Coming Out

Hey everyone, I wanted to share some personal news today. Up to this point, I’ve generally been presenting as male within my work, including during the livestreams we produce. This presentation, however, hasn’t been exactly correct for awhile now. While I am still early in the process, in my personal life I’ve begun transitioning to feminine presentation and pronouns. It’s been getting harder and harder to continue presenting as “male”, when that’s honestly not who I am. I am a trans woman, and I want to present myself honestly in my public life.

So what does this mean for Valorous Games? Functionally, very little. We’ve been working to make our programming inclusive, portraying gender, sexuality and racial diversity wherever possible. This won’t change. Valorous Games is committed to portraying, hiring, and giving creative voice to a diverse range of creatives and performers. I’m proud of the work we’ve already done, and want to improve even more. The major change will be in our content, for our Developer Streams and for Best in Class, you’ll see me more authentically.

For future content, we’ll be working on a reprint of the Valor core book once Best in Class’s printing is complete. With both of the creators having since come out as trans, and with our initial print run almost depleted, now is a great time for us to add in the errata and put our proper names on the cover. Best in Class is already being printed under  my proper name, and all content we produce going forward will bear that name as well. We will continue to support and work with any creatives who want to play or write for Valor, and encourage everyone, especially POC and LGBTQ+ groups interested in working with us to reach out!

My dream has been to turn Valorous Games into an independent small studio where I can work with other amazing creatives and make games full time. That dream hasn’t changed. We’ll continue to do everything we can to make amazing Valor content, and hope you’ll continue to support us! We have a lot of projects in work, and are excited to share everything with all of you. Thank you again for all of the support you’ve given us so far, and can’t wait for what’s to come!

 

Liana MacKenzie

Valorous Games Owner

Announcing Valor Live: Best in Class

We’re excited to announce our next Live Play! Valor Live: Best in Class will debut with episode 0 on Saturday, February 27th at 2:00 PM Pacific Time on our Twitch Channel! This will be a bi-weekly game run by Valor Co-Creator Austin MacKenzie. This game will explore our Best in Class module which we  hope to release physical copies of within the next few months. It will follow the exploits of a group of students within the Knighthood program at the illustrious Silver League school Mercurial University.

As with the original Valor Live: Wind Riders campaign this game will take place in our modern fantasy Valress setting. We’ll reveal the characters with session 0, but first, let’s meet the cast!

Asher Dmitri

Asher Dmitri is a curious little nonbinary individual living out of the Pacific Northwest. They discovered a love for art and comics at a young age and chose to follow the bonkers path of a self-taught artist, which brought them to conventions, and ultimately to a seat at an early Valor playtest panel. From there, they not only found a love for the Valor system, they also joined Austin’s team as a baby artist, providing some of their work to the core manual. They’ve since gone on to work in Kickstarter projects, comics, music, and voice acting, as well as finding time to take their first art class through Syn Studio. Today, they’re a freelance illustrator working out of their home with their spouse, still in the dampest corner of Washington state. Eleven months living indoors and counting – Stay safe out there, everyone!

Jason de Kanter Gualberto

Jason de Kanter Gualberto is a Texas-born IT professional, occasional freelance writer, and host of the podcast Come Back a Star: A Movie Award Podcast. He had an unusual childhood with parents who both grew up in fascist Spain. He went to one of those high schools that taught Creationism and had Latin as a required course. College at the University of Chicago opened Jason’s eyes up to a broader world of social science, movies, and acting – all worlds that he still loves to this day.

Jason has been a proud supporter and play tester of Valor ever since he befriended creator Austin MacKenzie when they both worked in the aerospace forges of Washington state. Buying metals for the might of the Boeing Empire took its toll and the two witnessed many lives sacrificed to the success of the dreaded Project Polymos. After a while, the furnaces became too hot, and, after a daring escape, the two left for greener pastures. Theirs is a bond forged in blood, loss, and triumph against overwhelming orcs.

These days, Austin is a game dev and Jason supports Project Polymos from the comfort of his home office.

