Update - 30/12/2024 - A Year in Review

Hello, everyone! I hope you all had a nice Christmas time, if you are one to celebrate. I've spent the whole week extremely ill, unfortunately, with the worst fever I've had in my life, so I ended up going to the hospital. I'm doing better now, as it's apparently just a very strong flu virus, but I'm totally beat and the fever isn't totally gone. So unfortunately, the week I was hoping to use to wrap up more content for you guys was spent recovering from the damn flu. I still have some stuff to give you guys for this month's Patreon rewards, and I really hope I can do it before the year's over. If not, it will be during the first week of January.

My idea was to write a detailed Year in Review post, but I'm honestly too exhausted to be able to concentrate for that long, so I'll just write a few highlights:

• The Good: As you guys know, this was my first year going full-time RPG writer, and it's been the best decision of my life so far. It's a lot of stress, and a lot of work, but I'm doing what I love, and people seem to like it, so there's nothing better than that! I released a little dungeon crawler called Ker Nethalas, and for some reason, it clicked with a lot of people. This is amazing, because I think it did so despite the fact that it can be considered crunchy by most. I think that there's a really simple reason for this: the setting and game's flavor. The already existing dungeon crawlers are all fantastic, but they also have some of the blandest settings I can think of. This isn't 1970 anymore, we've already played vanilla fantasy for years, I think we can come up with something more interesting. That isn't to say Ker Nethalas' setting is super original -it's not-, but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who wants the worldbuilding to be more about dwarves hating elves and bards being horny or whatever.
  Another awesome aspect of this year, a really incredible one for me, is this Patreon's growth. As of this writing, there are 179 paid members, which is absolutely incredible! I've said this before, but you can't imagine how much of a blessing it is to know that I have something akin to a salary I can rely on monthly, instead of the always fluctuating sales. Sure, Patreon numbers change wildly from month to month too, but it's been slowly going upwards, so I'm immensely grateful to all of you!

• The So-So:  As most of you know, I was a bit disappointed with how Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate was received. It's the game I've worked the hardest on (actually Carnage & Aether probably deserves that title now, but RHBF felt much more intensive because it's not grimdark and as such it requires 100% more effort from my side), and I spent a lot to get it done, too. But I stand by the game, I think it's a great one and I'm happy I got it done! It will serve as the foundation for even greater things, the same as every game I write.

• The Bad: This is an easy one: being screwed, once again, over the Across a Thousand Dead Worlds books. As you guys know, all the US-side books (and profits) were essentially stolen by the person that had been working with me for their distribution. The fact that this was done by someone I considered a friend was obviously the cherry on the top. I know it wasn't done out of malice, but it was done nonetheless, and it really screwed me over, especially because it happened around the time of the ENNIE nomination, with tons of people in the US wanting to buy the book, and being unable to do so. It's going to be a long time before I loosen my grip over any of my projects again, and if I was a control freak before, now I'm basically a dictator, and I don't care. I'm going to do things my way, even if it isn't the smart way of doing it always.

Overall, 2024 has been an incredibly positive year for me, at least work-wise. And as you guys know, I have so, so many plans for 2025, let's see how many of them I can actually bring to fruition.

So once again, thank you all for being here along for the ride! It's been a year with lots of new folks joining here, people I now speak with on a daily basis on the Blackoath Discord, and it's always a blast to have such a cool community!

Happy 2025!

-Alex