficient quantities? One of the common misconceptions with digital products is that they are somehow cheaper to produce than physical products. The greatest costs for these (physical or digital) is the creative personnel cost to create all the stories, game design, artwork, etc. Just like there is a secondary market for companies to produce physical minis for use with adventure modules, there is a secondary market for artists to make miniature packs that can be used to further enhance your experience. Companies like Fiery Dragon Press, ArcKnight Games or Devin Night Productions all put together mini packs that can fill gaps like these. Whether or not you paid for it twice is up to you.
I don't think people can complain when there isn't 'more' in the digital module than the physical, as D says, you wouldn't expect your paper copy to come with tokens and figures. Same with things like the links to the items in the digital module, where there are new items they have a linked picture, where they are DMG items they have a link to the yet to be announced DMG. Very fair .....
But... there are a lot of par5ing spelling errors, and you are kind of asking the community to proof these documents they are paying for, and report back to you so you can fix and re-update - if this was a physical version (and the prices are comparable) then it would be unacceptable to have errors in the text of a written module, so why would you expect them in one you just paid for . Longer tern you need to spend a little more time on proofing. I know you are playing catch up, but there is a delay between physical release and digitial release ... you would expect that 'holding' time to be in testing and proofing before charging people
Ironically you misspelled something in you post. ;)
If I have missed any relevant artwork that is included in the published rulebooks and adventures from WotC from the digital FG module editions then this is unintentional and please accept my apologies. I work from the digital archives that WotC make available to us and so in most cases the majority of the cases the artwork is readily accessible although it is possible on occasion for specific images to be excluded/missed. Therefore please feel free to contact me directly (via PM) or via the bug thread in the 5E forum to report specific missing images - I will work as quickly as I can to rectify.
In fairness to WotC the MM contains artwork for the vast majority of the NPCs it includes, there are not very many that are missing (mainly regular beasts). Having said that we include everything they give us and so if more can be made available we will of course update the modules as soon as. I will speak to Doug about it.
For adventures like PotA, again I think that WotC have done a great job - again a great number of the major NPCs/monsters have supporting artwork (and therefore a token), from what I can see the majority of NPCs missing tokens are either minor to the story line or are regular humanoids and therefore perhaps we can simply introduce some generic human character tokens - again I'll have to talk to Doug who will have to talk to WotC.
For token tools I currently use the Photoshop which I find fits all my needs, if your looking for something a little easier and more focused, I might suggest you try TokenTool (part of RPTools).
Koreapsu I understand your point on missing tokens - I will work with Doug to see if we can get this addressed as quickly as possible. In terms of the product being rushed and full of errors, apologies if this is the case both Doug and I have reviewed the module along with WotC so a little surprised to hear its full of errors. We will of course want to address this as quickly as possible and therefore any support you can provide in terms of identifying and reporting specific problems will be of much value and will help expedite fixes. In terms of the module being incomplete, all I can say is that it is complete and in line with the published hardback book - the issue of missing NPC tokens will be addressed once we get supporting artwork and permission from WotC to do so.
That's fair. We have more room for improvements on catching errors. It does go through a lot of back and forth testing and error handling, but obviously things still slip through. The more difficult ones to test for are the ones where FG doesn't recognize the characters and replaces them with gibberish in-game.
The module actually does have many improvements over the physical books though. For instance, the maps are all scaled up to be usable for play instead of as references. All encounters have the tokens pre-placed on the map and the monster stats are placed in-line instead of requiring you to go look them up in the MM. If you've ever done this yourself, you'll know that it takes a lot of time rescaling the maps just right, making DM and player versions, etc. Pre-linking all the story entries is another long process.
While it would be nice, I feel it would be unreasonable to expect Smiteworks to employ an artist to have the rights to make new royalty free tokens which would all then have to go through a corporate approval at wotc and/or have wizards do so with their tiny staff for a support product which they 3rd partied to not have to deal with other than oversight. And to do this at a price which is less than the book. I am sure a big part of our digital cost goes right back to wizards pocket....
