Update - 13/01/2025

Hello, and welcome to another weekly update! I hope you all had a great week. I'm still recovering from The Flu (TM), believe it or not. This thing doesn't want to go away... So I'm still not going to the gym or anything like that, which means I'm working a lot! I made some progress with Across a Thousand Hollow Vaults, and I even started writing some stuff for the third issue of The Vaelorian Codex (no ETA for it at all, though) because I needed a change of pace. As a matter of fact, I was feeling a bit uninspired with ATHV and Sacrifice 2e, and ended up working on a new thing. Well, it isn't entirely new: a while back (two years ago, actually) I started working on a rules-light RPG with another creator. We came up with a setting, and I was in charge of rules while the other person was handling art and design. The thing never really ended up going anywhere, though, and I've had an almost finished ruleset sitting there for all this time. So I decided to take those almost finished rules and combine them with a cool setting idea I had while being sick. Yeah, this whole thing is basically a fever dream. But I'm keeping it pretty grounded, you guys know I'm boring and I'm still reeling from the slight gonzo and light elements that Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate had, I need my grimdark.

So yeah, all this is to say I'm making a new game. But this is a small thing; as a matter of fact, it's an experiment. First of all, it's going to be rules-light (like actually rules-light), so I'm guessing it will end up being a small zine of 50 pages or less. My idea is to make this game completely modular, and release a lot of small little zines with extra rules, options, and adventures. So basically a deconstructed Blackoath game; instead of writing 300 pages and releasing it at once, it will be released piecemeal. The second part of the experiment is that it's going to be a Patreon exclusive. This is both to thank you all for sticking with me, and to give you another reason to stick around. Since this is going to be small and modular, if you guys like it I'm confident I can release new content for it every month, aside from working on my usual stuff.

I'm still not sure if this initial release will be one or two zines, or maybe even three. I have the core rules that cover character creation and how to play the game, and then I was thinking maybe releasing a second zine with the solo rules and tools, and a third one with enemies and all that. Or I might try to condense it even further and release it in a single zine. Since I really want this thing to be less than 50 pages long, it all depends on how much I manage to minimize it all.

I'm not going to give you any details about the setting, mechanics, or anything like that, not yet. I want this to be a surprise! I personally love the setting and while it isn't revolutionary, I think it's going to be fun to explore. And the rules have some pretty clever tricks too. I'm stealing some stuff from Sacrifice 2e, even.

So that's it for this week, I'm going to wrap up this new thing this week and work on the layout immediately. I already have Simone Tammetta working on the art, and he's one of the fastest artists I know, so you might even get the actually finished thing this month! You'll get the WIP version for sure, though.

Have a great week!