{"id":12899,"date":"2011-09-17T22:14:46","date_gmt":"2011-09-18T03:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/?p=12899"},"modified":"2012-10-24T08:47:17","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T13:47:17","slug":"designers-diary-epidemic-books-oathbound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/?p=12899","title":{"rendered":"Designer’s Diary: Epidemic Books – Oathbound"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Oathbound<\/strong>
\nOathbound is a setting for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and published by Epidemic Books<\/a>.
\nBy Greg Dent<\/em>
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\nWelcome to the twenty-first Designer\u2019s Diary, a regular column where designers are given the opportunity to take readers on an in-depth ride through the design and development process of their system, setting, or product. If you\u2019d like to share your product in the Designer\u2019s Diary column, send a message to aaron@roleplayerschronicle.com.<\/p>\n

Designer’s Description<\/strong>
\nOathbound<\/em> is a rogue world that touches upon all other planes and draws in the best and the wildest from each, forcing it all into conflict in order to create the ultimate hero.\u00a0 Yet it is also a real word in and of itself.\u00a0 It is older than most other realms, and has its own cultures, races, and mythology.\u00a0 Bluntly, Oathbound<\/em> is the campaign setting that takes place on the planet known as the Forge, so named because it forges heroes out of those it draws there.\u00a0 Oathbound<\/em> is a great trap, yet also a rich reward.\u00a0 At the center of the world lies a great mystery, and seven of the most powerful creatures in all of creation are set as eternal guardians, bolstered by the great Oath, woven by a thousand gods to keep the mystery forever sealed.\u00a0 The Oath says that one of the Seven may go free only if it can find someone greater than it to take its place.\u00a0 To this end, the Seven seek out \u201cseeds\u201d (aka, fresh blood) of great potential throughout the multiverse and bring them to the Forge to be tested and pushed to their fullest potential.<\/p>\n

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\nThe main thread of the Oathbound<\/em> story has evolved over the years, weaving its own narrative and making an interesting read even outside of the gaming universe.\u00a0 We weren\u2019t content to simply make the Forge a hodgepodge of outside ideas, it had to have its own feel and its own flavor.\u00a0 We gave the setting its own vernacular, and the core books have a glossary at the end defining the unique language.\u00a0 The Forge itself is split into seven distinct and very different regions, each reflecting the personality of its guardian.\u00a0 Each one is essentially a different environment and a different campaign setting (being basically a continent).\u00a0 Our goal is to document the entire planet.\u00a0 We started with Penance at the center of the world (an environment made up entirely of city) and then expanded to the savannah around the city.\u00a0 From there we went to the vast red battle desert of Arena and the harsh wilderness of Wildwood.\u00a0 Most recently, we have documented the eternal night of Eclipse at the top of the world (our best book, frankly), and next up would be Anvil, the rugged mountain wilderness on the far side of the planet.\u00a0 In the future, we have yet to tackle the undead winter of the Vault and the volcanic madness of the Kiln.<\/p>\n

One thing we try to do with Oathbound<\/em> is constantly push the envelope of game design.\u00a0 Each book we write does something new or different.\u00a0 In the original book we introduced the concept of the \u201cprestige race\u201d which now have evolved into \u201cevolutions\u201d.\u00a0 The magic of the Forge cuts those who enter it off from outside worlds and outside gods, but the planet itself radiates a constant supply of raw creative energy that those who know how to use it can channel into themselves or the world around them.\u00a0 With evolutions, one can use the magic to alter one\u2019s own DNA, allowing oneself to grow faster or stronger, grow wings, scales, gills, spider legs, or whatever one can conceive of. Our second book worked this channeling into its own magic system, and subsequent products have each added their own unique element to the game.<\/p>\n

Our current focus is on presenting the most immersive world possible.\u00a0 We\u2019ve tried to strip away some of the language and conventions that separate the game world from the reader and present the books as if they might exist in the world themselves.\u00a0 They are written by a distinct personality from the game world, and try as best as possible to keep the subject matter relevant to the writer and the world itself.<\/p>\n

Purpose<\/strong>
\nTodd Morasch and I started Bastion Press in 2001 with Jim Butler, and from the start we wanted to create our own unique brand.\u00a0 A campaign setting seemed the best way to start, so we spent several weeks debating where to go from there.\u00a0 Todd and I mostly did all the creative work and Jim gave approval or disapproval of our ideas.\u00a0 At the beginning, Jim tied our hands somewhat with what seemed like Byzantine and arbitrary rules of what a campaign setting needed to have.\u00a0 Anything straightforward would never have appealed to Todd or I, and anything too \u201cout there\u201d wouldn\u2019t pass Jim\u2019s rules, so ironically, we ended up developing a setting centered around the powers that be having to navigate around a long series of Byzantine and arbitrary rules to create a world.<\/p>\n

