Health Update

Hey everyone, Liana here I wanted to give a bit of a health update and discuss some potential impacts to our production schedule.

About a month ago, I was formally diagnosed with colon cancer. I am fortunate in that we caught it early, so the cancer itself hasn’t spread and should be very much treatable. What it does mean, however, is that I am going to need pretty immediate surgery. I’m being scheduled for surgery next week, which will require a bit of a hospital stay and will incapacitate me for a bit longer afterward.

In terms of energy level, I’m expecting it’s going to be a near-term halt to all of my development operations, I’m slated to start a new job very soon and they’ve been wonderfully understanding about my condition but I am going to need to devote most of what energy I do have in early recovery to that job so my ability to manage development in my spare time is expected to be limited. Furthermore, due to the anticipated expense of the surgery, I will likely not have as much spare money to set aside for development as well. As many longtime Valor fans know, I currently self-fund most of our operations since I strive for a level of quality with our products that we haven’t been able to self-sustain with our current product lines and sales. This too will slow things down a bit in the near-term.

This may have some impact on the shipment of the completed Valor Core books for the Kickstarter as well, we’re expected to get them late this month so a lot will depend on my recovery in terms of getting them all packed up and shipped out. I’ll look to enlist in the help of some friends to get them out the door ASAP, so bear with us on that.

Ultimately, thankfully, this should not be a huge permanent impact. By my understanding the surgery should not produce much if any long-term negative effects to my life. I just need to get through this, and things should be well on the other side. As always, I appreciate the support of Valor players and fans, this is just a speedbump and while it’s a bit scary, I’m very lucky since something like this could have been so, so much worse.

I’m not at this time soliciting any donations, we should be able to handle it with our personal finances and we have family that can help support us if it comes to it. If you do want to help support us financially, the best thing you can do is buy our products, play our game, introduce your friends to it and use it in your Actual Plays. The more profit I make off Valor, especially during my recovery, the more I can devote to getting our production back on track when I’m well again and the more people playing Valor and spreading it around, the more I can leverage it to negotiate bigger and better things for the system in the future. If you’d like to support us, here are a few places you can do so:
Valor Storenvy (We’ve made our standard Hardcovers unavailable and are instead selling the remaining first printing hardcovers with eBook at a discounted rate)
Valorous Games on DrivethruRPG
Valorous Games on itch.io (Also has some pre-release content and smaller articles – any pre-release items bought at the current price will eventually garner a full updated version without any further payment)

Windriders Episode 18 Guest – Rook

Valor Live Windriders Episode 18 will feature our second Guest actor of the season season! Please welcome Rook, who will be playing the river dragon Minnow!

Rookuri is a pansexual variety MMORPG content creator, shoutcaster, and host. As a Twitch and ArenaNet partner, she strives to spread smiles while helping players connect to the games they love by fostering a welcoming, diverse, and uplifting community online. Her previous work includes official Twitch events, Twitch’s Crown channel, World First Race hosting & commentary, FFXIV Duty Commenced & official ArenaNet GW2 reveal streams. She’s looking forward to bringing her acting and TTRPG experience to the table alongside the wonderful cast of Windriders!

In Valor Live she will be playing Minnow, a river dragon guardian of a small stream who has gathered the mundane and ordinary stories many feel are not important.

You can find Rook on Twitch , YouTube and Twitter.

We’ll add Rook’s character art later this week, stay tuned!

Windriders Episode 15 Guest – Corina Boettger

Valor Live Windriders Episode 15 will feature our first Guest actor of the season season! Please welcome Corina Boettger, who will be playing the the aptly named Girl A!

Corina Boettger is an autistic, non-binary voice actor with a wide range of roles from both Anime and video games. Their notable roles include Emergency Food Paimon from Genshin Impact, Tatsumaki from One Punch Man, and Takeru Takaishi and Palmon from Digimon Adventure (2023). In addition to voice acting, they are also a notable streamer on Twitch and proud bird parent.

In Valor Live they will be playing Girl A, a hapless NPC who wanders into the party’s path as they investigate some illegal exotic pet dealings. Girl A is an eager and supportive young lady who is accompanied by her dearest companion, the Great Pigeon Mark.

