Elthos RPG
Create Your Own World
Elthos is a long term proposition. I have been working on it for 4 decades. It is constantly improving and I am it's most ardent fan and beneficiary at this time. Eventually, I think, people will catch on and find it as amazing as I do. Til then I expect I shall be the primary user of the service, and my players, who also have benefitted from it in the form of personal entertainment.
Most recent developments:
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Updated https://elthos.com website to get off of horrible WordPress and into elegant and low maintenance ASP Net. Thank goodness. Huge relief.
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Mythos Machine back end updates to database, data cleansing operation, and validators greatly improved.
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As ever, updates and enhancements to Mythos Machine features.
All is well in the world of Elthos. Keep going.
I spent the past 24 years working on various phases of this project, teaching myself programming and database design, and working on this as a side hobby project for most of this time. It's been great and I've learned a tremendous amount about programming, game design, business development and all of the related things one needs to know to start their own business. I regret nothing!
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24 years working sounds like Goethe's Faust
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Yes indeed. But as role playing games are my favorite creative hobby, the project has served two purposes... one to create a business around my love of RPG, and the other is to actually enjoy RPGing itself. As for Faust, I hope I fare a little better than he did. lol.
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If developers put only 10% of your efforts into their AAA titles... well, yours would still be more original. Best of luck to you. 24 years is impressive.
You should document your journey in a book someday.
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If I ever slow down enough to have the time to do that, I'd love to. It could go after the book on my 7 years on the road as a poetry writing artist hitch-hiking around the USA. That too has Stories. Believe me. :)
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It's great that such developers like you train on RPG games to create such games! I am really glad that there are a lot of projects inspired by the MMORPGs like league of legends. One thing that I can't admit, is when such games become more difficult with times. It is way to hard to feel some pleasure during multiplayer with your friends with such a difficult level. So, after this, I've decided to take a lvl boost for my character, and https://elo-boosters.com helped me with it. So, they can actually give a huge boost to the character that would cost not too much, but it would give a highly effective result. I think it's worth a try this, then to play in such horrific level.
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Thanks! That means a lot to me. I worked hard on this project for a long time. It's been a great project, keeping my mind focused on something other than the ailing world we live in. Especially now. So yeah, this is my focus. As I like to say ... Elthos is my Art Form. :)
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Wow! This is actually super encouraging. I've been working on my product on and off for probably 12 years, mostly as a hobby. I started to think that maybe it could be more than a hobby a couple of years ago and just joined Indie Hackers hoping to get to a real launch someday. Anyway, I've been a little hesitant to admit how long I've been picking at it, nice to see somebody else on a similar path! :-)
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Glad to hear you find this encouraging, mate. I work on this because I enjoy it. I think the product and service I have created are incredibly useful. It needs a bit of UI / UX work, but even as it is, it's a huge time saver for me as a Gamemaster, and fun to use. I know other people will think so if they give it a whirl. The problem, mainly, is getting the word out. Social Media has become a money sink for businesses, I think. You can't really get Organic Reach with a business page post on FB. When I post there my organic reach is usually 0 to 3 people. They want to get you to "Boost" your post. Originally they said $5 to reach 8 to 22 people. Wow! At that rate I'd go broke in three months. No thanks FB. The real problem, underlying my dilemma, is that I didn't want to go for VC, and lose ownership. I figured in the world of Social Media I should be able to make it on my own, and so I programmed the thing myself, and have been wearing all business hats. I have a perfectly lovely product and service, and the next great challenge is "how to get people to take note of the thing". I'm working on that now. If anyone has advice on this, feel free. I'm all ears. Anyway, thanks for your kind words, and best wishes on your success!
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Wow. Ambitious!
Kind of a bummer that I couldn't just jump into an existing world (don't think I am the type to set up a world and manage it). Waiting on an invite response. Maybe a quickstart of some type would be cool for newbies.
Best of luck!