One of the first things we decided when developing Oathbound<\/em> was that we wanted it to be a high-level setting, and that we\u2019d leverage our fan base by letting them take their beloved characters that had outgrown whatever world they currently lived in and use them somewhere new.\u00a0 That inspired the idea of the pull\u2014the act of the Seven stealing things and people from other worlds.\u00a0 That was mostly Jim\u2019s influence.\u00a0 Todd and I just wanted to do something non-generic, meaning basically a setting that didn\u2019t look just like every other fantasy setting out there, which for the most part means Tolkien-based in feel.\u00a0 My idea for this was to have the setting be inspired more by Greek and Roman mythology than medieval chivalry.\u00a0 Todd wanted to take away the human-centric nature of the world, and we added a wide variety (literally dozens) of completely new PC races to populate the world.\u00a0 Many of these are not just non-human, but non-humanoid, like the ceptu, the amphibious telekinetic magical jellyfish, or the dolphin, which is just a dolphin\u2026 though possibly outfitted with robotic arms and a voicebox and hover magic.\u00a0 Most of our races though are more animal based, like the catlike frey or the canine dover, the most populous race on the Forge.\u00a0 In our recent reboot of the series (Oathbound Seven<\/em>), there are fifteen player character races statted out.
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\nFinally, Todd and I kind of snuck this one in past Jim, but we wanted our world to be more gritty and realistic than other similar settings, so we pretty much did away with the concept of alignment.\u00a0 The excuse was that the Oath blocks alignment from being detected so that nobody would ever unlock the great mystery as they\u2019d never know whether it would be on their side or not.\u00a0 The reality is that alignment takes real morality out of the game and reduces it to its most cartoonish level.\u00a0 Alignment doesn\u2019t exist in the real world, so why would it exist in any realistic game world either? What\u2019s the point of role-playing if you can\u2019t experiment with a different set of rules or ways of thought to society?\u00a0 Players can\u2019t just rely upon the \u201cIt\u2019s evil, kill it!\u201d mentality, they have to engage in the world, use their judgment, and make the best decision they can, even if it isn\u2019t perfect.\u00a0 Reality means having to give up good for good enough.<\/p>\n

Even in our most recent product, the new Bestiary<\/em> for Oathbound<\/em>, I ran into this.\u00a0 I took the monsters from the designers, sent them to the editors and figured they were probably done.\u00a0 As prep for layout I took out the alignment line from them all, and then upon reading a number of them I was struck by the thought, \u201cWhy is this a monster?\u201d\u00a0 Once they didn\u2019t say \u201cEvil\u201d on them, there was nothing to indicate their motivation or why they might come into conflict with others.\u00a0 With each of these I ended up having to come up with a better concept, or at least expand upon the existing writeup until I was satisfied I was dealing with a true foe.<\/p>\n

Influences<\/strong>
\nWell, Oathbound<\/em> was conceived in 2002, and our favorite setting at the time was undoubtedly Planescape<\/em>.\u00a0 There is definitely quite a bit of Planescape<\/em> in the melting-pot style world and something of the Lady of Pain in the figure of Israfel, the original mistress of Penance.\u00a0 We also borrowed something from Ravenloft in the stealing people from other worlds thing.\u00a0 Also, Dark Sun<\/em> provided some influence, particularly over the domain of Arena, as far as having a gritty feel and consisting of a hot, war-torn, endless desert landscape.<\/p>\n

Beyond this, my own influences came from my education steeped in Greek mythology, and in my own personal hobby of seeking out and reading the myths of other cultures.\u00a0 Probably the biggest influence though was Todd\u2019s own home games that we have been playing for several years before writing Oathbound<\/em>.\u00a0 Most of the new races and creatures came from these settings, and much of the Forge\u2019s distinctive mythology came from Todd\u2019s unique vision of the universe.<\/p>\n

