Reliquary Studios
Origins 2017
This year at Origins Game Fair was good to Reliquary Game Studios. We shared a booth in the Exhibitor Hall with our friends at Fearlight Games. Much fun was had by all and we exposed a lot of new people to the Clockwork: Dominion Roleplaying Game.
If you have a Con that you would like to see Clockwork played at, let us know! We are happy to facilitate Narrators to run the game at any convention, and possibly even show up to sell books ourselves.
All Domestic Kickstarter Rewards have left our facility. We just shipped the last of the Deluxe editions this morning after we spent most of last night signing them. All domestic books are being shipped via Media Mail with tracking, so they should arrive within about a week. Delays are always possible in shipping, but if you have not received your book by the second week of August, please contact us immediately and we’ll sort it out.
Foreign Kickstarter reward fulfillment is a bit more complicated, but is well under way. We are working hard to get these books and cards to you as quickly as possible, but the intricacies of oversees shipping will take slightly longer to navigate. We’ll update again as things fall into place.
We are so excited to get these books into your hands! Please let us know what you think on our Facebook Page or in the forums on our website, www.clockworkdominion.com. Your comments will help us keep the gears turning and produce supplements and expansions that you want to see.
The World Turns,
Zeke, Than, & Brent
A long awaited day has come. The proofs are in hand and the books are about to be ordered from the printer. The final book will be 328 full-color pages. Layout is done by the veteran designer, Adam Jury, and there’s amazing artwork from people like Raven Mimura, Helen Mask, and Luke Santiago.
Provided all goes well with proof revision, it appears as though our domestic Kickstarter backers will have their copies sometime toward late July or early August, and the book will be available online as soon as our backers’ books are in the mail. Expect an update toward the end of this month on an exact date when the book will be available for purchase!
We’ve been quiet the last few weeks as we’ve been very busy working with Adam Jury on the initial layout of the book. Our efforts are paying off, and last week we got the first pass layout version of the entire core book! After all the time and effort that’s gone into getting it this far, seeing the whole book–even as a rough cut–in a single document was an exciting moment, and well worth an update. So here’s where we’re at:
Core Book Status 5.10.15
We still need to work on cleaning up pagination, making a few tweaks on art placement, and the like before we get final pagination and indexing complete, but this is a major milestone that shows we’re on track to have everything complete and ready to go to print in June.
Here are some sample pages from the book so you can get a sense of how things will look:
We hope you are as excited as we are!
Zeke & Than
Our schedule for Gen Con this year has 14 games over four days, with a total of 84 spots for players. Registration was opened this morning, and as of right now, there are five spots left available. We really want to thank our fans who jumped at the opportunity to play with us this year, and encourage those who haven’t yet played the game to snag those few remaining seats as fast as they can!
This year, the Core Rulebook will be available for sale. We will be sharing space with Postuhuman Studios at their exhibit, so stop by and check out their new Eclipse Phase products and buy copy of the new Clockwork: Dominion book!
The world turns,
Zeke & Than
We have just commissioned writing and artwork for the new adventure The Island of Dr. MacGuffin. The plot will revolve around a brilliant mad scientist (Dr. MacGuffin) and his life’s work of genetically and prosthetically enhancing penguins. Players will find themselves shipwrecked near his lab on the continent of Antarctica, and face off against the cute but deadly Steampunguins, who do the doctor’s bidding.
Can the players escape the deft flippers of the Steampunguins?
Will Dr. MacGuffin’s aquatic minions waddle their way to world domination?
Buy a copy of The Island of Dr. MacGuffin and find out for yourself. As a special sneak preview, here are just a few of the deadly antagonists that await any foolhardy enough to brave their icy fastness:
The Steampunguin Grunt are the early experiments of Dr. MacGuffin. Although they lack the versatility of his later creations they’re a serious threat in large numbers.
Supporting the ground troops Steampunguin Flyer can harry the field of battle, dropping bombs from above, or diving at foes with their vicious beaks.
An ominous figure looming behind the massed ranks of lesser steampunguins, The Emperor may pose too great of a challenge for even the bravest challengers…
(Artwork courtesy of Deviant Artist Pan77155, and used under the guidelines of Creative Commons).
f you haven’t heard from us in a while, it’s because we’ve been working behind the scenes. The last 90 days saw two conventions, and a slew of nearly completed artwork. The final versions of the art wont be available until we release the Core Book, but we thought we’d give you a bit of a taste of what’s been happening. The final versions of these paintings will be in full color, but for now, let’s whet your appetite.
First a rough sketch of the Changeling bloodline from Helen Mask.
Another sketch from Helen Mask, this time of the Nephilim bloodline. In the completed draft, the two figures will be manifested in different ways. The upper figure is orderly, while the lower figure is disorderly.
A landscape sketch by Michelle Mullen. She is the artist that did the artwork for the Clockwork Cards. When completed, this piece will depict “The Broken Road,” a path that winds through the Outer Reaches of creation beyond man’s domain.
The draft of a chapter splash draft by Ameen Naksewee. Ameen is the artist who painted the cover of the QSR and the beastfolk mechanic from the Kickstarter. His recent submissions have been even more amazing. Here he shows the “almost there” technology of automatons and the resentment felt toward them by the working class.
We’ll post more later. For now, we hope this gets you geared up for your imminent immersion into the Clockwork.
