Closing out the Year

by | Dec 28, 2024 | Blight, Doom, Dungeons & Dragons, General News, Table Top Gaming

For the end of the year, the holidays, birthdays, and family get-togethers tend to keep most of us busy, even during our time off. But some work has been progressing well. We have expanded the lore and content of Valendera ten-fold. We hope that it will bring a whole new crowd of players to the table when the game system is finally released. For now, all of the original Crusader Games campaign modules will be brought under the Valendera game world. While many of the other games we have in development will fit into one of the many worlds in that system. We plan to create a unique experience where players may spot Easter eggs through our game, and point to our TTRPG with excitement. I know where that comes from. That several worlds that encapsulate different genres, but all the fantasy stuff will be brought under the Valendera umbrella.

The modules themselves will still be self-contained, but the characters may be used in future Valendera modules. That also opens up my campaigns to a whole set of lore, from previously written material. Other games like Pip’s First Adventure, Farmcraft, and Tornado! will be set in their own universe. In Darkness will be in another universe, which itself is horror themed. This one is tricky, because In Darkness is based on real mythologies, inspired by actual events, and adapting a game world with it’s own lore for something darker is a harder challenge but and exciting one.

On the DOOM front, Blight had to be updated with a minor change, but will not be featured on this site. We call v1.4a and 1.4b. We’re working with Doomworld to get it uploaded to their unofficial Archive, but mustn’t contain unaltered assets from DOOM. Unfortunately, since Blight v1.4 has added a new intermission map, it uses the default blood splats and You are Here arrows that highlight map locations on the intermission screen. This was an oversight, so these images were altered and the mod was resubmitted. But, it has only been resubmitted to the archive, not to Bethesda or this site. Those locations still feature the original intended red blood splats. Moving forward, any updates will feature the altered images.

With the next year quickly approaching, we’re excited to see what new games we can get out to the public, and the progress we will make on our current projects. Here’s to 2025.

Extinguishing Old Content…with New

by | Dec 10, 2024 | Dungeons & Dragons, Table Top Gaming

I have been out of the office the this current week due to some health issues, but it’s given me some time to work on remastering an old Dungeons & Dragons module from several years back. As mentioned in a previous post, we are working on reissuing all previous campaigns again. The trade dress for this module is a call back to the old modules from the early years of D&D, and I’ve been working on fixing up many of the story and layout.

And, the maps. Oh, how I love maps, and making maps. There is just something about a hand drawn map (or in this case a digital drawn map) that, in my opinion, out ranks any VTT map. There are tools out there to help people craft amazing looking maps, but for me, I’d just soon open up Photoshop and draw with a pen on a tablet, or draw on a piece of paper. It’s relaxing to decompress and do something I’ve enjoyed doing since I was a child. Drawing maps.

These maps though are in the style of the old blue and white (or black and white) that was printed on those old yellowed pages. It felt almost like the ink would rub off on your thumbs as you flip through the pages and read the text on the pages. That is the style I’m going for. It allows for me to be more abstract when I don’t have time, talent, or a large team here at Crusader Games to draw these large scale maps comparable to the published campaigns of our current era.

With abstract maps, I can simplify the design to only what matters. This comes into play on dungeons the most, but even in towns, we’re not forced to make realistic looking maps. We can do simple layouts that allow the theatre of the mind draw the maps for you. But, it doesn’t make creating the maps any less complicated. I have layers upon layers, with styles and masks several levels deep. It takes time and the layers have to be in the precise order to look the way you want. Solid, Dithered, White, Grid Lines, Terrain Lines, everything has a place.

This just means it may take a few weeks before we get the first campaign up online for purchase. But working on the project and getting to update it has been a treat. And the homage to old school gaming manuals. As always, Happy Gaming, and lets hope to get this first one (and maybe two) out before Christmas.

What’s Coming New from Crusader Games?

by | Dec 7, 2024 | Dungeons & Dragons, Table Top Gaming

A year or two ago, when Wizards of the Coast was romanticizing the license structure for the 2024 version of D&D, there was a uncertainty about the content that was placed on the DMs Guild, and whether that was going to be owned by the creators or owned by WOTC. Due to the, at the time, unknown ownership of where our D&D campaigns would ultimately fall to, it was decided to temporarily remove them from the internet and house them back on our digital bookshelves until said time was further fleshed out. It turned out that none of the hyperbole was ended up the case, but our campaigns were already removed from the website.

Our next goal for would be to relaunch those 3 campaigns and the supplemental class as a purchase through our own website. This way we can have them back up for publishing, perhaps retool some of the nitpicky issues with the adventure modules and clean up a lot of the sticky parts of the stories, all the while, seeing if they would need adjusted for the 2024 ruleset. For some of the team, this means that the story will need to be fleshed out, and for the artists, reworking some of the maps to make larger dungeons, or cleaner visuals.

