Hooray! Early Access is OUT NOW!
Hey, Backers! Sins of Our Mother Early Access is out! Please scroll below to the Backer exclusive section for the link to the early access downl...
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Catacolyte Games
11 days ago
Sins of Our Mother EARLY ACCESS Coming on Sunday, the 15th!
Sins of Our Mother Early Access Announcement
Hey, @everyone! Sins of Our Mother early access is coming out this Saturday weekend! Early access will be available to all backers r...
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Catacolyte Games
6 months ago
Sins Update I - Progress, Changes, & More!
Hey Backers!
It’s been a minute, so I thought it high time to share some progress. Here’s what we’ll cover this update:
• Quest Hooks & Ritual Feats
• Hospital of Quiet Minds...
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Catacolyte Games
9 months ago
Campaign End & Thank you!
Campaign End & Thank You!
To new backers, welcome! To old backers, thank you so much for your continued support. I'll strive to live up to your expectations.
We crossed the fi...
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Catacolyte Games
9 months ago
Last Week! Sins Campaign & Progress Update
Hello! We're in the home stretch, so I wanted to share what I've been working on while the campaign pushes past the finish line.
$2,359 and Counting!
This is fantastic! Thank y...
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Catacolyte Games
10 months ago
$2,175 and Counting! Community Choice Poll, Stretch Goals, and Project Update!
Hello and welcome to the first campaign update! Thank you all for your support. Let's keep climbing higher and higher!
Community Choice Poll
Sins of Our Mother includes 4 narra...
Hooray! Early Access is OUT NOW! Hey, Backers! Sins of Our Mother Early Access is out! Please scroll below to the Backer exclusive section for the link to the early access download.
Hey, @everyone! Sins of Our Mother early access is coming out this Saturday weekend! Early access will be available to all backers regardless of their pledge tier. In my opinion, extra eyes and new perspectives will help improve the project, and ensure Sins becomes the best possible version of itself. So mark your calendars, and please don’t hesitate to share your feedback!
Sins early access will include the following:
4 Classes
Anathema Nurse class (previously Euphoria)
World Bearer class (previously Sloth Druid)
Vow of Beauty class (previously VoB Paladin)
Medusite class (previously Medusite Monk)
Red Mass
Crisis of Faith
2 Narrative Dungeons
Traitor Duchess & the Estate of Undeath
Star Lich Race
Church Armaments
Sinful Spells
Sins early access does NOT include (these are still coming):
Flesh Singer class (previously Flesh Singer Bard)
2 Narrative Dungeons
Hospital of Quiet Minds
Sickle City
Divine Creatures (monster stat blocks)
So, What Does Early Access Mean?
Games these days seem to treat early access as a kind of “pay to playtest” deal. I could definitely use the help playtesting, but that’s not the focus here. D&D is foremost a cooperative storytelling game. I’ve meticulously tweaked the game systems to ensure that the stories, quests, and classes inside Sins of Our Mother are fun, interesting, and evocative. But nothing’s perfect. Please, if you have the time, this is the perfect opportunity to share your thoughts , concerns, and impressions about the project.
Here are examples of the things that can change in early access:
Numbers (hit points, damage die, durations, etc.)
Specific Weapons, Items, Spells, or Abilities (too boring, weak, just don’t work, etc.)
Typos (self explanatory)
Here are examples of the things that CANNOT change in early access:
Major story beats in Narrative Dungeons (example, Resurrection from Traitor Duchess)
Class systems (example, Inheritance Memories from Medusite)
Class Redesigns
Originally, Sin’s new classes were supposed to rely on existing class design. However, D&D 2024’s impending class changes encouraged me to push Catacolyte’s own designs in a much more original and (hopefully) interesting direction. This shift meant going back to the drawing board for Flesh Singer, Medusite, and World Bearer (previously Sloth Druid). Although it cost time, I’m now confident this was the right decision. That said, there’s always room for improvement and polish. I’ll be looking for ways to better balance the classes until the full release.
Final Release When?
