Ouch. I didn't back the Kickstarter, but bought the software after it was released. It had so much promise and I continued to use it long after Lone Wolf ended support for it. Earlier this year I finally used Farling's RealmWorks importer mod for Foundry and migrated my world to Foundry. I never thought of it as a failed Kickstarter though. Was there anything that wasn't delivered? I've always thought of it as an overly ambitious software product that didn't have enough funding, customers, and content-creator support. Seems like it was a passion project that was just losing the company too much money that they had to end it to support more profitable projects (the online version of Hero Lab in particular). They were also releasing as nearly all other TTRPG world building and VTT software was going to to the cloud. But it was a cool product that no other World Building product has yet fully matched IMHO. I also miss the the discussion boards. I miss discussing and sharing world building and our creations on the RealmWorks forums.
Those are good points. Let me go into it a bit deeper.
I was heavily invested in Hero Lab and worked as a contractor for Lone Wolf, putting in two PF1 books data into Hero Lab. When RW was announced, I was happy about that. I like LW, was active on the message boards, and to date am the only person to create a framework for HLC, Alternity. I invested at a high tier to get alpha access to RW because LW could do little wrong for me at this point.
The early versions of RW were what I wanted. It was fast, it allowed me to use during a session, which was part of the claim, and it gave me some fascinating insights into faction relationships to PCs and other areas. I could track what I had told the PCs but keep notes for the session. I even got the player add on and gave all my players a code, so they could see revealed notes.
I don't remember which update it was but at some point, it wasn't fast anymore. Creating a new NPC, location, or something was too slow during the game. I had to write everything down and enter it later. Now I'm doing double the work, which isn't what I wanted. About this time, rob explained that his vision for this was always about being ninety five percent prepared ahead of time and a session is clicking what was learned, not taking notes. It could be that I projected what I wanted but I didn't remember that. rob was making something for what he wanted and did. It probably worked for Hero Lab, so why not RW?
After that point, all I saw were failures of what I wanted, not a success. I don't know if it was or not. The player updates were not real time. Not only that but it couldn't update the players without shutting the program down and syncing with the server. My install couldn't host things, it all went back to the LW servers, so I was at their mercy. No API support, although I could be wrong on that. Not sure if we ever got custom calendars or many other things the core of us wanted and were discussing in the forums. On top of that, long silences from rob and LW. Later, it was explained that he had health issues but he took two or three years to tell us, burning any sympathy he might have otherwise had.
I guess you could say I fell in love with Hero Lab and LW but then fell out of love due to RW and Hero Lab Online. I don't think I ever got my KS worth of functionality and was something I barely used a year after I first got it. I thought it was going to support my ad lib style of running games and once that didn't happen, RW didn't have anything for me anymore. I agree, it had functionality and abilities that many current systems don't. I have looked a lot for something like it but nothing comes close.
Thanks for the discussion!
docs.google.com