You can find Corina on Twitch as well as their birds and occasionally also them on Twitter.

Valor Live Windriders Season 2

Valorous Games is thrilled to announce the return of Valor Live: Windriders for a second season! Featuring an amazing cast of talented voice actors, Valor Live Windriders takes place in the modern fantasy world of Valress and follows the misadventures of four Cavaliers – professional monster-hunters-for-hire as they become entangled within their provincial politics and the machinations of the rich and sinister! Valor Live: Windriders will take place every other Friday starting April 7th at 6:00 PM Pacific/9:00 PM Eastern on Twitch! You don’t want to miss it!

If you want to get caught up with the original story and cast of Windriders, check out the complete season 1 up on YouTube!

Windriders will feature our full returning cast!

Zack Maher – GM
Francesca Calo – Callon “Kazhri” Lau
Lily Lammers – Bryn “Allez” Briar
Tamara Fritz – Gemma “HeartShine” Friedman
Paul Greene-Dennis – Faizon “S.P.” Black

Valor Core Rulebook Kickstarter

We are excited to announce that we will be launching a Kickstarter on September 24th for a second, updated printing of the Valor Core Rulebook! You can find the pre-release page here!

The new book will include all identified errata, as well as an updated layout and updating the creator names. Anybody who has purchased the original book in hardcover or PDF form will receive the updated PDF free of charge, but the Kickstarter will offer some fun extras for returning fans as well! We hope you’ll support us again on this relaunch!

As one of the big items we want to cover is updating our creator names to properly reflect our identities, so too would we like to update the list of names from the original backers if necessary. We will not be printing additional backer names for the second Kickstarter due to the timeline of printing and PDF completion, but if you were part of the original group who backed Valor and would like to update your listed name for any reason, please email us at info@valorousgames.com with the header BACKER NAME UPDATE. Identify the prior name and the name you would like to update it to. We will not share these details with anybody outside our core team and only for purposes of properly updating the names.

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out! We’ll have more details on logistics as the Kickstarter gets rolling!

Valor Live/Asians Represent Charity Stream to Support Trans Rights

We are excited to announce our first Charity stream! The stream will be on Saturday, June 25th at 10:00 AM Pacific/1:00 PM on our Twitch Channel. Additionally, we’re thrilled to be partnering with the phenomenal award-winning Asians Represent Podcast! This stream is a Pride Month stream supporting the Transgender Law Center, a cause near and dear to our hearts as Valor was developed by two trans people. The game will be a one-shot adventure designed around martial-arts inspired action and combat styles inspired by Bleach and Demon Slayer. Join us and our amazing crew to raise money for a great and necessary cause!

Here is our cast!

Emma Yasui

Emma Yasui (she/her) is a mixed Japanese-Canadian archaeologist who has found herself in the world of TTRPGs in the last few years. She started this expedition with the Asians Represent! podcast, discussing topics related to representations of Japan and the Japanese diaspora, and she now works as a writer and cultural consultant on TTRPG content. Emma also tries to be a professional academic, researching ancient foodways in northern Japan during the Jomon Period and teaching courses on the intersections of the past, pop culture, and diaspora experience. She loves squirrels, playing games, and knitting socks. She currently resides in Toronto with her cat Hunter, who has appeared on Asians Represent! live streams almost as many times as she has.

Lily Emil Lammers

Lily Emil Lammers is a bigender voice actor from Valencia, California. Their pronouns are she/he/they. After studying theater at Mills College in Oakland, she’s returned home and currently resides in Burbank.

Most notably, Emil can be heard as Ash in the Nintendo mobile game Fire Emblem Heroes, in addition to appearances in SMITE, Genshin Impact, and Negative Atmosphere. He’s also provided background voices for anime such as HunterXHunter and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun. Outside of anime and games, she was lucky enough to provide narration for the audiobook of Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens, now available on Audible.

In their free time, Lily enjoys listening to old radio dramas, practicing lightsaber combat, and learning new languages.

