A cooperative campaign experience for 1-4 adventurers set in a fantasy world on the brink of being consumed by nature. Setup in only 5 minutes, and complete a scenario in 30 minutes per player. Pre-Orders & Late Pledges are open now for a limited time!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
425k - Stretch Goal Unlocked!
6 months ago
– Thu, Jun 06, 2024 at 06:45:17 AM
Hey everyone, Mike @ Addax Games here! We've just hit 425k, which means you've all unlocked yet another stretch goal in our final dash towards the finish line. This stretch goal is a manufacturing upgrade, so now it's my turn to jump in and write an update!
If you had a chance to meet with us at Phoenix Fan Fusion, Kublacon, or the UK Games Expo, you likely had a chance to interact with our early prototype materials. While we have a variety of changes and upgrades planned for our materials, our team's biggest concern was the Map & Adversary Books. These two books will see quite a lot of action as you journey through the world of Chorus, and we want to be sure that the materials we use are durable enough to withstand the pressure of battle even after repeated playthroughs through our Choice & Consequence campaign.
We will be upgrading the thickness of the pages to a sturdier material and working with our manufacturing partner to apply a premium matte coating to each page. These two upgrades should help further prevent pages from bending, curling, or ripping, and the coating should prevent any damage to the pages no matter how frantic or explosive the combat (and your dice rolls) might be.
In addition, we are looking to upgrade our Quest Book with spiral binding so that it can be placed easily on the table as a handy reference during your games without the need to bend or fold it (also reducing the amount of tablespace this component requires).
These upgrades do increase our manufacturing cost, but by hitting this milestone we are able to safely make these changes while still keeping the price of Rove as affordable as possible.
Next up is Mo and Makaal's Secret Stash, a hidden cache of particularly exotic equipment that will become available to your party as you progress through the campaign. These items use unique mechanical concepts that we could not include at launch, but are now able to fully develop and release as a bonus for our backers.
Our stretch goal strategy is that we want to offer unique, cool options for our backers and get the community involved in development while keeping ourselves on a tight development schedule so that we can deliver Rove on-schedule.
Thank you again for all of your support, and we're all looking forward to the possibility of unlocking Mo and Makaal's Secret Stash before our campaign closes today!
Vote: A New Ally Appears!
6 months ago
– Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 05:41:55 PM
In the last update we mentioned how you would encounter “allies” throughout your adventure. Each one is a powerful warrior in their own right, but were too bound by obligations (or whims) to undergo the training necessary to be elevated to a Rover. At some point in the future we’ll spend a bit more time talking about that as well, but the quick-and-dirty of it is that becoming a Rover requires the support of almost an entire clan and spending a significant amount of time in specialized training.
New allies will emerge during your adventures across Chorus.
Regardless, allies create some novel game design space for us to take advantage of in Rove, so we’ve tried to ensure each one is memorable in one way or another! Part of the refocusing of the narrative and gameplay in development meant that the space we had to have a full array of allies representing the major peoples of Rove was lost, and I’m quite glad to be able to get at least one more in for you all this way.
While this ally and their related content will be designed Core Box, we also want to feature this particular ally in the Expansion Box as well. We want to give players as much time with the character voted for as possible. We genuinely weren’t expecting to have this opportunity, and the Expansion was already designed with a bit of narrative wiggle room, so we figured this was a pleasant way to give this special threshold a bit more kick in terms of impact to the narrative.
Let’s hear their stories before casting a vote! Both of these writeups will come with a bit of world primer; you expect more detail about these little nuggets later!
Hra: Starlings are creatures of adaptability and mimicry first and foremost. An animate core coalesces into existence and rapidly begins to absorb the ambient ether of its environment and copy behaviors to improve chances of survival. What then if there are no people around a nascent starling? Some very interesting adaptations have been observed with such starlings when they do eventually come into contact with other intelligent beings. We’re not sure what creatures Hra templated themselves off of–there seems to be a little gruv and perhaps terranape?
Hra is a lone starling that has been wandering the mountain ranges of Lalos for many years. With any unidentified starling in the wild most clans will simply wait for the being to find its way to them; the flow of ether in a clan is irresistible to a starling so it’s only a matter of time. In this case it was a tihfur clan nestled at the foot of one mountain Hra had been working their way over.