Research<\/strong>
\nWell, my designer\u2019s \u201cbible\u201d for Oathbound<\/em> is a pretty beat-up old copy of Bulfinch\u2019s Mythology.\u00a0 A lot of the names and language used in Oathbound<\/em> come from there, typically morphed or in some way.\u00a0 I think this contributes significantly to the feel that Oathbound<\/em> is both a real world and a non-generic one.\u00a0 The names feel real because they are.\u00a0 You have to be grounded in something, especially if you want go on the highest flights of fancy.
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\nBeyond this though, I have done a wide variety of research here and there as warranted by what we are writing.\u00a0 The first research I probably did back in 2002 was all astronomical.\u00a0 Since we were going to do an entire planet, I wanted to keep it small, so we decided the Forge would be about the size of Earth\u2019s moon\u2026 but how big is that exactly?\u00a0 We also have two suns and two moons in the sky on the Forge, and I spent a great deal of time figuring out how that would work.\u00a0 From here we ended up with a completely different set of seasons than on Earth (and all other Earth-based campaigns).\u00a0 The Forge has its own way of tracking time and its own calendar and holidays.\u00a0 Actually in Eclipse<\/em>, since there is no sun, we discovered as we were writing it that there is no natural way to track time there (at least in small scale).\u00a0 We could have invented timepieces for everyone there, but that would be boring, so we went the other direction.\u00a0 We invented an entirely new idea of society that didn\u2019t require time.\u00a0 Most recently, we really had to study topology in order to come up with an actual globe model of our world map that we released for Oathbound Seven<\/em>.\u00a0 That was a real mind bender.<\/p>\n

I did a lot of population research as well.\u00a0 I based the density of the city of Penance on Monaco here on Earth, for example.\u00a0 I had to research boat travel\u2014how long does it take to get around on various types of ships?\u00a0 How long would it take you to hit bottom if you jumped off the cliffs above Eclipse\u2026 300 miles above Eclipse that is.\u00a0 And how long would it take to fly up, or to climb up.<\/p>\n

One other thing I like to do with Oathbound is experiment with different ways a society can function.\u00a0 Since the Forge can pull people in from anywhere, there\u2019s a real freedom to mix and match ideas there.\u00a0 For Eclipse, Todd and I came up with two completely different socio-economic models.\u00a0 His Stygia is a city-state run entirely by vampires, and the economy there is very much slave-oriented and based on generations of power building and machinations.\u00a0 My Baradume is a city of thieves.\u00a0 In 2002 when we did the overview of the Forge, that sounded good enough, but when we did Eclipse<\/em> we had to sit down and think, \u201cWell what does that mean?\u201d\u00a0 Inspired somewhat by Burning Man<\/em>, I came up with a society without money at all, where people work for guilds (or more like big mob families) that provide them with everything they need (food, shelter, drink, entertainment) in return for their labors.\u00a0 Beyond the necessary, people take whatever they want and good thievery is considered an art.\u00a0 Outside the city, the guilds deal with money and markets and all that, but within the city, all is free and open.\u00a0 It took about a week to get all the checks and balances worked out, but I\u2019m actually really happy with how it worked out, and wouldn\u2019t mind living there myself someday.<\/p>\n

Our first book had a few editing flaws, and the most grievous was that Jim reordered the chapter of city-states within the City of Penance alphabetically.\u00a0 I considered this chapter my big masterpiece, as there were something like nine or ten fully functioning societies described there all with completely different social and economic models.\u00a0 Barrowhold was an ancient place where the complex 20-level caste system meant everything.\u00a0 Utopia was a dystopian view of somewhere America might have been headed, a prison state where the rich ruled and everyone else sat in jail and was forced to manufacture cheap goods all day long.\u00a0 Todd\u2019s Illumina was an experiment in controlled lawlessness, and my Oasis was meant to be Plato\u2019s ideal of a golden-hearted ruler running the state for the benefit of all.\u00a0 Only stuck in between all the other awful places so he had to make some pretty hard choices to survive.\u00a0 In the updated Oathbound<\/em> story in Oathbound Seven<\/em>, Flollo has changed significantly\u2014a bit of a broken man (well, lizard really) still trying to do his best even though he knows it is all probably futile and there is no future in it for him.<\/p>\n

