Community Update - A Look Towards 2025
Hi friends! Thomas here with a super long love note for 2025 :)
Welp, we made another trip around the sun and I'm happy to share our goals for 2025 with everyone!
Company Update
Forteller is entering its sixth year of operation. We continue to challenge ourselves to grow, mature and improve workflows, and scale responsibly.
Key Highlights:
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I am renewing my commitment to be paid a handsome salary of 0 USD. The team has made equal sacrifices with their time and talent to creating the very best products and I happily make this decision. I've always been vocal that actions speak louder than words.
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We are executing on our own products and IP strategically. This means fiscally responsibly and with a manageable cadence. I tell the team regularly something from my military time: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
- We are increasing our convention and retail presence. Conventions are a huge expense for anyone to exhibit at; the challenge is expanding at a sustainable rate without endangering people's jobs (i.e. dipping to low on working capital) - this is something that is all too prevalent in recent years with layoffs occurring almost daily.
Without further ado, let's get into it!
Stage
I'm excited to announce there are two big features coming this year!
Card/Deck Driven Narrative Companions
We are building a new runtime engine that will be able to accommodate games that rely on shuffling a deck (story cards, tiles, etc) to determine the game session.
These games are mechanically setup like 1] shuffle and draw X cards from deck A 2] shuffle and draw Y cards from deck B 3] shuffle and draw 1 card from big bad guy deck.
There are two special games that we've been keeping secret for over a year that will launch when this feature rolls out.
Background Music
This has been a popular request from everyone. It's taken us longer than I'd like to get here, but hey - we're here! The audio team had some due diligence to go through to make sure we made a good repeatable process on creating the music and ambiance for extended play sessions.
My vision was to provide a set-and-forget easy way to kick off music and just enjoy it while playing games. I want people focused on playing together and not with YouTube or Spotify or playlists all over the place.
We will launch this internally first and then aim to open it up into an artist marketplace where independent musicians can monetize their work and provide high quality assets (we will vet content and enforce audio engineering specs so all the content feels cohesive).
My goal is to launch this mid-year.
Internal Updates
We are moving our authentication off of Google entirely in an effort to stay ever vigilant in consumer privacy. I've wanted to do this for a long time, but it now makes sense strategically.
Doing this allows some new opportunities that will allow performance updates, enhance data privacy, eliminate some cloud services that are redundant, and more.
Sounds "neat", but what's that mean for players? We get to start focusing on improving our content pipelines - all the internal behind the scenes secret sauce things. Part of this sets us up to move towards more standardized file formats and specs that other industries utilize. What makes this exciting to me? It enables a path to allow user created stories that can run on our platform.
My vision is to empower creators to make their own adventures, stories, novels, etc... and make our narration services even more affordable! Who knows, maybe we could even narrate top rated / community voted content once a quarter!
Sunset
Sunset is our upcoming TTRPG. It is a unique and bespoke game designed to promote collaborative storytelling and face death, defy, and rip apart facades and reveal who we truly are to find peace.
We have a free quickstart available on DriveThruRPG right now! Show your support by downloading it, reading it, play it or play it with us at conventions. We want your feedback to ensure the final core book is the best it can be.
Sunset is not just an idea. The core book is largely written (roughly 300 pages already) and we just completed our guest collaborator team. I cannot wait to share those announcements in the coming weeks.
Follow this project on Kickstarter!
Deck of Many Dice
We have decided to consolidate resources for Deck of Many Dice on DriveThruRPG (be sure to follow us to be notified when new PDFs are available). To show off what it can do and how you can use it in different games today, we are creating the following free resources:
- General Quickstart aimed to inspire (currently in layout)
- D&D 5e - Tips for the DM (currently in editing/proofing)
- D&D 5e - Players Guide (currently being written)
- Mork Borg - (next for layout)
- Call of Cthulhu (planned)
- Pathfinder (planned)
- World of Darkness (planned)
- Starfinder (planned)
- Year Zero (planned)
If there are systems you want to see added, let us know! Online sales are available for US and Canada currently.