Rao - Developer Notes

      Today I'd like to discuss how the Pilgrims of Rao tabletop roleplaying game came to be what it is today.  It is my hope that by sharing this information you will be able to see all the thought, work, and love poured into the game to make it the highest quality product that I can deliver.  I'll also talk about where the project is at now, costs, and other miscellaneous concerns.  There will be a lot of video game jargon and references, in case anyone wants to duck out now.
      Still reading?  All right, let's do this!

THE WORLD BEGINS

      The first concepts for Rao began about a year ago in the summer of 2014.  I envisioned a world with four equally sized valleys, three positioned in a ring around the fourth, with high mountains separating each valley into its own fantasy sub world.  These worlds were Ekekewa, Acanthus, Aetherian, and Rao.  Most of these would make it into the final game, but at this time I treated them all as essential.  The southern valley of Rao had a functional Quorum, a giant pillar mountain that acted like a sun dial, and a race of giant turtle people living alongside humans and elves.  There was almost no magic, the magic that did exist was restricted to the elves on a limited four element system, and undead were the greatest threat to all existence.
      Humans went to the afterlife like all beings, but only through the grace of our patron God Kai'an were we able to reside in the highest of heavens.  One human could not bear the loss of life and so he slew a shepherd, essentially a grim reaper, and the gods punished us by rescinding access to the afterlife.  Human bodies rose again after death to become undead that haunted the earth.  Part of this concept made it into the final game as the Undead faction.  The shepherds were cut except as servants to the goddess of death.
      Each valley had three patron gods.  These gods ended up becoming the high gods in the final game.  Most other elements of religion, including the church of Rao and worship of the great gate that led out of the valleys into the rest of the world, were removed entirely.  I was watching a lot of "Attack On Titan" at the time and that was what led me to create the indestructible, insurmountable gate and the mountain walls with a threat of demons outside.  The demons stayed on as the Hel in a drastically altered role.
      There was no real game at this point, it was just a world I made up to place my stories and characters into.  An old series of stories that I wrote for years were moved from their world of Solvari into the world of the four valleys (this world was not yet named).  Solvari became the Solvarii, fire elves, and the world as a whole took the name of the central valley of Aetherian.  While most of the world was created from scratch and incredibly malleable, changing major elements from one day to the next, I was able to give it a foundation using the stories I wrote for years.  Some of those will be the first campaigns players encounter.

EARLY GAME CONCEPTS

      After I'd knocked the world down and built it back up a few dozen times I started to conceptualize letting other people take a crack at it.  My initial plans were beyond ambitious.  I wanted a dozen races, a fluid class system with dozens of options, and an explorable world the size of our Earth.  I had no mechanics, no balancing, nothing.  It was all concepts bouncing around without me ever finding something I really liked and writing it down.  As anyone can tell you should always write down your concepts, no matter how bad they are.  You need the bad material to get to what is really good.
      Around last holiday season I wrote down everything I had on the game, and it was indeed terrible, but it showed me the best concepts of what I had.  I over reached initially.  I wanted a world with tons of stats, hundreds of variables, and so much data that it would take five character sheets to even play the game.  I scrapped all of it and started from scratch with my primary goal to bring it all down to two pages for a character sheet.  Character sheets in the final game consist of two pages, one that you will refer to frequently and one that you will reference in special situations.
       I've created games for my friends since I was a kid.  I was making pencil and paper adventures in elementary school, building scenarios and custom maps for every video game that would let me (I still do that), coming up with new ways to play every board and video game I owned, writing out huge worlds just for myself, and building countless setups with my "Heroscape" pieces and miniatures when those came out.  Now I am sure some of you are wondering why an avid gamer and creator like myself would fall into the trap of over reaching straight out of the gate.  The simple answer is inexperience.  The early drafts for Rao were the first time I had ever worked on a game of that size from the ground up.  Before I had always had the benefit of building off of what someone else had done, using their engine, mechanics, and so on.
      I was determined not to get stuck here.  I studied for months on how to make a better game, continually iterating on my own designs the entire time.  I found a number of high quality game developer blogs and literature, reviewed every copy of tabletop guidebooks I could get my hands on (I am thankful that the bookstore didn't kick me out after two weeks), and watched hours of YouTube videos.  The best videos I can recommend to aspiring game developers come from the guys at "Extra Credits" or just EC.  They create videos for video game development but many lessons apply in tabletops as well.
      I hit upon a eureka moment while watching "Sword Art Online" and "Log Horizon," anime shows where the characters are trapped in video games.  You can knock at the stories all you want (and they deserve the criticism), but what got me was the fact that I have always loved that premise and the idea of a single driving goal uniting all people.  Video games and the academic system we grow up with present us with continuous end goals for our actions.  You're not just playing for five hours to waste time, you're trying to get strong enough to take on a raid boss, or you're not just wading through a year of exams for personal torture, you're trying to get the grades you need to graduate.  You have a clear, tangible objective.  Using that premise gave me a way to explain the gamey elements of the game rather than try to obfuscate them behind meaningless explanations.  That and it helped the game stand out in a growing independent tabletop RPG market.

