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 [email protected] 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.

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

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.

Valor Live Coming Soon!

Get ready, Cavaliers! Valor Live will be launching on September 25th! The Stream will be hosted on our Twitch Channel and will run from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM Pacific Time every Friday. The 25th will be Episode 0, our initial character creation session, with the game officially starting on October 2nd. Look forward to it!

Valor Sample Chapter

The Valor Sample Chapter can be found here

How to Use the Roll20 Character Sheet

Many of the people who play and develop Valor are scattered across the globe. To help facilitate easier play and testing of new rules and content as well as to just make playing the game easier, we’ve used Roll20 to schedule and play games online. To make this even easier, Valor co-creator Alan “Quinn” Gordon developed a Character Sheet for the platform, which is now available to the public. While this character sheet doesn’t have the full capabilities of the character builder application we are developing, it’s still a great tool for GMs to easily put together NPCs and players to put their own characters together. It does require the Valor core rulebook to use, but even if your game meets in person, this is a great tool to make the experience easier.

When starting a new game on Roll20, you’ll have the option to select a character sheet. Simply select “Valor” from the drop-down menu and you’re ready to go!

There are three parts of the Character sheet, Attributes, Skills and Flaws, and Techniques.

The attribute section will automatically calculate all of your attributes based on your level, skill selection, and primary attribute array. The level and type will also factor in, if you are playing a PC or Elite you will receive the full stats but if you select Soldier or Flunky you’ll note dramatically reduced skill point and stat totals to reflect the different enemy type.

The skills and flaws section lets you input skills and flaws. Every skill and flaw in the Core Rulebook is included, but no descriptions are present in the Character Sheet so players will need to refer to the rulebook for the effect. Any skills or flaws that directly effect your base stats will be automatically calculated into the character sheet. You can also input custom skills, in this case the level of the custom skill equals the amount of skill points it removes from your character.

Finally, the Technique tab makes the hardest part of Valor character creation much easier. You can select from any cores within the book and assign an attribute, which will determine how Modifiers and Limits interact with it. All Modifiers and Limits can be typed into the respective text boxes with a number at the end signifying their level. These inputs will populate the text section with a full description of the Technique, how to use it and what it does. While all modifiers are loaded into the Character Sheet, you will still need the core Valor rulebook for their names and the level requirements.

The Valor Character Sheet is completely free to use for anyone with a Roll20 account. While Valorous Games is not in any way affiliated with Roll20’s service, we use it quite a bit, and hope it will help some of you either for building characters and NPCs, or even for running whole games online with friends all over the world!

International Tabletop Day Demo Podcast

In celebration of International Tabletop Day, the Valor team got together and put together a podcast of an adventure for your enjoyment! You can listen to the trailer here:

The full version can be found here:

Show Off Your Valor Character!

Valor is all about the characters. It’s about you being able to play who you want how you want, and being rewarded for doing that. We know there are some amazing characters out there that you’ve already been bringing to life at the table. This year for International Tabletop Day, we want to share your amazing characters with the community!

If you want to enter, all you need to do is submit a description and backstory for an original character you have played (or want to play) in a Valor game! We’ll pick our 3 favorites and give them a full-body color interpretation by the Valor art team and share them with the community after the contest! Please send all submissions to [email protected].

We will also be accepting submissions at both our gaming table and our Sales booth at Sakura-Con this year! If you’re going to be at Sakura-Con, stop by and see us, we’ll be happy to accept your submission! The gaming table in Room 613 will be holding workshops throughout the day to help with submissions and will have supplies to write them out. We’ll also be at Booth 409 in the Exhibitor’s Hall. All submissions must be received by the end of Monday, April 17th.

 

Please read below for full rules:

-Submissions via email must be in .doc, .txt, .pdf, or .jpeg format

-Submissions must include a physical description of the character and the character’s general backstory, including in-game accomplishments if applicable. The more detailed the better!

-If desired, you can include additional documents such as their character sheet, a picture you’ve drawn of them, a description of their personality and goals, or anything else you think will help the character stand out.

-Please make sure they’re original! We appreciate characters that draw inspiration from all the fantastic media that’s out there, but we can’t accept characters that use terminology and names from existing properties.

-Submission deadline is 11:59 PM Monday, April 17th. Any submissions received after that will not be counted.

Valor Interview: Jenna MacKenzie, Lead Writer

For our third interview, we sat down with Jenna MacKenzie, the Lead Everything Writer for Valorous Games and asked her about the process of writing for Valorous Foes, as well as the Valor events she runs.

Staff: So, tell me a bit about yourself and what you do with Valor

MacKenzie: I actually wear quite a few hats here. Most recently, I’m the Lead Writer for the new expansion, but I’ve also done a wide variety of other things both for the game as well as getting the name out there. Before VCF, most of what I was involved with was getting Valor to events, so more often than not I was the person that people would see either at convention booths or at local gaming events. If you’ve seen us around, you’ve probably seen me!

Staff: What are you most excited about in the writing for this book?