Sins of Our Mother is slated to release on PDF this winter and all other rewards to follow shortly after!
It’s been a minute, so I thought it high time to share some progress. Here’s what we’ll cover this update:
Quest Hooks & Ritual Feats
Hospital of Quiet Minds
Medusite
Conclusion & Partings
Quest Hook & Ritual Feats
I originally pitched Quest Hooks & Ritual Feats as separate sections, but while writing I realized they belonged together.
Have you ever played a game, fought an enemy, and thought ‘that’s awesome! I want that’? At the table we usually call this “NPC magic,” and I hate it. There should be as little distinction as possible between NPCs and PCs. Basically, PCs should be able to do whatever an NPC does.
At times these differences are necessary for the story or mechanical balance, but the greater this dissonance grows the less players feel part of the world and more like they’re playing a video game.
This change benefits both Quest Hooks and Ritual Feats and allows the two pieces to reinforce each other. We’ll get richer, more personal Quest Hooks for GMs and deeper, more immersive Ritual Feats for players. This new section is called Red Mass.
Here’s a sneak peak at part of the rough draft for Blood in the Streets, one of the entries in Red Mass.
Blood in the Streets
Rumors change as they spread from tongue to tongue, but you’d need not meet a gossip to know someone holds this city in a vice grip. At sunrise, the streets fill ‘til bustling, but look and see how they walk with eyes to their feet and never saying a word without need. At dusk, the streets clear, shutters slam shut, cats prowl, and the city listens with bated breath for a portent of the morrow.
Sacrament
Faithful may carry out ritual murders in the dark hearts of crowded cities to instill fear, provoke hatred, or elicit other emotions. This holy blasphemy is best suited for rogues, sadists, and anyone capable of killing in plain sight then absconding. To earn the Blood Queen’s blessing of Delectable Fear, a faithful must perform 5 ritual murders with the following conditions:
Commonality of Victims: Each victim must share some aspect such as profession or class.
Consistent Method: The manner of murders must be recognizable and attributable to the same entity.
Commentary: The deaths must speak to some purport whether personal or social and cannot be solely for slaying’s sake.
Delectable Fear - Ritual Feat
Death and fear hand in hand.
[REDACTED]
Here’s a few of the other entries:
Ecstasy & Death
Saints of the Setting Sun
Delicate Degeneracy
Also, here's some new art from Amin Manaa.
Hospital of Quiet Minds
I’ve shelved over a month’s worth of work that went into the second narrative dungeon. Hospital morphed into something that went beyond the bounds of a D&D 5E supplement. It grew into its own game involving characters made up of their constituent body parts and movement based combat. It is, in two words, a skirmish game. I’m proud of what Catacolyte designed, but the work is best suited for a different project.
So, where does that leave Hospital of Quiet Minds? The mechanical effort helped settle the core narrative elements. Hospital will raise questions like whether we are our bodies or our brains and force PCs to confront their own self-conceptions.
Medusite
I stand by the core thematic aspects of the Medusite, but the mechanical execution didn’t feel right. Playtests revealed that we need to beef up the class' foundation and better integrate Inheritance Memories. While it needs a rework, I can’t wait to see how it turns out!
Conclusion
Sins of Our Mother is Catacolyte’s biggest project yet, and I’ve found the sheer size difficult to manage. Unfortunately, I may have to delay Sins by a few months. That said, this book is double Cult’s length, and page for page is denser. Sins already has more content than Cult even at just 30~ pages. Please look forward to its release, it’s going to be great.
To new backers, welcome! To old backers, thank you so much for your continued support. I'll strive to live up to your expectations.
We crossed the finish line with 114 backers, raising over $2,700. Between this project and Cult of the Blood Queen, we have come so far this past year. I hope you have as much fun playing in this world as I have creating it.
Crisis of Faith
We unlocked the Crisis of Faith milestone on the last day! These challenges will be standalone encounters GMs can slot into existing campaigns to test their players. These encounters could be boss fights, puzzles, or even moral quandaries. More on these soon!
