Game Arts Guild

The Game Arts Guild is a game development team. We have worked on both computer games and tabletop role-playing games. Learn about our latest RPG books and upcoming projects here. Contact us through the Game Arts Guild Discord server.

News

June 2024: FINALLY Squawk 2nd Edition!

We are exited to announce that you can now finally buy Squawk 2nd Edition core rule book in hardcover or PDF on DriveThruRPG.com. This book hundreds of color images, the Abbadon setting and the Eye For An Eye Campaign that are not found in the Squawk RPG sysem resource document. The Squawk RPG is about dinosaurs taken from Earth before their extinction and modified to become intelligent settlers of far away worlds. It uses the easy to learn system from the Resilience RPG. Get the PDF for free when you order the hardcover Squawk 2nd Edition book!

May 2024: Resilience Book now available

We are exited to announce that you can now buy the Resilience RPG core rule book in hardcover or PDF on DriveThruRPG.com. This book contains 3 additional scenarios and hundreds of color images that are not found in the Resilience RPG sysem resource document. The Resilience RPG takes place in today's world were player characters face contemporary emergencies, but the Resilience RPG system is also used in the soon to be released 2nd Editions of both The Dark Woods RPG and Squawk. Get the PDF for free when you order the hardcover Resilience RPG book!

April 2024: Stick Fight

Benjamin was in a stick fight recently, seen here in the deer camo:

1st Quarter 2024: Proofs

We have full color proofs, both hardcover and paperback, for both Resilience RPG and Squawk 2nd Edition, cluttering up our workspace. We anticipate releasing both of these products (finally) before the end of the Summer of this year. It seems likely Resilience RPG will be released first simply because it is much shorter book, as Squawk 2nd Edition is over 300 pages long. There is a 2nd Edition of The Dark Woods that could potentially be complete this year as well. All three books use the Resilience core rules and have many more images than our previous books.

2023: "Fantasy RPG"

Game Arts Guild team member Seth Galbraith was distracted by the recent OGL controversy, (as we have been working on a side project that is compatible with the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules,) while he was laid up from a kidney stone for a month. Unable sit or to touch type on his keyboard to work on Squawk 2E, he made a new version of 5th Edition D&D on his phone. "Fantasy RPG" is the official Game Arts Guild version of the 5th Edition rules, and we feel it is a signficant improvement over all, as Seth fixed many things about 5th Edition that have annoyed us over the years.

2022: Squawk 2nd Edition almost done?

In 2022, we worked really hard on Squawk 2nd Edition. Tons and tons of hours, most of our spare time, completely neglecting this website. Still working on it in 2023, we will be done very soon?

2021: www.ResilienceRPG.com

As a byproduct of working on Squawk 2nd Edition for the last several years we have produced a role playing game system we call "Resilience" (www.ResilienceRPG.com.) It is set in the modern day world as a sort of contingency-management tool for emergency preparedness, but it is designed to adapt to other settings as well (obviously, as we are using it for Squawk 2nd Edition.)

2020: Game Night

We keep a "game night" group going, where we test out various tabletop games, and often test out new ideas we have. Without such a group, it would be impossible for us to test changes in projects we are currently developing, but it also means we accumulate completely finished game prototypes that may never see the light of day (because coming up with a funcitonal game prototype is about 5% of the work needed to get a product completed and ready for a customer to buy.)

So we thought we would try our hand at 3D Printing, since we have some decent 3D Artists here at the Game Arts Guild, if for no other reason than to help us develop game prototypes. We got a 3D printer with a good reputation, an Ender 3, but we were in for quite a suprise for how much work goes into 3D printing. It took about a week to put the printer together correctly. Then it took about another week to get the bed leveled so that anything would print out of the printer at all. Then it took about another week to figure out that G-Code slicing is the main skill involved in 3D Printing. We never did get around to trying to print out one of our own models before we decided to stop wasting our time and get back to work on Squawk 2E. We did get some insight into why little plastic models are designed the way they are.

4th Quarter 2019: Squawk RPG Field Guide

We have been working on a new feature for the Squawk RPG 2nd Edition, which is a "field guide" section for Game Masters. This will make it easier to look up enemies for PCs as well as the effects of enviornmental conditions, so that GMs can more easily make their own campaigns istead of only using the one that comes in the book.

