IMPORTANT UPDATE - Legacy of the Ancestors Expansion Backers
24 days ago
– Tue, Mar 26, 2024 at 02:52:29 PM
If you did not back our recent Gamefound campaign, you can ignore this update.
If you DID back our recent Gamefound campaign, please continue reading:
If you pledged at the "Gameplay All-in" level during the original Kickstarter campaign (and/or added the Legacy of the Ancestors expansion to your pledge in BackerKit) and also backed our recent Gamefound campaign, we may need your help to ensure that you get your copy of Legacy of the Ancestors as quickly and easily as possible.
If you used a different email address for your Gamefound pledge than you used in BackerKit (the pledge manager for the original campaign), please fill out this form. If you do not, we have no way to combine your original pledge with your Gamefound pledge, and fulfillment of your rewards may be delayed as a result.
The deadline to complete the form is Friday, April 12, 2024. If you've missed the deadline, please contact us at [email protected] or [email protected].
If you used the same email address in BackerKit that you used in Gamefound, you do not need to complete the form. We already have everything we need to ensure that your pledge is taken care of.
Thank you for your help!
--The Earthborne Team
Earthborne Games Welcomes Maxine Newman
about 1 month ago
– Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 09:10:31 AM
St. Paul, Minnesota - Earthborne Games is excited to announce the hiring of Maxine Newman as its new Lead Game Designer. Newman, formerly Senior Game Designer at Fantasy Flight Games is best known for her extensive design and development work on Arkham Horror the Card Game, which she co-designed with Nate French.
Newman will join the Earthborne Rangers design team where she will be an immediate contributor to products currently in development (such as the Legacy of the Ancestors campaign expansion). Once those products enter production, she will become lead designer on Earthborne Rangers and begin design and development work on future expansions.
“I’m overjoyed to have Maxine on board,” said Andrew Navaro, founder of Earthborne Games. “She’s a rare talent, and arguably the best narrative card game developer on the planet. I can’t wait to see what she does with the Earthborne Rangers game system and the narrative design. We’re all in for a treat.”
The hire comes on the heels of the successful Earthborne Rangers 2nd Printing Gamefound Campaign which has raised over $1.8M to date.
"I am beyond excited to be joining the Earthborne Games team alongside such amazing talent,” said Newman. “I can't wait to get started crafting new content and stories for players to discover!”
The second printing of Earthborne Rangers and wave of expansions is scheduled to begin fulfillment at the end of this year.
Design Update - Expanding the Open World
3 months ago
– Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 05:17:37 PM
Hi Everyone,
I’m Andrew Fischer, Design Director at Earthborne Games. We’re so excited by the reception of the second printing campaign so far! Bringing the Earthborne Rangers to life has been a labor of love that’s now entering its fourth year, so it is incredibly rewarding to see so many of you enjoying it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.
For today’s design update, I’m going to be discussing the process we undertook in modifying the core game’s open world in order to allow for the new paths, locations, and characters featured in Legacy of the Ancestors. Expanding the game world into new areas proved more challenging than we originally anticipated, and it required some creative problem solving to get it to feel exactly how we wanted.
A Note on Spoilers: In these design updates, we will be sharing some parts of the campaign expansion and Ranger cards. We will not be spoiling any details that occur past the first day or two of the new campaign or that aren’t readily apparent from reading the rules and components of the new expansion. However, if you want to go into the new content completely sight-unseen, I’d recommend not reading these design updates.
Perilous New Pathways
We started expansion development by creating the lore and general layout of the underground sections. This involved a few in-person meetings between Sam, Luke, Andrew, and me, a lot of writing by Sam to capture those discussions, and some trial and error as I designed the first map concepts. Once that was done to our satisfaction, adding this new region to the open world, from a mechanical perspective, felt like a fairly straightforward proposition: we designed a new map with new locations, and designated some paths that connected this new map directly back to certain locations of the Valley. In this way, the new areas simply expanded the original map, creating one giant world for the Rangers to explore. They could go anywhere in the original Valley, and explore underground. This seemed like a slam dunk, and we felt it would provide players with the maximum amount of freedom. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t work as well as we had hoped.
As we started testing, we realized that we were ignoring one of the key components that makes the open world great. The open world of Earthborne Rangers provides two key experiences that help the game feel unique from others in the genre. First, it gives you an immense freedom of choice that makes the story feel like your own. Second, it reacts to your decisions, making it feel alive and like a real place that could actually exist. Both of these are key to the experience. It was this second experience that our new map wasn’t delivering on.
