State of the Realm: 2025

TL;DR

  1. I spent nearly the entirety of 2024 realizing a dream.

  2. FlexCrawl is awesome, but it did put us behind our goals for the year.

  3. I remain committed to finishing our backlog of promised work as our top priority. My continued plan is not even consider any future kickstarter efforts until I successfully complete and deliver on the outstanding committed work from old kickstarters.

Completed in 2024

Infinite Adventures: Dungeons [completed]

FlexTale Adventure Generator: Dungeons [completed]

FlexCrawl Toolkit [completed]

FlexCrawl Theme Packs 1-18 [completed]

Coming Up in 2025

Artifacts & Artifice: Second Edition & Volume 3 [in process now]

This is my current focus. Far more than the original vision of merely adding a few dozen more items to the roster, this will re-imagine the first two AA volumes to make them easy to use, accessible, and to align them to the roll-a-single-d6 simple approach of FlexCrawl, integrating them into the overall vision of easy-to-generate dynamic adventure content.

Q1 2025 target for this.

Deeper Pipeline

Villainous Locales [in process]

Tangible progress: As part of developing the Western Realm Gazetteer, I’ve placed more than 150 Points of Interest directly related to the Villainous Compendium and the baddies therein.

The VL book will include an overland “heatmap” of the western continent of Aquilae, highlighting the locations of villainous hideouts and maps. In addition, more than 50 regional maps will be included, showing the surrounding region where each and every villainous point of interest.

You’d be inclined to ignore these of course if you’re not playing in the campaign setting of Aquilae, but even if you aren’t using the IGS setting, having regional maps ready to go with zero prep describing the area around each zoomed-in actual map will be useful for many GMs.

This is all in addition to and a bonus on top of the actual planned content: a villainous locale map for each baddie in the Villainous Compendium. That’s still happening!

Each and every one of the dozens of maps has been sketched out by hand.  Figure about a half to a full day per map to adapt to CC3+ and flesh out and lay out.

Prior Lives [in queue]

This, too, has been part of developing the Western Realm Gazetteer: each and every one of the dozens of NPCs featured in the Prior Lives stories has two points of interest: one for their present location, and one for their “Prior Lives” formative adventure.

I realize it’s not much, particularly for those awaiting the actual adventures, but it’s in progress!

The adventures and backstory for all of Volume 1 is sketched out; I need to draw the maps and lay it all out.

Dark Harbor [in queue]

Since last writing, I have been mapping this intensively: hundreds of roads and landmarks are already present, with hundreds more to come.

I cannot wait to focus fully on this. So many dozens of pages of notes, sketches, and ideas, just yearning for the time available to put on page. I know a lot of you are excited about this, and some have even told me outright that they’ve gotten even more psyched having now seen the Western Realm work and having more of a feel for what’s in store. Be patient and hang in there—it’s coming for sure!

Other Planned Work

I’m well aware that there are other books waiting in the wings.  These are largely planned out, outlined sketched, and/or otherwise in a ready state; it’s just a matter of freeing up enough time to launch them in earnest. 

To those eagerly awaiting such concepts, I can offer my continued apologies, and to verify that I have in no way forgotten them, nor even neglected: simply that I need to wrap up other work first.

Thank you for your feedback—positive or negative, it’s still constructive!

Other Detail (unchanged from the start of 2020)

I’m not good with deadlines.  We’ve established that over the past 5 years. 

We’ve also established that I will, and do, deliver. And that the end product tends to be massive, and beyond what was originally conceived and promised.

Whether our ubiquitous delays are “worth it” relative to the end result is up to your individual assessment as a backer, a user, and a player or GM.  I try to be as transparent as I can be, but it’s an unavoidable fact that I have difficulty predicting my output, and so target dates continue to be more of a guideline than a commitment.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from backers and customers. Ultimately, it seems as though there are two general camps.

  1. Those who have gotten something from IGS remain almost universally very positive about the situation. They may be frustrated, or disappointed, in the pace of what is delivered when, but they tend to be thrilled with the products they’ve gotten, and are eager for more.

  2. Those who are still awaiting anything that they’re owed are also pretty positive, but the frustration is greater. This only makes sense: they have much less in hand to demonstrate the value that will be coming, and the longer it takes to receive what they’re owed, the more that absence penalizes their interpretation of the situation.

I get it. As I’ve said numerous times, I’m a backer and a customer, too, and I get frustrated and disappointed when I’m put in the position that many of my backers are in. All I can do is to remain transparent, and to work as hard as I’m physically capable of to deliver everything as quickly as possible.

Self-praise by omission, then: Deadlines, crap. Everything else, aside from delivery timing, I’m super proud of.

Conclusion

Thank you. I’ve said it before, and hopefully I’ll have many future opportunities to say it: I get to do what I want to do most. This is the most intellectually, professionally, and creatively rewarding work I’ve ever done, and it’s only possible because of all of the people who see a spark of potential in what envision. From the original 56 backers of Dark Obelisk 1, to the now-six-thousand-plus customers who have grabbed at least one of our products, it is all of you who make my work possible.

I endeavor as hard as I physically can to make it worth your confidence, your patience, your input, and, well, yes, your money too. I lose money on every hardcopy I deliver, and at best I break even with Kickstarters. I invest every single minute of time, every dollar of income, into making more, and making everything better.

Onward.