I feel you pay for your time with these products. Not having to manually input all the information yourself is well worth every penny as I can't sit there for 80+ hours doing that and still have time to play (assuming you only have the physical book which you then have to scan yourself and or manually type everything as this is the legal route used for example). The only thing that bugs me ;) is the occasional broken link with story or encounter links that open up a blank page and the spelling/transcription errors, but unlike a lot of companies they are receptive and fix these issues quickly with nothing but kind words. I understand completely what they must go through. Its not like they want to put out a product with errors, it seems they are gamers at heart and I am sure they take ownership of their work and take every error personally.
Its easy to pick apart 50 errors that slipped through when there are 10000 possible ones to choose from that are error free and say this is not worth my money, its just not very reasonable....
What would be great is to have a "bundle" available through the FG store, where you could buy the hardcover and the FG module together. Given that the hardcovers seem to retail for about 30% less than MSRP, I think setting the bundle price at MSRP would be about right. I know you're not currently set up to sell physical products, but you've probably been thinking about selling FG merch in your store anyway, haven't you?
When I used Par5e to do the monster manual I used the Fiery Dragon portrait tokens, myself. As I had tokens for all the 4E monsters, I could mostly just use them since there are a lot less monster variation in 5E. For some of the stuff (dumb flump) I had to go back to 3.x tokens. :p
It would be nice if the official MM packs allowed you to put a set of tokens in a folder that would override the ones in the monster pack if there was a token in the folder kinda like the extensions and modules overrides. Personally, I agree its strange that the monster packs have to use letter tokens as filler. Maybe since they are licensed, Smiteworks can get permission to use some of WotC's old art for missing tokens.
the irony would of been... if I charged to read my post :)
On the errors in the current modules, one thing to keep in mind is they've been playing catchup with the current release of D&D product. So it's a balance between releasing as fast as possible in a market where the hard copy is already out vs getting everything perfect. Since they can update the modules at whim, I think releasing a little early and patching small mistakes was probably the way to go. On future product they should be getting content before release so hopefully that'll take the pressure off.
For module content, I really don't expect them to add in content not already in the official modules. It would be nice if we could buy "enhancement packs" for the modules that alter them with additional maps, tokens, and so on. I wonder if the module code allows for sub-classing them that way. If not that might be something for the future engine so people can sell/give out "mods" that alter and add to the base modules.
That's a pretty disappointing response from a dev.
No, because this isn't something expected from that product. Having tokens for a VTT product is expected. Having letter tokens is lazy.
The creative costs to produce the actual story from absolutely zero is greater than scanning a book and running it through PAR5E. The people creating it for FG are not creating the story in that sense, it's data entry.
Right and I have paid for almost every pack out there. I have had custom jobs done by Devin Night regularly over the past few years, and I know these tokens can be commercially licensed - which is what should be happening here instead of using letter tokens for what amounts to the key NPCs in this story.
Just the attitude that is denounced on every other forum in regard to FG having the rights to WotC products.
Look you can go two ways with it. Get all bent out of shape and bury your head in the sand that someone dared criticize a product, or acknowledge the fact that a paying customer of many years has issues with the quality of products being released now, and see if solutions can be worked out for further releases. That's your call. Your choice will ultimately decide the $$ in your wallet.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm happy to send a PM of the errors I've noticed.
I know Raymond Gaustadnes (https://www.rpgartkits.com/) commercially licenses all his tokens for around $200 - couldn't these or something he creates be used in future modules? Then the modules would have hires top down tokens for all NPCs. Just an idea.
Its not our call Koreapsu as the intellectual property rights for these products belongs to WotC. The brand marketing and artwork style that can be used with these products is very specific and requires prior approval. Having said that I am a big fan of Raymond's work and look forward to possibly working with him in the future for future products.
Zeus, I see you list the DMG as completed, while your current project is a "Magic Items & Parcel Generator." Will that be a stand-alone tool, or included with the DMG?