Update 28: The First Draft of S&F is done!
about 6 years ago – Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 01:56:25 AM

Good enough reason as any for an update!

Ok, let's talk about what this means. The "First Draft" isn't the entire manuscript, it's about 98% of it. What's left to write falls into three categories; 

There's a lot of "Hey you never actually explain why this is in here" from our editor Joshua Yearsley (the fine gentleman who edits my novels) and this is critical feedback. With a playtest I can kinda write "Here's how this works" and it's a safe assumption the folks in the playtest don't need to have "why are there rules for warfare in here?" explained to them. Testers are way more educated on the contents of the book than your average consumer. Mr. Yearsley is going through and making sure A: I wrote everything I needed to write and B: I didn't write anything I didn't need to (there's a lot of this. :D )

There's also a lot of feedback from the testers that hasn't been incorporated into the manuscript. Sometimes testers notice stuff I need to fix right away or they can't test, sometimes they notice stuff Lars (our QA director) needs to know there IS an answer for, even if we don't deploy it right away, and sometimes they notice stuff that absolutely needs to be addressed, but I know I can do it whenever and it's not critical. Now is when we go through and sweep up all the stuff from the latter two categories and add them to the manuscript.

And there's a third category of stuff I just forgot to do, like...some creatures are missing some important abilities. There are only a handful of these. 

So the manuscript as it stands can be read from beginning to end, and you wouldn't necessarily notice anything was missing, but it would be rough.

The editing process works like this:

1: I send a playtest packet to Mr Yearsley and he makes thousands of edits and dozens of comments and questions and sends it back to me.

2: I review his edits and accept or reject them (I think I've accepted all but maybe 3 of them) and answer his questions, and send the document back to him.

3: He reviews my answers and makes another pass based on what we decided. This tends to be stuff like...in which person should this section be (i.e. to whom am I talking?) and do we capitalize this term throughout the book? 

4: He sends it back to me with more edits and at this point probably no (or very few) comments. After I accept all these edits, and address his last comments, that Packet is in a Fair Draft state.

Right now the entire book has been sent to Joshua. He's done his first pass on almost all of it. I have reviewed his comments on about half the book and accepted/rejected changes and sent it back to him.

So, even if you haven't followed all of this, the TL;DR version is "The entire manuscript has been written once, and about 80% of it has gotten an editing pass." There's still work to do, but actually not a lot! We're only a few days away from having a Fair Draft complete.

But the book NEVER stops being edited. Something I learned waaay back at Last Unicorn Games, the number of errors you find in a book expands to fill the time you allocate to looking for errors. At some point we will lock the manuscript to send it to the printer and this is the Final Draft.

EVEN AT THIS STATE we will still make changes, but this will be a new document. It will be Strongholds and Followers v1.1. Because for one thing once the book is out in the wild and all 28,918 backers have gotten it and anyone can buy a copy in the store, folks will start saying "This part sucks, why doesn't it work like this?" And we will continually revise version 1.1 to bring it in line with the way in which folks are using the book. We'll update the PDF regularly so it's always got the current rules in it, and whenever we reprint the book it will always be from the current version (and it will which version it is).

That will continue until feedback dies down either because the book is stable or folks just stop using it. But our goal is to make sure it always reflects our best design, not just "the best we would come up with back in the summer of '18."

We still have some art to finish and the book needs to be layed out. I have no idea how long this will take, but I believe we're now talking about weeks, not months. Months for the print version, I should say, weeks for the PDF.

I still have a few days work left to do on the edits and revisions to the manuscript, but my workload for S&F is now very light which means I can turn my attention to other projects like...the campaign!

It's now been a year since I last ran D&D and that's probably the longest I've gone without GMing since I was 15 and I'm itching to get back to it. I think, rather than plunge right into the new game, I'm going to run an adventure for some friends to get the scent back. Some of these folks are friends who've never played before and those are my favorite players. :D 

We'll record it but it won't be live. We'll probably upload it all sometime after the MCDM game gets going. This way I can spend the next couple of weeks prepping the MCDM game, running a home game to get back into the swing of things.

I can't be certain when the MCDM game will start, but like the PDF of Strongholds and Followers, we're talking weeks, not months. If I say "October" people will freak out once OCT rolls around and start counting days which I don't think is healthy for them or me. It might be November. But work begins on it now in earnest.

