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Hey all, Mark Della-Croce here. We survived Gen Con and announced some awesome new stuff just a few weeks ago, so this newsletter won’t be long, but we’ll try to make it enjoyable!

First, thanks to everyone who made their way to our out-of-the-way corner of Gen Con under Lucas Oil Stadium, signed up for the newsletter or a free World Tier account, and grabbed some swag! We were excited to meet more of you in person, show off our progress with Lore Link, and find out what you are looking for in a campaign management tool.

A bald man wearing a mask, looking at the camera while standing in front of the Lore Link booth at Gen Con.

Trust us: he really is smiling under the mask.

Streaming-wise, we got two Twitch streams in between everything else we were doing. First, twenty20sight (Lore Link moderator, Twitch streamer, and all-around great person) took over the channel while we were moving into Gen Con. She streamed Darkest Dungeon, a PC game that pulls elements from the deadly days of early fantasy roleplaying and mixes in the horror and sanity mechanics of games like Call of Cthulhu. It’s a great game, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, watch her stream in our YouTube channel’s stream archives. Next, after recovering from Gen Con, I pulled out another classic SSI PC TTRPG game from the vault and played Shadow Sorcerer. This game pulled from the classic Dragonlance novels to pull off a slightly different CRPG (Computer RPG) take, with a real-time exploration and combat system that sees the player attempting to escort a group of escaping refugees to a place of safety hidden somewhere on the map. My first attempt featured explosions, refugee mutinies (twice! By the same leader!), and spending too much time in a dwarven maze. The last one cost me the game as I emerged from the maze only to discover I’d spent too much time exploring and most of the refugees were dead or scattered.

A screenshot from an OLD PC game, showing a group of people on fire, and over it says "Your party has been wiped out. Try another party." while Mark is laughing in the lower right corner.

Cause of Death: Miscalculated the volume of a 1st Ed Fireball

Coming up on our Twitch streams, we’ll look at one of the exciting new releases from Gen Con 2024: Starfinder Second Edition! Our group of Lore Link players consists of many Pathfinder and Starfinder veterans, so they’re excited to see how Starfinder Second Edition improves on the original by taking the solid mechanical foundation of *Pathfinder 2E *Remastered and combining it with the exciting world of Starfinder 1E. I started this journey with a planning session last Tuesday (August 13th). I’ll have one more planning session next Tuesday (August 20th), wrapping it all up with an actual play session on August 23rd! So, follow the Twitch channel to find out when we will go live with those exciting games. After that, stop back by on August 27th to catch Tony and me blowing off steam and dirt and cleaning up Warhammer 40k vehicles as we return to cleaning off that last giant ship in PowerWash Simulator.

The logo for Starfinder 2nd Edition

It even has a fancy new logo to go with its new mechanics!

Also, please stop by for the August 20th stream to catch a preview of the player-sharing feature in action as I show off how I’d share world-building information with players using the upcoming player-sharing feature in Lore Link. That feature will be included in the forthcoming release of Lore Link. Following World Tier exiting early access, we’ll soon have the other paid tiers becoming available to the public. Watch your inboxes for that announcement, which is coming soon!

A close up of a section of a calendar. The 20 is clear and sharp with a red circle around it, while the rest of the numbers are blurred.

Keep that date circled!

All right, I said at the top that this would be a short newsletter, and I need to keep those promises. I’ve got to get back to digging into Starfinder Second Edition.

May you be able to take your Olympic Memes and change them into TTRPG dreams (I mean, come on, those target shooting ones are great gunslinger archetypes to build around).

Mark D.C. Project Lead, Lore Link
July
August 2024