From the Desk of the Animancer, Nov 14th 2020: Green Lineages & The Fledgling Line

Hi folks!

Jake here, excited to share what I’ve been working on over the past few weeks – including a new supplement of plant-themed lineages for your 5E game! Green Lineages has three new lineages: the powerful and compassionate aurx and half-aurx, fuelled by the power of the sun through their green skin, and the serene and contemplative verdants, treefolk that hide in plain sight among the forests of the world.

Green Lineages also presents two backgrounds to accompany the new cultures within: the Aurc Tribesperson and the Verdant Copsetender, so you can contextualize characters of all lineages within these cultures.

Green Lineages is also the first in a new line and experiment for us that we’re calling Fledglings. Fledglings are smaller/less popular/more experimental content that we produce without an external budget, which means the same standard of writing, design and layout (which I do myself, this is currently a one person operation) but no art, cartography or external editing. I have a high bar of quality for what we put out and believe in paying people fairly for their time, so sourcing external work like that at the quality level I’m looking for isn’t cheap, unfortunately, and is the main reason we haven’t put anything out since Corwyn. Having a line without expenses like that will hopefully allow us to produce more content, content that excites us but might not be as commercially viable, or content that’s experimental, and should give us an idea of what people are interested in.

Just because we initially produce these Fledglings without that budget doesn’t mean they’ll never get it, I’ll be keeping an eye on the popularity of individual Fledglings and if we can find an art or cartography or whatever budget then I’ll see what can be done. Also as you’ll see from Green Lineages it doesn’t mean they’re raw text or just run through Homebrewery or GMBinder, I still lay everything out as if it were any other product and I know a little Illustrator.

Fledglings are going to be an interesting experiment but one I feel good about. I go over them in more detail in the Fledgling brief over here, and if that sounds interesting to you, Green Lineages is available on DriveThruRPG and our shop – I hope they find a use in your game!

With the launch of these Fledglings we’re also restructuring our pricing. Corwyn’s going to be going up in price from Monday November 16th, increasing from £2.49 to £4.95. This is based on a number of reasons including market trends, but mainly because a large revision (Corwyn v2) is in the works, which I’m hoping to get out before the end of the year. Earlier, ideally, but it feels dangerous to tempt fate this year. I’ll have more info on that soon, hopefully, as it’s now my main focus.

In other news, Chronicles of Rinn is back again after a hiatus, you can watch previous episodes here, read episode synopses here and end credits scenes here, and we’ll be live on Twitch every Tuesday, 19:00 Scotland Time (GMT currently).

And that about wraps it for the moment, new lineages and backgrounds you can get here, Corwyn revisions Soon, and Chronicles of Rinn streaming weekly. This From the Desk of the Animancer column will be running…sporadically, as and when I’ve news to share. I’d considered doing some commentary on how I design lineages and backgrounds using some of the Green Lineages stuff as an example, so you’ll maybe see that soon too.

Until then, I hope you’re all keeping well, and I look forward to seeing how you use aurx, half-aurx and verdants in your games!