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Defiant RPG

Created by Game Machinery

An urban fantasy ttrpg about the mighty, modern-day aristocrats: fallen angels, demons, ancient gods, and dragons. Now in print! To learn more about the game, click "View the campaign" below or go to www.kickstarter.com/projects/dfnt/defiant-rpg.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

The new Defiant Discord Bot has arrived!
about 1 year ago – Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 05:57:03 PM

Hello everyone,

Our new Defiant Discord Bot might come in handy if you're planning on playing Defiant online! It's not an upgrade to the previous one; it's a completely new bot designed to make the online games run smoother. Here's a link you can use to invite the bot to your servers:

https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1057623507317575750&permissions=534723820608&scope=bot


The bot uses "slash commands," so once you invite it to a server, start writing the "/" symbol, and the list of commands should become visible. It can do Challenge rolls for you, help with regaining Shards, and rolls for Court management. It can also display a complete list of your Character's Theme Questions and Special Rules and gives you lists of things like Personal Affairs options.

Be sure to give it a try and tell us what you think. It's still a beta version, and we will upgrade the bot in about a month, so your suggestions do matter. :-) 

Cheers,

Martin

AI Art in Defiant
over 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 20, 2022 at 05:35:54 PM

We've posted this on all of our social media, but I wanted to share this on KS as well. :-)

In light of recent developments in the field of AI art generators, we feel obliged to clarify our stance on AI art in general and the use of AI when illustrating Defiant Role Playing Game. I’d like to start with a clarification as to the latter. There are no “AI-generated illustrations” in the Defiant RPG rulebook, nor in any of the supplements. 


Most of the artwork for Defiant was created over two years ago, way before diffusion-based AIs were available to the public. All of our illustrations were done using stock art photos, mixed together, and matt painted in Photoshop. Then we painted over each illustration to add additional details and change face proportions to more “comic-like”.


Afterward, in most cases (about 70% of the art), we did use Style GAN AI to add a specific style to the picture. We used our own local network, which has been fed our own illustrations as a reference. It was pretty much the same procedure as all the popular “make your photo in the style of Van Gogh” or “turn your photo into a sketch” from a few years back. It slightly changed the photo but did not generate any new art.


This new photo was then used as a new layer in the original art, with a different degree of opacity. Next, we painted over the layer and ran the whole picture through our set of actions we designed ourselves. Then came the recoloring, texture adding, lightning, and all other details that we believe make Defiant’s artwork unique.


I am writing this in detail because I want you all to have a good idea of the process. Defiant RPG does not contain any AI-generated artwork. Since we want to stick to the original art style throughout the whole Defiant run, future supplements will not contain any AI-generated artwork as well. 


Game Machinery is, for the most part, two people creating games. Both Kate and I do not consider ourselves anti-AI art or anti-AI in general. On the contrary, the new possibilities that AI brings are exciting and have an enormous potential to change the world for the better. I spend countless hours learning about AIs and have grown to consider them “the next step”, much like electrification or at least personal computers.


Having said that, I believe there are obvious risks and problems we as a society should address in these new, strange times. The issues of copyright laws, keeping the source code open, corporate censorship, and coming up with a way to compensate artists or give them a way to maintain control over how their artwork is used - these are but a few of the burning problems that need to be resolved on a government, or global level.


Until this happens, we would not feel comfortable using AI-generated artwork in any of our games. So while we plan to spend a lot of time dabbling in the fascinating world of AI, we will not be using AI artwork in any of our books until further notice.

Hot NPCs in your area!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Dec 07, 2022 at 02:39:23 AM

This update (along with the app) was supposed to be ready by Saturday, but unfortunately, I had some health issues. It's all (almost) good now, and while I'm still recuperating, I was well enough to finish yet another app. The Character Card is still in shambles, as it's hard for this sort of app to be really useful without connecting it to a database. And whenever I start designing the database, it brings me back to the main Defiant Online platform; I spend hours and hours on improvements and changes but barely make progress with the Character App.

Instead, I felt I need to focus on something different - smartphones. The last two apps are barely working on small screens, so this time I wanted to finally dig into that and bring you something that was designed with smartphones in mind. I thought about all the iconic iOS/Android Apps, and Tinder was the obvious choice.

So, without further ado, here's Finder, or rather "Defiant NPC Finder," an app that lets you swipe through interesting NPCs and find perfect matches for your Chronicles. Enjoy!

Find the perfect (NPC) match!

The app should work just fine on desktops and notebooks, but it's mainly designed with smartphones in mind.

Without the whole platform, it only lets you save an interesting NPC (by swiping right or pressing the button) as a PDF file. Of course, once everything is ready, you will be able to add them to your Chronicles, write additional notes about them, come up with Secrets, and so on.

Hope you like the app! :-)

The Secret Defiant Game
over 1 year ago – Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 06:10:08 AM

Another Defiant App is available

Hello everyone! As promised, here's another app that will become a part of the Defiant Online platform once everything is ready. "The Secret Game" is a mini-game for GMs who got stuck when designing Secrets for their NPCs. Unlike Defiant Threads, it's meant to serve more as an inspiration and creative challenge. You'll be the ones coming up with the Secrets, the app will simply make it more fun. :-)

You can check out the app at this address: https://secret.dfnt.online/ - as with the previous one ( https://thread.dfnt.online/ ), it's not optimized for phone screens - that feature will be available once the whole service is ready. 

The next app on the menu is a digital character sheet / Court management app. Once it's ready, I'll post the link here. We're also still working on the two supplements - they will eventually come out. I just figured that the web apps should have priority for now. 

Cornucopia 2022

We're taking part in the Bundle of Holding Cornucopia 2022! The Defiant RPG main rulebook is a part of the Bonus Collection. Since you all already have the book, I'd like to spotlight Wanderhome, available in the starter pack. It's an amazing, one-of-a-kind game that I really enjoyed playing throughout the summer.  And you can get it for less than 18 USD, along with two other titles, or pay about 35 USD for the whole pack of seven games. You'll also be supporting the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program, which is a nice bonus. :-)

Here's a link to the bundle: https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Cornucopia2022


Happy Thanksgiving!

Martin




Defiant Thread available in beta
over 1 year ago – Wed, Nov 09, 2022 at 10:38:30 PM

Hi everyone, 

I feel that you are waiting way to long for the Defiant Online platform. It's a big project that I code on my own, and after a year of working on it, I still have many quirks to work out. On the other hand, plenty of systems are working just fine, and only need a bit of polishing. 

I decided that I should publish the smaller parts as independent tools and merge them with the platform, once it's ready. That way, you get to use them now, rather than wait for who knows how long. 

The first one to go is Defiant Thread. It's a GM tool that helps with creating a Thread for your next Episode. You can choose things at random, and then customize them by writing in your own ideas and notes. Currently, you can save your work to a PDF. Of course, once the whole platform is ready, you'll have an option to save it into your online notes for any of the Chronicles you're running.

The service is meant to be used on computer screens and I do not recommend using it on a phone. Here's the link, there's no login needed:

https://thread.dfnt.online 

The Defiant Secrets and Defiant Character Sheet are next on their way. 

If you have any suggestions or something does not work, let me know (preferably via Discord, there's a link to our Discord in the rightmost column in Defiant Thread). 

Cheers, 

Martin