Due to the sheer number of different people and places you can visit in the Valley, we couldn’t update the text for all of them for the new expansion. (If we did, it would take up the entire page count of the new campaign guide!) Instead, in our initial prototypes we only updated characters and locations relevant to the plot, leaving the others to use their text from Lure of the Valley (the core game campaign).
This seemed like a good compromise, but as we started playing, we realized that it wasn’t working. It felt strange. Some people in the Valley had advanced their storyline - they had changed and grown since the first campaign, and were now reacting to the exciting new things happening in the Valley. But others seemed frozen in time, unchanged by the events unfolding in Legacy of the Ancestors. Seeing these two side by side during gameplay created a narrative dissonance that undermined the feeling of the Valley being a real, lived-in place. Something had to change.
A More Immersive Valley
One approach we explored to solve this problem was to simply isolate the expansion to the new, subterranean map. In this approach, you would start the new campaign already at an underground location, and be limited to just the new region for the duration of the expansion’s campaign. This solved the problem, but it made the expansion’s story feel far too disconnected from the Valley itself, and we wanted to create a contiguous open world both geographically and narratively as best we could given our constraints.
In the end, we landed on a solution that mixed both approaches, giving you the best of both worlds. Now, you start the expansion campaign at Lone Tree Station, the headquarters of the Rangers, and the most logical place to begin your adventure.
From there, you can venture into the Valley, but you are limited in where you can go to a discreet section of the Valley, with the locations that are the most relevant to the expansion’s story. This way, everything and everyone you encounter in the Valley can have new story and new side missions for you to pursue. You’ll discover that everyone you encounter has grown and changed since the events of Lure of the Valley, and that they react in one way or another to the choices you made during that first campaign. When it comes time to delve into the arcology, the subterranean map connects directly to this section of the Valley, keeping the continuity of the open world intact. This approach makes the world feel wholly reactive, connects it back to the Valley, and gives you interesting choices as to where to explore next.
In this expansion, you are going to be exploring the caverns and the arcology ruins beneath the Valley, venturing deeper underground and deeper into the past. The map is divided into strata, each representing an area deeper than the strata above. To avoid spoilers we won’t show the entire map here, but we can definitely share the two uppermost levels: the Valley and the Arcology Stratum 1. All told, there are 21 new locations to visit, and 5 new terrain types to traverse, and like in the core game, there are pivotal locations with unique beings and features as well as wandering NPCs and mysteries to discover at non-pivotal locations.
Note: The bottom 2/3 of the Arcology map is not shown below to prevent spoilers.
Thank you everyone for reading! You can look forward to more previews in the weeks and months to come!
Our Gamefound Campaign Launches Tomorrow!
3 months ago
– Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 03:21:37 PM
Hello everyone!
It's hard to believe that tomorrow is the day our
Gamefound campaign launches. We've put a lot of hard work and love into this game, and are so incredibly thankful to every single one of you who backed the original Kickstarter, helping us get the first printing out into the world.
Now, with this Gamefound campaign, we have a chance to get the game into more people's hands, and produce new content like the Legacy of the Ancestors campaign, Stewards of the Valley Ranger card expansion, and the Moments on the Path expansion.
You can also be sure to expect a large variety of new add-ons like wooden tokens, new playmat designs, new reclaimed pewter Ranger minis and more.
A couple of important notes on the Gamefound campaign:
- If you ordered Legacy of the Ancestors in the first campaign you do not need to order it again. You will receive it when the Gamefound campaign fulfills, and will not be charged additional shipping.
- If you ordered Legacy of the Ancestors in the first campaign and order anything from the Gamefound campaign, you will be charged shipping for all new items and they will ship together with your original Legacy of the Ancestors pledge.
- There will be an Errata Card Pack for owners of the first printing who would like updated cards.
- The Gamefound is an English-only campaign, and many of the add-ons like Ranger minis, playmats, etc., will be exclusive to it. We will have a section for other language editions on the project page, and the partner sites we link there will be handling preorders for their language editions at some point after the conclusion of the campaign.
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You do not need to choose a reward level in order to back the Gamefound campaign. You can back by purchasing add-ons. You do not need to select a reward level to in order to purchase add-ons. That is, you can shop a la cart.
- We will be offering Stretch Pay.
- We will be shipping globally.
There's a lot to share, and we can't wait for you to see it tomorrow. See you there!
Best,
The Earthborne Team
