On March 18, 2008, I made the first post on this website (or, more accurately, the instance of the free forum software InvisionFree which sometime later we'd move off to our own web hosting). It's been seventeen years since then: we've been through a lot, found new friends, parted with others along the way, but I hope we're still being - ultimately - useful to people out there. Whether it's creative chatter and community or just finding a space online to rest one's brain, the spirit of curiosity and creativity in which I was tinkering with little game mods as a teenager is something that, over half my life later, I believe in just as much.

And I believe in you guys. Thanks to all of you who continue to be part of this little thing we've built together. In a world that feels too dark too often, it's too big a thing to ask a little place like this to really hold all that night at bay: but if we can be a little piece of starlight to remind people how to imagine dawn, then I'm more than proud of doing that.

Happy birthday, Exilian: here's to another year.

Election Results

The regular annual Exilian elections for core volunteer staff positions have happened, and our new committee has been duly elected as follows.

Regularly Elected Staff

Jubal (FIF) re-elected unopposed as Basileus, 4 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Tusky (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Sebastokrator, 3 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
The Seamstress elected unopposed as Spatharios, 4 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Spritelady (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Tribounos, 4 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions

Ratification of Permanent Staff

Jubal (FIF) ratified as Megadux, 4 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Glaurung (Ind) ratified as Sakellarios, 3 votes to 0 with 1 abstention

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Thanks to everyone who voted and to all our staff: the next regular elections will be in January 2026. There are still vacancies for staff members, for both content creation and technical matters, and we welcome volunteers for these posts.

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome back to Updates from the Forge! It's time for another round of projects across a multitude of different forms and types of creativity - but first, some news!

The main site news hasn't been very visible but it is very important - we've moved hosting to a new provider. This will both provide the site with more reliable service and a significant improvement in costs for the next four years, which will in turn hopefully free up some more money for community projects. We seem to have managed the move with remarkably few technical issues, and after summer's major forum upgrade we hope that the technical improvements over the course of this year will help keep your experience on Exilian smooth and enjoyable.

We've also had a particularly bumper crop of articles in the last months of 2024. Our five new pieces include irreverent explorations of ideas we accidentally came up with playing word association and how to use two cows to explain medieval European history - but also tackle more practical questions, like when to build dungeon encounters in RPGs. Monsters and mythos have rounded out the set, with a toe-curlingly grim set of new folk horror monster concepts written for Halloween and a dive into the mythology of Asturias, a northern Spanish region defined by its isolating mountains and local traditions.

We've had one major project announcement too, with The Exile Princes, Jubal's tactical procedural medieval RPG, being released for free on Steam in December. With well over 90% positive reviews so far, it may be worth checking out!

Finally, please do check out our winter competition: with a prize offered by brilliant indie author Veo Corva, and guest judging from musician & game producer Clio Em and Twitch variety streamer GoldKarat, we're excited to see what you come up with on this year's frosted theme of ICEBOUND.

And with that - onto the updates!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Venleitche: A TTRPG of Seasons, Morality, and Magic
  • Jubal's Godot tests
  • Modding Minecraft's Menu: ChefQuest!
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Cosy Hallowe'en Crafting
  • A New Language is Born
  • The Song of Fen'harel
  • Writing and Cultures
• Miscellany
  
  • SoundImage goes Urban
  • MAMG Proceedings 2024
  • Jump off at Exilian's Docks for a new project!

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New member WanderingBeekeper has brought a new RPG to the site! Venleitche covers a world in which the karmic effects of people's actions are bound deeply into the fabric of existence - with disastrous consequences for the decidedly imperfect beings who inhabit Antillia. Loss of karmic connection can cause penalties from mere difficulty to full monstrous transformation, with large parts of the world turned into post-apocalyptic wreckage by the terrifying effects of tearing karmic horror. Those who are willing to make hard choices - with the very real social and monstrous dangers that implies - may become the adventurers who can respond to problems and try to rebuild the social fabric of a broken world... but at real personal cost.

Antillia's magic is woven into the natural as well as karmic worlds, with the changing seasons having different tones and flavours to the magic that they best support, with connections to the classical elements and to the souls of individuals who most closely align with their character. The game's name, Venleitche, encapsulates an in-world concept of natural rightness and order that underpins the way the people in this world have to understand their environment. Some character stats are trade-off balances rather than simply numbers that improve as they go up, giving characters more need to find ways to align with their world rather than just breaking free of it on an endless power curve.

If you're looking for an interesting new take on morality in RPGs, this may well be worth having a good look at - will you keep a karmic balance, or will the clash of magic and excess lead to tales best left untold?

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With The Exile Princes coming to release after six years of development, Jubal has been investigating possibilities for future projects, including the Godot engine, a popular open source game engine that has a wide community and user base, and which has underpinned some other Exilian members' projects like Priory Games' Under the Yoke. Jubal has been cataloguing his first steps with the engine's capabilities, focusing on points that differed from his previous experience with 2d Python development such as 3D controls and physics.

If you're thinking of getting into game development, or looking at Godot specifically, Jubal's notes may be useful for helping you set up the basics of a 3d environment, controls, and cameras. If you're interested in his next game development plans, there may be hints of what's to come. Either way - do check out the log and ask any questions you may have!

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If what you want out of Minecraft is an experience to make your mouth water in voxel style, the ChefQuest pack will introduce you to the Arboghast Culinary Academy and the construction of magically automated farming to supply your dairy, winery, bakery and brewery with the finest ingredients to produce meals fit for the most discerning of connoisseurs - or the most hungry of guests.

And what's known for being discerningly cunning and very, very hungry? A dragon!

