Mark Della-Croce, Product Lead for Lore Link, is shaking off the dust of the holiday slumber to bring you the January Lore Link Newsletter! Looking back and looking forward, let’s talk about what is going on with Lore Link!
We started 2024 with a big push for Affiliate for our Twitch Channel. This push helped establish the channel, allowing us to take full advantage of more of the features Twitch offers, including excellent emotes (Created by our own Martine Dowden!)! During the push, and throughout the rest of the year, we’ve been doing the classic Twitch thing with a twist: we played a lot of video games, but through the lens of TTRPGs, playing a ton of tabletop-adjacent games! Tony and I went through all of Powerwash Simulator’s Warhammer 40k expansion, while Mike and I had a blast playing through many excellent TTRPG-style co-op games, like Demeo and Wildermyth. Even Twenty got in on the act with a few streams of Darkest Dungeon! And, of course, we’ve also been looking through many diverse TTRPGs all year. You can find a list of those on our system examples page. If you want to see Lore Link in action, you can watch us playing through several of them (including Fallout, Blades in the Dark, Discworld, and my favorite actual play of 2024: Hard Wired Island); you can check those out either through the above-linked System Examples page or head over to our YouTube channel to check all of the VODs of those videos.
Though the snow piled up outside keeps most of the Lore Link crew safe indoors, we did venture out quite a bit in 2024 as well, attending three different conventions over the year. We sponsored the charity-focused Who’s Yer Con in our backyard in April of 2024, then headed east to Origins in June, and lastly came back home for Gen Con in August. We’re booked into Who’s Yer Con and Origins in 2025, so look forward to seeing us back there. We’re adding panels to our convention repertoire as well in the coming year, so if you’ve wanted to hear us talk about GMing, choosing games, or even to come sit in on the game we’re running, keep an eye out for us! Plus, if you’ve got suggestions for cool TTRPG conventions in your area, let us know about them! We’re looking to get Lore Link in front of as many people as possible in 2025.
On the development side, 2024 wasn’t a quiet year either. We released bug fixes over the year, keeping Lore Link running smoothly for our users. We also asked for input from our user base regarding features they wanted in upcoming releases, and the #1 ask was for a player-sharing feature, which I am extremely proud to say we delivered! GMs in Lore Link can share their campaigns with their players (paid or free; players don’t have to have a higher-tier account). The GMs can then determine which pieces of Lore they want to make available to the players. Players can then join the campaign and quickly bring themselves up to speed before or even during a game session, and they can even use Lore Link’s note feature to add their perspective to the places, events, and people present in a campaign. You may have seen me mention paid or free members, which brings me to the other exciting feature released in 2024: Lore Link is now available for all users, not just our awesome Kickstarter backers! Please visit our Get Started page and sign up for a free tier account if you haven’t already, and invite your fellow gamers to do the same!
So, what does the future hold for Lore Link? First, our Twitch Channel will continue exploring how Lore Link can help you organize and run your games. This month has seen me plan through Mage the Ascension’s 20th anniversary: The Victorian Age, over the last two weeks, and today (January 17th) will see the Lore Link players attempting to make magic thrive during the so-called “Age of Reason.” I predict chaos; the streets of London will never be the same. If you read this newsletter in time, the stream starts at 1:00 PM EST, so please join us! Later this month (January 28th), I’ll look at another London-based Magic game: Rivers of London. We’ll also briefly detour into one of the less successful attempts at a World of Darkness video game, Hunter: The Reckoning, on January 21st.
On the development side, we also have some tremendous changes that we aren’t quite ready to announce. We’re close, so watch your inbox for future announcements that might come outside the usual newsletter cycle!
This newsletter is longer than I expected, but it always excites me for the new year when I see just what we’ve accomplished in the last year. However, I need to get back to work, as I have to plan how to keep the Lore Link players in check when I’m giving them access to phenomenal cosmic powers. I’ll have to make sure their living quarters are sufficiently small…
‘Til next time, may you at least stay warm in front of the fires all your players have caused in their rampages.
