Things are coming along here at Talsorian. Unfortunately there hasn’t been a developer note for a while as we’ve been hard at work and, to be honest, the work has been pretty mundane. Tweaking small things and writing descriptions for weapons and armor.

We have, however, spent quite a bit of time on the relic items in the Witcher RPG. In the video game relic items become the norm after a few levels. Anyone who’s played Witcher 2 or Witcher 3 knows the feeling of going to a smith or a merchant and selling off 2 or 3 titled weapons with magic abilities because you found better. Or, even worse, being gifted titled weapons but already having a better one. To some extent that won’t change but we wanted to make sure that each relic item felt important. To that end we sat down and wrote background for all the relic items we would have in the game. This seems easy but it turned out to be surprisingly hard. Save for swords such as Unicorn and armor like Raven’s Armor there are very few relic items that actually have cannon backgrounds. Swords like Maugrim and Cleaverhood and armors like the Mountain Folk armor have no cannon background and thus we had to create backgrounds for them. We wanted to make sure that when you found a relic item, either through a quest, in a monsters horde or as a plot point the item felt like it was a legitimate reward. Besides giving you an interesting item the relic background hail from all over the continent giving you a feel for the history and tales of the different regions. Even if it’s stats may not be amazing it had some cool history behind it and maybe even the seeds of a quest for your party.

Secondarily, we realized that there were almost no relic items that weren’t swords. As we want to support fighting styles of all types we created some relic weapons other than swords such as axe, polearms and bows. In the Witcher video games we get what’s important to Geralt and Geralt is a swordsman, but there are plenty of people out there who use other weapons and many players who would rather use other weapons.

You can expect many interesting stories and varied relics in the Witcher PNP RPG!

As a side note: A lot of people have asked about the release date of the Witcher RPG. As we are working closely with CDPR we cannot disclose a dedicated release date yet, just as they can’t release a dedicated release date for Cyberpunk.