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Hi wavve! I have worlds for GMs to start with as templates to build off of. They come with a basic set of stuff, such as weapons and armors, classes and skills. They are typically a basic genre, like Fantasy or Western, and I add a Campaign with a few adventures to show the GM how to structure things. You can sign up as a Free Marketplace GM, which means you don't pay a subscription, so instead of creating your own worlds you can purchase Worlds from the Marketplace. Once you buy a World you can re-shape it any way you want, though. Worlds can cost between $3 and, well, whatever the publishing GM wants to charge based on the amount of work they put into it. Elthos gets a commission on each sale of 24%. Premium GMs can create Worlds for Sale in the Worlds Marketplace. That said, since I am just getting started, there are only a few worlds to begin with. As the application gains popularity I expect there to be many more worlds by many GMs going forward.
I think/hope I sent you an invite to my current Cosmic Sci-Fi Space Opera named "The Way of All Flesh" which I'm currently finishing writing and play testing with my friends.
As for a QuickStart ... absolutely! I am trying to figure out how to present that best. Right now I have a World Builder's Guide which can be found off of the Information Page, but it is not quite front facing enough at the moment. I definitely want to figure out a better Glide Path for new users! Thanks!
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Looks super cool -- good luck!
I launched Elthos RPG on Stripe with a subscription system for the Mythos Machine, and used Stripe Connect to create a Worlds Marketplace. I got 106 new signups in the first year.
Here are three good lessons to keep in mind, I agree:
Refine your website before launching. Make sure it's done as well as you can get it. Then launch.
Stay consistent. Keep posting about your project, and don't give up, even when it seems like no one is paying attention.
Don't pay attention to the haters. There will always be some negative commenters. Ignore them, try not to take it personally, and focus on the positive.
I'm excited for what comes next!
Having a working and quite useful version of Elthos RPG in Visual Basic 6 was great from a hobby perspective. However, since VB6 was a buggy and rather awful environment that just begged for technical support nightmares, I decided to alter tack and re-program my system into ASP Net. And so the Mythos Machine was born.
At this point I had a lovely working version of the Gamemaster Toolbox, which I used to run my own games. It was wonderful, but it was not something I could comfortably release to the public. I decided at this point to create a new version that would have a stronger more reliable code base. I chose ASP Net, and SQL Server as a back end.
I also started a local club for Gamemasters who were interested in the literary aspects of Role Playing Games, called the Literary RPG Society of Westchester. This went strong for quite a few years and during this period I decided to create a mini-system based on the original Elthos RPG Rules. The purpose was to allow us to try out small example game ideas in the Pub we were meeting at, without drawing too much attention to ourselves, and so I created the "One Die System" as a distillation of Elthos for this reason. However, I immediately realized that the new tighter and more modular system would be even more perfect for programming than the original Elthos Rules, and so that became the basis Rules system for the Mythos Machine.
Over the intervening years I spent my after work hours tooling around teaching myself visual basic and database modeling in order to build the first version of the Elthos RPG Gamemaster's Toolbox. By 2000 I had a complete version of the software. However, it was programmed in the very dodgy Visual Basic 6, and I felt that letting it out into the wild in that form would lead to never ending technical support headaches. So it remains functional, with lots of never seen in public features that make it a truly Way-Of-The-Future application. To this date some features have never appeared elsewhere in the market. However, most features have been ported over to the revised version called The Mythos Machine.
At this phase I had decided that software to help Gamemasters run their games by doing the number crunching and record keeping was something that I as a GM wanted, and needed. As nothing like this existed at this point, I decided to go ahead and do it myself. How hard could it be? And so I wrote up the specifications for what I wanted the software to do, and formed the New York Group with two of my Gamemaster buddies, and we set about working towards the goal of creating Gamemaster Tools software. I sent the specifications to the Copyright Office in Washington, DC, and we were off to the races.
I had noticed in 1992 that no one seemed to have put together software that would help Gamemasters do the number crunching and record keeping for their worlds. I thought to myself, why hasn't anyone done that? I decided to do it myself, with a bit of help from my friends. And voila ... only a few decades later and I have the Mythos Machine! lol.
When I was 14 I began playing a homebrew version of Dungeons & Dragons with a few of my high school friends. I was immediately struck by the fantastic creativity involved with role playing games, and I wanted to become a Gamemaster. As was not uncommon in those days, I created my own homebrew rules system and named it Elthos RPG.
I have a more detailed writeup on my blog here:
http://elthosrpg.blogspot.com/p/what-is-elthos-rpg.html
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