Update - 03/01/2022

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful start of the new year, and that 2022 is a good one for all of us!

It will certainly start interesting for me, considering the Across a Thousand Dead Worlds Kickstarter campaign will take place un just a few weeks! I'm super close to finally being done with the last missing chapter, and playtesting is still going on and producing fantastic feedback, so I cannot wait for this to be done. It's been a long time of thinking and working on this game exclusively, and I'm very eager to put it out there and see what the world thinks of it. I'm still a bit afraid that it might have too many moving parts that makes it a bit too complex, but I don't see anyway around it for a solo game. If it's played as a traditional RPG, with GM and all, it should be pretty straight forward because the GM should do all the heavy lifting, but as a solo player you have two options: to pre-generate the whole mission site so you're not interrupted later on by having to create the different creatures, etc., or do it all on the fly, which is cooler in my opinion but does mean that you'll have to stop and roll on a few tables each time you need to generate a creature. I was looking into simplified rules for creature creation, so I might include those... The problem is that you'd have to sacrifice enemy variety, but I guess many would gladly trade complexity for quickness of play. 

Now that things are almost done with ATDW I'm starting to think about what comes next. My next game is 99% probably going to be Empire Undying (I still think I should finish Under Ashen Skies though...), so I'm thinking of how to approach that. I don't want to forget the fact that I have plans for ATDW's future though, more concretely, the story's next arc. But before I tackle that my goal is to produce content for you guys; I was thinking of adding missions and sites for your ATDW games, with some new rules or gear added here and there. The next story arc is such a big game changer that it would be a bit of a waste not to develop a bit further the core gameplay, before moving on from it. There are some stories I still want to tell on this first arc! But you guys know me, always excited about what comes next.

Speaking of what comes next, as I mentioned we're working on setting up the Kickstarter page so I can submit it for approval, and it seems we've decided not to have a project video. I did a small casual poll on Twitter (https://twitter.com/iamthehornedone/status/1476655770448150533) and judging by the results, the vast majority generally ignore the videos. I'm talking about presentation videos, not gameplay ones which I think are great. So yeah, no video for us, which is something my wallet is very thankful for! But what about you, guys? Do you watch the KS campaign videos? I know I never do either, I go straight to the text. It's not even conscious at this point, I literally don't see them, it's like the ads on most sites now, they're just background noise. 

So this week will hopefully be the one that signals the end of ATDW's development (at least aside from fixes and smaller additions here and there). I'll be focusing on that 100%, and the KS campaign, that's it. 

Hope you all have a great first week of the year!