3rd Quarter 2019: Blender 2.8

Blender 2.8 is a historical release that massively improves Blender 3D's usability. This is a big deal to us (for example the space ship graphics in Squawk 2nd Ed were made in Blender):

2nd Quarter 2019: Spring Tipon

Lots of testing and retesting behind closed doors. We did attend the 2019 PNW Warrior Tipon Tipon however...

1st Quarter 2019: Snowocalypse

We had a lot of personal time consuming stuff come up over the last half dozen months that severely impeded our ability to work on projects. (It's possible one of our key members might be finnishing up yet another academic certification.) Adminttedly we have been doing a lot more self-care stuff like martial arts latetly, so we can be mentally available for game development later. But officially, we are blaming our slow product development all on the weather:

October 2018: Squawk Tweeks

Significant updates to Squawk:

Focus is now highest defense - 10. If you use expertise you get +5. If you use another ability it is only +2.
Maximum Coordination is Focus + 2.
"Intelligence" (int) is now "Perception" (per).
"Rest Dice" have been added to the rules and the character sheet. (1d6 for every 6 toughness, minimum 1d6.)
By design, templates now have less abilities than they used to.
Templates have built-in abilities and "options." Options are abilities that additional character points can be spent on.
There is now a universal limit for character stats in relation to their templates. Character defesnes can't be higher than 5 over the template default, and character toughness and power can't be more than double the template default.
There is no longer a cap on ability ranks (except for the ability who's ranks only go up to 2.)

September 2018: Web Page Update

We have a new web page look that is intentionally less experimental and more like what you would expect out of a web page in 2018. There are two important functional differences with this new design:

Individual projects (like Mano a Mano and Squawk RPG) are have their own " search" feature.
Individual parts of projects are now linkable. If you copy the URL at the top of one of our projects, that URL will take you back to the same place you go the URL from.

Summer Fun 2018

Most of the work we have been doing on the Squawk RPG 2nd Edition lately has been on image placement, as in where images should go in relation to the text. We have been digging around in our old archives of Squawk images to see what things we should include in the 2nd Edition that we didn't include in the first edition. For example here is an image that might not make it into 2nd Edition:

February and March 2018

We've been very busy over the last few months, working on image placement for Squawk 2nd Edition, and preparing for the annual Warrior Tipon Tipon North West. Here's how we did:

January 2018 Summary

Playtested a unnamed project using the Mano a Mano system, concluded we need to add rest dice (the amount of hit points you recover when you take a short rest) to Mano a Mano (and thus Squawk 2E.)
Worked on our open document generation code (for PDF export) working for Squawk 2E.

Holidays 2017

November & December are usually not very productive months for the Game Arts Guild. In addition to finalizing Squawk RPG 2E graphics we have been working on a new web site design.

October 2017

We are finishing up graphics for the Squawk Role-Playing Game 2nd Edition. We have been working on a few other projects behind closed doors, but we don't want to get into explaining any of that until we are done finally rolling out Squawk 2E.

September 2017

This image is from October 2014, just after we finished the rough draft of Squawk 2nd Edition, which we still are not quite yet ready to release. It is interesting that the majority of our regular testers are still featured in this picture:

2017 July & August: Tres Espadas

We were busy road tripping through the forrest fire smoke of the Western Washington summer, introducing Tres Espadas to some old friends, and otherwise doing Tres Espadas stuff. We are now resuming work on Squawk RPG 2nd Edition.

2017.06.30: Squawk RPG 2E Character Generator

Our Squawk RPG 2E Character Generator seems to work well on Chrome on the PC and in Android. It has many features to enjoy, so check it out!

2017.05.09: Friend's project on Kickstarter

One of our playtesters has a brother who has an interesting card game project on Kickstarter:t

2017.04.30: Minor Adjustments

The changes we have been making to Squawk 2nd Edition over the last month have been minor and superficial. This includes using certain abbreviations, capitalizing abbreviations, using less verbiage in the key words and adding "focus", which is simply a pre-calculated stat for something we used to have players add up each time PCs used it in events. No game mechanics changes, but usability changes that make the system slightly easier to implement.

