Hi,
Hopefully I can resolve your questions.
Fantasy Triumph is under development. The announcement was about _development_, not about it being actually available.
The timeline as planned last January/February was (very approximately):
- Battle Cards are currently in beta test. Release was planned possibly before the end of the year.
- Fantasy Triumph is in development. Alpha test was planned possibly before the end of the year.
- Campaign Book 1 is in development. Sending it to the editor is currently planned around October.
Sadly, Coronavirus has had an impact on us. We have been unable to get together to play and wrangle (we wrangle on biweekly meetings through Zoom, but that isn't as productive as getting to playtest the game and wrangle about play). We have been doing some alpha testing of Fantasy Triumph using Inkscape. But the major testbed for alpha testing and beta testing over the last several years has been the big East Coast US historical gaming conventions -- Fall In, Cold Wars, and Historicon. And since Covid19, those conventions have been cancelled. This has slowed the pace of some projects, as we have little to no feedback from players on alpha and beta testing.
Battle Cards is the big active thing -- we had hoped that there would be a lot of feedback on them in this calendar year before we finalize them by the end of the year. Sadly, Covid19 has had a huge negative impact upon our ability to run battle card stuff at conventions (alpha testing) and the number of people playing Triumph using the battle card rules outside our direct influence (beta testing). Our artist is finished with about 1/3 of the artwork so far, which is still on schedule for an end-of-year release date.
The Campaign Book hasn't been slowed as much. The first book is largely complete rough-draft. Work remaining is as follows (in no particular order):
- Maps are roughed out; we're finalizing choices of colors and style. Rod and I are working on them.
- Army lists, campaign design, and intro text for every campaign are finished.
- Overall campaign rules and how to run a campaign is roughed out. DS and I are working on them.
- Pictures and color art (beyond the maps) is a bit of a problem because of Covid19 -- Jack is beginning experiments with taking pictures outside (natural sunlight) rather our system of a lightbox that we used for the miniatures and pictures in the printed rulebook.
Fantasy Triumph depends heavily upon Battle Cards. We have a rough draft of the rules for all the major parts:
- Abilities (battle cards, mostly, with some expansion for abilities not existing historically)
- Magic
- Flight
- Characters (individuals potent enough to actually influence the course of a battle of 10,000 combatants on a side. No, that is not Gimli or Legolas)
The level of how "rough" each draft is depends. Abilities (fantasy battle cards) is pretty well completed. Flight is also good and has had quite a bit of testing, although that's no guarantee that it won't get tweaked some more before release. Magic and Character rules have been drafted but not tested. If you have any questions about any of these, as me -- I'm the principal investigator for Fantasy Triumph.
Since I'm also (one of the) major contributors for the Campaign Book, Fantasy Triumph has been put a little on the back burner while I was working on it. Since my part of the campaign book is mostly finished now (army lists, campaign design, intro text) I'm hoping to have more time to devote to this project for the rest of the summer. We'll see.
Let me know if you have any questions.