Zeke & Than
“An Empire has borders. An Empire serves a human being on a throne. Yet our duty extends to the ends of the Earth, and our calling is to serve something much greater than man. The Great Clockmaker has blessed us and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ If we are to push back the Pontus… If we are to preserve the Clockwork, then we must realize that the Empire is not enough. This is our destiny, and all of creation must become our Dominion.”
– excerpt from the monograph A Call for Just Dominion” by Sir Edward Herschel
Thanks to your support and the success of the Kickstarter, the Clockwork Roleplaying Game has gotten off to a fantastic start, and with the strong start has come a great deal more exposure. As things have grown in scope, we’ve found that there were several other creative ventures that used close variations on “clockwork empire” as part of their work, and in order to make sure that fans of our game and other creators’ works are all able to clearly and distinctly follow each project, we’re taking this as an opportunity to further refine ourgame’s identity. For consistency of reference, we’re formalizing the use of the Clockwork Roleplaying Game to refer to the entire range of the project.
To more fully tie in the setting into the cosmology of the Clockwork world and the ideology that helps drive the expansion of the British Empire into the narrative this setting and future supplements for it will be part of the Clockwork: Dominion line.
We have some long-term plans for where we hope to go with this project, and these changes to the names help our current work continue, and will put us in a better position for the future. Everything will remain exactly the same for our website – www.aclockworkworld.com – and our Facebook and Twitter names @AClockworkWorld. It may take a bit to get used to the name change, but we hope that you’ll agree with us that it’s an even better and more evocative fit for the setting.
In other news, we’ve gotten the majority of the backer survey responses, but we still need a few more. If you haven’t already, please respond to them right away, as we need the responses to make sure we have the correct count for cards and books, and to verify shipping addresses so we can get the order in for the cards this month. We want to get them out to you as soon as we can so you can start using the playtest materials when we send them out later this month.
Thank you! With you’re support we’ve blown past many major stretch goals and are we producing the 300+, full-color hardback core book, a kickstarter-exclusive design card deck, a new adventure, and 3 small supplements each exploring a different area of the setting and player options. All of that additional content is being added – for free! – to all backers of $20 and above. Right now we still have just over 13 hours left to go in our Kickstarter campaign and there’s more yet to come. As we announced in our last update, our next stretch goal will allow us to provide some additional content and prepare all of the unlocked pdfs as the first printed supplement to Clockwork. If we hit our next stretch goal at $26k, we’ll present all our Imperial Emigre backers and above with an opportunity to buy the [i]Cabinet of Curiosities[/i] at a discounted price before general release. All our stretch goals beyond $26k will go towards helping us add more Clockwork minis to our collaboration with Proxy Army.
We’re particularly excited to be working with Proxy Army (who just launched their own Kickstarter because working with them allows us an opportunity to design and develop miniatures for the unique aesthetic of Clockwork and make them available to all our players in high quality and at a great price. We’ll have a larger development post about our work with Proxy Army soon, but wanted to make sure you knew there’s so much more exciting Clockwork goodness coming up.
Thanks again to all our backers for their support, we can’t wait to share the game with you.
All the Best,
Zeke & Than
Our new friends over at SteampunkGoggles.com have posted an eloquent review of the Clockwork: Empire Roleplaying Game. I highly recommend you check out both their products and their review. I’ve been a longtime fan of Steampunk Goggles, and own a couple of their products myself. I have a real soft spot in my heart for artisans who are both skilled and passionate about what they do – so I love these people. We were floored when they agreed to review the game, and all the more when they reviewed it so well. This is a great opportunity for me to talk up a company in our genre that really deserves to be talked-up, and seems like a good time to explain about the use of goggles in the Clockwork world.
To be honest, in the very early stages of development, we were opposed to a heavy use of goggles. It can sometimes seem like the steampunk genre can be defined by slapping gears and goggles onto objects that in no way require them; and that seemed forced to us. Why would someone put goggles on a top hat at a dinner party? What purpose did that serve? The truth is that for most of the inhabitants of the Clockwork, goggles serve no more purpose than they do for people in our own world. Thus, most people don’t own or wear them. However, we quickly realized there would be a minority of people whose activities would require eye-protection: air-shipmen and airship pirates, scientists (mad or otherwise), those experimenting with electricity or alchemy, the explorers of harsh climates, inventors, people who use any sort of volatile experimental technology, pilots and drivers, and dozens of other endeavors where eye-safety is a matter of concern. Not only this, but the invention of advanced optics added doctors, and perhaps even some soldiers and investigators to the list. We quickly realized that, depending on your campaign style, this group of people can make up a disproportional percentage of player characters. So while the majority of people within the Clockwork don’t walk around with goggles on their hats, a fair percentage of player characters will have some on hand. So as we’ve moved from the beginning stages of development to nearing its completion, our stance on goggles has opened up considerably. If your character is involved in any of these optically dangerous activities, you might want to invest in some.
Wait? Why would anyone need a physical set of goggles for a tabletop roleplaying game? Could it be that there is a Live Action Role-Playing version of Clockwork: Empire on the horizon? Could it be that these LARP rules might even make it into the Core Rule Book as a brief appendix? Could it be that we’re actually planning to test these rules at upcoming conventions before we decide to make their existence known to the general public? Well, right now, there’s no real way to be sure (unless you’re us). So, I’ll not comment on that anymore.
In the meantime, let some of the artistic creations over at www.SteampunkGoggles.com inspire you to try something truly dangerous to your peepers.