In the wake of the OGL meltdown, and with progress on Aether and Aethermancy ahead of schedule, it’s time to announce another project for 2023. We will be releasing a second edition of our fantasy RPG Ingenium!
Way back in 2014, we did a Kickstarter for a second edition of Ingenium. We got as far as releasing review copies of the book to some people. The Kickstarter failed, but likely only because our dollar amount was overly ambitious. It had a ton of support. Still, in light of that failure, we regrouped and decided not to push Ingenium as heavily as our Savage Worlds and Aether books.
Fast forward to 2023. The company rose from the dead. Kevin and I gained another decade of experience designing and selling tabletop games. Wizards of the Coast decided to destroy the third-party Dungeons & Dragons publishing community in the most dramatic way possible.
Since I finished the Aether 2023 edition manuscript earlier than expected, I found myself with free time. I dusted off the old Ingenium Second Edition manuscript. After a read through it, I decided to scrap the whole thing. It added too many systems and deviated too much from the original. Instead, we will release a second edition of Ingenium that hews much closer to the original rules.
I cleaned up the discrepancies in the original edition. This included references to old mechanics. Some Talents that were clearly broken needed reworking. Quite a few Attribute pairings for Traits were missing. I fixed a ton of typos. I clarified a number of rules that were too vague. Races were renamed heritages and decoupled from behavior. If that’s where I stopped, though, that would just be a second printing, rather than a second edition.
Content additions in Ingenium second edition
The new edition also adds the setting chapters from the original second edition. It includes monster stats for a number of common fantasy monsters. New heritages from the original second edition are in there. The advancement process is more streamlined. And with all of this, it changes the core mechanics and gameplay as little as possible.
At the time of writing this post, the second edition manuscript is more than half complete. The cover artist for the original edition, Aaron Nakahara, is on tap to do a new but familiar cover for the second edition. Two pieces that Eric Lofgren did for us for the original but that were left unused will be making their way into the new edition. I’ll be doing a fair amount of artwork for the new edition, too.
So then. Ingenium Second Edition is coming this year. We’re shooting for a Q3 release. In future posts, I’ll go into detail on some of the new content that is in the new edition. I’ll also reveal some of our plans for supporting books. Keep an eye out!