WORD COUNT LIMITS AND FUTURE RELEASES FOR OGRE GATE

The Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate rulebook will be bigger than I expected initially, but we still have a hard word count cap that we need to abide by and that means some things won't make it into the final release. We are probably going to steer those things toward PDF releases. 

That said, the book is fairly substantial in terms of content, it includes all the core rules, character creation, sects, sample adventure, kung fu Techniques (and we are getting close to 200 of these now), equipment, NPCs, culture, history, gazetteer, monster section, GM section, appendix and the ritual chapter. 

In many ways we are trying to do just as much as we did with Sertorius (which was 500 pages) but in less space (300 pages or so). Basically the gazetteer will fully cover the southern frontier area (which is where players are expected to do most of their exploration). We include a map of the empire and some basic descriptions of it, but the focus is a place called The Banyan. This is fully described and labeled to encourage a kind of sandbox-style play. We also include a huge number of NPCs in the book to go along with the Banyan. However we couldn't include everyone we wanted to. There are a few masters we just don't have room for in the NPC chapter, so what we will probably do is release an NPC supplement down the road containing those a long with new threats for the party. Similarly the monster Chapter, while not small, isn't going to be the size of the monster chapter in Sertorius. This will be a more modest effort because monsters are simply not the focus of the game. 

One of the things we did in this book that we didn't do in Sertorius is include a sample adventure, which takes up considerable space. We also include a large sample dungeon in the Gazeteer section that is about 10,000 words (which is a lot because that could have been many, many NPCs and Monsters instead). In the end we felt it was very important to include the dungeon and the adventure, even though they brought us perilously close to our word count cap. 

While the book does have close to 200 techniques (we need to count since our last tally to see where we are exactly) we might also release technique supplements as well (these will be free if we do them). Ideally groups will use the underlying system to make their own techniques, but if folks want it, we are happy to create more. 

I will release further updates as we continue to make progress.