Battlezoo Ancestries: Year of Titans

Titans Incoming!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 12:52:49 PM

Hey everyone, I'm sorry for the slight delay in the update. I wanted to make sure everything was set and ready to go before I gave an overview of what was going on. And away we go!

BackerKit Surveys Out Now

Everyone should have received an invitation to complete the BackerKit survey. There, you will finalize your Kickstarter choices. You must complete the survey before you receive any products, so make sure you do. If you are having trouble finding your survey, check your email or head over to Am I A Backer to find the survey.

BackerKit Surveys Locking and Charging Tomorrow

Rewards can only be sent out once surveys have been completed and any outstanding charges have been paid. These are due to be processed later tomorrow, after which you will receive instructions in the BackerKit Digital Downloads section. For those new to our process, this is how we handle the fulfillment of digital downloads and Foundry VTT fulfillment:

• Most digital downloads will provide you with a discount code to use at battlezoo.com. This will allow you to redeem the product on the battlezoo.com website for "free" and add it to your account. That way, you can keep all of your downloads in one location, and all updates will automatically be emailed to you as they are released or updated. Nearly all of your items will be handled this way, and the instructions are simple and clear. But, of course, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
• Since the Titan ancestry won't be released to the general public until December 2025, you will find the Titan PDF, Foundry VTT module, animated tokens, digital assets, Pathbuilder 2e module, and maps on BackerKit directly. They should all be released within the next few days, so don't panic if you don't see them on your account immediately.
• Any digital add-ons or extras you'll also find in your BackerKit digital downloads will be fulfilled using the same method as outlined above.

VIP Digital Maps

Anyone who was an early backer and expected to receive the VIP digital maps should now have the item "VIP Themed Battle Maps for Year of Titans" added to their account. If you don't see this yet, there can be a few reasons:

• You haven't completed the BackerKit survey. Make sure to complete your survey to see the add-on in your account.
• You won't receive the VIP maps if you only backed the $1 tier. You must back any tier above the $1 tier to receive these maps.
• Your email in BackerKit doesn't match the one you used when submitting your VIP preorder. If you used a different email address, please send us a message with both of your email addresses (the one in BackerKit and the one used in the VIP early pledge) so we can manually match them to [email protected].

When to Expect the Items

Everything is locked and loaded, but we must coordinate the release with BackerKit and Foundry. We are hoping by late tomorrow, January 1, 2025, but it might be closer to January 2, as that is when BackerKit is back in the office. But either way, expect to receive some Titans later this week!

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know. And Happy New Year everyone!

~Stephen Glicker
Roll For Combat, Publisher

BackerKit Update & Read This If You Are Getting Kickstarter Errors
over 1 year ago – Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 09:38:42 AM

Hey Everyone, a quick update on the status of the post-Kickstarter timeline!

What to Do if You Can't Complete Your Kickstarter Pledge

There seems to be a bug with Kickstarter that some people are experiencing, such as a lack of ability to complete their pledge and pay for it. I have been talking with Kickstarter, and this is a bug on their end.

If you are experiencing this error, don't panic! We have a simple solution to fix this:

• If you can't complete your pledge, message me via Kickstarter.
• Once BackerKit is live next week, I'll coordinate with you personally so you can complete your payment via BackerKit instead of Kickstarter.
• You will then be all set, and you'll get the same rewards.

I don't expect Kickstarter to fix this bug before BackerKit goes live next week, so just follow the steps above, and I'll make sure you get your rewards on time!

BackerKit is Going Live Next Week

We need to wait 14 days from the end of the Kickstarter before we can send out the BackerKit surveys to allow you to finalize your pledges. We expect this will be December 27, which is when the BackerKit surveys will be sent out.

We'll send out the surveys as soon as we get the green light from BackerKit and everyone is imported into the system.

For those new to this process, here is a quick overview:

• Everyone who was successfully charged will receive a survey from BackerKit via email.
• This survey is required to finalize your pledge and to let us know whether you want your rewards for 5th Edition or Pathfinder.
• You will also receive instructions on how to redeem your rewards via BackerKit.

PDFs, Foundry Modules, Maps, and Animated Tokens to be Released in the First Week of January 

We are prepared and anticipate releasing everything within the initial days of January 2025. We expect to release everyone on January 1, 2025, but with the holidays and coordinating with other vendors (such as Foundry), do be patient in case we need to release a few days after the 1st of January. However, we have everything ready to go, so expect to start the new year with Titans and Trolls!

~ Stephen Glicker
Roll For Combat, Publisher

What a Journey! The Titans Rise Again and We'll Watch Them Together!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 09:05:55 PM

It's been a long journey across the land, searching for signs of the ancient god-beasts and their titan offspring. But together, our team is stronger than we are individually, and we've managed to discover everything there is to know. I want to thank each and every one of you for your support. Without you, there's no way we could continue creating these amazing books, and I couldn't be more grateful to have you in our community.

