Interview - 23rd Century Productions - Savage Battlelords TTRPG Kickstarter

Today I chat with 23rd Century Productions - David Soruco, Anthony Oliviera and Kurt Willis.

We discuss the Kickstarter Booster for Savage Battlelords TTRPG and its 2nd printing, Battlelords of the 23rd Century, Savage Worlds game system and much more.

You can find 23rd Century Productions and all of their associated content via the links below.

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BattlelordsRPG

Website:
www.battlelords.com

Other:
info@23rdcentury.net
https://bit.ly/BattlelordsYouTube
https://www.instagram.com/battlelords_of_the_23rdcentury/
https://www.facebook.com/Battlelords/
https://bit.ly/BLatDTRPGhttps://bit.ly/3aNiXSJ
https://bit.ly/BLords
https://bit.ly/BLords
https://bit.ly/SBLSpeciesQuiz

Calibration Tools:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/114jRmhzBpdqkAlhmveis0nmW73qkAZCj

Please leave reviews on ITunes to help us to learn and grow as a Podcast

Yours Sincerely,

Adam 'Cosy' Powell

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CAST & CREW

Host: Adam Powell

Guest: Anthony Oliviera / Kurt Willis / David Soruco

Sound Design: Adam Powell
Edited by: Adam Powell
Music: Epidemic Sound

Cover Art: Tim Cunningham - www.Wix.com

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Transcript

Adam Powell (00:03.434)
Hello and welcome to Snyder's Return, a tabletop roleplay podcast. My guests today take our hand, outfit us in highly customized armor and transport us to the savage world in the 23rd century. Here to form an alliance, squash arachnids, spend a weekend at Uncle Bernie's and be my companion in all this carnage. Our managers and counsel of 23rd century productions, Tony Oliviera, Kurt Willis and David Soruco. Thank you all for joining me.

Kurt (00:38.402)
Thank you for having us.

Tony Oliveira (00:38.443)
Thanks for having us.

David (CDO) (00:38.704)
Thank you for having us.

Adam Powell (00:40.714)
It's a genuine pleasure, guys. So I suppose the question I would like to understand is how each of you got into tabletop role -playing games and how you came together to form 23rd century productions, please.

Tony Oliveira (00:57.163)
My name is Tony Olivera. I got into tabletop role -playing. Ooh, that was a long time ago. I would have been in the early 80s, and it was Dungeons and Dragons, because it was probably the only thing around at that point. And I quickly decided that wasn't my genre the minute I saw games like Cyberpunk. And I've been in the sci -fi tabletop space ever since.

David (CDO) (01:29.04)
And I'll jump in, I guess. David Sorruco. My call sign is CDO. That's OCD in the proper alphabetical order, as it should be. And when I got into games, you'd think that 80s was early. No, no, no. I feel like I'm going to be in the skit for Yorkshire men. No, no. Back in my day, we had D &D back in the mid 70s, so about 78, 77, somewhere about there. The original.

Adam Powell (01:29.706)
Yes, please.

David (CDO) (01:57.744)
basic edition and the original little pamphlet sized booklets from the original release of Dungeons & Dragons before they had the advanced edition players handbook come out. So that was all kinds of fun. And then also played the original edition of Travelers in a nice box set with a nice Mayday Mayday in front. And that kind of hooked me. It was also kind of fun because you could get into that game, start a character, only to have it die or age out, to start all over again. So it had some interesting quirks.

and you could cover all sorts of grounds in the future. That was kind of cool. And then from there, Brandon Duttoni in college, and that's when he introduced me to this fun. And we got into what we call classic Battle Lords now and all the crazy excess that comes with it.

Kurt (02:43.81)
All right, Kurt Wallace, I've been in gaming pretty much since the early 80s.

Adam Powell (02:43.818)
Amazing. And Kurt, please.

Kurt (02:51.522)
started with the D &D box set and went on from there, did a lot of D &D and then like Tony, cyber bunk come out, got into Shadowrun, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of my favorites too back in the day and played things like Star Finders way back in the day and then dipped a toe into Battle Tech and some of that as far as without miniatures.

