Wrapping Up + (Two!) New Project Previews
7 days ago
– Sun, May 31, 2026 at 01:30:13 PM
Venerators,
A small, almost-final wave went out last week, bringing this Kickstarter to inches from its end.
If you completed your survey and paid for shipping, I have shipped your rewards.
A thousand thank-yous to everyone who backed the campaign, read these updates, and generally stayed with me from what turned out to be a barely-started manuscript to a printed, now delivered book. It was a very long haul, but I'm proud of the outcome and happy to have connected with you all, so I expect to do this all again soon (implementing a few critical lessons, of course).
Staying in Touch
If you've read and/or played with your books and have thoughts, or if you just wanna be pals, please don't hesitate to connect with me through one of the following:
New Project Previews
I'm working on no fewer than three followup projects already (because I have more ideas than sense and also loathe myself), and I want you guys to see those previews first.
Let's do that here, right now, for two of those three projects. Please note that both of these are very WIP, and I have no idea which we'll finish first.
The Aphelion
First up is The Aphelion, or what we're calling an "All-Wizards TTRPG" with...
- Open-ended, West Marches-style campaigns
- Magical scholarship as character progression
- Time-stopped metaphysical combat
The basic player fantasy here is that the world is old, but civilization is new, and as an order of magi you're the first to seek, codify, and weild its secrets. We're talking magic as naturalism here, which is to say hyper-rationality in our mysticism and fantastical academic discourse as gameplay progression.
Imagine if the Bene Gesserit fought like Dr. Strange, with encounters playing out like counterspell wars in Magic: the Gathering; or if the maesters in A Song of Ice & Fire left The Citadel to adventure on their own, returning to assert how crystal caves or waterfalls impact theoretical math.
A simple ashcan edition is likely how we'll likely start.
Tile-Based Analog Game Console (Untitled)
This year I made a small, solo map-drawing game called Kill the Wizard in the vein of Twelve Years and MIRU, and in doing so I realized that I don't actually want to draw. Months later, at a local art market, a vendor put a lightweight, laser-etched wooden tile in my hand as a "business card," and I realized "Oooooh this is a board game."
Now Laura Lang (Sewer Sanctuary) and I are developing a game-agnostic fantasy tileset that would support any number of games—basically an analog RPG console.
EM|NCD could continuously release games for this as little A6 (SANCTUM-sized) booklets that utilize the same base tiles (occassionally introducing new ones). You'd randomly draw these tiles from a cloth bag and place them on a grid-painted cloth during play, tracking gameplay values with dice on little A6 worksheet cards (like the Pilgrimage one that came with Shrines), and pack it all back up into a box when you're done.
Using tiles lets us explore materiality for textured, tactile play, radically reduces friction and cognitive load for the player, and unlocks cool design space like eraser-free state changes (flipping tiles) and weighted probability ("Start play with X Forest tiles in your bag, swapping up to Y for Desolation tiles to increase difficulty").
Here's a closer look at some of the "Feature" coins that might sit atop "Terrain" hexes:
Here's how Kill the Wizard looked when I drew the board by hand:
Notice how distinguishing content types via color enhanced readability. The tiles will need their own solution for that, which I expect to find while fabricating prototypes (color adds manufacturing cost, so we're trying other ideas first).
I'd love to ship this as a boxed starter set, including the tiles, a cloth bag, a grid-painted cloth playmat for the board, and ~3 games as A6 booklets with their worksheet cards and any special tiles they involve.
Continuously supporting this with new games sounds super realistic, rewarding, and long-term.
Incomplete Surveys
Anyway, closing out with Shrines again, BackerKit tells me that a full 35 of you have not completed your survey for shipping, shirt sizing, and/or add-ons—and an additional 3 used cards that no longer work—which means I can't ship any of those rewards!
Eventually I'll start tracking down these 38 backers individually, but I would love to not do that, so if you're among them please complete your survey so I can ship you what you're owed.
As always, thank you and in touch,
James Pianka