THE PROJECT BEGINS

      Around February of 2015 I set my plans in motion and began developing Rao's alpha which can be found here on dA on my page where I posted it a few months later.  At this point I was confident in my design and direction.  I made two major commitments to the project in the coming months.  Number one, I left my traditional job to pursue work on Rao full time.  This proved to be the most stressful choice I made during the entire project as it meant that I no longer had a steady supply of income and I still had to pay the bills.  However, I had to make this choice because I knew that if I didn't commit myself fully, the project would never be all that it could become.  Second, I began financing materials for the game using my own funds.  Initial plans put off payment until after funding was over, but who in their right mind would support a project without any content beyond words?  The final project now is a 150 page, illustrated 8x11 book.  Now that is something respectable that I would back (hint hint).
      I did my research on what the most popular funding levels and rewards are, how often projects succeed, how much money I'd need to actually make money (just over breaking even), and what not to do in a Kickstarter campaign.  I have seen several good looking projects die on the funding floor because they just couldn't sell their product.  They made promises they could not deliver on and asked for far more money than people were willing to give for half-baked plans.  The success of games that seemingly should not have succeeded rests on the shoulders of good marketing and innovative game play.  Don't offer an idea, offer a product at a discount with an investment that gets better the more people that support it.
      The materials will be produced as cost effectively as possible using Amazon's print on demand functions.  That allows me to print the exact number of books I need with no additional costs for inventory, storage, or overhead.  I can sell the digital e-book for even less money.  I am a straight-shooting kind of guy so I'll tell you exactly how much I make per copy sold.  I make $4 (giver or take for tax) per copy sold, digital or physical.  I will have the price as affordable as possible for the consumer while still offering some money on my end.  I rely on profits from individual sales because I am not selling in bulk.  I don't ship out 1000 copies with a flat $5000 gain.  I am moving a much smaller number of items and so I rely on the amount I make from individual sales in order to make anything at all.  I need that in order to pay my bills and to continue to produce high quality content for you.  
      Backers can get the products for even cheaper.

GAME MECHANICS

      Do you recall me saying that the mechanics for this game are entirely new?  Well, they are for a tabletop game, but not for video games.  I took the best elements of the video games I grew up with and melded them into the kind of game I've always wanted to play.  There are so many that I'm just going to list them all and forget the quotation marks.
      Deep breath.  I've got stuff from Legend of Legaia, Legend of Dragoon, Final Fantasy, Chrono Cross, Tales of Symphonia/Vesperia, Borderlands, Diablo, Torchlight, Pokemon, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fire Emblem, Oblivion/Skyrim, Goblin Commander, World of Warcraft, Magic the Gathering, Dark Souls, and a lot more.  Pointing to what elements of the game that these games influenced would take far more paragraphs than any sane human being would be willing to read unless they were procrastinating during finals week.  My point is that I have played a lot of games, I've made a lot of little games, and I am well versed and experienced in game creation.  You can trust me to make something awesome.

      That is all I wanted to share today.  I hope that this made you even more interested in Pilgrims of Rao and that you will support it on Kickstarter when it launches.  Hasta luego.