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