Announcing Horizon

Horizon is an upcoming digital toolkit designed for use with Old-School Essentials. Its goal is to enhance your play at the table and online by providing digital tools that improve the play experience. It will provide character sheets with automated inventory management for players and campaign and session management tools for the referee. It will also include automatic initiative and combat phase tracking, as well as tools to assist with all other common procedures in the game.

The project will launch with support for the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy variant, built using its free SRD under the Open Gaming License. After that, we'll reach out to first and third-party publishers in the Old-School Essentials space to integrate more aspects of the game and provide a new digital storefront for them to sell through.

You won't have to buy PDFs of games you already own. The versions available on Horizon feature a completely separate and new digitization. This includes automation of new classes and equipment, as well as tools that will help you run specific adventures. The experience provided through Horizon will be superior to what would be possible with a PDF or physical copy of any game materials purchased.

Purchasing published content won't be the only way to access new classes, equipment, and monsters. Although it may not be available at launch, Horizon will feature a comprehensive homebrew creative suite, allowing you to bring the content you've created onto the platform without having to directly partner with us to make it available for general sale.

While we're eager to show off the parts of this tool that already work, a preview won't be available until later, when we begin preparing for our official launch, which is planned for later this year.

Once it's launched, there will be a two-tier pricing structure available. The free tier is a feature-complete version of Horizon, but it will restrict you to only being able to host one game and participate in three games. We believe this should be enough for most average users. You'll also be restricted to 10 MB of file uploads, so make sure to compress your maps and images!

Horizon Plus, which will cost $8, will grant you unlimited games joined and hosted, and will enable multi-referee tools in games that you host, for all your large-scale West Marches and open table needs! The storage limit will be lifted, but if you start overwhelming our servers with too many files, we may send you an email asking you to cut back a little. We hope to eventually sweeten the deal on Horizon Plus by adding free content drops and other Plus member benefits.

This announcement will also serve as the official start of the Horizon ecosystem. Those of you with a keen eye who have been following Lucille L. Blumire on the internet for a while will likely have known about this ahead of time, and this blog already has some of the best articles she's written, tidied up, and ported over.

In addition, the YouTube channel will provide the media arm of Horizon, which will eventually be full of video reviews, creator interviews, and content focused on discussions. The community discord can serve as a hub for discussing the Horizon project with others who have an interest in it, and it's available to join today!

The team making all of this happen currently consists of Lucille L. Blumire as a Lead Developer, with some of her friends and family, providing additional content and support.

We'll be collecting FAQ questions from the Discord, and adding them to the bottom of this article, so come and say hello and ask all of your excellent questions about the project!