Hra - Sketch by Alexandr Elichev
The starling was offered a name and home by the clan–it wasn’t long until Hra realized the significance of things such as names, and relationships, and purpose. Despite the clan’s encouragement Hra always remained a taciturn individual. Possibly something to do with the creatures and locales they developed in. After satisfying their desire to learn and grow from the clan, they resumed their march across the mountains of Lalos in search of an unvoiced desire that continued to call to them.
Daring: Zusag have several Schools–cultural foundations of particular philosophy. The five Schools ascribed to in the modern era are that of the Ears, Eyes, Nose, Mouth, and Claws. Most clans biased towards zusag find the teachings of one of these major philosophies at the core of how the culture is shaped. Daring has had quite a tumultuous history; it shook her belief in her original teachings so thoroughly that she has become almost zealous in her following of the School of Claws. She struck out to find a different clan who could teach her what she came to believe as the “superior” methods of thought.
Those that practice teachings from the School of Claws are warriors who pride their skill in combat above all else and train themselves (and fellow clanmates) mercilessly to prove superiority in battle through any and all means necessary. As a generally diminutive species, many zusag find the teachings of the Claws to be antithetical, for how can someone a quarter the size of their foe stand on equal footing? But contending with such challenges is the common factor for all zusag cultures and so the School of Claws takes its place as the fifth major pillar in zusag rhetoric.
Daring - Sketch by Alexandr Elichev
Daring may strike one as especially brusque for an adherent to a School. She also just likes to strike living things in general. It’s not as if she’s lost her sense of humor… it just might be a bit differently shaded these days. A ranger with brutal efficiency; she’s become a master at hunting large quarries with precision strikes and surprise attacks. Unfortunately, for a lone adventurer in Chorus, that lifestyle rarely ends well.
Thank you all so so much for helping us reach 400k in funding! We’re honored by the passion you’ve shared with us and we can’t wait to pay it back with each box. With the final day upon us, all we can do is simmer in the excitement of the moment and prepare to put a ribbon on Rove for all of you! Join us on our socials in the signature below to celebrate with us!
400k - New Stretch Goal Unlocked!!
6 months ago
– Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 12:28:37 PM
We just keep being blown away… We genuinely didn’t think we’d be here a month ago, but everyone is doing what they can to make sure we get to make Rove the best it can be! When many of us were just starting out making custom content for other games, a dominating focus was always a push for quality; we wanted to ensure what we were working on felt like a flawless addition to the game experience. We’re bringing that same energy to Rove and it’s incredible seeing it matched by you all in turn.
Throughout your adventure you’ll meet a number of “allies”. Each has their own unique circumstances and motivations. These characters are meant to illustrate the divide between Chorus’ less prestigious warriors and Rovers–or more specifically how little of a divide there truly is. Naturally you’re going to be stronger than these characters, but if they’re able to keep up with you even halfway decently, what stopped them from becoming Rovers in the first place? You’ll have to meet up with them to find out!
We wanted to be careful to not overburden the campaign with myriad “escort missions” (though trust us that none of the encounters featuring allies should feel cumbersome), so there are quite a number of quests that are just Rovers vs Chorus without an ally present and that means we didn’t get a chance to feature a representative for every major species.
Our Backers surprised us with the rush to 400k today, so we need a little more time for Alexandr Elichev to finish up the concept sketching, but you all get to decide who the last ally in the Core Box gets to be! When the sketches are ready, they’ll be featured in another update with more information about what to expect, but to get you a little excited:
Hra: A lone starling that has been wandering the mountain ranges of Lalos for many years. They were offered a name by a tihfur clan they encountered in the past and accepted the moniker–choosing to introduce themselves with it from that point forward.
Nobody is certain what Hra has been searching the mountains for, but what Hra has certainly found is a potent amount of Earth ether throughout their endeavors. Few will ever lay eyes upon such a stout and robust starling form.
Daring: An adherent of the School of Claws zusag philosophy. It’s possible she wasn’t always one but now it’s an undeniable fact. Those that practice teachings from the School of Claws are zusag warriors who pride their skill in combat above all else and train themselves and clanmates mercilessly to prove superiority in battle through any means necessary.
For a zusag she’s got quite the mean-streak. Ultimately Daring seeks the same thing as anyone else on Chorus; a reprise from the unending surge of beasts from every corner of the land. She’s simply chosen a more… direct path to that goal.
We’re in the last days of the Kickstarter campaign now and all of the excitement that kicked off today was an amazing welcome home from our convention circuit. We’re committed to being as present and available as possible for the rest of the week, so please be sure to comment or find us at one of our socials down below!