The idea that I could just...spend my days prepping D&D and that's like...my job...is pretty crazy. HOPEFULLY it results in a better game than you would have gotten if I were still doing all this in my spare time. Actually, I'm certain it will. :D

And we're gonna try and get back on a regular cadence for Running the Game. I'm working on a script for the first video in the new office. EVIL! In which we talk about Manichaeism and Milgram's 37 and why old adventures were about dungeons instead of saving the world and oh yeah how to run Evil PCs and whether you should even think about that. :D

Getting the weight of the S&F manuscript off my shoulders opens up a lot. So hopefully we'll all see that difference in the weeks to come. 

Oh, and I suppose I should start doing some preliminary work on the outline for Kingdoms and Warfare. :D

P.S. I don't want to post an update without some ART, so check this out!

 More Servitor art!

 Tons more like this in the book!

Update #27
about 6 years ago – Sun, Sep 09, 2018 at 01:39:46 AM

No update for a while just because I'm really close to finishing the first draft of the manuscript for S&F and I'm laser focused on getting it done. 

So this is gonna be a short update, and you'll get a longer one once I finish the manuscript. The studio for the livestream is ready! We shot our first video there, playing Codenames as an excuse to do an audio/video test and it went great, I was very happy with the results. There's still tweaks to be made, but there always will be.

The D&D Stream is still a few weeks away, have to finish S&F first, but I am ramping back up. I sent out a questionnaire to the players to get them thinking about their backstories. In case you don't know; the campaign follows a mercenary company called The Chain (The Chain of what, we don't know yet, maybe Acheron or Tartarus or Kur, we'll see) as they experience a major defeat and retreat to Capital, the greatest city in this or any age, the City of the Great Game, to lick their wounds and rebuild. The PCs are the officer corps of the Chain which means they'll be starting at 5th level.

Oh, actually, here's something cool I haven't shown anyone else. This is the questionnaire I sent the players. This just went out a couple of days ago.

No updates on stuff like the minis or shirts and stickers because (crossing fingers) those are all solved problems. Minis are being made, shirts and stickers have been approved. 

Lots of cool new art comes in all the time but I don't want to spoil everything in the book by showcasing it all here. But I also don't want to show you nothing so here's a little somethin'-somethin';

One way to gain a Stronghold: steal it!

One of the Inexorables, the Servitors of Uttermost Law. Found a Temple and serve your Deity well, and you could attract one of these things!

Anyway I'm here on the weekend messing with the Time Rider and working on the manuscript. More updates as we get closer to being finished!

P.S. There's probably a LOT of stuff that's happened since we started all this that I haven't covered, but it's just because we're so busy right now. Once I'm done with the manuscript, we'll do a big Post-mortem video where we talk about everything, and go through all the data we collected in the survey, etc...

Update #26
over 6 years ago – Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 01:43:54 AM

Ooohhh let’s see what’s new since last we left our heroes.  

The Book  

We just finished Playtest Packet #5 and I think there will only be six packets total so that gives you some idea how close the manuscript is to being done. Packet Five includes the rules for Establishments, the last of the four major Stronghold types and the one for folks like Bards and Rogues though of course anyone can build any stronghold. Establishments generate cassshhhh. They also let you buy Favors (temporarily duplicating another Stronghold’s special ability for a price) and collect Rumors that give you an advantage in your next adventure.

Establishments also let you do intelligence gathering on other local organizations and find out what your enemies are up to. Of course, this ability benefits a lot from having enemies but rules like this give GMs a good excuse to flesh out the other organizations in their world. Kingdoms & Warfare will have formal rules for the actions an Organization can take.

We also dumped ALL the Follower charts on the testers as well as all the improved class abilities. That leaves mostly only Items! There are a few other things, like we need to cook up some special units, and I want to make Druid Groves cooler. And there’s a draft of a Basic Warfare system I need to clean up that will give folks the ability to resolve huge battles with just a couple of die rolls. But that won’t be a lot of work all told, the Items will be the bulk of it.

The art continues to come in. Lots more to do, but the stuff we have is just cool as hell, I hope everyone else is as stoked by the art as I am.

We're incredibly lucky in the artists working with us.

Let’s see...what else..  

The Set!  

Want to see something cool?  

This is like 90% of the finished set. The table is by Rathskellers, you’ll get a whole video just on that table soon. We’ve got the truss holding up the cameras, the lights, and the micromaphones. All of which are final. That gold foil disc is a bounce light so we can do something about the shadows the downward-facing lights create. It’s not bad as it is, but we wanted to try it. Here’s what it looks like without any bounce lights.

It’s not bad! I mean apart from the prating coxcomb in the middle of the shot, but some of the other shots you can see some unflattering shadows we’d sort of like to fill in.