You can catch Jason’s Come Back a Star podcast, covering every Best Picture winner and nominee since 1927, every week on Thursdays.

Jenna MacKenzie

Jenna MacKenzie has been with Valor for over a decade, being introduced to the system during its first convention demo in 2009. From then on, she was hooked, hopping on board as a playtester, PR/event manager and one of the founding members of Valorous Games. A Midwestern transplant with a background in vocal performance and stage acting, she looks forward to bringing nearly a decade of opera, musical and improv theater experience to Valor Live: Best in Class. When she isn’t flexing her managerial muscles or doing weird voices on the internet, she can be found streaming old-school RPGs and randomly bursting into song on Twitch.

Zack Maher

A self-proclaimed “King of Screaming,” Zack Maher is a voice actor who’s work you can hear in various indie animations and video games all over the internet. Notable credits include Dr. Sylvester Ashling in the animated series Epithet Erased, and various characters in the So This is Basically webseries.

For that past five years Zack has been creating laughs, delivering tears, and making unforgettable memories in various tabletop games. He is a frequent GM and player in different streamed shows that can be found at https://www.twitch.tv/surpriseroundrpg. He also served as the GM for the first show of Valor Live: Wind Riders, happily excited to work on the player side of story telling.

When he’s not booking jobs or playing games, Zack is also pursuing the field of school psychology, where he hopes to provide kids the resources they need to succeed in their education. He also hopes to develop a specialty for transgender advocacy in the schools he’ll be working with in the future.

Tools of the Trade Community Content Requests

As we develop Tools of the Trade content (currently available on Early Access here), we want to tailor the content to make sure the community gets as many options as we can provide. To that end, we’re opening up requests! If you’re interested in requesting some kind of content, email us at info@valorousgames.com with the subject header “TOOLS OF THE TRADE REQUEST”. This will be open indefinitely as we refine Tools of the Trade, although depending on the request we will not guarantee that we will make that content or that it will appear exactly as you requested with consideration to game balance and thematic appropriateness. The submissions can be broad or narrow in scope, things like “I want more abilities to use while flying” to “I want a power that lets me jump under a target’s feet and throw them out of their space”. Please do not submit full writeups for skills or abilities, we will not be able to use your original text so keep this conceptual wherever possible.

We’ll regularly talk Tools of the Trade on Developer Streams via our Twitch Channel so keep an eye out there or on our Twitter for more announcements and content! So long as you own the Early Access, you’ll get the updates for free as they come out.

New Year Update

Happy New Year everybody! A few quick updates on Valor and what we have in store for the next year!

First, we’ve added a PDF to the Errata page – we were initially thinking we might be able to get the fully updated PDF pushed through but given our current development timeline we decided it’d be best to just release the Errata-only document. You can find the Errata here

Second, Best in Class development continues with the final layout, we have some final text double-checks that need to be completed before the full layout can be placed, we’re hoping that will be finished within the next few days pending layout schedule. Announcements on Best in Class will generally still remain on the Kickstarter page.

Third, we’re looking forward to the conclusion of Season 1 of Valor Live! The current Valor Live will continue later this year – we want to give Zack a chance to develop the next arc, but in the interim we’ll probably have some other streams with different casts running. More details to come on that!

Fourth, we’ve made a quick update to our Patreon. We recently put out the first call for series submissions to do a stream on how to run various Anime and video games in Valor. Based on the response, we’re going to make this a regular fixture, going forward Patrons can submit potential series for us to cover and we’ll put it to a vote on Twitter as to what to cover. Topic submissions start at the $5 Patreon tier, so if you’re interested in making submissions our Patreon can be found here! If we receive enough submissions, we’ll let the Patrons narrow down the topics to about 5 before putting it up on Twitter, and any Patron, no matter the contribution tier is eligible to vote on the narrowed down topic list.

Finally, conventions. We’d love to do them, but we’re not going to start until we have vaccines ourselves and the vaccine situation in the country has dramatically improved. Unfortunately, there’s no saying when that’s actually going to be, but we are guardedly hopeful we may be able to do some conventions during the latter part of the year. More to come on that as we know more.