Vote: New Item! 375k Stretch Goal Unlocked! 🔓
6 months ago
– Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 03:49:09 AM
We’ve traveled quite far now, Rovers. Indeed, yet another choice for the path ahead lies before us. It’s thanks to you all that we’ve made it all this way; now let’s see what’s hidden around the trail!
Items in Rove are interesting (biased opinion, I know). Armor and shields made of shed keb-carapace, literal bombs packed together by rasska, knives made of separated tihfur claws; quite the list of odd and homespun goods.
The most esoteric, however, tend to be that which the zusag assemble. Scholars and sages pride themselves on the construction of Crux-infused keystones, scrolls, and tomes that all contain knowledge both enlightening and disorienting.
Our Backers have pressed far enough to reach in and grasp one of the most treasured of zusag inventions: Glyph-Autonomos, a conjuration shaped and controlled through the use of a separated medium, rather than through a zusag themselves. This allows anybody that is able to power the medium sufficiently to call forth, and control, a very rigidly-defined construct which will follow simple instructions.
I’m very glad to be able to get at least one of these ideas into the game thanks to you all. These were early ideas that unfortunately had to be left behind as we refined the focus of the narrative. Initially they were going to be adversaries but they would have only had a very narrow use-case as originally conceived. When the team proposed bringing them back as items I was so happy to hear it!
The first choice is Glyph-Autonomos: Vertex. A “vertex”, as the zusag call it, is actually one of the fundamental teaching tools for mathematics and geometry across most of their cultures. It begins as a small collection of simple prisms, then gains more and more dimensions as the student comes to grips with the higher-dimensional thought necessary to master their use of conjurations. It wouldn’t be uncommon to see smaller variations being used as toys by the young scattered throughout a clan.
This vertex is anything but small or simple. It represents the (current) pinnacle of the vertex as used as a tool for conceptualizing spatial relationships, and designed even further to accomodate offensive features. Such autonomos are now used as early warning systems for the obscured zusag clan sites around Chorus. When something not properly identified strays too close to the village’s entrypoint, a gleaming mass of swirling shapes flashes into existence to pelt the potential threat in pure expulsions of Crux.
To paint a more straightforward picture: The zusag took a perfectly good cube and stuck a big laser inside of it! The diamond opens into a decahedral nightmare that refracts energy through its myriad channels, rendering its angles of attack impossible to predict. As an item this would be something of a static emplacement you would install and use to support your party with ranged attacks.
The second choice is Glyph-Autonomos: Operior. The operior is actually a rather ancient concept for the zusag–one that has gone through much more philosophic drift than the vertex has. Before the zusag were truly sapient, one of their primal and instinctive uses of Crux was just to rapidly conjure an image of themselves but at ten times the size, hopefully scaring off any predator with the sudden appearance of a giant being. From there the different zusag cultures have been forever arguing about how best to deploy the concept of “enlarged being” in battle.
This particular autonomos was designed specifically by sages of the School of Ears, known for their proactive-defense teachings of combat. Other Schools will scoff at what seems to be a waste of effort for such inelegant functionality, but turning the operior into a solid wall that stands between its master and their foes has yet to ever fail its purpose as such. Though the same could be said for the other operior designs and their goals… Contentious lot, the zusag.
After all, if this colossus of light starts to march toward you, what are you supposed to do about it? If you’d prefer a large melee buddy to hold the frontline then be sure to cast your vote for tall, pale, and handsome here.
Be sure to comment or join the debate on one of the social media platforms linked below, and we hope you enjoy whichever makes it to the Core Box in the end! Don’t forget at 400k we have another vote–you’ll be voting on a new Ally character to join you in another new Encounter…
Our time at the UK Games Expo!
6 months ago
– Mon, Jun 03, 2024 at 04:25:44 PM
Hey everyone! This won’t be a long update; things were crazy here at UK Games Expo! These are some shots from the “slow” day:
All 8 of our demo tables spent most of the whole con entirely filled out. It was packed! Everyone showing up at our convention appearances has been super nice, and the passion on display is a treat. Cheers!
But every day of this campaign has been fantastic–convention or not. All of your support and feedback is deeply important to us here at Addax Games, and we’re very sorry to anyone that has had to wait to receive a response while we’re busy! 🙇
We’re always happy to hear from anybody stopping by, physically or digitally. If you can’t catch us at a con appearance, we’re always checking up on Discord, Facebook, and Instagram as seen in the signature on every post! The comments you guys leave on the Votes also get noticed so thank you to everyone who writes something for us!