I hope you'll enjoy the "metastory" throughout Year of Titans, which is a little something new for us compared to Year of Monsters or Year of Legends. The Release the Kraken adventure from Linda Zayas-Palmer connected to that storyline should be a real treat, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you when you include it in your game!

Here is a little timeline of what to expect for the next few weeks/months:

• Kickstarter will change everyone who backed this campaign. This takes approximately 2 1/2 weeks to finalize.
• After Kickstarter finishes, the BackerKit for the campaign will open about a week later. You will automatically receive an email with your BackerKit login information, and we'll provide everyone with instructions on how to log into their BackerKit account manually.
• BackerKit is where you can add additional items to your order, where you enter your shipping address, and where you select if you want 5th Edition or Pathfinder products. BackerKit allows you to manage your pledge after the Kickstarter ends.
• BackerKit is also where you will receive your digital products, such as PDFs and Foundry Module keys.
• Each month starting in January (on January 1st assuming the Kickstarter finalizes and BackerKit is ready by then but otherwise as soon as BackerKit is ready, since the files are ready to go on our end), we will send out the pdfs and Foundry modules for both games, and the Pathbuilder files for the Pathfinder 2e version on the first of the month. You'll receive two ancestries in January for backing the Kickstarter, including the bonus titan ancestry. Everyone else will have to wait until December for titans.

As always, if you have any questions, please let us know, and we'll do our best to answer them. 

Talk to you again soon and thanks again for your continuing support!

~Mark Seifter, Roll for Combat Director of Game Design

We're in For a Fright! 110k with Just 90 Minutes Left
over 1 year ago – Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 07:33:34 PM

We made it to 110k with just 90 minutes to go. Thanks to everyone for making it happen including our last minute reinforcements from reddit! So contaminated bogeys are a go! Bogeys are a really exciting ancestry because they play around with the idea of making creatures not just "frightened" as per the condition but "terrified" where the fear leaves a lasting impression for a time, giving the bogies additional benefits. One of my favorites is a feat where as long as someone somewhere is terrified of you, if you die, they have a nightmare with you in it and then they wake up in a cold sweat and you are right next to them (there's a cooldown so you'll want to lay low for a while).

With that, we've reached all our stretch goals for the project (unless Stephen suddenly appears with something for the last 90 minutes, so never say never I guess)! Thanks so much everyone, and I'll see you soon for the celebration party update at midnight. Until then, why not turn on your nightlight to protect you from the darkness and read Aitheria Nyx's essay on bogeys, included below.

~Mark Seifter, Roll for Combat Director of Game Design

From the Archives of Aitheria Nyx

The Only Thing We Have To Fear

Fear is ancient. Primordial. Essential to the survival of countless creatures, as it has guided them to avoid circumstances that would put their lives at risk. Yet among species who experience sapience and build cultures, fear is a more nuanced experience. Certainly, there are fears that correspond to clear and present dangers, but there are many more that represent perceived threats to social status, pessimistic projections into the unknown and unfamiliar, or echoes of past trauma. Fear among sapient creatures is a complex phenomenon. It protects us, instructs us, and encourages us to avoid mistakes that could bring us harm. But it also constrains us, and it can all too often serve as fuel for prejudice and inflexibility.

Fear itself came to life, in the distant past, in the form of bogeys. Bogeys are fey creatures born of the collective fears of millions, nightmares given mind and form. When the patterns of terror take hold, bogeys flourish, and some claim responsibility for incidents where mass panic led to transformative events.

Among the most world-shaking events for which some bogeys claim ancestral responsibility is the Titanomachy, the war between the god-beasts known as the First Ones and the new gods, represented by the dragon deity Talir, all the way down to the ending where the victorious Talir was locked away by their own parents. These bogeys claim that their ancestors were the puppet masters behind the entire event, that the terror they stoked among mortals fomented the war, and then afterward forced the Father and Mother to take the drastic step of sealing away the being the mortals feared the most, even though that being was their own child. 

While I’m certain that bogeys flourished in those frightening times, I take their grandiose claims of responsibility with a grain of salt. After all, mortal hearts are complicated, and it is much to the advantage of bogeys as a whole to exaggerate the magnitude of their powers and influence, the better to inspire terror in the modern day.

Efforts to understand the true nature and history of bogeys are complicated, because both bogeys themselves and frightened chroniclers from other ancestries are typically disinclined toward straightforward and unembellished accounts. I’ve begun to question if the search for a pure factual account unclouded by the distortions of fear is even an appropriate objective, or if such attempts would strip away a vital layer of the truth. 