The problem with reordering this chapter, is that one of the city-states was called \u201cthe Alliance\u201d which starting with \u201cA\u201d now came at the beginning.\u00a0 So pretty much everyone who got the book read the first page and thought, \u201cOh, some alliance of lords runs Penance.\u201d and failed to understand the many faceted and complex web of powers we had set up to function as the Penance setting.\u00a0 I even remember reading a review in 2003 that said, \u201cOh and Chapter 7 outlines the alliance of lords that runs the city.\u00a0 And chapter 8\u2026\u201d\u00a0 This won\u2019t happen with the new Oathbound<\/em>.
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\nArt Direction<\/strong>
\nThis has historically been Todd\u2019s baby, though for Eclipse<\/em> I ended up taking on the Art Director role since he was doing the bulk of the writing.\u00a0 There\u2019s more to it than I thought.\u00a0 The entire Eclipse<\/em> book is dark\u2014we actually went to an art store and bought several dozen different kinds of paper and digitally scanned it all to give an ashen texture to the printed pages.\u00a0 The art had to be unique as well; since there is no sunlight there, the people had to be pale and all the scenes had to be drawn at night.\u00a0 I had to reject many paintings not because the quality way bad, but because they were drawn in daylight.\u00a0 Most artists had never even considered drawing something at night before\u2014without light it\u2019s pretty hard to give clarity.\u00a0 We also wanted the book itself to read like art.\u00a0 We wrote the book like it was a scrapbook compiled by the former guardian of the land.\u00a0 Every chapter had at least one section that looked like someone took a few pages out of a diary or a leaflet or something and pasted them into the book.\u00a0 Even the drawings have little corner pieces holding them in like they were pasted right on the page.\u00a0 We even came up with a variety of supporting characters in the world itself who supposedly had painted the art.\u00a0 In the werran section there\u2019s a big muddy paw print on one of the pages that makes it look like some big were-bear leaned in while Colopitiron was journaling and said \u201cHey, what\u2019s that you\u2019re writing in there?\u201d
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\nWe also try to put a lot of symbolism in our Oathbound<\/em> art.\u00a0 There are a number of iconic elements to the world that we try to show as much as possible.\u00a0 The great Oath holds the whole prison together, and we try to show it in the form of books and chains.\u00a0 The avatars of the Seven guardians all must wear a book chained to their bodies at all times that contains all the rules by which they are bound.\u00a0 At Gen Con 2003 Todd even sculpted these ancient books for us that we wore strapped to our belts and wrists as we ran the booth.\u00a0 The Seven are probably the most iconic Oathbound<\/em> figures, having been born right from Todd\u2019s unusual brain.\u00a0 The Seven have elements of both angel and demon together.\u00a0 They have four horns and feathered wings, empty eye sockets, and ornate masks that cover their faces.\u00a0 The Seven are also represented by their ravens, which they can use to spy on what happens throughout the land.\u00a0 Lots of our pictures have ravens in them, and we even bought a bunch of stuffed ravens and placed them all over our booth at Gen Con.\u00a0 I still have one ratty one left that sits on my desk and watches me work.<\/p>\n

We also try to use the art to Illustrate the world itself so that it looks like an alien place.\u00a0 Letters are never in Latin characters if they are visible, and the architecture is a strange blend of old and new.\u00a0 The Forge is an old, old world, so there is plenty of room for civilizations that have mastered different kinds of technology and then fallen to ruin.\u00a0 There are guns and flying ships here, but we only add them as color, we don\u2019t let them overpower the classical base of the world.<\/p>\n

Gaming Experience<\/strong>
\nWe do have an art guide for Oathbound<\/em> that we wrote a while back and that I updated for Eclipse<\/em>.\u00a0 The most memorable guideline in this says \u201calways show three sides to every conflict.\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t know that we do that in the art so much, but the story reads this way.<\/p>\n

I think the Forge is meant to be a more chaotic, fast-paced, and morally ambiguous place than the typical game world.\u00a0 We put a lot of mature concepts in both the art and the story, so it\u2019s not really meant for children or first-time gamers, but for people who have been there, done that, and want to go somewhere where they have to push the limits of what they are used to.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve tried to make the Forge a non-human-centric world, and not just in the way characters look, but in the way they think, act, and believe.\u00a0 It can be fun just to experiment with different ways that different creatures interact with the world.\u00a0 In one of our recent games, we had someone playing a ceptu, the jellyfish-like race.\u00a0 It was going quite well until they got to a place where they had to go down a long ladder into a cavern.\u00a0 Though the ceptu can levitate, they have to say within a few feet of the ground, so there was simply no way it could get down the ladder.\u00a0 Another PC had to tie him into a harness and carry him down, and the resulting weight broke the ladder and sent the ceptu plummeting to its death.\u00a0 We call that one the \u201cbag of soup\u201d incident.
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\nLike I said earlier, Oathbound<\/em> was originally meant to be a place where you could take beloved characters that had outgrown their home worlds but that you still wanted to play.\u00a0 There is a great deal of politics and diplomacy involved.\u00a0 In some games you might become king at the end, but in Oathbound<\/em> acquiring power is only the beginning of the story.\u00a0 Penance is fully meant for the PCs to be bloodlords, and Arena for the players to command their own army.\u00a0 And Wildwood and Eclipse are another thing altogether, experiments more in freedom than law.<\/p>\n