That bookcase was a test, just to see how it looked onscreen and if we could light it well and thanks to the Lumix GH5s, it looks GREAT! So we ordered more for the rest of the set. Next time you see this, bookcases like that will be behind all the players and that is the LAST component of the set! Then we’re ready!

I wanted bookcases so we could all put our own personal knicknacks behind us and swap one or two out after every session a la the bookcase behind me in the YouTube videos. There were TONS of ideas about what “the set” should look like, what kind of feel we should go for and they were all really good. But I said I wanted the set to look like Sherlock Holmes’ den, and that meant something that looked Victorian. I’m pretty happy with where we landed on that.

We tested a lot of cameras, including a couple of Blackmagics and in the end we went with the Panasonic GH5 for a few reasons. First, it was the cheapest by a lot. And when you’re ordering 4 of them anything you save is good. But also they just produced the best picture out of the camera. The more expensive Studio cameras collect a LOT of data and just vomit all of it out, expecting you to do all the color correction in post. Well, the GH5 is more like a consumer camera so it has lots of software built in that does its best to make the picture look good for you and that’s great for us. Our friend Scott who’s a pro with this stuff assured us any of the cameras we were looking at would do great, the more expensive ones are just more versatile and let you shoot in many different conditions. Well, we’re in a pretty controlled environment so the ability to shoot outside or in low light or whatever wasn’t really valuable to us.

They were also the smallest and lightest of the bunch and when you’re hanging cameras from poles right next to the players, and each camera is in another camera’s shot, the smaller the better. Jerry got these cool cages for them that makes it real easy to detach them and hook them up somewhere else which is good because we have two other sets we’ve built; one to do more interviews like the one I did with Jim Murphy and another set for Maker Videos featuring all the folks we know who make replica props and cosplay stuff and custom D&D terrain and maybe I can get Phil or Jim to do some painting How To videos! :D

The lights are I Don’t Know What Brand but the cool thing about them is they have built in ethernet so Jerry can control the light levels and warmth from the production room which is a whole other different part of the office! They are Huge compared to our old lights but that means they pump out a lot of light without feeling like spotlights. We’ve already played games for hours in these conditions...mostly Roborally...and no one complained about the lights being bright. And they’re LEDs so they don’t give off a lot of heat.

The microphones are Sennheiser mkh 416’s which are the workhorse of the industry, you see them everywhere. We could have gone with cheaper mics but that would have meant more research and cheaper mics are less tolerant. I’ve used this model for years now and just trust it. We did a sound test with everyone sitting at the table and our audio guy Brian said it was aces. You’ll get to meet Brian soon, I believe he’ll be the host of our first Maker Video. :D

We are really, really close to being able to stream. We’re not close to the campaign being ready, but you’ll see a video pretty soon from me on that very set.

GenCon

Oh we went to GenCon! That was a blast and also crazy. I personally shook hands with what seemed like a couple hundred people over the four days of the show and got to see tons of old friends from back in the Last Unicorn/WotC/Decipher days. Without exception, every person I talked to was awesome and respectful and I never felt put upon.

I was generally worried I was going to be short with someone? Or run out of steam and blow someone off, or say something stupid by accident. I mean I’m generally a pretty well-spoken dude, but I’ve made an idiot out of myself just talking to the checker at the grocery store. Anyone can say something stupid in the moment and go “WTH did I say that for?” afterwards but I think I did ok.

I’m just hyperconscious that when folks come up to me at a show, they have a certain expectation of what Talking To Matt is gonna be like and I really don’t want to let anyone down.

We also met with artists and other vendors and just generally learned a lot and the team agreed it was a productive trip. I was supposed to give a talk called From YouTube to Kickstarter: Monetizing Your Community which I feel like I now know a lot about? But looking out at 150 people in the audience I thought “Man I could talk about whatever” and on the spur of the moment decided to try and make a Running the Game video about the structure of a good adventure which began with the structure of good story.

It went pretty well! :D I had a lot of fun and I think the folks in the audience liked it and it seemed like the response on YouTube was positive so that’s good.

One person, however, was upset I didn’t give the talk I said I was going to give because they had no idea who I was and weren’t interested in Story Time With Uncle Matt. If I had known that person was out there I would have just sat down with them afterwards and done my talk just for them!

So to make it up to that person, even though they may never see it, I will do a video on the subject soon.

