The 3rd of September was a big day for fans of the interactive Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that have brought countless hours of entertainment to so many of us since the 1980s. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the fourth Fighting Fantasy Fest was held in London. Visitors of the Fest could meet legends like Steve Jackson and Sir Ian Livingstone in person, along with many other prominent gamebook writers like Rhianna Pratchett, Jonathan Green, or Marc Gascoigne, as well as many graphic artists of the book series. We could have our books signed, pick up a bunch of merchandise, mingle with other fans, and watch presentations on various, exciting topics. It was indeed great fun!

Hello everyone,

Recently, we have published posts about several bigger and smaller features and other goodies, such as the Glossary, improvements, new Skills, and so on. There is, however, something else we have been spending a lot of time on, and probably most of our players won’t even notice the outcome.

Our post last week featured James, one of our recently hired writers. We hope you expect the unexpected because today’s post is about Zeli, a recently hired writer! Both of them have joined Lost Pilgrims at the same time, so their tasks have been essentially the same: working on the Glossary, reviewing existing material, delving into the rich lore of the Riven Realms, and of course spinning tales for the upcoming Seekers of Knowledge DLC – among other things.

As part of our ongoing efforts to expand the team, one of the tasks we set about doing was hiring a couple of new writers. James is one such writer; born in Zambia to British parents, he grew up in New Zealand where he took to games, fantasy books, and D&D at an early age – wasting far too much of his time running campaigns with his school and university mates.

As it has become standard since the release of Vagrus, the team has been hard at work on another much-requested update – this time it’s scouting we’re addressing. Players have been expressing their concerns about the state of scouting for some time now, and we’re happy to announce that we think we have managed to bring it to a place where it offers a great deal to those who are willing to make use of its more niche qualities while incorporating enough concrete drawbacks that it does not become a default or even mandatory choice for vagri out traversing the wasteland.

Hey everyone,

We are working on something special for you, especially those who would enjoy picking the Knowledge ambition in a future playthrough. Our next free DLC will feature the Sunken Tower and the Knowledge ambition victory. That’s right, you will get the chance to explore that location and in doing so, win the game! Let’s look into it, shall we?

Hey everyone,

We keep working on improving features and fixing issues for the game and from time to time we push it into the Demo build as well – this is such a time! The most significant additions are Character UI-related improvements, as well as new content, albeit the restricted nature of the Demo makes accessing some of these a bit tricky. Still, we included them for the sake of thoroughness. We have also improved visuals and fixed about a dozen bugs.

Hey everyone,

As usual, we’ve been working on fixing issues and adding new features as well as improvements. The most significant additions include our new name generator, along with the custom journal and chart notes features. As for improvements, besides smaller optimizations across various parts of the game, we have made the Companion Combat AI significantly faster while the initial loading time has been shortened as well.

Have you ever arrived at the final step of a character creation screen and felt completely stumped as to what you are going to call yourself in the game? Do you wonder what kind of names would be appropriate for your vagrus based on their background? We’ve been there, and we get it.

That’s why our new random name generator has been a long time coming. Our priorities were two-fold: give options to those who would rather not worry about such matters, and also to allow players some insight into naming conventions in the Riven Realms. This feature will be available with our next build, and you can check out a preview video here.

The artbook of Vagrus is finally here (well, technically it is also on its way to everyone who ordered it) and holding it in our hands is indeed fantastic.

Admittedly, putting the book together was quite rough. Some of us thought that pulling it together from already existing artwork and writing texts around the art is going to take a couple of weeks. Turns out, compiling and writing something this big for physical publishing takes a handful of months, more like. All this in spite of doing a sort of a dry run previously with the smaller (A5) art booklet that went into the Collectors' Editions, albeit that had no texts accompanying the images.