Update - 07/04/2025
Hello, and welcome to another weekly update! I hope you all had a great weekend. I spent mine home, basically working and doing little else. I did catch up with the new Daredevil TV show, which I'm enjoying.
It's been quite a week for the RPG and boardgame industry, right? Unless you've been living under a rock, most of you have probably heard of the recent tariffs the US is imposing over most imported goods. This is cataclysmic for the boardgame industry, and possibly pretty bad for the RPG industry as well. I say "possibly" because it's likely that the new tariffs won't affect books, but I guess we'll see. It's not that bad for me personally because I'm in Europe and I print all my books in Europe (when I print them, since I don't make offset copies of all my games), and it's really looking like US customers purchasing books from me will still only have to pay for shipping and nothing else, but it is still quite horrible to watch the industry fall apart in basically a week, and see how it affects close friends and collaborators. Let's hope there's a solution offered, otherwise the industry is going to look very different in just a few months.
I've been focused on getting Tales from the Green (that's the game I'm writing with Ivan Sorensen, author of 5 Parsecs from Home, for those of you who don't know), and I think the character creation chapter is basically done. I've added Feats, Powers, and Evolutions, so there are nice options to personalize your characters. There are some original ideas that I think people are going to love about this game, it's going to be really exciting to see it in play once we're done!
I've also worked on a variety of things these last days. I've done some more progress with Riftbreakers 2e (which I still want to wrap up this month), although less than I would have liked, and I've made quite good progress with the third Vaelorian Codex for Ker Nethalas. It's still pretty far off due to how slow art goes (I still don't even have the cover), but writing is moving along nicely and I'll be sharing the artless version with you guys next month for sure. I'm really excited to release this codex because it adds a lot of very fun new gameplay options and optional rules, such as having environmental hazards that can appear during a fight, or using the new attrition rules to make sure fights don't last 40 minutes.
I've also released the first official Blackoath video on the YouTube channel! The response has been fantastic so far, so please, share the word, and like and subscribe! Gwydion did a fantastic job with the video. The currently planned release pace is one new video a month, because I don't think there's any need to do more than that. Next video will be about the new Ker Nethalas quickstart, or the Voidspire Territories book for Machine Gods. We'll see! the Machine Gods books should be ready to go next month, so it might be interesting to have a video for each of the two books online that I can refer to when people ask me about the game.
This week I'll keep working on Tales from the Green, and try to wrap up the exploration content for overworld travel in Riftbreakers 2e. I've added a new region to the peninsula, and each region has its own exploration tables, so it's a lot of work! After that I'll rework how questing works, and after that comes Rift exploration, which I want to tweak as well. Lots to do! Oh yeah, and I also want to start figuring out how to expand magic in Machine Gods for the Advanced Rules book.
Have a great week!