War of the Dead Chapter 1

I just finished making an Adventure Deck recently for this and was prepping to run it.

I realized that it only has HALF of the "Archtype" pre-gen characters that are available for it (in DTRPG, it was sold as pack 1 and 2, you have only one of them.) I assume this is not a "bug" but either due to licensing or more likely, it was converted to FG before they added the second set of archetypes? NOTE: The Portraits/ICONS are there for these missing PCs, like Scarlett Rose or the Priest.

While going over the module, I noticed typos as well. I see the company that originally put this out is no where to be found - one reason I didn't bother trying to see if I could do the Adventure Deck >officially< for sale on FG store. It appears to have been (according to an old post on PEGINC) bought by another company but that company did not in fact continue to release for it nor does it have it on their website as a product of theirs for sale or otherwise.

So, probably means that his is not atm being supported by anyone. If there IS an updater that fixes bugs, I can gladly send typos for correction (can't do myself as do not have access to vault files of course) as well as try to send the next archetypes if they can be added. There is a typo or error on one of them as it is today (missing rank, setting, race, maybe more need to compare closer to other sheets.)

After Lee Szczepanik's father passed, he didn't want to deal with the topic of death anymore (at least for awhile) and he did transfer it over to another company at that time. However, that company was already struggling to support their own games as it was, never did anything with it, and ultimately transferred the rights back to Daring Entertainment. The material is still for sale on DriveThruRPG, but he hasn't done anything with the setting for years either. His first love was/is supers and I think he was more interested in doing his Daring Comics line. Last I heard, the RPG market (although never his full time gig) wasn't making him enough money and he wanted to focus more on his writing.Since it's two ruleset versions out of date now and Smiteworks would have to duplicate the material in FG as it exists in print, I'm not sure how much interest there is in additional WotD content conversion. With plenty of newer settings available, more coming all the time, and some people already confused by what modules for sale in the store are and aren't material for SWADE as it is, launching "new" non-SWADE stuff can't be very high priority.

Thanks so much for that breakdown. I had no knowledge of the history of it. I'm so sorry to head about his father's passing.

Yeah, I can see why then Smiteworks may not be interested in taking offers on converting his full product into FG. Since it is SWD and what you are saying is that they only want to support products that have a SWD AND SWADE version. Seems an interesting point of view. I'd be surprised if that was an actual rule of thumb for folks bringing new conversions of products out there only in SWD.

I don't care about offering the WotD cards, I am happy to have them just for myself - not like they are needed to play the module. It's just flavor. Besides anyone with modicum of ability to read the instructions in the base AdventureCard extension and who is smart enough to post here with questions when in trouble can do the cards in 30-45 minutes code wise. The creating of the assets from the PDF for ME was long and tedious 'cos I am not. a "graphic guy" (that's the only reason I TRIED to reach out to Daring - I wanted to see if they were interested in putting it on FG SIMPLY ;) because I didn't want to convert the art from a multiple cards on one sheet thing to singles if he had it already as single art pieces ;)

That said - as I said I am not asking about selling anything - I am asking about if anyone is correcting typos and the like in the product. I just started reviewing it for setup and saw mistakes in one pregen and realized the other pregens were actually missing not intentionally left out since the artwork/tokens and portraits were included in the modules for those missing PC pregens. If no one is handling fixes on this, I can submit the HTML for the Pregens as well as any typos for someone to stick in the product. I've never worked on any submissions so I do not have access to their version control system for submissions.

For the record, SmiteWorks doesn't handle the adaptation of anything Savage Worlds-related (or honestly, much of anything other than a handful of 5E supplements and a couple Pathfinder 1E books). You'll notice on the store page for WotD Ch1 there are three developers for that project. Far as I'm aware, Eric is no longer a community developer, having moved on to co-running Just Insert Imagination, but @damned and @ianmward are still active developers (both are also in charge of the Call of Cthuhu 7E ruleset in fact) but I have no clue if they are still interested in keeping this project updated with the latest ruleset features or doing the later chapters. I had considered doing them but honestly zombies are not exactly my favorite genre.

However, as noted, WotD was written for what? SWEX? SWD at best. So unless the publisher issues an official SWADE conversion guide, any updates to the project would be exactly that: updates to include the newer features like the more advanced NPC construction we have now, effects keywords, and so forth, but it would have to stay within SWD; no SWADE-specific stuff could be included in the official DLC.