And then ran into these guys at the martial arts studio and found some kindred souls. And here we are playing the games and making them now together. So, I've been in battle lords since what? Mid, late nineties, Tony?

Tony Oliveira (03:37.323)
Yeah, would have been probably 90... You got in, it would have been mid to late 90s, 96, 97, somewhere in there.

Kurt (03:48.226)
Yeah. So been playing it a while.

Adam Powell (03:53.61)
Yeah, so each of you sort of have seemed to sort of, starting time not standing, sort of moved away from the fantasy, the high fantasy, and really found your niche in the sci -fi genre. Martial Arts Club, great place to meet. Can't argue with that. So having sort of found this affinity, this combined joy, what was your inspiration to form 23rd century productions? What?

What was the inspiration to begin the production of the classic battlelords?

Tony Oliveira (04:31.467)
I had been playing Battlelord since third edition, which would have been about 1991 -ish. It came out in 1990. It's 34 years old. And we're the third company to helm the brand. The first company was the creator, Larry Sims in ODS Systems. And then second company was SSDC, that was Larry's web designer and art director who took over the helm from him when he retired.

In about 2016, Mike and Aaron who ran SSDC contacted me and they said, we're tired, understandably. It had been almost 20 years at that point of running Battlelords, the company. And they said, we're ready to throw in the towel. And they didn't know what to do with it. And we had been playing and I'd actually been helping write some of the books at that point. And so I contacted these guys and...

kind of did a star lord said hey I have part of a plan would you guys like in on this and they foolishly said yes and that's that's how we find ourselves here today.

David (CDO) (05:38.992)
And then Tony and I, when we played together in college, we probably have the distinction, possibly infamy, of having the most questions for the FAQ. We took it to GenCon one year, printed it out, tape bound it, and asked them to sign this new book. We got some commentary from them. They were good -humored about it, but, you know, they did razz us a bit in the signatures.

Adam Powell (05:54.634)
Oh wow.

Adam Powell (06:03.69)
Happy with that. Happy with that. That's I mean, fair play, fair play. So Battle Lords of the 23rd century became your property, became 23rd century productions, I do apply those 23rd century productions property. And it hasn't stagnated. You've you've continued to evolve and are continuing to involve the game. What has it been like to sort of keep the game refreshed and bringing it forward, which kind of brings us around to the topic of this?

this interview, this discussion.

David (CDO) (06:35.76)
I'll jump in and start kind of in the in the classic space and then Tony and Kurt feel free to kind of jump in on the transition towards Savage if that works So yeah, so as I said Tony and I we first were playing and he introduced me to the game We really looked at all these different things that we thought would you know make the game a little better tweaks to the rules tweaks the way things worked and just trying to get some consistency around interpretations of how things worked And then some common questions like this is a science fiction game, right? Yeah

So should the science fiction game have, I don't know, spaceships? So needless to say, that kind of bothered me since I started in Travelers, and that was one of the first things you got to do is tinker about and make your own ships and things like that. I thought, well, OK, I'm going to make something. So I did my own little homegrown thing. So I had some interest in that and then decided I wanted to make my own types of weapons. So I started doing that. And so kind of fiddle and fiddle and fiddle. And when this opportunity came along, it's like, well, I think we have some ideas we might be able to.

integrate here. And then we started thinking about, well, there's more than one way to run this. So where do we go from here? And that's when we started looking at Savage.

Tony Oliveira (07:48.619)
At the, with the seventh, with the classic, what we call classic Battle Lords, original Battle Lords is now in its seventh edition. And our goal with that was really just to streamline it and simplify it while keeping everything that makes Battle Lords Battle Lords. But with, once we've kind of gotten that done, we started, like Dave said, we started looking at other game systems and it was kind of a no brainer, particularly now, I guess in hindsight, now.

uh... no brainer to choose savage the whole point of that game is fast, fun, and furious battle orge is over the top to begin with and savage also has a lot of flexibility savage worlds in terms of how it handles game mechanics and when you're representing everything from mechanized battle armor to cybernetically enhanced aliens

uh... spaceships vehicles you need something that's this flexible and uh... it fit all our needs and it was open source so we could use the system and that's where we started to uh... to develop set what we call savage battle or to which is the uh... battle or setting for the savage world's rules

Adam Powell (09:00.138)
Mmm.

