PROJECT ROADMAP
PROJECT ROADMAP
What’s next for Voidspiral Entertainment?
We have an endless supply of ideas and projects, but a finite amount of time. The project roadmap is a first-order approximation of what we’re up to.
The Wytchheart Machine
Based on the Spiral Game System, The Wytchheart Machine is a high-magic, techo-arcane, steampunk/dieselpunk role-playing game.
So far, we’ve nailed down the design and playtested it for 2+ years. We have some of the book written, but the project is waiting for development time. We’re also working on the art style, as it seems to be somewhat slippery to capture.
The eponymous Wytchheart Machines are those clear human-sized jars that mad scientists contain physical gods inside of in order to brutally harvest power from them. Many of the settings and themes of TWM revolve around mad science and the intersection between magic and technology, which we call “arcanic,” in parallel to “mechanic.”
In The Wytchheart Machine, there are no classes. Instead, characters are focused around weapons, special powers, and broadly-applicable skills falling into the categories of Academic, Combat, Espionage, Social, and Special.
Dice rolls are similar to but different from traditional D20 games. Int TWM, you roll 1d20 plus your skill bonus, plus the stat tagged on the skill you’re using, plus any bonus for the item you’re using. If you’re attacking, you also add the damage die and any bonus for the weapon’s skill. Outside of combat, skill checks work more or less like normal, but in combat, your total is compared to several damage thresholds to determine how much damage you deal.
Because SGS is designed with balance and customization in mind, it’s very easy for players and GMs to create new powers, weapons, armors, items, vehicles, and creatures.
The Wytchheart Machine will be designed to be a game separate from any lore, so that we can publish a couple separate campaign settings for it, including the worlds of Westvault, Galerose, and Greenheath
The Wytchheart Machine is probably the next thing we’ll publish.
Rotting Gods
Also based on the Spiral Game System, Rotting Gods is a dark fantasy/horror role-playing game where players take the roles of mortal beings fighting for a place in a complex, dangerous, cruel, and violent universe.
The player-characters of Rotting Gods have been twisted and harmed by the fell powers of generations of hateful dead gods and malicious cosmic abominations. While some may begin trying to escape their fates, the story of Rotting Gods is a journey from worshiping dead gods to understanding and beyond to transcendence.
Unlike The Wytchheart Machine, Rotting Gods has the lore deeply integrated within the rules and the book. A large portion of the book will be devoted to the various regions of the cosmos of Necrostrata, the wars that the five generations of gods have perpetrated, and the strange remnants of ancient power. Currently the history of the world stretches back billions of years to the founding and forging of the cosmos, and allows us to organically design the current events of the world based on huge chains of causation.
Rotting Gods is currently in progress. The rules are solid and we have a fair amount of rules content already designed, including numerous kinds (similar to species), backgrounds, creeds, professions, and monsters. Much of the historical lore is designed out, but we still have a lot of work to do on the modern regions and current events. Not much of the content of the core book is written yet, and the art you see here is all we have on this project so far, however, the art style is much more well-defined than The Wytchheart Machine. See Dark Oracle for an approximate style guide.
We will likely be working on Rotting Gods at the same time as The Wytchheart Machine, but it will very likely be the second published.
Other Projects
The order and priority of these projects is completely up in the air. These projects may or may not ever materialize, but they’re what we’re thinking about for after The Wytchheart Machine and Rotting Gods.
Oubliette Solo/Duo Guide
Now that we’ve done some generic solo guides, we’re looking at doing some more specific solo products for our flagship games. The first of these would probably be an Oubliette Solo/Duo guide, providing randomizers and guidelines for the weird, chaotic world of The Grand Cage.
HFA Solo/Duo Guide
Powered by the Apocalypse style games are ripe for solo/duo play, because for the most part the moves prompt the player for when things go wrong. Randomizers and inspirational content could make this a pretty easy project to do.
Shadows over Edgefield
This is another low-stakes cozy-style RPG, in the vein of My Neighbor Totoro, Watership Down, and Hakume and Mikochi. The design intent was to see if we could create a SGS game that skipped the math by using menus of options of equal XP value.
AVDR
Arcandio’s Virtual Dice Roller’s kickstarter did not succeed, but we still have the technology sitting there, and we still use it from time to time. We would still like to produce the app, we have simply back-burnered it for the time being to work on more game content.
Eradicus Expansions
We’d love to produce some expansions for Ex Eradicus, particularly some lore fiction and splat books for each faction with new art, new model stats, and new items.
Wasuremonogatari 2.0
Every year, we talk about resurrecting Wasuremonogatari, and now that SGS is fully functional, we have a great tookbox to rebuild it from scratch.
The Spiral Game System Toolkit
Eventually, when a few more SGS games have been published, we’d like to do a book specifically about SGS itself, providing the underlying engine for building SGS games to other people. This isn’t just a System Reference Document for an existing game, this is a toolkit for building your own games using the SGS engine. We’d also have a ton of optional rules, expansions, and alterations you can do to SGS games. This would be great for anyone playing an SGS game that is also a world builder or homebrew fan.