2017.03.08: Website Content Update

On this website (www.GameArtsGuild.com), the Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Beta Document and the Mano a Mano Role-Playing System Reference Document have both been updated to MaM 2017 (and now the only place you can find the 2016 version is on DriveThruRPG. Soon 2017 will be the only MaM RPS on DriveThruRPG well.)

2017.02.10: WARNING for MaM 2016 fans

We are now in the process of replacing all of MaM 2016 with MaM 2017. Right now the only place we know of you can get MaM 2016 is by downloading MaM 2016 from DriveThruRPG. Soon that will no longer be an option, so if you want a copy of MaM 2016, get one now because we are moving on to MaM 2017 and wiping MaM 2016 from the face of the Earth.

2017.01.05: S2E gets MaM 2017

We have decided to update Squawk 2nd Edition with Mano a Mano 2017 before we publish it. This will require a minor re-write and last second playtesting. So for all of you who have been holding your breath for S2E since 2015... sorry...

2016.12.26: Plain English

In the latest versions of the Mano a Mano RPS, we have strived to use the "normal" words used by other RPGs to describe the system. In that spirit, we have changed "Background" to "Template," and "Unused Character Points" to "Action Points."

2016.12.16: Old Versions of Role-Playing Systems

We have open source role-playing systems that we use to develop products. If you want to find an old version of one of our role playing systems, go find the last product that used it. (Orignial Scratch RPS was used in 1st Edition Squawk RPG, more mature version used in The Dark Woods RPG.)

2016.11.30: Slow Progress on Squawk 2E

Progress has been slow as usual on Squawk 2nd Edition, and it looks like we won't have it on sale in time for the holidays. However it is still inching along and should be done soon. Here is a graphic we have been working on for the book in Blender 3D:

2016.10.31: Three Body Problem

Unfortunately we have nothing to report on the progress of the Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. However most of us did happnen to get through most of the Three Body Problem trilogy (aka "Remembrance of Earth's Past", by Liu Cixin). Definitely some interesting similarities, with the "no faster than light," "life in not so distant star systems," bleak outlook and dark humor themes found in both Remebrance of Earth's Past and Squawk. All similarities aside they are extremely entertaining books, Cixin's masterpiece is one of our favorite sci-fi trilogies of all time.

2016.09.30: Direction of Mano a Mano in 2017

The shape Mano a Mano takes is entirely dependent on what people are using it for. It is currently optimized for the Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Our next RPG is likely to be Resilience, a project we've been thinking about seriously for several years now. This is likely to lead to random damage only, having the following results:

When dealing with more realistic human characters, it will reduce to suspension-of-disbelief problem inherant in Mano a Mano's current reliance on "power." Power "3d6+1" makes more sense for a character using both machete and shotgun attacks (as some imagine even a very sharp machete might not be as lethal as a shotgun), than simply "3" does (which suggests both weapons always do identical damage without abilities).
There will be a new character point scale, which will put slightly less emphasis on Power and Toughness (making defenses reletively slightly more valueable. As you get towards the end of the campaign that comes with Squawk 2nd Ed. character defenses can get so high that it is very hard for the NPCs to attack them.)
There are some other optional rules that may become standard and not optional, simplifying the system by having less optional parts. (The Grid system is the one optional rule that is likely to remain optional.)

2016.08.11: August 2016 Squawk Update

The following changes have been made to the Squawk RPG SRD on this website:

In the character generator a few minor bugs have been fixed, abilities can be filtered by category, and the backgrounds list CP value.
In Characters/Derived Statistics, Coordination modifier also applies to non-attack encounter actions like release and Defense modifier only applies to the difficulty of attacks.
In Missions/Resting, if you are dying at the end of a failed encounter and survive, you usually play dead and get away like characters who escape during the encounter.
In Setting/Spacecraft, Maia Cosmoraptor change from “fighter bomber” to rocketplane, Nereid Devilray changed laser to maser, Solar Guard Fortress removed “multiple redundant fuel stores,” and Trydeen Sporecraft are single stage launch vehicles, mostly hollow when they reach orbit, and land with a combination of aerobraking and thrusters.
In the Campaign:
- In the Jungle encounter, Ancient Pyramid encounter, Stampeded Encoutner and Reinforcements event there are various typos that have been corrected.
- Escape victory has been added to the Warlord Arena encounter.
- Dive and Fly abilities can be used in the Polar Hunters encounter.
- Rules for adjusting the difficulty of Encounters when more or less players show up have been added to the Campaign/Opening section