Kurt (09:05.474)
And the main reason we wanted to go that route is we were looking at it. I mean, Battle Lords, we love the system, especially with the changes and updates that we've done to it. But.

You know, we've got 30 years of history and nobody knows about this game. It's got a small hardcore following. So we wanted to kind of get the idea out, use that 30 years of history to kind of branch out and get new players in it. And so Savage Worlds is fast growing. It's got a lot of players. So we're like, Hey, let's, let's port it over there so they can enjoy this massive backstory that that's in Battle Lords and you know, have fun with the.

tons of equipment, monsters, all that kind of stuff that are in it. So that was a big portion of it.

David (CDO) (09:53.168)
Yeah, and then as part of our intent, we really wanted to keep the rule set of Savage Worlds wherever possible. We really wanted to fit within it rather than fit it within our system, and so that was a really intentional decision to really wherever possible, even if we had to contort things for the way we would have done things in the classic space, contort things so they actually work just fine within the Savage context so that you can broadly just start with the Savage rule book and most of the things that we've got do work.

Adam Powell (10:00.01)
Hmm.

David (CDO) (10:21.712)
or like we have, we'll call them spell -like abilities. They're called matrices in our context, but they work like special powers or spells or whatever. And Savage has a perfectly acceptable list. I don't think we had to add very many, keep me honest there, guys. Right, so we didn't change, we have little tweaks around the edges to make it fit within our context, but broadly, it's Savage.

Adam Powell (10:31.626)
Hmm.

Tony Oliveira (10:35.531)
Three. Three.

Adam Powell (10:44.938)
Yeah.

David (CDO) (10:46.256)
where we really tweaked things quite a bit more was really around the armor and the weapons. That is really uniquely Battle Lords. It's probably the only game system that really your armor almost becomes a little like a second character in a sense. It really has a lot of things that you have to be aware of and think about. You don't just willingly grab something, oh, I'm going to suit a chain. I'm good.

Adam Powell (11:11.466)
Yeah, there is an incredible amount of customization. And as you say, the Savage World system, which is fun in of itself, both within its game mechanics and its fun, fast, and fluid playing style and sort of enjoyment in that respect, seem to perfectly dovetail the two together. And this Kickstarter that's going on, this isn't like a Kickstarter to get battle lords off the ground. As you say, this is a 34 -year -old

IP or a whole ecosystem around which the game has established itself with the fan base you've mentioned. This Kickstarter, it's mentioned on the Kickstarter page, is a booster. So what is the purpose of the Kickstarter that is up and sort of running at the moment? The time of recording? Well, tell us more about the Kickstarter.

Tony Oliveira (12:07.179)
The the Kickstarter is for the second printing of the Savage Battlelords books. There are three well four now but We probably underestimated the number of Savage Worlds players out there and the demand for the product and We found ourselves in a unique situation where within a month of receiving the books They were all gone

So we had to print more. So this is a booster Kickstarter to help us get a kind of a better idea about how many books we need to print for the second print run. And while we're doing that, we're going to fix all the errors and typos that we found in the first print run. And we've set it up so that if you just missed a book or two the first time around, you can grab them. Or if you're totally new to the game, this is a great time to pick it up.

Adam Powell (13:08.298)
Absolutely. So before I dive into more of the content and what's involved with the Kickstarter or the booster as it really is.

Where can we find battle, where can we find yourselves? Where can we find 23rd century productions and battle lords as a game, as it were?

Tony Oliveira (13:35.115)
uh... in terms of social media presence uh... we're on most not all they keep adding new ones i can't keep up uh... but we're on uh... we're pretty active on twitter uh... we have uh... facebook page we have a facebook discussion group uh... david curter very active on our company discord which is probably the best place to chat with us uh... we have an instagram account and there's our web page battlelords dot com

Adam Powell (13:37.994)
Absolutely, yes please.

