About this Newsletter

A lot of BRPG and BGE owners reading this might well never have returned to visit the Battlegrounds Games website or forums after their initial purchase. I strongly recommend that you do so from time to time, to keep up to date on the latest BRPG and BGE releases, submit feature requests and bug reports, and to generally help shape the evolution of BRPG and BGE with your feedback. Tell us what you like, what you don't, what you think could be improved, and what future products you would like to see made available.

For those of you who do not regularly visit the Battlegrounds Games site or forums, this newsletter will keep you posted on important news, developments, and product releases.

In This Issue

The last newsletter went out in October 2012. A lot has happened since then, so there is a lot of catching up to do.

First and Foremost: Battlegrounds Games is rebooting

If you haven't read the recent announcement on the BG forums, please do so. This is important, folks.

Battlegrounds Kickstarter Campaigns Planned for late 2015 and early 2016

This is another very important announcement, and you should definitely read it, since it is the means by which Battlegrounds Games can not only continue to exist, but also finally develop and release the much-awaited Version 2 of BRPG. But even if you have no interest in ever upgrading to Version 2 of BRPG, the Content Drive, if successfull (either in part or in full), will produce some great new artpacks for use in BRPG v1.x.

Battlegrounds Games is now on Facebook

Battlegrounds Games now has a Facebook page. Read all about it here.

The page has actually been up since February 2015, and I thought we would be well over 100 Likes by now (preferably in the hundreds), but I was dismayed that we haven't even reached 50 (!) Likes, yet. I've seen Facebook pages for VTTs that were announced and never actually released a thing, yet they had 350 Likes. What's up with that?!

BRPG and BGE are now also available on a subscription basis

For the fist time ever, I am offering subscriptions for both of the Battlegrounds VTTs, and will be managing them through a Patreon campaign that I just launched. Tell your friends, especially anyone you know who may have voiced an interest in BRPG but balked at the cost. As an example, you can now get a GM and five players gaming together for just $10.50 a month, as opposed to paying $119 all at once to purchase permanent licenses.

In fact, if you look at the Milestone Goals for the Patreon campaign, you'll see that there is a good chance that BRPG, and possibly even BGE, could be made available to everyone for free! Wouldn't that do wonders for increasing the userbase and dramatically increasing the player/opponent pool for your games?

Rating Virtual Tabletop Software

The Battlegrounds VTTs would probably get more attention if some of you would be kind enough to Like/Upvote them on the various software comparison sites, such as AlternativeTo and Slant.

Gamers interested in trying out virtual tabletops might just come across these ratings, which may (should?) influence their choice of VT. To keep things fair, I hope you will take a moment to rate all of the VTs that you have had some experience with (not just Battlegrounds), and ask that you please abstain from rating the VTTs that you have never tried.

Battlegrounds Forums in Disuse

The Battlegrounds Forums are there for your use and enjoyment. I try to keep them free of spam (a daily struggle, at times), I purge/ban bot users whenever I find them, and I post whatever tips and tricks I can think of to help your games run smoothly. I provide news and links to things that should be of interest to gamers. There's even a section devoted to finding games and players.

Despite all this, in recent years the BG forums have been extremely silent. This is not good for two reasons. First, gamers new to the Battlegrounds site may balk at the lack of recent activity, and assume this is a dead project with a dead community, and they will likely take their business elsewhere. Secondly, I had really hoped an active and engaged community would have formed around the BG software, as they have for other gaming-related sites such as Dundjinni, and even other VTTs. Sadly, this never happened to any great extent, and I'm really not sure why.

Although my software lets you very easily distribute RPG adventures, Encounters, dice macros, and ready-to-play digital game conversions, there has been alarmingly little content produced by BG users for BG users. Practically zero content-sharing. Why is this? Feel free to use the BG forums to share your creations, and to voice your opinions. I encourage you to do so, and I implore you to do so. Software without a community is just a bunch of cold ones and zeros. Let's dust off the cobwebs and make the forums come alive again.

New Artpacks for BRPG

There have been no new artpacks released for BRPG since the last Newsletter went out. However, the Content Drive mentioned above should soon produce a slew of new artpacks.

New Game Conversions for BGE

There have been no new digital game conversions release for BGE since the last Newsletter went out, though I have been in talks with a couple of game publishers who have expressed an interest in having their games ported to this platform. Hopefully there will be something to report soon, but it's likely not going to be in what little remains of 2015.

That's all for this issue. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!