Greetings from the Grotto

Wow, past the middle of May already? Good grief time sails. The draft of A Gathering of the Marked is complete, and I'm doing the 'post-final-playtest' re-write to touch everything up before sending it off for final proofing. It's taken a bit longer than expected to get to this point, as 'work-work' (the kind that keeps the lights on in the Sorcerous Grotto) has been busy, and my health has unfortunately been a bit sketchy. But we're getting there. I truly appreciate everyone's support!

Like most small publishers, I work on the adventures and tools in my spare time, and it's often a personal battle of wills to keep pushing on in the wee hours of the night to see things through to completion. But then someone will send me a message about how much fun their group had with one of the adventures, or how useful the tools are, and it really does fire me up. I hope everyone embraces the new adventure, it's been fun to write/test.

The Future
I've been doing lots of research/planning on the next batch of projects. The M-Series of adventures is going to have a cool new look/format/feel, and I can't wait to clear the decks to really start production. I'm also going to be creating a series of 2-4 page 'sandbox' style resources called Sunken Sidetreks that will largely be system neutral: A fun map, a cool locale, some interesting personalities and rumors... I really need something like this that I can crank out quickly to fill the spur-of-the-moment creative bug while I'm working on larger projects.

I also have something ambitious brewing in the hidden recesses of my mind, but the work-load involved will require spreading the effort about a bit. As things firm up I'll offer details. :)

The Tools
On the tools front: if you have not done so, please join in with other loyal tools supporters on the pledge drive! We've raised enough to pay for 9 months of our reoccurring costs to host and publish the tools, which is awesome and much appreciated! But I'd love to be able to avoid having to revisit this anytime soon, so the more the merrier. Awesome dude Harley Stroh might be providing some fun stuff on the rewards side, so I'll probably be extending the close of the drive for a few days to give folks more time to participate. The generators have churned out over 370,000 characters over the past 2 years, and over 3000 happy gamers have installed the Crawler's Companion... if just a tiny percentage of users participate, we'll basically be set for years.

In the coming months, I'll be completing the initial feature set of the Crawler's Companion: adding in the demon/dragon/sword generators, the character generator, and a few extra dice sets. And exploring the possibility of sharing dice rolls between Crawlers, which would be real cool indeed!

Farther out, I have a number of new very cool features in mind for the Crawler, as well as entirely new gaming utilities. As I get closer to production I'll have more details to share.

As always, thanks to one and all for your support!