David (CDO) (14:04.112)
Yeah, I would really encourage people if they're curious about the game, really interested in the ideas, keen to play, keen to understand how we do things, reach out. We get all kinds of questions in both Classic and Savage. How would you handle X? And some of these questions are perfunctory. Hey, yeah, this is in the rules, blah, blah. But a number of them are like, well, OK, here's an oddball situation. Could you do this? Well, yeah, it'd be a bit of a trick, but you can pull that off. And here's what you might do. You could do it this way. You could do it that way.

And there's some things where people like and I prefer to do it this way is okay great And we encourage people to house rules like at the end of the day if you're not having fun You know, what's the point? So we definitely set step in is like this is if you want to do it kind of the canon way Here's ways you can make it more crunchy if you like crunch Here's how you could do it kind of less crunchy if you want to just kind of blow through this but get some of the feel And if you want to house rule it here's some fun tweaks you could do but be careful and we'll tell people This is why we've done it this way in classic or savage

And if you're tinkering with this, here are the implications of tinkering. So you know if this is likely to really mess with something critical or if it's really just for feel. If you don't want this kind of a feel, you want a different feel, you're not really going to destroy things. But if you change how armor works, that's going to have some significant changes in how things work. And it'll affect the effectiveness of weapons. It'll affect the way that you're going to have to deal with critters that are created for Adlords who are designed to go through set armor.

And so part of the thing we also tell people is, and Tony, you're going to have to jump in here. It's around when people bring savage player characters from other settings into this. This is a little more lethal and gritty than most people are used to. Tony, you want to talk to that?

Tony Oliveira (15:48.267)
Yeah, Savage Battlelords, because the alien species, you can play over a dozen alien species in Battlelords, and they each have their unique abilities. And representing those abilities in Savage Worlds essentially makes them seasoned characters from the get -go. So that's the first kind of gotcha that we warned Savage Worlds players about. Your starting players are a little stronger than you're going to be used to.

Adam Powell (16:17.386)
Hmm.

Tony Oliveira (16:17.675)
The other one is because Battle Ords is essentially futuristic infantry armored combat, that's kind of our tagline, bringing futuristic infantry armored combat to Savage Worlds, characters do not last long without their armor, and it's designed that way. Like Dave said, your armor, character's armor is almost a second character. It's customizable, you can outfit it however you want. And...

we have to make savage worlds players aware of this is in all of the books so it's not a secret if you come in and you're running around essentially street clothes even if you're a veteran character the the pulse cannon doesn't care you're going to have a bad day even with the bennies so uh... you get get a suit of armor just because you're a veteran character does not mean you can take on the biggest baddie in the game unarmored and win

Adam Powell (16:50.634)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (16:58.538)
No.

Adam Powell (17:14.89)
Hmm. Anyone? Yeah.

David (CDO) (17:16.112)
For reference that would be the sucks to be you and if you run into one it definitely sucks to be you Your best bet is to run away quietly because frankly it may not notice you if you shoot it You'll draw its attention and that's usually not a good thing

Adam Powell (17:30.634)
Relying on plot armour is not a good idea, I'm getting. So you mentioned... Sorry, go on.

David (CDO) (17:34.768)
That'd be correct.

Kurt (17:35.938)
And that's, I was going to say, and not only, you know, the weapons and armor in the system are kind of over the top, but so is the metal clip gear. So if you get blown away and you know, the only things left is, you know, your head, you're actually good. They can grow your new body or they can just slap you on a, uh, you know, give you a cybernetic body and you know, you can walk out the door shortly. So, uh,

Understand just because you think in normal savage worlds that you're dead and battle lords We can we can rebuild you better stronger faster

David (CDO) (18:11.056)
You're only mostly dead. We can work with this.

Tony Oliveira (18:14.411)
Dave has a catchphrase for that. What is it Dave? It's not how often you die.

Adam Powell (18:14.538)
I'm happy with that. Go on.

David (CDO) (18:19.824)
Oh yeah, we tell people if they want to play Battlelords. It's not a question of if you die when or how often and if you can afford to come back. So how often can you afford? The companies are quite happy to just tack on another year or two under your contract. It's no big deal. We'll just extend that contract out a little bit, take a little bit out of your wages. It'll be good.

Kurt (18:38.242)
but you may have a phobia of the hat box afterwards.

David (CDO) (18:42.192)
May have it before.