2016.07.08: Optional Rules - Unused CP & Random Damage Update

These optional rules have only been updated here on the website, they have not been updated in the DriveThruRPG PDF yet:

Random damage has been updated so that random damage power can have a +1 or a +2 (so that power could be for example "1d6+2" or "3d6+1" or just "2d6.") See Mano a Mano 2016 Characters/Derived Statistics/Random Damage.
These more gradual increments of power can still leave some interesting fluxuations in character points. We now have another optional rule for being able to use "unused character points" in a similar way to how some other RPGs might use "action points." See Mano a Mano 2016 Characters/Training and Upgrades/Unused CP.

2016.06.15: Character Points vs. Levels

As many of you have likely been enjoying Mano a Mano 2016 (MaM) along side 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, you have probably been wondering "how many character points (CP) are equal to a 5th-Ed.-D&D-or-Pathfinder-level (level)?"

The answer is this: 1st level characters are worth about 95 character points in MaM. Each additional level after 1st level is worth about 15 MaM character points. So a 2nd level character would be worth about 110 character points, a 3rd level character worth about 125 character points, 4th level would be 140 CP and so on.

The reason for this is that in MaM after 90 CP, the formidability of characters doubles every 30 CP. So in MaM, a 120 CP character is an equal match to two 90 CP characters. It appears to us that a D&D character is a match for two D&D chracters that are two levels lower (so that for example a 3rd level character would be an equal match for two 1st level characters.) We estimate most 1st level characters are worth 95 CP in MaM. Then we add 30 CP for every two additional levels, 15 CP at a time.

(Based on the 2004 Edition of GURPS Lite, we speculate that it is something similar for the value of levels in GURPS character points, but would defer to someone from Wizzards of the Coast or Steve Jackson Games for a reliable opinion on that.)

2016.05.04: Mano a Mano Role-Playing System 2016 Edition

Today we released the 2016 version of the Mano a Mano Role-Playing System that we have been using to make the 2nd Edition of the Squawk RPG. Like Mano a Mano on Facebook and ask us any questions you may have about this project in the Mano a Mano Google+ Community.

Pay what you want for Mano a Mano

2016.04.21: Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Public Beta Test Concluded

We are officially concluding the public beta test of the 2nd Edition of the Squawk Role-Playing Game. If you have any more feed back from beta testing, please send it to us immediately, we are wrapping up this phase of development.

2016.03.30: Pay what you want for The Dark Woods RPG

Our price for The Dark Woods RPG was understandably unpopular. We have changed the price to "pay what you want."

2016.02.29: Working on Mano a Mano 2016, Squawk RPG 2nd Editon

We are now close to rolling out Mano a Mano 2016. Once we do that we'll be working on the final page layouts for Squawk RPG 2nd Edition.

2016.01.27: Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Public Beta Update #7

Many recent updates to the Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Beta and Mano a Mano RPS:

In the Squawk campain, the "base of operations" has been clarified for each mission.

Minor bugs have been fixed in the character generators.

Minor features have been tweaked in the character generators.

Minor errors were fixed with the backgrounds in the Mano a Mano campaign.

Both now have a training and upgrades subsection of Making PCs.

Mano a Mano has an introduction section that among other things gives suggestions for reuse.

Background Design in Mano a Mano includes an average human background "for scale," and then a couple of short paragraphs explaining the defense, coordination, toughness and power scales.

In both Squawk and Mano a Mano Background Design is now part of the Game Master section.

There are other minor structural changes in the chapters and sections.

2016.01.22: Squawk RPG 2nd Ed. Public Beta Update #6

Two big updates here for the Public Beta Test of the Squawk RPG 2nd Ed.:

The Chracters/Backgrounds section has been combed over to remove excess abilities, because in testing we found long ability lists to be inconvenient.

The Characters/Training and Upgrades section has been massively modified and updated, and now includes suggestions for how to develop characters based on their backgrounds.

Older News

News from 2010 through 2015

News from before 2010