TroveWeblog

Along with the reasons I mentioned in our last post, there is something else that has been occupying quite a bit of time over the past year and is now fairly close to fruition. While my development machines were in storage, my brother and I started working up an idea for an entirely new role playing game – or rather, a combat system for role playing games.

This whole thing started because we found ourselves bored with the majority of the way combat typically played out. At the time, I myself was involved in several gaming groups. I was playing in a Pathfinder campaign, a 2nd Edition D&D campaign, and DM’ing a third-party rogue system at the same time. What I found, and what we agreed was the case in most combat systems, was that they were structured in a way so as to elicit apathy and disinterest. You wait for your turn, you roll some dice, you stand around and get beat on. That’s the way pretty much every combat system works, right? There has to be some form of turn order and initiative, giving everyone the chance to act in their own sequential timeframe.

The problem with that is that it’s boring. It becomes incredibly repetitive to do the same thing over and over, to move and attack and then stand there getting pummeled. You roll some dice, and even the best-laid plans can fail because of some bad luck. So we set out to change things in a huge way. We wanted to make combat more about skill than luck; more reactive than sequential; and more engaging and dynamic than static and repetitive. I’ll be talking more at-length about what we did and the ideas and concepts we’re using to make combat a more engaging, free-flowing experience once we’ve been through a few more play testing sessions and have made sure there is some semblance of balance. This is a system we have been working with off-and-on over a period of just over 10 months, and we’re finally at a place where we are making it into something big – commissioning artists, working up a Kickstarter proposal, and finalizing our designs. I’m pretty stoked about it, but for now that is all I can say! At this point I unfortunately have to be somewhat cryptic and ambiguous. More to come.

If you’re a DM/GM of any fantasy pen-and-paper role playing game, you need to seriously consider managing your magic items with Trove Tokens.

What do you currently do when your players discover a new magic item in-game? Wait for them to identify it, then have one of them write it down on his or her character sheet – right? Well, Trove Tokens gives you the ability to physically hand them that magic item. It’s a tactile representation that represents what should be a vastly more important part of your game than just a line of text on a character sheet.

With Trove Tokens, your players can now amass a collection of equipment cards that show them what each rare and wondrous item looks like. They’ll derive new meaning and excitement each time they find a new item and receive the card – a card that was custom-created by you at the click of a mouse.

But the best part about the Trove Tokens magical item creation system is that after you’ve purchased it once, you get unrestricted access to all bonus content, art expansion packs, and of course, the ability to create an unlimited supply of items. Compare that to magic item sets where you have to continually buy expensive new cards or tokens in booster packs and decks, to be used just once and then discarded.

Even if you scan and reproduce these cards, the process of organizing them – aligning, straightening, resizing – could take hours of your time! Trove Tokens is organized so that a single 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper or cardstock produces sixteen (16) colorful, incredibly detailed magic item tokens, perfectly set to be sliced up and used immediately.

New expansion packs for Trove Tokens are being released every few months, and the work of fantasy artist Rui Ferreira shines in our series of themed releases. Along with the standard set of 100+ items, each of the bonus packs adds over 50+ items to the collection. Did we mention that all of the bonus expansion sets are completely FREE to owners of the basic set? That’s right; at just $9.95 for a system that will potentially result in thousands of ancient, glittering items for your games, what’s not to love?

To purchase Trove Tokens, visit our website at http://www.trovetokens.com/

As of yesterday the latest expansion pack for the Trove Tokens magical item creation system, Bastions of Defense, has been released. The set contains 50+ new magical items geared toward increasing your fortifications – suits of armor, shields, gauntlets, boots, belts, and helms. Check out our website for more:

http://www.trovetokens.com/