Adam Powell (18:45.13)
Maybe, maybe. Before I dive into some of that and the content within the booster Kickstarter, you mentioned there the variety and species you mentioned. Do you each have your own favorite species within the world, within the setting?

Tony Oliveira (19:05.867)
Mine is different in classic and savage because of the way they're modeled. In classic, I tend to go with your regular old human just because you can load them up on skills and they're very capable. But in savage, I tend to lean towards the Eridani sword saints. So you've got this feudal samurai militaristic culture called these Eridani.

and in Savage you start adding those edges in and there's nothing cooler than running across the battlefield in your armor, wielding your plasma sword in a berserker fury. You can do that in Savage Battlelords, in classic Battlelords that's probably going to put you in an early grave.

Kurt (19:55.842)
for several pieces.

Tony Oliveira (19:57.195)
Yes.

David (CDO) (20:00.176)
I tend to lean towards the, what you refer to in a fancy setting as the spellcasters. We have the Mzokans who basically the Area 51 alien type big headed gray colored creatures have immense powers. They can destroy.

Adam Powell (20:00.394)
up into a groove. Go, sorry, please, next.

David (CDO) (20:25.904)
whole sections of space. By that I mean like multiple star systems if they're really in a tizzy about something. They get upset, it's not a good day for somebody. They don't do that lightly, but yeah, at higher levels they can do some pretty impressive things. And from their size, they also get off easy on the cost of armor, which can be nice as well. But the guilty pleasure would also be the fought. They're redneck rabbits with guns and there's just a lot of fun to be had playing one of them.

Adam Powell (20:55.274)
And finally...

Kurt (20:56.418)
Yeah, I'm with Dave on the fought for classic battle lords. Their stats are just about better than anybody else's as far as the bonuses, but everybody hates them.

So it allows you to play the most obnoxious character you've ever thought of playing and have fun with it It's kind of like the kinder for battle lords. So And then the when we go to the savage worlds It's it's a toss -up. I do like my pythonians in that because they can literally rip people limb from limb and you know

with a, uh, with a raise, uh, it, you can literally chuck somebody about a half mile. So yeah, they're that strong.

Adam Powell (21:44.97)
So if someone's been inspired by your preferences for species, the customization, the armor, we've mentioned Savage Wells, is there something in place, a quick start, for example, where they could go and check out these rules and see if they fit in with their Savage World game or if they just wanted to start within the battle laws of the 23rd century sort of.

Sphere.

Tony Oliveira (22:13.259)
we've got uh... free quick start rules available for both classic and savage battle orcs uh... they're on our website on drive thru rpg uh... they both include pre -generated characters and a short adventure so you can kind of run through the game and see what it's like see if you enjoy it the quick start for savage battle orcs also includes a list of all of the edges i think all of the hindrances

and a list of all of the weapons and armor options that you can get. So just sort of a teaser for the amount of choices you have when playing in that sandbox.

David (CDO) (22:55.92)
I'll jump into, I think it also highlights, keep me honest here Tony, in the quick start rules we include enough of the gun so you can see what the raises do because each of the systems, types of weapons systems we have, have different effects on a raise and so you might have one that knocks people over, you might have another one that electrifies them, etc. etc. So, gives you some flavor on what these different systems can do and why you need to customize that armor.

Adam Powell (23:20.074)
Yeah, so there's just have a look at now there's like a page and a half of weapons previews and and all sorts of these sort of good things So I mean this as you said the quick starter is is jam packed with with useful information An adventure at the end as you've mentioned fantastic artwork all the way through absolutely love the artwork So highly recommend people go and check out there will be links to your website

and to the Kickstarter and to your social medias down in the description below. So please scroll down, follow those links. Download yourself a copy of either the classic or the savage was quick start rules and have a game now today, tomorrow. Find a group. Check the discord. I'm sure there's players on there waiting, waiting for GMs or GMs waiting for players. I'm sure you guys will confirm that with me.

David (CDO) (24:13.136)
Yes, indeed. Always somebody looking for a game.