I’m not sure what our Convention Presence is going to be like going forward, I think we’re probably just going to pick one con per year and do that one, maybe GenCon, maybe Pax Unplugged. We’ll see. Something we’d like to do is have a permanent presence at the local L.A. conventions put on by Strategicon. We don’t really have a game folks can play yet? So I don’t know what we’d do there, but if we ever DO have a game, that’ll be Ground Zero for promoting it.

The Campaign  

Because of our schedule, I can’t really work on prepping the campaign until the manuscript for the book is done but we’re pretty close to that! And I do little bits here and there, nothing major though. You’ll know we’re getting close when you see me streaming more prep videos.

We couldn’t start playing until the set was ready anyway, but now it looks like the set will be ready about 3 or 4 weeks before the campaign is. So you’ll gets some videos of us playing other games at that table. And we’ve got some cool tech we haven’t shown off yet that will make things fun. :D

That’s it! Hope that feels substantive. We’re getting close to the point where I won’t have much to talk about. Once the book goes out, once the stream starts, then we’ve fulfilled the Kickstarter! We’re much closer to the end with all that than the beginning, but if you’ve been enjoying these updates, no fear. We’ll keep doing them on the website or summat. Maybe regular videos.

Thanks for reading all this folks, see you all on YouTube soon!

We're Not Going To Talk About How Tired I Am
over 6 years ago – Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 01:55:12 AM

Because if I even bring it up, people will be like "Oh be sure to take some time off, you have to take care of yourself!" Whatever, I got a book to finish! On that note...

The Fourth Packet Is Away!

Huzzah! In a very real sense, this last packet is why we slipped our dates, so I really hope folks like it.

Packet Four includes the rules for Temples, which grant you boons depending on how happy your god or patron is with you. This is measured by a new stat called Concordance and includes 30 new monsters who may come aid you in battle if your god is pleased with you.

Those thirty monsters all have new, unique abilities and backstories complete with tons of lore explaining the different Planes they come from. Obviously folks can use their own cosmologies or the official cosmology, but while I use a lot of default stuff in my own game, any time I sit down to design something new I also make sure to take seriously the job of where these things come from or why these things work the way they do and that's how my world gets built. Now I have a much more robust cosmology than I did before.

P4 also includes the rules (but not descriptions, those will come in packet 4.5) for the Gemstone Dragons. That's 5 different species of dragon and 4 examples of each, one for each age category, so that's another 20 monsters for a total of 50 monsters.

AND there are new rules for Psionics which represent my own personal notions of how psionics should work in a fantasy game. I expect them to be controversial, but they will at least be mine which is what I think people are paying for. I'm counting on the testers pounding hard on those rules.

To give you and idea where we are with the book; here's what's left to do;

Packet 5 will be Establishments, the Follower Rules & charts, and the Improved Class Abilities you get for founding a Stronghold.  

The only thing not already finished here are the Establishment rules, but they aren't anywhere near as complex as Temples or Towers. They mostly make money and let you spy on your (political) neighbors, and sabotage them. But because that's not super exciting for someone in the middle of a battle, you also collect Rumors that grant your bonuses against your enemies. Rumors work pretty much the way you'd expect them to. :D

Packet Six will be New Items, the Simple Warfare System for people who just want to roll some dice and resolve a battle, and rules for Adventuring Followers. The Simple Warfare System is already done, it just needs to be edited and brought in line with the language of the rest of the book.

The New Items, including ten different codices, are the bulk of the remaining work. That's what I'm taking to GenCon with me. So if you're in Indy next week looking for me, I'm in my hotel room slaving over a hot keyboard.

And that's it! Then the manuscript will be done! Well, it may never be "done" we'll always be tweaking it based on user feedback, but that's the version we'll send to Layout and very shortly thereafter you will have it!

Special thanks to Lars for taking my Excel sheets with all the monster data in them with 8 tabs each of which had to be viewed at 50% if you had any hope of taking it all in, and turning it into something the testers could read. Lars also helped with some of the design but I won't say what, we'll see if people notice. :D Ideally...they won't!

So that's your book update, let's see...what else...

Oh We Visited The New Critical Role Set

I told Matt Mercer it was because I wanted to pick up my copy of the limited edition Critical Role comic, but between you and me it was because I wanted to spy on their setup and steal all their ideas. I think their lights each cost $4,000. We looked them up.

We're, ah...we're not spending $30,000 on lights. Maybe later. If the show does well. :D But gosh Critical Role looks really good in the new studio. Hopefully we can get close. We got some tricks up our sleeves. We looked at all their gear and took notes about what they're using. Some stuff was surprisingly cheap! Some things were ridiculously expensive and it wasn't always what you'd guess.