Because Oathbound is intended to be a high-power world, we also offer a number of ways in which PCs can gain bonuses outside of the standard 1-20 level system.\u00a0 The evolutions are one.\u00a0 Because they leech XP, they slow down the character\u2019s level progression, but allows him a great deal more power once he does reach that cap.\u00a0 The world itself is full of energy as well, and it frequently bestows \u201cgifts\u201d on those who live there.\u00a0 These are little one-off powers that the world uses to push people into exploring the greater ones.\u00a0 Everyone who comes to the Forge gets one gift right off the bat.\u00a0 These are fun little abilities and run the gamut from simple skill bonuses to oddball benefits, like the \u201cbladder of holding\u201d or the \u201cdetachable head\u201d.\u00a0 The Forge is said to forge heroes by pushing them toward their full and true potential.\u00a0 These are some of the ways that it starts newcomers down the path.<\/p>\n

The last thing that makes Oathbound<\/em> different is the way it deals with religion and divine magic.\u00a0 Divine magic still works, but the plane itself wards all gods from entering it, so it\u2019s really the energy of the world itself that powers magical spells, not the energy of one\u2019s god.\u00a0 Its more the strength of belief that empowers the caster and not the religion itself.\u00a0 Even an agnostic can cast spells on the Forge if he is firm enough in his belief that the secrets of the universe are not comprehensible to the mortal mind.\u00a0 This also takes divine intervention out of the game somewhat, although the Seven are always there to interfere with things.\u00a0 In fact, the Seven are meant to be a part of the game, helping the PCs at times and hindering them at others.\u00a0 The motivations of the Seven are strange and mysterious.<\/p>\n

Comparison<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m not certain I\u2019m familiar with enough other products that I can answer this one easily.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already touched upon the non-medieval and the non-human flavors of the world.\u00a0 These are probably the most obvious differences.\u00a0 The environments, particularly in Eclipse<\/em>, are pretty non-standard as well.\u00a0 When Penance came out it was pretty bold\u2014a city so big and so old that it sits upon a pedestal of ruins a quarter mile high.\u00a0 Adventure occurs not so much out in the wilderness but right beneath your feet.\u00a0 Today it\u2019s probably not that unique.\u00a0 But that\u2019s why we are constantly pushing ourselves to come up with something not just new but different.<\/p>\n

One thing I should mention is that Oathbound<\/em> is not meant for the lazy gamer.\u00a0 There\u2019s not much money to be made in this right now, so we have to do this in our spare time, and Todd and I don\u2019t really get paid.\u00a0 This means we tend to be slow at rolling out supplements and adventures.\u00a0 If you want great resources to build your own campaign, then Oathbound<\/em> is great, if you want to run something out of the box, then you may want something else.\u00a0 However, much like the Forge reaches out to other worlds and pulls in elements to create its story, I expect most people will do the same with our books.\u00a0 Even if you don\u2019t intend to play a game in the Forge, there is so much good material in there that can be pulled out and used in another game.\u00a0 Our new Bestiary<\/em>, for example, can undoubtedly be used in almost any game setting, and we are hoping to score a lot of crossover sales from people who don\u2019t care to play Oathbound<\/em> but just want some great new monsters.<\/p>\n

Development Process<\/strong>
\nOathbound<\/em> has gone through a lot of changes over the years.\u00a0 Our current method is a lot like our original one actually, only not as constrained.\u00a0 After the first three books, Todd and I lost control of Oathbound<\/em> as Bastion was losing money and Jim decided he couldn\u2019t afford to keep us anymore.\u00a0 A number of freelancers were hired to produce the next few books, but there was no transition or knowledge transfer, so there were a number of things that they got wrong about the setting.\u00a0 Bastion ended up producing three more Oathbound<\/em> books without us, of varying quality.\u00a0 The Arena book I had fully outlined before I left (although I didn\u2019t get a credit in it for some reason), so its structure ended up being pretty close to the official Oathbound<\/em> canon.\u00a0 The next two were on their own, and while they did add a few interesting elements, I consider them somewhat apocryphal in some of what they say about the world.<\/p>\n