Adam Powell (24:15.306)
So we've mentioned a lot of content there, and that's just within the Quickstart. Going back to the Kickstarter, we've mentioned the call rules are getting a second printing. Then you have the Alliance setting guide, the carnage companion, and then a fun one at the bottom, Uncle Ernie's. It seems like a fun release. What's it been like to sort of get these put back through the

back through the mills, the wrong word, but back through the printing process and out to new players and and new actual plays as well.

Tony Oliveira (25:02.251)
The one of the things we noticed with the new Kickstarter is that most of our backers are new players. We're very excited about that. We're excited to bring Battlelords to a new audience. I'd like to say doing the books a second time is easier. It's not. One of the reasons Dave has that call sign of CDO is because he is a exceptional editor.

Adam Powell (25:05.802)
Hmm.

Tony Oliveira (25:29.931)
and he spots every little thing we missed the first time around. And I'm trying to be lazy, but he keeps on me about putting out at least one book a year. So that's what we're doing.

Adam Powell (25:30.378)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (25:40.97)
Fair enough. So from these books, one of them I mentioned there, the Alliance Setting Guide. If anyone's sort of like sci -fi but not quite engaged, would you mind sort of giving us a brief outline of the Alliance Setting and how that sort of plays into just the wider narrative of what's going on? There is a meta.

narrative mentioned on the Kickstarter. We don't need to go into that, but just the outline of the Alliance and all that sort of good stuff, please.

David (CDO) (26:15.984)
Yeah, happy to jump in Tony hurt just jump in and add things because there's lots of layers to this. But the basics starting at the most simple dystopian not utopian. So there's a whole bunch of companies out there. They run everything. Everyone's become a number. There's no such thing as OSHA. Oh, we don't need a railing. I'll just hire another guy if they fall over. Oh, another one fell off. Get another guy. Too many fall off. It's becoming a bother to me. Let's go ahead and put a railing in I guess. But I'd really rather not. It's kind of expensive.

Tony Oliveira (26:16.299)
Sure. Good.

David (CDO) (26:43.504)
So there's life is cheap and people are put to drudgery and keeping things going. There's a intergalactic war going on that a lot of people's efforts are being directed to. Colonies are being put out there constantly to spread out and garner new resources and establish populations in new places to spread out just to make sure if something goes wrong that at least somebody survives. I'm missing a lot, I'm sure. Tony Kurt, jump in.

Kurt (27:11.202)
gonna say it's it is definitely a wide open space opera so any everything from like Firefly where you're flying around trying to keep your ship in the air you know fighting helping people out where you can to we're not quite to Star Trek because you don't have it that nice unless you're working for the Alliance in the Navy or something along those lines then you have those nice cool ships but they're not traveling for you know exploration they're traveling to blow things up.

So there's a lot of dichotomy. You can literally do anything you want with it. You can go wherever you want. I mean, one of the missions we have, one of the classic Battlelords books is called Charlie Foxtrot. And one of the missions in there, you can actually be colony inspectors. You know, we do think it literally the system is flexible enough in both.

Savage Battle Lords and Battle Lords that if you didn't want to do the corporate mercenary you could do espionage you could do piracy you could do all these other different things with the system so it kind of just sets that whole setting up gives you an idea that's what the Alliance setting guide does gives you that background who's the players you know what's going on the kind of life you have so and then you just make it up and go from there

Adam Powell (28:29.29)
It's...

David (CDO) (28:32.336)
I'll just add, being the old player that played Travelers, it'd be like Travelers with more armor and weapons and a lot more kit. I mean, you can kit out in any which way you want. The guy who created the game was in the military, in the Army, in the US Army. And so a bit of it reads like a field manual in the classic rules. They've got canteens, they've got carabiners, they've got web gear, they've got cots, they've got that. I mean, just if you can think of it being needed for an army, it's in there somewhere. So.

Adam Powell (28:55.274)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

David (CDO) (28:59.184)
When you think about exploration, though, same things are needed, right? You still need canteens, you still need compasses, you still need things that are not terribly complicated and electronic and might break. You want things that are just basic and are going to work, right? So it's all of that. Oh, and everything in the game system has a chance of breaking. Things are built by the lowest bidder, and you know what? Maybe that wasn't the day for your lot. Maybe your lot was a not so good lot of this particular thing, and well, sorry. Not sorry. We made money on it.

