Silvervine Games : Svg / Silvervine News Archive One 12/05 to 06/06

2006-06-26 :: I told you we should have taken that left at Albequerque- 06/26/06

We've got some new stuff going on. A change in artists from my last post and of course I've put more info at my journal than here. One big piece of news is that Alec and I will be going down to Origins this weekend. I might try to do a silvervine games shirt for us to wear. I may not get to it, but it'd be a nifty idea. We'll have more posts and more updates soon and you'll be seeing more art by a new artist. Like something that may be posted . . here soon.

2006-06-19 :: New Artist, A post by Arcadian, and a productive surge forward- 06/19/06

We've brought on a new artist to fill in some gaps and I feel good about promoting her. Go check out the Developers Journal for Arcadian as it contains much more information and where-in I wax philosophic for a stanza or so. We're also making productive surges forward and you should see some site updates here within the next few days. They only problem with productive surges is that if too many happen at once, we're out of paychecks to fund them and still eat. Yay ramen.

2006-06-16 :: Changes to site, changes in rules- 06/16/06

We've removed the little used guestbook page as it was getting spammed. We're actually quite happy with that because it means the site gets enough traffic that someone says hey there is something worthspamming here. Right on. However, we don't want to deal with the spam so, bye bye. We may one day set up a forum or something for feedback or we'll just rely on feeback links and forms. So outside of this stuff we've got a few rules changes. They're talked about more in the Developers Journal . We're starting weekly meetings again and going over the systems. The last weekly meeting got a change in the movement rules ratified and we completely changed our flight system, which made it 100 times easier and much more realistic. You can expect to see a lot of fun things coming out in the next few months.

2006-06-05 :: Small treat before dinner - 06/05/06

Here is a small treat for everyone. These are some of the backgrond files we have been working on for the SVG character sheet. We may in fact create multiple versions of the sheet at some point in time, but these are a few of the producion proofs.

2006-06-02 :: Back in the Fray - 06/02/06

Latest things

New developers journal up. Explains our slowness in posting lately.
Character sheet is very very very close to being finished.
Our pallette cleanser campaign is being finished on wednesday, although tommorrow might be more approriate.
I'm tempted to write another Treasure Tables post about GMing playtests.
We are in dire need of artists. If you have artistic skills and can work QUICKLY we NEED YOU. We pay decently and on time. Our biggest needs are technical drawings of a steampunk/anime variety and those who can draw decent "furries" for animalia. Contact us at SVGbulk@gmail.com if you're interested.

2006-05-12 :: Imperial War Heromachine! - 05/12/06

We'll we've just got permission to make use of Heromachine files within the context of the Imperial Games wiki. Since I've got not drawing artistic talent I decided to make use of the Hero Machine character generator to create a few NPC pictures for the next playtest. The program is very good for anyone who can't really draw well but needs a way to visually represent characters. The nature of the program doesn't allow you to make any Picasso's but it's handy in a pinch and pretty damn rounded out. It's definately worth the price.

2006-05-01 :: We Update Sometimes - 05/01/06

Just because it's not being seeng on the frontpage doesn't mean stuff hasn't been going on behind the scenes. We've just finished a major reoginazation of the book and we're working on incorporating grammar edits. Once that is done and we've gotten the final tallies no the system modules we will be putting out the Level 0 guide. The exciting thing about that is that it will be shaped in a unique way. Look back later for more details. Also be sure to check out our Imperial War playtest site. This is currently an internal playtest, once we finish (we still haven't started) the playtest we will update that site with a PDF version with full GM information so that it can be played and used on your own as a campaign. For now check out the playtest site of http://www.silvervinegames.com/imperialwar/

2006-04-11 :: The Imperial War - 04/11/06

From Email from John Arcadian Regarding upcoming gaming:

" Allright people I'm gearing up to do some more SVG. There are two things on the board right now:

1. The actual fighters tournament. We'll be doing this in about a month or sooner if we can get everyone ready and set to go. After this we will probably be getting into ed's game and then scheduling the next playtest for SVG after that.

2. The next playtest will take place when summer comes around. I'm going to make sure it doesn't interfere with ed's game too much and of course it's closer to everyone so it's going to be easier to get everyone together. The playtest will center around the misions of a military unit based with the belcraft army. This unit will be responsible for various missions culminating in the aid of a deposed emperor from clave. The main goal and focus of this unit is to carry out precision strikes in key places to turn the outcome of the war. The orders for this unit will come down from a high ranking clavian official who the party may be responsible for. The tone of the game will be mostly serious. T

The things which will make this playtest different.

We'll be implementing a social contract. Sets of informal rules as to how the game will go.
"Sometimes the best way to accomplish this is with an informal social contract, which you can cover before the game. For example: The players agree to avoid splitting up the party (even if it would be more logical to do so), and you agree not to include adventure situations that require them to split up." from www.treasuretables.org

For our game things like, the party agrees to dismiss with the infighting. No dwarf hating humans, or human hating dwarves put together. Modify character concepts to ensure this. In return I'll give you each a skill which you would need for the group. I.e. you want to be the unit's "face" Ill give you a free level of seduction or speaking skills, or mediation or disguise.