The best part of tackling this is to dive into some 1980s red box set D&D campaigns and redo all the visuals in the style of those maps. There is always a piece of that in our hearts, and we personally have loved the old blue print maps from back in that era.

We’re also exploring the idea of including additional merchandise on the store front that could be sold based on previous works by Crusader Games. That portion of the website will be developed as time comes, and we’ll be sure to announce it on our social media pages as well.

Until then, Happy Gaming.

Afflicted by Blight

by | Nov 24, 2024 | Blight, Doom

I promise this isn’t turning into a DOOM only website, and especially not one that is only dedicated to Blight. But with the first game wrapped up, and the tongue-in-cheek humor with the mention of two other Blight games, I felt somewhat motivated to carry through with those ideas.

Blight: Affliction is the second game in what would eventually be known as a trilogy. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that, but that is my long (very long) term goal. It will be the Blight trilogy that all takes place between DOOM and DOOM II. The second of the three (as well as the third) will take place within DOOM II. No more limitations on the monsters or weapons. Players will get to fight the Archvile, and kill things with the Super Shotgun.

Progress has already begun on Blight: Affliction, and will feature the first half of DOOM II Megawad. So you will have MAP01 through MAP016. While the second half, MAP17 through MAP32, will be the last of the trilogy. The name is mentioned in Blight but will not be mentioned here just yet. This will feature some unreleased maps that I had worked on since my 20+ years of DOOM design. Old maps will be updated, New maps will be added. I will try to not use custom textures unless I need to illustrate an idea. And, this will once again take place directly after Blight.

I will only work on this sparingly as I have other projects as you can see that do need worked on, and Blight doesn’t make us money. Thoughts about that have stirred in my head, but it would be a fully realized drop with goodies. But again, I don’t have a name behind my mapping, and Blight wasn’t supposed to be a Magnum Opus. I did jump head first into the mod developing scene and release that as my first mod.

Blight: Affliction will try to address many of the issues that was brought up during the development of Blight, such as difficulty, bugs, and lack of weaponry. And with the KEX port released, I will have to make sure I develop for that as well. My ports I’m shooting for is GZDOOM, DSDA, Woof, and KEX. I’ll see as I move further along if I need to test in other ports. But those are the ones I’m looking at. 

John Romero once stated in his streams, after a suggestion by a viewer, that they were known as “SIGILians”. Well I hereby declare Blight fans to be “BLIGHTarians”. Anyway, a short update to the progress of Crusader Games. Aside from personal, health, and work related issues, we are still a company designed to create some awesome content for a variety of genres. Happy DOOMing. 

Blight Version 1.3 Released

by | Oct 31, 2024 | Blight, Doom

With the release of DOOM + DOOM II, Doom is now available to a wider audience with the release on consoles. One of the benefits of this version is the ability to release mods to that audience to allow users with PlayStation or Xbox, or even Switch to play the mods on these gaming consoles. I’ve had a few individuals suggest some quality of life improvements for Blight. And with this version of the game being released, I wanted to make sure I could get Blight out on this list as well.

I’ve made many Quality of Life improvements over the last version. First QoL improvement is to get the word out or fix related postings to say “While inspired by SI6IL and SI6IL 2, Blight is not meant to be as hard” That was one of the biggest amount of comments I had received and mentioned in previous topics. Balancing the difficulty for the majority of the Doom community is like me trying to shoot a penny. I’m just not going to be able to with my experience. It’s either too easy, too hard, or too cheap. So it is a mild experience that gets hard in the end, but isn’t nearly as hard as many of the mods that show up in Bethesda release.

I have brought back the Baron of Hell on every level. John Romero had placed a Cyberdemon on every level in UV mode for Si6il II, but I’m not that bad, I chose to go with the simple Baron of Hell. I like them. They provide a bit sponginess while putting in some high damage enemy fire. I did modify some enemy placements, though not many. And while the following was present in version 1.2, I don’t think it got much attention. I have enemies that are randomly placed through out the map. So one play through may have an enemy show up behind a specific door, but the next time, they appear at the top of a platform. It adds a little bit of randomness to specific monster types giving even me an element of surprise.

Since the release of this remaster is using a new engine, I had to add the appropriate files to my map. So I fixed it to be KEX compatible, I’ve added some bonus things like altered HELP and ENDOOM screens. I’ve created widescreen support, and for the ports that do use intermission maps, there is now an intermission map based on a rural mountain side in the eastern mountain ranges based loosely around an image of my work. There is a M_DOOM logo in there as well, and I made some alterations to the music in a couple levels. I’m using two new tracks for E7M5 and E7M9 due the nature of E7M5, I felt it was more appropriate to change that. 

Outside of some small bug adjustments and line definition changes, a lot of the improvements were to get it updated to the KEX engine so my console friends can download the mod. Look for the mod to be released in the next day or two. Planned releases will be Crusader Games, idgames Archive, Bethesda mod browser, and links can be found also on the Doomworld posting.