I smuggled Jerry and Anna in with me and while I was talking to Matt and Liam, they took notes on the CR setup to see what ideas we can steal. It was pretty exciting and everyone there was SUPER cool to us. Of course they knew what we were doing, I cleared it with Matt first, so their producers took the time to explain to Jerry and Anna what they did and why. If our show looks good, it will be at least in part because of the Critical Role crew.

We did our first sound test with all the real mics we'll be using and my audio guy said it sounded really good! So, cross your fingers.

The actual lights we intend on using started arriving today, they're pretty awesome. They can be very bright, and they can be warm, but the question remains whether they can do both. I think the secret to the way CR looks right now is their lights. They are very warm, and they pump out many lumens, but because the lights are so BIG, you don't ever have a sense of being surrounded by spotlights. It isn't tiring on the eyes, because no individual light or LED is "bright." There's just a lot of them. Which is, by the way, the same strategy I use filming at home, after using studio lights for two years, I switched to just A Lot Of LEDs In My Room. Normal LiFX bulbs.

We're gonna do some tests with these new lights when we get back from GenCon. We may just go with them for now and upgrade later once MCDM is generating revenue. Not everything needs to be a home run the first time, but I think people expect at least a a double from us now.

I think we know which camera we'll be using on set. We tested two Black Magic cameras and one Panasonic camera and they each have different pros and cons, but it looks like The Most Expensive Camera is actually the best, so we'll be getting three more of those.

Otherwise we're getting VERY close to being able to shoot actual video in the studio. Stay tuned!

GenCon

The WHOLE CREW will be at GenCon so if you see us please come say hi! We are friendly! Well, Anna and Jerry and I are friendly, at any rate. Lololololol....

I'm doing a talk the time and day and location of which I shall not reveal here because we asked for a room with 150 people in it thinking that would be more than enough and all tickets sold out in like an hour. >.< So...I'm stupid, that's the only lesson here.

Unfortunately we don't have a booth so there's no real coordinated way to organize a signing or anything, I apologize. We'll do better next time!

We got a bunch more art, and advanced many smaller causes. There's a million little battles to be fought the entire tale of which would bore you, but the tl;dr is;

More Book Gets Done Every Day, And We're Almost Done

and

We Get Closer To Streaming Every Week.

Hopefully you reading this get a real sense of progress being made. It's your money we're spending here, I want to make sure you know where it's going.

The book is shaping up to be really exciting and what I consider a Major Work. I hope folks like it. I hope they use it and it gives them more and different ways to play the game.

Missing September
over 6 years ago – Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 01:40:21 AM

Ok well, might as well rip the band-aid off. The bad news is; the physical copy of Strongholds & Followers will not be shipping in September. This is the post where we talk about why.

Once it was obvious we weren’t going to get the physical book out in September, we had a big meeting where we made a new schedule based on everything we’ve learned in the past several months, so instead of being a guess, we now have a real estimate we’re confident in. Based on that estimate, we’re confident we can get the PDF out in September and the print book and all the physical rewards (the minis, the shirts, stickers) out in January/February. So in one sense the “book” should still go out in September, it’ll just be the PDF.

That sucks. I wanted very badly to meet our deadline but unless you count the PDF (and, it’s not done yet! So we can’t count those chickens) we’re going to miss it. I apologize to everyone. We are busting our ass over here to get everything done, we’re not missing September because we blew all the money on booze and negotiable affection. The playtest gets new packets every couple of weeks, we’re showing off new art all the time. The minis are happening AMAZINGLY. Everything is moving forward.

But I’d like to talk about why we’re missing September, because I think the behind the scenes stuff is interesting.

There are a lot of little reasons why we’re missing our deadline (in print at least) but there are three big ones.

MCDM

I think we lost about six weeks to me starting my own company and hiring three employees. It was an incredibly disruptive process and something I, personally, found excruciatingly tedious. It was many hours, every day, on phone calls and in emails just having people explain to me all the crap I needed to do. Like...we have insurance in case the boat the books are shipped on sinks! We have lots of insurance, stuff I never knew about and would never have thought about, but it’s all stuff you need to do if you want to get an office, or sign contracts with other people who want to know you’re insured.

Just one of the several health insurance docs I had to fill out was 64 pages long! But everyone at MCDM gets Health Insurance. And good health insurance! Everyone also gets equity, 401k, all the stuff you would expect from a “real company.” Maybe I could have found a way to do all this faster or cheaper, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to do the right thing and that actually takes a lot of work.

