Hello! Liana here, I wanted to sit down and talk through where we stand and where we hope to go with Valorous Games in the upcoming months and years. It’s been a long time since we did one of these posts, so I’ll try not to be TOO wordy but I have a lot of ground to cover. Let’s get into it!
We continue to work through the Pandemic, although it has caused a number of issues for us operationally. While still modest, we relied a lot on the profits from conventions to help fund our new products. Having lost two years of that revenue has hurt quite a bit. Fortunately, we have received a boon in the way of some government disaster funding which we hope to stretch toward pushing some of our larger projects forward.
Our first major developmental project is a full errata update to our Core Rulebook. We’ve been out for years now, and over time people have found a number of rules and balance issues that need tweaking and sorting to make the system run smoother. On top of that, our master file had some issues that prevented us from extracting the text to make a proper fix. We’ve been undergoing the painstaking process of fully rebuilding the book from legacy text files, and I’m excited to say we’re very nearly done. I’m coordinating with our designer and we hope to have this moving through the reconstruction process soon. Upon completion, we will release an updated PDF file that will be available for free to anybody who owns the book in any form. For itch.io and DrivethruRPG customers, we’ll push an update through the system that people will be able to download. We’re looking into options for Storenvy customers, our intent is to blast an email with a download link. Finally, for convention customers who only purchased the book or for those who have purchased through one of our distributors, we’ll open an email where you can send a picture of your hardcover and receive a PDF download link.
Once the PDF is fully updated, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter to fund a second printing. Even with the pandemic, Valor’s sales have been steady and interest continues to grow. We couldn’t be more thrilled and with the major updates and our physical stock dwindling now is the perfect time to go for a second printing. With all the layout work completed, the printing should be a fairly quick process so our hope is this particular Kickstarter will be fulfilled somewhere between 3 and 5 months after completion depending on current freight times.
While that is in progress, we’ll be launching back into Valor: Villains, Creatures and Foes. While we were unsuccessful in Kickstarting the book several years ago, we still have most of the completed text on hand. We’ve been assessing what we have completed and determined that part of the issue with the book was simply its immense size – clocking in at 400 pages in a word document the book would have easily been 800 pages, an art budget for which could quite easily run tens of thousands of dollars and well beyond our funding capabilities. With that in mind, we’ve made the decision to split out the book into two books, focusing on Foes that work best with our two in-development campaign settings. Our hope for this is to have the text wrapped up later this year and get the art in a good enough position to Kickstart for the final push and printing in 2023. We’ll be first focusing on the Foes from Valress, featured in the Actual Play Windriders which is currently available on YouTube.
With the Foes book focusing on specific lore related to our original settings, we’ll also be working to further produce information for our two campaign settings currently in development. Part of this will be through our Actual Plays, with Windriders Season 2 expecting to launch later this Summer and The Woven launching on June 10th and featuring our new Lenaia setting. With these two settings in progress, our hope is to release more infomation on them with hopes of releasing proper setting supplements and adventure paths over time. We’re also interested in exploring other mediums, and are in early discussions with some writers to write some novels within the settings. More to come on that as it develops!
In terms of core books, once we finish the first Foes book we’ll assess whether the second is in a position to push but our hope is to focus in on our Tools of the Trade expansion, the alpha for which can be found on itch.io. With the Foes book, we want to make sure we’re giving player characters a lot of new and interesting options to really engage with the system and open up new forms of play and engagement.
Beyond that, we’re still working on improving our web and tech presence. Development on the Character Builder continues with assistance from our phenomenal Discord community in identifying bugs and errors. We’re also working on putting together a proper SRD that we hope to make widely available. We’re committed to making Valor a strong option for any TTRPG that wants to draw heavier inspiration from Anime, Manga and Super Hero fiction and part of that is taking full advantage of our Creative Commons license to allow other creators to develop for and even sell their own Valor projects without being required to give us any money at all. A healthy system is one people can freely develop for, and we fully support this for our community and want to deliver the tools to allow them to do so. Depending on the success of our other programs, we are also hoping to update our web presence to something stronger, we’d love to allow users to fully register and manage all their digital files and products directly on our website. This is a lower priority for us, but if we manage to secure additional funding it is something we’d like to explore to improve our online services for all our players and fans.
When all is said and done, the goal for Valor hasn’t changed – we want to create a fun and engaging system that people love to play. We want to deliver this system to as wide an audience as possible, and engage fans who want to play tabletop RPGs but haven’t been able to get into them yet. We want to keep improving the game so people still want to play it for another decade.
This isn’t an easy journey. We are entirely self-funded, we both work day jobs and divert whatever money we can spare to keeping this business rolling. We keep at it because we love the system and we love the community that has formed around it, we love being able to meet fans at conventions and hear about the games they’re running (Valor fans REALLY love My Hero Academia as it turns out), hear stories of their epic moments, and the kinds of things they want to do with the system. You all make it worth it. Even after all these years, we’re still having a blast creating and playing Valor, and we hope you will all continue to join us as we keep pushing forward. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for your continued support, I will do my best to deliver great content that keeps you playing for years to come.
Liana MacKenzie
Valorous Games Owner and Lead Designer