I got the Oathbound<\/em> license back rather by surprise after Bastion closed.\u00a0 Jim offered it to my family as payment for a dead loan.\u00a0 By this point, Todd and I had moved on and come up with numerous other worlds and settings, and were more focused on writing our young adult novel series, Sara and the Chimera<\/em>.\u00a0 Not knowing what to do with it, we sat on Oathbound<\/em> for a few years, until Darrin Drader contacted me and convinced me to resurrect Oathbound<\/em> for the new Pathfinder<\/em> rules.\u00a0 We decided to let Todd write the first book to counter the assumption that you might get by looking at the series that I do the writing and Todd does the art.<\/p>\n

In truth, Todd and I work amazingly well together because we have such very different minds.\u00a0 He is outgoing and incredibly visual, and loves characters, as well as intriguing plots and narratives.\u00a0 I am way more introspective and into thing like economic systems, ecology, science, and philosophy.\u00a0 If you were to read a book by Todd alone it would be exciting and fast paced, but probably not at all grounded in reality.\u00a0 The last novel I wrote on my own didn\u2019t actually have a plot at all, it was just a framework of interconnected ideas.\u00a0 Probably not most people\u2019s idea of a good time.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s how this works.\u00a0 Todd comes to me with some raw ideas and I take them and run with them, then I go back and show him what I\u2019ve done and he adds more ideas.\u00a0 In the end we end up with something that is both readable and interesting.\u00a0 The best of both worlds you might say.<\/p>\n

As I said, we don\u2019t really make a living off of these products right now, so we have limited resources.\u00a0 There\u2019s the classic saying, \u201cquality, cost, time\u2014pick two.\u201d\u00a0 Well, we don\u2019t have the luxury to pick two, so we picked one, quality.\u00a0 We can\u2019t afford to farm much of our development out, so we do most of the work ourselves.\u00a0 All is done to our exacting standards, and we don\u2019t release anything until it is done.\u00a0 We have taken some flak recently for being a little sloppy on our release dates, but we figure people would rather have a great book a few days late than a flawed one on time.\u00a0 We also don\u2019t do a book if we don\u2019t think we can make it interesting.<\/p>\n

The first thing we ask ourselves when we start a new project is, \u201cWhat\u2019s our angle on this.\u00a0 How do we push the envelope?\u201d\u00a0 For Eclipse<\/em> we sat in a coffee shop for three hours debating how to approach the project before settling on the idea of producing a book that looked like it could be found within the world it described.\u00a0 And then we worked on figuring out how the Forge itself had changed in the seven years that had passed since the original Oathbound<\/em>.\u00a0 From there, I took all our ideas and the overview of Eclipse<\/em> from the first book and put together a detailed outline of all the chapters.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Todd worked on the map, which ended up being the coolest part of all (how do you draw a vertical world), and which really drove the setting forward.\u00a0 The vignettes were given to people outside the fantasy community to write; I didn\u2019t want them to sound generic.\u00a0 My ex-girlfriend wrote a few and our friend Jeff wrote many of the others.\u00a0 These were fun, as they didn\u2019t need to concern themselves with the game rules or overall setting, they could just be pure narrative.\u00a0 I sent the various parts of the book out to various writers and then tried to manage the art.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Darrin ended up getting pneumonia and I had to cut back his portion significantly, so Todd and I ended up having to pick up much of the slack.\u00a0 Even Jeff got to write the water chapter, which gave it some freshness that Todd or I would not have had the energy to put into it.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t get everything right the first time.\u00a0 Oathbound Seven<\/em> was a chance to fix some of the problems or confusing elements of the setting, and I think I told the overall story of the Forge better this time.\u00a0 Todd and I had been unhappy with some of the editing of the original book, so I went back to the raw, unedited files and started over.\u00a0 So even the parts that were just reused verbatim read differently this time around.\u00a0 I realized that when the editor had done my chapter on the seasons and calendar of the Forge he had been confused by the weird seasons and put summer, winter, etc in parenthesis after each one.\u00a0 Which totally ruined the newness of the setting.\u00a0 That got taken out.\u00a0 I think Oathbound Seven<\/em> may have taken seven years to put together, but it ended up being the setting that we wanted to do in the first place, wild, raw, unique, and captivating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oathbound Oathbound is a setting for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and published by Epidemic Books. By Greg Dent Welcome to the twenty-first Designer\u2019s Diary, a regular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[267,268,14],"class_list":["post-12899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-designers-diary","tag-epidemic-books","tag-oathbound","tag-pathfinder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roleplayerschronicle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}