MacKenzie: The lore for our Foes. While we aren’t drawing from any one particular setting, getting to write the flavor for each one has been a blast. I was a huge mythology nerd as a kid (I think I lot of us were, honestly), so I feel like I’m making my nine-year old self really happy. While most of the Foes that we have in this book are based on things that people might recognize—urban legends, myths, things like that—we also have a few originals, and I get to really go wild with those. Being able to take a base stat line and breathe life into it has been an amazing experience, and I’m having a lot of fun.

Staff: What are some of the challenges for writing for a book like this?

MacKenzie: This thing is enormous. Initially, we had 200 Foes slotted, and that got to be too much, but even 160 makes it a huge challenge. But I think the most challenging part comes with translating the rules in such a way that will be approachable both to GMs who are veterans of the system, as well as those who are coming to us fresh. Valor really lets players and GMs come up with just about anything, but there is a learning curve. I hope I don’t end up writing over anyone’s heads!

Staff: You mention Valor lets players do whatever they want, how do you plan to express that with VCF?

MacKenzie: With VCF, we’ve added a bunch of different Skills and Abilities to give both GMs and players more options. Obviously a large majority of them are Foe specific, but I like to think that there’s enough in there that the players can really sink their teeth into. And who knows, maybe this book might be a sign of more to come on the players-side.

But you didn’t hear that from me.

Staff: Duly noted! Are there any new skills or abilities that really stand out in making interesting lore?

MacKenzie: Too many! Going into this project, we expected to create a few different Skills and Abilities to be able to properly depict some of the Foes, but we ended up with a lot! Did I say this book was going to be enormous?

I think the most fun new toys that we’ve had to play with are the ones that expand upon Malevolent Entity. It’s something that we thought was a really fun mechanic, but really felt needed to be fleshed out. It might have seemed like a simple Flaw in the core rulebook, but in VCF it’s potentially really dangerous. I kind of feel bad for the players who have to deal with it!

But no I don’t. Sorry. This may have also been indirectly my fault. And I’m still not sorry.

Staff: Let’s talk about some of the other hats you wear, what has it been like being the face of Valor, and running all these events?

MacKenzie: One of the faces at least. Running events is probably the most exhilarating, exciting, stressful and chaotic things ever. You have to be crazy to want to do them. And yet it’s one of the most fun things for me, since I get to meet with our players face-to-face. It’s really gratifying. Tiring, but gratifying. Our fans are awesome, we get a lot of people who come back and see us event after event, either to tell us stories about their games or even just to give us some love.

Most of the time I’m in the trenches selling the game, but being able to run demos as well has been a blast. I’m still a bit shaky as a GM myself, so I feel sorry for anyone who has to be at a table with me! But honestly, the feedback and support we get from the fans is almost addictive. I love it.

Staff: What are some of the best or most memorable moments from events you’ve been a part of?

MacKenzie: That’s really not fair. Can I say all of them?

Staff: Try to narrow it down to two or three

MacKenzie: That’s still really tough. We’ve been running demos and events for seven years now, even well before Valor was first released, and we’ve had so many wonderful memories and experiences. But I think my favorite ones come from when the players really get into the game. Valor naturally lends itself to loud, dynamic games, and there have been times where I’ll laugh so hard that I start crying. But I think the moments that stand out the most to me were when people really went outside of themselves to role-play their character.

We’ve had people rap at the table before, which was fantastic, by the way. We’ve had epic monologues at bitter rivals, and puns. So many puns. It’s terrible, the dad jokes flow freely apparently. But really asking me to narrow it down to two or three concrete memories is nearly impossible.

I’ve been with Valor since our first demo, and in the seven years, I’ve gotten a chance to be a play tester, a con gofer, booth staff, marketing staff, so many different things. So not only are my favorite memories tied to the things that our players have done at the table, but also to being able to see players get excited while playing our game. We’ve had people who come to see us every year, who have been around about as long as I have. And when asked what I remember most about the events, I would have to say that look of joy and excitement when they come out to play our game.

Staff: It definitely sounds like you’ve done a lot with Valor. Is there anything else you wanted to mention, either about the events or the writing you’re doing now?

MacKenzie: I’m just that person behind the curtain, don’t mind me.

But in all seriousness, I know my opinion is probably extremely biased, but having played tabletop roleplaying games for half my life, and playing a number of different systems this one really does feel like home for me. And I don’t just mean in the way that Valor plays, which, yes, it is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. But with the people who have created and contributed to it, with our fans, and the people who we’ve been able to meet along the way.

As far as writing is concerned, I always wanted to write books, but I never imagined that my first would be a rulebook! It’s strange to think about, but at the same way, it’s been a fun challenge, and I love being able to construct this lore for players and GMs to do with as they please. I want to hear about what stories everyone ends up telling with the Foes in this book. In a way, they’re all like my kids. My sometimes ugly, awkward, terrifying kids.

Valor: Villains, Creatures and Foes can be found on Kickstarter through October 15.