News

Winter is Coming!

Now that 2016 is over, we're anticipating the arrival of Winter. With no events to run for six months, this is when we get some time to relax. So after a couple of weeks, once we're thoroughly bored of relaxing, we start looking at what we can do to improve Empire for next year. Continual improvement is a core design concept for Empire, and we know that we need to lead the way if we want the game to live up to those lofty ambitions.

Winter is great for this - it's the only time of the year when we have the freedom to work on major projects to improve the game. The last two years that precious time has been largely consumed sorting sites for events. This year - with a site all sorted for 2017 - we can spend some time looking at what we can do to improve Empire.

A lot of the work will take place behind the scenes - our game team will look at the rules and see what improvements, if any, we can make to the game system. There are lots of rituals and magic items that see little use and some have become obsolete because of other rules changes. It's a big job but we're planning to go over these two big libraries to ensure that everything the players can make or cast has a place in the game.

Upgrade the Main Toilet Block

But there are two large projects that we'll need the winter time to work on. The first is our ongoing battle to improve our hygiene facilities. Many of our units have taken a battering with two site moves in the last twelve months and are urgently in need of replacement or overhaul. We have managed to deploy two brand new toilet blocks - but new blocks are very expensive and replacing them all is out of the question in the short term.

What is achievable is to upgrade the facilities that are stationed next to GOD. This block is used by our crew, as well as most of the players from nations like Urizen, Highguard, and the Marches. The unit there is not a patch on the two new blocks but many people use the closest unit regardless of what condition it is in.

So improving that facility there will produce a better event for a lot of players. What we don't yet know is what kind of improvement we can afford to make. Ideally we'd like to purchase a replacement unit - it wouldn't be new but it would be in much better condition. If we can't afford that, then we'll keep the existing unit and overhaul it instead. Whatever we decide, we need to make a start on that now - how good an improvement we can make will come down to our finances.

New Environment Tent System

The other big project we have lined up for the winter is a big upgrade to our environment tents. These are a set of tents set up in the crew area that we can dress to create different scenes. We use them for audiences with eternals - but we also use them for a lot of more mundane plot encounters when players travel through the Sentinel Gate. Some of you will already have experienced an encounter in one of our tents - encounters like the meeting with the rebellious Wintermark thane, or the battle in the Catazari bay against a Kraken!

Having the encounter tents allows us to create and run a lot more plot, as well as increasing the different kinds of plot we can run. What limits the use we can make of them is the time and effort required to dress the tents in preparation for each encounter. If we can improve this process then we can run more plot - and that's a win for everyone.

One of our game team has a really exciting plan to overhaul the way we use our encounter tents - creating some generic base settings that we can reuse. If we already have a generic cave set - then we can dress the tent for a cave encounter much more quickly if we only have to add the finishing touches for the scene. We'll get a better effect with less effort on the day - it just needs the initial investment to get the system off the ground. Like the hygiene block we need to make a final decision in the next few weeks on what we can afford to build this winter.

Why are we telling you this?

At the end of the year we always make a big appeal to players and ask anyone who can afford to book early to do so. We use the money from those early bookings to budget for the improvements that we are going to spend the winter making. The crude truth is that the more bookings we take in the next couple of weeks, then the more ambitious we can afford to be with our plans to improve the game next year.

Unfortunately our finances are particularly strained this year. Moving is expensive - moving twice in two years doubly so! Last year didn't matter as much because with all the site issues we just didn't have the time to be making major infrastructure improvements. But now that we've sorted the access on our new site by putting the road in, we want to turn our attention to improving other areas of the game this winter.

We Need Your Help!

To do that we need your help! We do appreciate that not everyone can book early - but if you can, then we'll be able to use your money to pay for significant improvements to our hygiene and plot infrastructure. We need to decide in November what we can afford to attempt this Winter, so the bookings in the next few weeks are crucial. If lots of players book early then it will make a real difference to what we can achieve this winter and help us to regain the momentum we lost with the dreadful weather at Easter.

We want to make the first event next year the best so far - right now the best way to help us achieve that is to book in the next few weeks!