Steven Hyunh

Steve Huynh (he/him) is a Vietnamese tabletop RPG writer and gaming enthusiast based in Toronto, ON. He is a co-host and Discord Admin for the Asians Represent! podcast. His most recently writing credit was for Unbreakable Vol 1 where he wrote an adventure based on his childhood memories of climbing mountains in Vietnam. He edited for both Unbreakable: Revolutions and Unbreakable Vol 2 releasing in 2022.
He works full-time as a business consultant and spends the rest of his time pursuing cooking, lifting heavy stuff, cosplaying, and trying out as many RPGs as possible!
With a background in education, Steve loves RPGs for their ability to give you space to tell stories that both bring you joy but also give you a safe environment to explore and play with feelings and thoughts – with people you love and want to grow with.

Tamara “Tide” Fritz

Tamara Fritz (she or he) is a genderfluid British-American Voice Actor who has been producing work online under her handle ‘totalspiffage’ for more than 10 years, including original music, parody songs, and covers. She got her start in VO in 2014 and has worked as a full-time VO ever since. She works primarily in the commercial sector, but video game VO is her passion.
His more notable credits include Wargroove, as Queen Mercia, Magic the Gathering: Arena, as Freyalise, and multiple roles in the MMO Warframe, as the evil robotic spider Profit-Taker as well as the lead quest-giving NPC Eudico in Warframe’s expansion, Fortuna. He was also a cast member on Live Play series URealms for two years, where he provided voices for animations as well as performing on the show, and a podcast for Demon: The Fallen called “Ladies of Darkness”.
She currently lives in Columbus, OH, where she spends her free time writing and playing music, gaming, and memorizing obscure video game lore.

What’s in Store for Valor

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

Announcing Valor Live: The Woven

We are excited to announce our next Actual Play! Valor Live: The Woven will debut with a pre-recorded episode 0 on Friday, May 27th at 5:00 PM Pacific Time on our Twitch Channel. This will be a bi-monthly game run by Valor Co-Creator Liana MacKenzie. This game will take place in our new Lenaia setting inspired by magical girl, idol, and magical academy Anime. It will follow a student Unit as they investigate the ley lines of power that run through the world. 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 Liana’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. Twenty-six months living indoors and counting – Stay safe out there, everyone!

Michelle Rapp

Michelle Rapp is a Vietnamese-American cozy bisexual who regularly fails to disguise her real identity (three bewildered owls in a sweater). A bookworm who loves complicated board games, Magic the Gathering and rolling dice, she set fire to her past career within tech to create pottery and write RPG’s. Michelle often appears as an RPG performer and GM on Loading Ready Run, and also makes her voice heard on Asian Diaspora topics on the Asians Represent! Podcast. She loves cats, ceramics, baking, blankets, and smashing the patriarchy.

Steven Hyunh

Steve Huynh (he/him) is a Vietnamese tabletop RPG writer and gaming enthusiast based in Toronto, ON. He is a co-host and Discord Admin for the Asians Represent! podcast. His most recently writing credit was for Unbreakable Vol 1 where he wrote an adventure based on his childhood memories of climbing mountains in Vietnam. He edited for both Unbreakable: Revolutions and Unbreakable Vol 2 releasing in 2022.
He works full-time as a business consultant and spends the rest of his time pursuing cooking, lifting heavy stuff, cosplaying, and trying out as many RPGs as possible!
With a background in education, Steve loves RPGs for their ability to give you space to tell stories that both bring you joy but also give you a safe environment to explore and play with feelings and thoughts – with people you love and want to grow with.

Vanessa Hoskins

Vanessa Hoskins (she/her) is a giant TTRPG nerd who has been playing and running tabletop games for [REDACTED] years! Phew! Though most of her recent writing credits and play experience are in the Pathfinder and Starfinder systems, she’s excited to jump face first into Valor again after her appearance on Episode 3 of Valor Live playing the fey performer LuminousGrove! (Go Lummi!) You may recognize Vanessa from such actual play podcasts as Know Direction’s Adventurous! and Roll For Combat’s Three Ring Adventure. She also co-authors Vellum & Lace, the first piece of serialized Pathfinder fiction on Pathfinder Infinite, with Helen Savore. Finally, she’s recently started Ninja Cat Games, an indie video game studio . What can’t she do?! (Cook, the answer is: she cannot cook) She does all of this with the support of her brilliant wife and their adorable cat.

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.