Their will be multitudes of playtesting information made available to everyone so that no one has to keep lists, etc. There will be places made available so you can share information. Check out http://www.silvervinegames.com/imperialwar/
The unit will have a commander who is in charge in game. This will be decided by a dice roll or a psuedo-random system. Any player could be in charge of the group in game.
The unit, and the commander will be in charge of how they actually carry out missions. No. Here is your preconfigured dungeon crawl, but Goal: Go get an airship aaaaaaand begin. I'm aiming for more interactive here.

Unit name. Right now what I need from anyone who thinks they might be playing is a valid decent Unit name for the military unit. A codename, a unit designation or number. This can and should follow military standards and will not be something satirical, such as "Unit Kimche", etc. The name should also bear in mind that it isn't modern day military but medieval military. So keep that as a theme. "

2006-03-27 :: The Great Site UPDATE! - 03/27/06

There are all sorts of brand new things in the world of Cyrus and time will bring a flood of even more. Now you too can learn THINGS! about Cyrus and discover STUFF! about the history and people. In fact OBJECTS! from the world are even going to be put into their own section next to the one which talks about how people DO ACTIONS!

So don't miss THESE! fun filled updates.

http://www.silvervinegames.com/cyrus/index.php/Geography/Index

http://www.silvervinegames.com/cyrus/index.php/History/Index

http://www.silvervinegames.com/cyrus/index.php/Armory/Index

http://www.silvervinegames.com/cyrus/index.php/Focuses/Index

http://www.silvervinegames.com/cyrus/index.php/Spells/Index

2006-03-24 :: World Information! - 03/24/06

There is now updatedinformation about the World of Cyrus over in the History, Races, and Geograpy sections. The information is still semi-raw and basic but I promised a big site update before the weeekend. Now some time over the weekend is going to be used to clean up and add in some information to all those places. In Two weeks we start back into full production cycle. So things will get done, stuff will be updated, things will be polished, play tests will begin again.

Here are a few SVG haiku's as a freebie

Site Updates Promised

Before the weekend, but raw

Fish to Be Sushi

Ronsha in the mist

Hidden well with stealthy skill

It makes the fur itch

Silvervine Game Group

Company or Geeks with Time

rough works should tell all

2006-03-22 :: Site Update before Weekend, Guestbook now - 03/22/06

We put up a small basic guestbook on the site so anyone visiting could leave a message. Feel free but don't post anything vulgar. We will remove obscenity and foul language.

2006-03-22 :: Site Update before End of Weekend - 03/22/06

We're very close to a site update. Over 25 pages of information on the World of Cyrus will be included into the site. Specifics about places, lands, timeline, groups, characters and more. It's been a long time since we've updated the site. We've been busy working on refining a lot of information about the world and of course real life issues. We are a small gaming company and most of this has to occur in the time away from jobs, family and the million other things which dictate our lives. We know much of our work is rough and has not been polished yet, but the more we work the more we'll get it to a point where it will be an incredible things which we can release into the world. We thank anyone who has even visited the site or been interested in what we're doing here. We welcome any and all feedback. Contact us at svgbulk@gmail.com.

2006-03-13 :: New Developers Journal Entry Up, Close to Site Update - 03/13/06

There is a new developers entry up. Click on the Arcadian's Developer Journal. We're also close to having a few updates to the Cyrus section. I've only got about 6 out of 30 some pages left to transcribe and expand then the Cyrus section should be in full bloom. Also check out: http://www.silvervinegames.com/imperialwar/ for the barebones of our next playtest. We'll be chroncialling via wiki and keeping all the campaign information there.

2006-03-07 :: All Things Must Come To Light(We've been linked by Treasure Tables) - 03/07/06

Well all things must come to light and be seen by people eventually. We've just been linked from Treasure Tables a GM advice website. Which is fun and scary in two ways.
One- We'll be getting seen by people.
Two- We'll be getting seen by people.
See we're just eeking out of our Alpha phase of production and plowing into the Beta Phase. So suffice it to say things are still a little rough and subject to change in some areas. Such as our world's history. The current project we're embroiled in is working on the history and revising stuff within it based on information we recievedn from the Southern outpost of SVG. So the history and timeline will be greatly expanded in the next week as well as notable NPC descriptions, etc. Despite the fact that we're still not polished smooth by the river of time and effort we invite you to look around and ask any questions you want.
Email us at SVGBULK@GMAIL.COM with any questions, comments and check back for updates often. We've also got an RSS feed in case you want to have the updates sent to you. Be Seeing You - JAC
RSS FEED

2006-02-25 :: Problems Fixed, Breaks Over - Back to the Grind 02/25/06

Well we've fixed the site problems and the breaks are ending for us soon. Tommorrow we'll be cracking down on reshaping history for Cyrus and redoing the map. Once that is finished we'll start refining and reworking weapons techniques to get ready for the fighters tournament. More to come later.