Adam Powell (29:25.322)
Yeah, I personally experienced that kind of setup, but moving on from me. So the Kickstarter currently at time of recording is over $9 ,000 backed, which I think your initial target was like $1 ,000. So you'd like to smash this out of the park with some fantastic support and it's still going. So when does that sort of

Kickstarter slash booster. When does that close just for reference for listeners?

Tony Oliveira (30:03.467)
We've got 20 days, I believe, before it's done. So yeah, we're 20 days out from the close, so plenty of time to get in, and lots of stuff to choose from.

Adam Powell (30:13.61)
Absolutely.

David (CDO) (30:17.296)
just add, you know, we've, the whole purpose of this, as we said, was a reprint, so it's not like, you know, people are going to be, you know, when people start a new thing, you know, there's usually a period of time we were waiting and all that. We've already done all the editing, we've already done all the printing, actually we're waiting for the books to arrive at this point, they're on a boat. So yeah, working the way from the Europe to the US, so we'll have them in hand soon.

Adam Powell (30:37.354)
Amazing. Yeah, I'm sure. I think there's been some shipping issues worldwide in the recent times. So I'm sure there's just sort of a catch up on the backlog. So this is where we are. So we spoke about classic battle lords there for a brief time and how you've sort of converted and taken.

David (CDO) (30:44.432)
Fingers crossed.

David (CDO) (30:51.056)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (31:04.17)
Battle Lords of the 23rd century into the Savage Worlds gaming system. What's next after this kickstart, this booster? What can we expect to see down the line future releases or products from your good selves to support either this or a different IP if you have something you're working on?

Adam Powell (31:26.954)
hahahaha

Tony Oliveira (31:28.299)
I'm gonna need a nap first.

Kurt (31:30.562)
You

David (CDO) (31:31.952)
No naps, back to it.

Tony Oliveira (31:32.907)
Yeah, see there he goes again But we just we just finished the Kickstarter for uncle Ernie's arm summer catalog And I think that's probably our prettiest book to date aesthetically and that is a collection of Cybernetically augmented in bioengineered killing machines that uncle Ernie and his minions distribute for fun and profit And you can use them as monsters in your battle or its game or your savage worlds game

Adam Powell (31:40.842)
Hmm.

Tony Oliveira (32:02.987)
uh... and uh... that is also hopefully will be on a boat over here soon and then after that uh... i think because we've this kickstarter spent seven next well we'll probably be charlie foxtrot for savage world so our our scenario book uh... charlie foxtrot is a collection of one shots areas each area you play a different occupation and a different sort of power level within the game

so you can see what's available about awards universe like kurt said mercenary soldiers pirates spies are the big four and uh... we are about halfway through converting that to savage worlds

David (CDO) (32:43.984)
So we're looking for that in the second half of the year. We've also got some other stuff in early development, character books with archetypes, and also looking at species guides. So those are things that are in early stages of development. And we'll provide additional insight into the different species and fun things for people to bring in from a setting perspective as well.

Adam Powell (33:04.49)
Well, a lot to look forward to, especially when the ship comes in, as it were. Sorry. So yeah, I really did. Couldn't help myself. So that's all to look forward to. So you've told you can't sleep. But do you get any downtime? Are you always on? Is this that?

David (CDO) (33:16.048)
You had to.

Adam Powell (33:31.978)
treadmill of not disposable because that's the battle lord's thing. But always at the grindstone. Or do you get time to sort of unwind and relax away? Or do you go to the table to relax at the table top?

Tony Oliveira (33:52.907)
We have what I call a faux vacation once a year. And it's when we quit working on developing product for Battlelords and we go to GenCon and we spend months preparing to run Battlelords games at GenCon. So it's downtime in terms of we're not producing anything while we're at the conventions and running at conventions and prepping for them. But we're not, we're still working.

We're not taking a break.

Adam Powell (34:25.226)
Oh, strong, strong. So generous.

David (CDO) (34:25.296)
allow one hour every quarter.

Kurt (34:25.41)
Go.

Tony Oliveira (34:27.659)
This is for...

