August turned out to be a very productive month: 99 pages completed! All while coordinating playtests, assigning, and receiving a mountain of art, and celebrating our anniversary! Much of this month's content involved creating material from rough notes -- not simply moving finished text into the final layout.
Web Covering, Arachnomancer Spell
We finished the Shining Knight and Skinweaver spells, created Lirra’s Venom Rite carousing table, numbered city maps, expanded city information, and began the creation of random Rumors tables (more on that later). We also moved the Ceremonies and Curiosities from Unnatural Selection into Druskara, making some improvements along the way, including allowing the Shaman to initiate ceremonies through their class talents.
A dozen volunteer playtesters also began digging into the campaign material and immediately made the book better. Their feedback convinced me that Druskara needed something I hadn’t planned: MORE RANDOM TABLES. We completed Random Quests and Random Dungeon Concepts, expanded a smaller dungeon, and added lore for Chroma Magic and Shining Steel (our much more twisted equivalent to mithril.)
Mind Graft, Skinweaver Spell
We added Druskara-specific Chroma Magic spells for every spellcasting class, including wonderfully strange creations such as All for One, Leap of Faith, Second Head, and Undead Unicorn. We also completed a dragon’s lair for low-level characters. HA!
Another major job was creating rumor tables by region and city. These take a LONG time to create. The d20 tables I originally planned were nowhere near large enough -- there’s simply too much cool stuff happening in these locations. I had to shift to d100 tables, and I love them! Some are even four pages long. Special thanks to the Discord discussion we had about rumor tables. It really helped guide the creation process! One of our testers said, "These rumor tables are a great reference for new GMs as they get started."
Healing Feast Spell
All this additional material has pushed the projected size of Realms and Rivals, our main world book, from just under 500 pages to at least 550 pages. Whew.
We closed August with the last remaining large capital: the Shining City. Most of it existed as notes, but we completed its city descriptions, events, quests, residents' stat blocks, and rumors. The section now stands at 32 pages! It’s our biggest city, has deep ties to Druskara’s worldwide events and lore, and I’m extremely happy with it.
And then there was the ART! OMG. What a beautiful month.
One week alone brought 15 finished pieces, with another five in their final stages. We received large pieces, spot art, and spell illustrations, some of which you see here! The quality has been absolutely stellar.
So that’s August: 99 more pages, a 32-page Shining City brought into final form, new and revised class material, quests, dungeons, carousing, ceremonies, curiosities, Chroma Magic spells, more random tables, and a flood of beautiful art.
That brings us to a total of about 750 pages completed with about 350 more to go! Our current pace is still holding over 2.5 pages per day, including weekends, which is a higher average than we'd planned for (but, our page count has increased as we've gone!) That still puts us in line to be finished with the four main books before the end of the year, and that's our goal. Editing and odds and ends will continue beyond that time, but we're happy with our steady progress!
If you'd like to participate in the creation journey, consider joining us on our Discord server where discussions and community playtests continue!
