FFG putting the stake in Terrinoth, but still rolling with other stuff

bfkiller wrote:
From a business perspective, I get it. Keeping art and graphic design costs down makes sense to me.

Yeah, but money spent on forgettable content is money wasted. They'd have done better to reinvent with something remarkable or just let it drop for a vanilla RPG world. But you keep hoping the NEXT game will really make it stick! Sunk costs and all that.

Sagrilarus wrote: Yeah, but money spent on forgettable content is money wasted. They'd have done better to reinvent with something remarkable or just let it drop for a vanilla RPG world. But you keep hoping the NEXT game will really make it stick! Sunk costs and all that.

But it is a vanilla RPG world.

I know this is a high falluting place to navel gaze and discuss the platonic ideal, but Terrinoth is just fine. It is not forgettable content, and it is not money wasted. Personally I am a fan of Descent, Runebound, and Heroes of Terrinoth (despite balancing being horrible on that one). I'm pleased as punch with the repeat of characters, monsters, and that magic works not as a trait of the wizard themselves (except for exceptional historical figures) but by a talented individual using a runestone (created by that first exceptional wizard).

Take out real world, compress expansion into the same game, and I happen to have more Terrinoth boxes (3) than anything other than LotR (4). Although I do consider Warhammer to be two distinct settings (Warhammer Quest & Chaos Marauders/Space Hulk & Battle for Armageddon).

That's always been my approach. There are times when generic is just fine. I like running into the same creatures in Descent, Runebound, Runewars, and Rune Age. I like playing the same characters in Descent and Runebound. I like going from macro-level combat with my Obscenes in Runewars to micro-level combat with them in Battlelore. I like that there's a common theme that ties together four great games. Do I think they could have gone into more detail about what makes the world unique? Sure. But I don't care. There's enough detail (you know... if you actually read the cards in Runebound and the character histories in Descent and the lore in Rune Age) for me to know I'm doing things in the same world and that's all I really care about.

In some cases, I don't want to have to have read four Dune novels and/or the SIlmarillion to really "get it." I just want to have played the games.

While FFG's thesaurus-humping marketing department would have you believe that Terrinoth was "rich, vibrant, and evocatively adjectival," it was actually worse than generic—it was confusing. Forgettable is one thing, but I was never sure exactly what was supposed to be going on in Terrinoth, and how I was supposed to feel about it... Concerned? Titillated? Intrigued? There's more cogent world-building in the flavor text of a minor Magic: The Gathering set than in any of the Terrinoth junk I was exposed to. It worked great as the one-shot in-game world for OG Runebound, where it was consistent and created a nice little snowglobe you could shake up every now and again. But as a "core IP" it just felt forced, an artifact of marketing rather than a creative storytelling endeavor.

I'm willing to give the Terrinoth setting the benefit of the doubt, that its setting has something to offer beyond generic fantasy tropes, but I can't get past the art. Every time I start to get a little invested or interested in the setting I look at an illustration and it pulls me right back out. To me, everything looks like Thomas Kinkade by way of Tolkien and no fluff, no matter how well-conceived, can overcome it.

Whenever I hear the name Terrinoth, I immediately visualize that ridiculous picture of Red Scorpion. You know which one I mean.

Overly booby chic?

cf.geekdo-images.com/camo/3d0adaa98f73af...72735f3030312e6a7067

Clutching my pearls.

It already looks retro, like the old Succubus illustration in the OG Monster Manual

My issue with the illustration is that she lifts her right leg way too high so how a bit of her ass.

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Yesterday I met to play Legend of the Five Rings LCG with the same people that I used to play Android: Netrunner with and we talked about FFG and card games. With Game of Thrones closing and Netrunner gone, L5R is the last remaning competitive card game FFG has and the only one with the superb "Living Card game model" in the market and I can't shake the feeling I'm going to run out of games to play.

FFG is not great at supporting product lines. They release product, very fast but they struggle to keep a consistent quality and to make the product endure. They don't put enough work on, say, organized play and tend to release very similar games one after the other when fewer, better supported games would do better.

L5R is the best example. They bought the entire franchise from AEG. All rights to the card game, the setting, the roleplaying game, illustrations, everything. And they did it because it was a non-generic franchise with appeal to a wide audience they could own forever. But they rushed the card game and released just one middling, almost abstract game on the setting. I suspect they see L5R as underperforming and think Keyforge is the bee knees...until they under support it again and it goes away.

I mean, Arkham Horror LCG has been a huge success and there are scenarios that are just bad. Really, really bad. And people aren't dumb and notice. Even their better products, like Cosmic Encounter, have development issues (The Cosmic Storm expansion).

Were it on me, I would clean-up, keep the number of releases under control and focus on making each game more durable in the long term.

I might have missed the party, but I'm fine with Terrinoth. I love generic settings. It allows me to put myself into the setting instead of having the setting pushed into me. I also dislike the "old" Terrinoth, and really enjoy art style of the 2nd ed Descent one. Two disappointing things about this era of Terrinoth:

1. They're trying not to recycle thing (because of the conversion pack, which is total waste, IMO), and they end with the more esoteric types of monsters (ettin instead of giants, no basic spear wielding goblin). I wish they had gone _more_ generic! With goblins, skeletons, and orcs in the basic set.

2. Not having a world map. It would have made the world a lot more coherent.

My issue with the illustration is that she lifts her right leg way too high so how a bit of her ass.


Read the flavor text dude, it’s about balance. A proper balance of T and A.

Ska_baron wrote: Here's a great interview that dropped yesterday with Papa Petersen himself: spacecatspeaceturtles.podbean.com/

Nice get by a great podcast! (A great podcast for TI fans, at any rate.)

Erik Twice wrote: FFG is not great at supporting product lines. They release product, very fast but they struggle to keep a consistent quality and to make the product endure. They don't put enough work on, say, organized play and tend to release very similar games one after the other when fewer, better supported games would do better.

This begs for a "State Of FFG's LCGs" article from the braintrust here at TWBG.

I am of the opinion that (it took a while, but) people en masse have begun seeing through FFG's LCG business model. It was introduced as the end-all be-all antidote to blind-buy CCGs, but has become just another expansion-based FOMO-exploiting way to keep boardgame consumers on a drip-feed for FFG products. From the multi-purchase core sets, to the product-lines either being dropped (Netrunner) or rebooted (AGoT) the LCG model has its own slate of issues that people are finally coming around to acknowledging.

FFG took a complex, very niche, very nerd-centric IP (Legend Of The Five Rings) and instead of reducing/streamlining it for mass consumption, they made it just as clunky and opaque as the original, then stood around dumbfounded when the adoption rate never took off to Netrunner levels. I bet AEG breathed a huge sigh of relief when FFG took it off their hands.