Kurt (34:29.154)
And we still are producing because we're making up, we get bored with the scenarios that we're running, so we make up new ones and we're trying to get at least one of those made up a year too and tested and played. So even though we're not technically making new material, we're still running and trying new game setups and that kind of stuff because honestly, we all have fun doing that.

Adam Powell (34:33.034)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (34:50.954)
is amazing. So you go from production of the books into generation of interest around the product and therefore that leads into more production. I can see how the cycle perpetuates. It sounds grueling and I respect you for it. Absolutely. So, you know, we've covered a little about yourselves and your introduction into Battlelords.

The class battle lords, Savage World's battle lords or Savage battle lords as it is. The Kickstarter, which is a booster for the second printing and future works releases and the fact that we can find you at Jane corn still working and having just an hour or a quarter off apparently is the allocation. Is there anything that we haven't spoken about that we'd like to bring up now in this interview, just in case I've missed anything?

Tony Oliveira (35:52.299)
I think you've already mentioned one of the things I always like to tell people is I think the art in the book is fantastic and we try and put as much of that in the quick start guides as we can so you can see it for free. If cool sci -fi art is your thing, download a copy, take a look. It might get you interested in the game.

David (CDO) (36:14.256)
have free out -through drive -through RPG. There's a free copy of all the interior for the core rules which should be scattered across the three books in Savage.

Tony Oliveira (36:24.043)
And then the other thing I like to remind people is that even if Battle Lords, the setting isn't your thing and you're a Savage Worlds player, we've come up with a lot of cool mechanics, game mechanics, rule mechanics, and those are all transportable, transplantable, I should say, into any other Savage Worlds game or setting. If you need aliens or armor or weapons or a ton of gear, vehicles, spaceships,

Adam Powell (36:35.114)
Hmm.

Tony Oliveira (36:53.707)
those are all things we have. I know Pinnacle just did a booster for their new addition of the sci -fi companions. So if you like Savage World sci -fi, check us out. There's probably something in there that you would like. And we had to come up with some unique ways of solving game mechanic problems that I don't even think the Pinnacle people have done. So there's a lot of...

of a plated stuff in classic battle or stuff that gets worn down over time and that savage worlds doesn't do that so we had to come up with some new mechanics new ways of dealing with that and i think we're pretty successful

Adam Powell (37:25.098)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (37:33.386)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's on the Kickstarter page. Scroll down towards, I think it's towards the bottom around Uncle Ernie's about taking sort of things like the Uncle Ernie's content and dropping it into Deadlands, for example, which I think is such a fantastic use of one Savage World's, your content and its flexibility within the sort of universe that.

Savage Worlds allows GMs and gaming groups to create. So it's definitely piqued my interest. I definitely have to say that. So we can have your Kickstarter support until the end and then the product supported through until you decide that the BattleLords is no longer for you. Touchwood, that's never. Where can we find?

Savage Battle laws, where can we find battle laws of the 23rd century? Where can we find your good selves on social media and the interwebs, please?

Tony Oliveira (38:45.451)
here. Our website is battlelords .com or you can go to 23rdcentury .net which will take you to the same place. We can get you a link to our discord. It is a private discord but we'll get you a link that you can share. Anybody who wants to jump on the discord. Our Twitter handle I believe is battlerordsrpg.

and uh... instagram is probably best just to search for battle or just because we have a real it's the graham name that i need to short i think it's a bit like battle or to underscore of underscore the underscore it's their century and eventually they said no more letters that we had to stop

Adam Powell (39:26.122)
enough. Well I will make sure that all those links are down in the description below so please scroll down follow those links support 23rd century productions support Savage Battlelords, Classic Battlelords, support this fantastic team the Kickstarter if you're able to get in before the Kickstarter booster closes which is in about 20 days from time of recording. Thank you so much.

Tony, David and Kurt for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure to get an insight into not only your conversion to Savage Worlds, the Quick Start, the Kickstarter, the booster and all the fantastic products you have coming down the line. So thank you so much.

David (CDO) (40:09.392)
Thank you for having us.

Tony Oliveira (40:09.451)
Thanks again for having us.

Kurt (40:10.786)
Thanks for having us.