I haven’t found it particularly easy to converse with bogeys on the subject. Bogeys tend to be disinclined toward speaking on private matters, which I suspect is in part a response to how rarely they find themselves welcome among people of other ancestries. Because acting as they must to survive causes emotions that most people experience as unpleasant, bogeys typically face hatred and scorn. People are prone to fearing and hating what they don’t understand, so the need for fear inspires many bogeys to avoid allowing others to understand them. The way a bogey perceives this rejection is a deeply personal experience, with some viewing it as a status symbol, while others have more conflicted feelings, including resentment and frustration.

But to those who would assume that bogeys should be rejected out of hand, I ask, why not push through the challenge of the terror they promote and try to reach a greater understanding? The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.

~Aitheria Nyx, Herald of the Space Element, Advocate of Monsters

$100k Achieved! Icesoul Unlocked, with Contaminated Bogey Up Next
over 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 02:10:37 PM

Hi everyone!

Thanks to an amazing surge of support from new members of the Battlezoo community, we've made it over $100k together with just over two days to go. While it was a close call in the voting at first, snowsoul took the advantage and just snowballed from there, so icesoul won the vote, and, seeing the writing on the wall, I added icesoul to the ancestry today. I think it's going to be exciting for fans of a more armored character, and there are tradeoffs you can make with being frozen to increase your defenses further!

Contaminated bogeys had enough support to continue on as our next stretch goal, so if we can hit one more goal, we'll be able to add them too. Let's see how far we can take this together! I'll leave off with more from Aitheria Nyx about snowsouls. Let the storm rage on!

~Mark Seifter, Roll for Combat Director of Game Design

From the Archives of Aitheria Nyx

Let It Snow

The rare and reclusive snowsouls, humanoid-shaped primal fey formed from elemental ice and snow, are the subject of countless fairy tales. The monarch with a heart as cold as ice. The young lad or maiden luring the unwary into the heart of the blizzard. The bringer of the first frost and herald of winter. All of these are snowsouls. 

But where did it all begin? Snowsouls aren’t exactly forthcoming about their origin story, and the truth is lost in the chilled mists of the past. One origin that I find compelling, and which brought snowsouls to my interest given my current research on titans and the First Ones, brings us back to the Titanomachy, the war between the god-beasts known as the First Ones or Progenitors, and the new gods, specifically the dragon deity Talir. This ongoing war took Talir across the world, to all the hidden places where the First Ones slept and laired. One such place was a land of eternal winter, unseasonably so despite its latitude. Deep inside slept a being of ineffable cold who blanketed the land in snow year-long, causing it to be impossible to grow any crops. The shape and form of this mythical First One varies from story to story, as do the tales of Talir’s battle with it, but the end result was an explosion of wintry magic and the birth of one of the icy dragon heritages, as well as the clearing of the curse of eternal winter from the land. 

And depending on who tells the tale, one of the aftereffects of the battle gave birth to snowsouls as well. Were snowsouls the fragments of the shattered wintry domain? One account claims it, and that might make them close to titanborn, as I suspect krakens and trolls might be. Are they instead the result of the escaping magic of winter suffusing itself into the local humanoid population who made their home what used to be a safe distance away from the god-beast’s domain? That would make them less like titans, born from the god-beast’s spark, and more like ogres, directly changed by the god-beast’s magic. Were they fey from a wintry court of Faerie who existed all along and were lured to our world by this explosion of boreal magic? That would suggest they were older than the Titanomachy, and that while they weren’t directly involved, that they might have first-hand accounts of that aftermath among the writings of their elders. The only possibility in this branch of origins that wouldn’t help us learn more about the Titanomachy is the one that makes snowsouls out to be younger: in this version, the people of the lands near to the battle weren’t directly transformed by the event, but as a result they struggled to survive as the glacial magic spread to their lands and spoiled their harvests. Over time, a new god was born who took notice of their plight: Kasa the cold-hearted lord of winter. The mortals agreed to undertake a harsh trial Kasa offered, and in exchange, depending on the result, he would make sure they were protected from the spreading winter. Depending on your source, they either succeeded or failed at the trial, and as a result, Kasa transformed them all into the first snowsouls.   

It’s high time that I ask as many snowsouls as I can what they think happened. And if I can find the truth, I might learn more about the Titanomachy. This outcome, with the spreading cold mentioned in several versions of the tale, didn’t seem to be the new gods’ intent when they released Talir to clear out the First Ones; they sought to protect mortals from the god-beasts instead. So whose was it? Is it perhaps the influence of the Enigmas, and if so, why was this a part of their plans? If I seek to unravel the truth, I must travel to the icy realm that snowsouls call home. In which case, let it snow!

–Aitheria Nyx, Herald of the Space Element, Advocate of Monsters