Cult of the Blood Queen 1.3
I've spent an extensive time iterating on the layouts for Sins of Our Mother in an attempt to create something unique. I still have a long way to go, but researching fonts, graphical hierarchy, and general layout design has taught me Cult of the Blood Queen is still really raw. I'm committed to producing the best possible version of my work I can so I'll spend a short stint bringing Cult up to level.
Everyone who backed Cult of the Blood Queen will receive an updated pdf copy via Backerkit, and this new version will become the standard issue.
Happy Holidays!
Best, Ashton Baker Creator of Catacolyte Games
P.S. The Lich Star Race won the Community Choice Poll by 1 vote. Woo!
Hello! We're in the home stretch, so I wanted to share what I've been working on while the campaign pushes past the finish line.
$2,359 and Counting!
This is fantastic! Thank you all so much for your support. I've got a good feeling about Sins of Our Mother.
Graphic Design & Layout
One of my goals for Sins is to innovate on design layouts in D&D and other TTRPGs. To this end, I've been hard at work refining and iterating on layouts to present the information in the best possible light. Here's a Traitor Duchess stat page before and after:
Traitor Duchess Before Redesign
Traitor Duchess After Redesign
The iteration on the right presents the information more clearly, and contains more information. The attacks, abilities, and stat block are all placed with accessibility in mind. There are still problems to shave out (look how cramped the flavor and body text are), but this new iteration solves many of the issues I set out to tackle.
I've taken the same approach to the classes. One of the prevalent notes I got was that Sins didn't feel like scripture, or a bible. If anything, it felt sci-fi. I've reworked the class layouts to make them more on theme and convey the information more clearly.
Vow Before Redesign
Vow After Redesign
General Game Design & Development
Layout's cool, but what about the actual game design?
Work has been going well! Euphoria and Sloth are in the beginning phase of development, but they're already shaping up to be really, really fun.
Here's a surprise piece of Euphoria art, the Mosquito Syringe! I love it.
Mosquito Syringe
I originally conceived of Vow of Beauty, Medusite, Flesh Singer, etc. as subclasses that would heavily modify existing D&D classes. I wanted them to feel like corrupted versions of the classic archetypes, but this idea did not survive playtesting as people would inevitably work in their favorite class abilities and wreck the game balance.
For example, people playing the Vow of Beauty would keep trying to cast Lay on Hands. I've decided to pivot to just full, independent classes while maintaining a few, key abilities. This gives us more design space to play with, and opens doors we deliberately closed to maintain the boundaries we'd set for ourselves.
Vow of Beauty
The Vow of Beauty has seen some minor tweaks and I plan on improving some Flawless Executions, but right now I'm pretty happy with this class.
Medusite
The Medusite may be low key my favorite in Sins, but its development has been a little difficult to nail down. Some abilities, like Voracious and Medusa's Wrath, were incredibly fun but over powered. I've taken her back into the shop for a rework, and things are promising.
We're keeping Inheritance Memories, but slightly retooling the other abilities.
Flesh Singer
The Flesh Singer went through a soft revision. Stress is gone. Instead, Bardic Inspiration and Hit Die are now one and the same. This ability actually lets you sing with your flesh and grow steadily in power as you level up. Pretty fun!
Furthermore, the Flesh Singer's abilities changed into spells to maintain the pure spell caster mechanics. While powerful, these abilities cost Bardic Inspiration die. This 'balance of power' between the Flesh Singer and their inspired creatures will see a lot of playtesting in a campaign, but so far its been fun in the one-off encounters.
4th Narrative Adventure Poll
The Lich's Star Race & Inquisitorial Tyranny are tied, so get in there and vote before it closes at noon on the 14th. The house wins in case of a tie!
What's Next?
Catacolyte will take a short break for the holidays, and then come back and lay some ground work. I'm going to quickly update the digital version of Cult of the Blood Queen with what I've learned about layouts working on Sins. This update won't be major, but it'll clean the document up and make everything more readable.
Then, it'll be back to work on Sins to push towards our October release date.