As for SWD vs SWADE "priority" from our "bosses" ... all I really say is I was recently placed in charge of two projects where the developer left (Beasts & Barbarians and Nemezis) both are on FG as SWD but both have official SWADE Conversion Guides from the publisher. The decision was to leave the SWD ones available if the customers chooses to load into that ruleset, and they have very little, if any, attention from me (other than I'm responsible for fixing things if they break) but the SWADE versions will be total remasters/updates from me (Beasts & Barbarians Steel Edition has been out for a month or two and is 100% SWADE) and the instructions were that only the SWADE editions will receive new features and new DLC. On a similar note, when I did Lankhmar obviously that was SWD but when Pinnacle released the Conversion Guide, I developed a SWADE edition too. On the one hand, if I'm permitted to be "proud of myself" for doing that, sure, I am and I thought it was "good customer service" as well. However, it's also twice as much work for the same commission, so given how everyone loves to chase the "new shiny" (SWADE in this case) does it make sense for me to continue supporting SWD as much?

Talyn, I’m gonna do the fixes for myself. If you want me or whoever wants it - let me know. I’ll have the PC fixes by late tonight (currently took day off cos worked on weekend due to promising a release for today ;) myself - but first have to help son finish schoolwork) if you want the xml. I’m gonna find out - never tried it, if can make a mod file for just pregens. If not, then I have other ways in mind. But can send you the xml to insert after you diff it.

(Edit Happy to fix anything I find typo or missing box-wise so no devs need work for free but you still can fix small errors in it. I’d convert the later portions except I am always put off by the refeeence book stuff. It’s a personality thing, I have trouble with “fuzzy” work full of graphical choices :(. Entering data and creating NPCs is less chore. I’ll be doing it for myself but since Lee isn’t interested it will stay personal project.)

I have several projects in my queue already, so for now keep your stuff with the hopes that damned or Ian would be interested in incorporating it since it's their project unless they've relinquished it. If they have relinquished it, then maybe later this year I might consider it. DriveThruRPG had a huge "FREE FREE FREE" thing a couple months ago for all of Daring's products so I nabbed the entire War of the Dead lineup. So did Mortar for that matter, and he also might be interested?

Wow Free? - I missed that... well wait... I guess it wouldn't have mattered, I own all the Daring stuff from the last time they had a big sale (was close enough to free ;) ) about 2 years back and then eventually got the World of Dead more recently in PDF. I meant o run for a long time, and finally the recent plague and ... cruise stuff pushed me over the edge to finish the Adventure Cards and now the NPCs. I wasn't planning on bringing it up to any other release - it WORKS as it atm - I was just fixing the NPCs and the annoying typos ;)

If we get into it, Ill probably enter the rest of series since I have all the map VTT add-ons and of course the adventures. If you guys do it before I do I will gladly buy it :)


Rock on Talyn with your good works!

Still helping son here - but maybe tonight will post up the SWD and SWADE Adventure Deck setups I did - meaning the 32 Adv Cards supplied by Daring mixed with the defined subset of SWD (or SWADE) cards that you can add to the deck and made sense to me (Im no expert so will take nah-does-fit or should-have-included X cards advice from anyone who reads it. Mainly I dropped all Power based cards and once which assumed a wide variety of enemies etc.

I just want to clarify that WotD was produced for SWEX, the edition that predates SWD, so as I said before, it is now two editions out of date. Note that the difference between SWEX and SWD is far less than the difference between SWD and SWADE, but it's why Guts is a skill for example, since that wasn't changed to just testing v. Spirit in core until SWD. I realize that the modules are produced by volunteers and just assumed that since nobody had a burning passion to do the other parts of this series in all these years, it wasn't high on anyone's list. I also assumed that since there have already been numerous questions about which edition particular products are designed for, that users might be less interested in buying something produced for SWEX at this point, even though it is technically compatible with SWD and SWADE, since there is still much more GM work to be done to run it. It's not going to be open the module and go, like the 5e stuff or some of the more recently developed Savage Worlds modules. I further assume that Smiteworks is generally limited to having developers provide FG versions of what the publisher produces, which would mean that all the work of converting to SWADE would need to be done by the end user since the dev couldn't produce a SWADE version with their own take on what that would look like since Daring hasn't (and probably won't) put out a conversion guide. For all I know however, it might be possible.

FYI, WotD Part 1 was one of the first campaigns I ran in FG back when it first came out. And by that I mean, in pdf, when it was being released on a weekly basis by Lee via a subscription model. The ruleset wasn't owned by Smiteworks at the time, nor did we have the tools for module creation back then. I entered all the NPCs by hand and ran the game from the pdf. Eric was actually a player in my campaign and I like to think my game played a part in the decision to put this module together for FG. My game fell apart shortly after we started Chapter 2 due to real life issues for me intruding on my gaming life, so I never got to run the other 3 Chapters.