But! That’s all done now! And has been for a while. But we did lose a month and a half I never budgeted for.

Also I somewhat stupidly gave Kickstarter the September deadline based on the length of the manuscript if we unlocked NO stretch goals. But we did the opposite! I think we basically doubled the length of the book in stretch goals, and all that takes time to write and (more importantly for us) art direct. That’s a mistake we won’t make again, the deadline should be the timetable for producing all stretch goals.

The Playtest

I don’t think we’d do it exactly the same way again, but one of the backer levels on Kickstarter granted access to the playtest and this impacted our schedule in an unexpected way. Because people could use the Pledge Manager to change their pledge level. They could leave the playtest by changing to a lower pledge level.

Which meant...we didn’t know who was going to be in the playtest until the pledge manager closed. We couldn’t start playtesting until after we closed the pledge manager.

That sucked, and it cost us a lot of time, but obviously we learned something important there. We won’t do that again! This is our first Kickstarter and even though we talked to a lot of people who’d done it before, we still learned a LOT of stuff you can only learn by doing it.

Also, we did a lot of innovative stuff, Jerry wrote a bot to invite people to the playtest discord, we have google surveys running everything, there's a lot of cool behind-the-scenes tech we had to develop to manage the playtest and that took time. But it means future products will have all this infrastructure in place, which is really exciting to me.

The Temple Summoning Rules

I’ve already talked about this in another update but I don’t think the full magnitude of it is understood.

The temple summoning rules let players call upon the powers that grant them their spells and, if they have been loyal and true servants, gain the services of an extraplanar ally for the duration of a combat.

My own, personal, tables that you roll on are populated with lots of stuff from other editions we can’t use. And they aren’t closely linked, thematically. They were always a hodge-podge. Each edition of the game only produces a few “monsters” that aren’t either evil or just Neutral Hungry, and could be relied upon to help you in combat. The game assumes that most monsters are things you fight, not allies that can fight with you.

And a lot of the creatures that ARE allies are so high level it would be game-breaking to summon one.

So I had to invent about 30 new monsters. More if you count the Gemstone Dragons. I probably could have gotten away with fewer monsters but I very strongly wanted to do it right. I wanted to make sure there was a chart for Demons, a chart for Devils, for Undead (these were easy, plenty of those already!) but also a chart for Angels, for agents of Chaos, of Nature, of Law. Something for any character that might build any kind of temple.

That meant inventing a ton of new monsters. Well, I’d done that before for third edition. Wrote a whole monster book. And I love these new monsters, there’s some crazy epic stuff in here. And if they are well-received, we can add more in later products. Make longer charts or more charts!

But it all took time to design, about a month. I think between starting a new company, waiting for the playtest, and inventing a tiny manual of monsters, we lost about 3 months.

Apart from the playtest, I don’t think we could have done any of these things any faster, but we could have planned better, and we will plan better next time. I also think this book will be the last time we schedule me to work on One Thing Only. Future print projects need to account for me doing other stuff like Making Videos and Streaming D&D, which includes Campaign Prep. All that stuff takes time and right now I don’t have time for anything except Strongholds & Followers.

But we are close to being done with the manuscript! That’ll be a huge weight off my shoulders. And I believe we’ll be streaming something, who knows what, by the end of the month. We’re getting cameras and microphones and working on how we’re going to do our background and it’s all pretty exciting. It’s nice to come out of my office after four days solid writing and see the stage has advanced by leaps and bounds.

We’ll keep updating you with everything, so you’ll be seeing steady progress, I don’t think there’s any danger we’re suddenly going to do dark, so even though we’re missing September, I hope everyone reading this feels like “well the book is definitely happening!”

Also, since I like showing off new stuff, these are some of the new monsters you can summon;

That's just a rough, fyi, the final piece will be cooler. Like this!

This thing uses divine spells along with a hypnotic, charming display. And a life drain, it's not all pretty lights and spells. The fey are deadly as well as beautiful. Like ME!

Chief of the Court of All Flesh, this dude grows new limbs every time you hit him. Not arms, mind you, Well, they could be arms. They could also be tentacles or claws! It's a surprise!

We've got lots more but I want to dole them out slowly. :D

Thanks for being patient everyone. I know this is bad news, but the good news is the book is moving along at pace and the company making it is infinitely more robust now than we were when we were all doing this part-time. That's because of you, and your support for which we are intensely grateful. This is going to be an amazing book, I think. Something we'll all be proud of.