2006-02-16 :: Site Problems 02/16/06

We're experiencing a few site problems right now. Full functionality should be restored later this evening.

2006-02-13 :: The Great Sanding 02/14/06

The great sanding has begun. The next step in our production process is to go through and sand down and redefine a lot of the rules. Tonight we'll be starting on some of the weapons techniques. We'll update sporadically but a new long playtest will be in the works soon.

2006-02-09 :: More Cyrus Info! 02/09/06

I went down to matt's place in virginia this last weekend and I got four hours of great information. We sat down with a tape recorder, sake and beer and then I started grilling him for information and codifying some of the history of cyrus. It's some good stuff and soon we'll be adding a history section to the website and a new map complete with countries. Wheee!

2006-01-27 :: Skills Changes 01-27-06

We've been working hard on testing some system imperatives and we've gotten some system bugs worked out. We'll be making a few new changes to the skills system with an exciting new feature: Level 5 powers. Skills will be weighted more so that the higher levels are harder to acquire but give you a special power once you've reached your peak at a skill. So with stealth skills at level 5 you may be able to turn invisible once per session for SPR number of actions. For weaving at level 5 you may be able to choose SPR number of spells which you can weave with or without magic ritualization(cyrus setting). With Smithing you may be able to change the properties of a smithed metal to give it extra sharpness, the properties of adamant, etc.

2006-01-20 :: Design Elements Added 01-20-06

Well we've implemented design elements so the site doesn't look so bland. Check out the change design links. Once we've got our logo re-designed it will look good with the night theme. Hope you like it. We'll keep adding stuff as we get the time.

don't worry about the extra s in there the link is good.

2006-01-19 :: New Website Addendum 01-19-06

The new website has been updated with RSS feeds. Rss feeds are available at RSS FEED

We'll add a button soon.

2006-01-19 :: New Website Design 01-19-06

Well folks, we've gone WIKI! PmWiki to be precise. The wonderful code for this little php run website can be found at http://www.pmwiki.org. The reason we changed over to a wiki style website is simple. Adaptability. One of our goals is to continuously expand on the information available on the settings sections. In order to do this we had looked at using a hard coded website with an auto generating download script. The possibillities and headaches of that just weren't working. So now we are working on the wiki model and I (arcadian) am very pleased. There are a few things we haven't implemented yet. - Downloads - RSS feed for news - design

As of now nothing has been done with the format and site design so it's very bleak. Soon we'll be messing with that and applying (and creating) some skins which we'll add to the wiki cookbook. For now enjoy and if you've got any suggestions drop a line at arcadian{at}silvervinegames.com

2006-01-06 :: Cornucopia of changes 01-06-06

There hasn't been a lot of major stuff going on with SVG as we're still working out some minor things. We have as always been engaged in doing more polishing work. We are currently shoring up some of the writing in the first chapter. New ideas on book format have come up and are being looked into. We've got someone editing out the second, third and fourth chapters. Weapons techniques were tested and used successfully, everyone agreed they were quite incredible. The fighters tournament playtest will be occurring soon and new playtest versions will be coming out as well.

2005-12-29 :: Website Re-design in the works 12-29-05

Well our little temporary/test website here will soon be seeing a new overview and refacing. With a lot of the work now being in other peoples hands Arcadian will be focusing on cleaning up and designing the website. One of the changes and ideas is to use a wiki style interface and include much of the Cyrus information.

2005-12-29 :: Races by Virginia Ramsey 12-29-05

The wonderful writer Virginia Ramsey who did a majority of the flavor text asides in the book is now signed on to write the entire chapter on racial choices for cyrus. She will be taking the reference information on it and writing it up under the voice of Frederick Sujour. We'll post some of it later.

2005-12-28 :: Commerce System Redefined 12-28-05

We've made a few small changes to our commerce system over the christmas break. Before we defined basic prices and premium prices for wide categories of items. It was very basic and didn't work well. Whittling it off the todo list we gave more defined items with an AVG price. The gm can decide how to modify this average price if he or she wants to create a more realistic gaming world or they can choose to just use the average price and leave it in metagaming.

2005-12-25 :: Merry Christmas Everyone 12-25-05

There will pobably be no new updates for a while as I'll be away for the next few days. We'll be putting up some fun new stuff after that though and we're churning away to a more solid state.

Over christmas we hope to put up our level 1 guide so that everyone can get a decent idea of what the system looks like.

2005-12-21 :: Weapon Techniques! 12-21-05

Well we've rolled out an interesting fighting system. It's more of an add on to the new fighting system. It deals with weapon techniques, mini skills that you can purchase to add into your weapon skills. Weapon techniques add on manuevers, speed, and new abilities that are combat centric. Initial playtests were incredible and we're working on expanding this more.