What could go wrong?

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Not all projects on Exilian exist in exclusively digital formats! Crafts are just as welcome as any other form of creative geekery in these halls, and we're delighted to see people sharing such things, including Exilian member The Seamstress, whose Hallowe'en preparations included this delightfully round and fluffly pumpkin. Her new thread in the Artisans' guilds is there for telling us about her crafting works, something other members seem to approve of especially when they are squishy. This pumpkin in fact reportedly ended up being very significantly larger than planned for double halloween squish!

If you have your own crafts to share, do please do so in the Artisans' Guilds on the forum, where our visual artists, sculptors, tailors, and more are all welcome to hang out and discuss their latest projects. See you there sometime.

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Conlanging, the process of creating artificial languages for stories, has a long history in SFF writing, and so it makes its way to our halls of creative geekery too: new member JessMahler has been discussing fahngow, a constructed language being created for an upcoming story. The grammar is not yet in place, but the first ideas of a language are being hammered into shape.

Some interesting constraints have already emerged: a small 19-phoneme range of possible sounds, and the isolating language, where each word represents a singular idea without modifiers. So a word like unenviable - consisting of un-, a negative, envy, a core concept, and able, a modifier for possibility - won't be able to exist as a single word in fahngow.

Other members have also been sharing some of their conlanging experience, so if you're interested in this and in discovering how a language might be put together, do head over and check out the thread:

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In rather larger game news than most of the projects we do here on Exilian, the last few months also saw the release of the fourth Dragon Age game, Veilguard. But we're not here in Updates from the Forge to report on big game releases directly - though you can read Jubal's detailed review if you want to find out more about the game - rather, we're here to tell you about Jubal's musical take on one of the series' most iconic characters, the dread wolf Fen'harel. You can have a listen here:


Jubal's music take puts the listener among the Dalish, elves struggling to hold onto their old traditions in the wilderness, in the face of isolation and the ghettoisation or enslavement of the city-dwelling cousins. The Dread Wolf's schemes may spread fast among such folk, keen as they are to see a revival of the ancient beauty and immortality their. Would this song sway you to to the side of a trickster god, if you were in such shoes?

You can always check out this and all of Jubal's other music at the ExilianMedia YouTube channel, and on our forum area for discussing Exilian Media projects:

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We've had an interesting discussion going on recently in the writing section looking at how to encapsulate different cultures' world experiences in writing. The starting point of the conversation was how to take a relatively reserved-personality book character from outside the same culture as most of the rest of the characters and include him properly in group conversations. Of course direct culture-clash writing is possible in such cases, and even humour as people adjust to new settings, but this can only be played for so long before it becomes a joke at a character and culture's expense rather than the inevitable misunderstandings of a new meeting.

Ideas for alternative routes have been interesting, including a "rope and saw" approach where characters can see connections between items or concepts differently as a result of their different cultural background, and utilising alternative skills and experiences more directly that will retain utility even when the character does much better understand the new cultural landscape they now inhabit. If you have further ideas or want to see how the discussion develops, do take a look!

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It's a new year for SoundImage, and that means new sounds free to use in people's projects - whether reflecting the mood of 2025, or a desire for futuristic escape from it, the most recent set have a sci-fi urban theme, with Cyber Mean Streets and Nightmare City Grid as the titles. Are the streets real or virtual? Is this all the result of a lack of good public transport? Is it just all about the frustration of someone stuck in traffic recently? Only you can answer these questions by including the pieces in whatever creativity you're inspired to use them for.

All SoundImage music can be used completely free in commercial and non-commercial projects by attribution license: OGG format sound packs, custom music work, and non-attribution licenses are available from SoundImage proprietor Eric Matyas for a price. Please do support this fantastic resource: it's a great aid to commercial and non-commercial creators alike.

We'll doubtless have more new SoundImage work to report later this year: until then, we'll see you on the cyber streets somewhere...!

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The proceedings book for the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference 2024 has been released! This year's MAMG was the first to be hosted by Exilian: we're providing hosting space to the virtual conference's website to help support a wide range of academics and developers investigate the ways in which the medieval world and modern gaming ideas and cultures collide.

The MAMG2024 proceedings include a wide array of short pieces looking at games from Age of Empires II to Morrowind to Overwatch, looking at the narratives, dynamics, and presentation of a range of ideas and themes around our imagination of the medieval world. From integrating the Langobard law codes into a tabletop RPG to investigating the , there's a lot for historians and game designers alike to have a look at.

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One area of Exilian that you might not have seen much of is the River Docks, our area for sharing resources, ideas, and skills for creative projects of all kinds. Recently we've had a couple of additions to the Tutorial Base section of the docks, with a new mini-explainer on the basics of copyright for those starting creative journeys, and a new and growing resource on some of the best places to find non-AI sources of images, sounds, textures, music, and 3D art across the web.

The docks also include areas for offering skills and resources, and requesting help or posting job ads for projects you're working on. We hope you can make use of them and set sail for your next creative destination!

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That's all for now! Welcome to 2025, and we hope for a kinder and more creative year for all of us to come. If you'd like something of yours to be in this newsletter next time, please do post it on the forum and you may well be featured here in Spring's issue. Until then, good luck with the winter months and may better flowers grow again soon, wherever you are.

It's time for another of our winter creative competitions! Moving on from last year's HIBERNATION, this year we're back out in the cold with our new theme, ICEBOUND. Whether you're heading bound for the ice or stuck bound within it, this hard-frozen stillness will require creativity, will and wit to overcome. Whatever your response to the hard cold of winter, we hope to see your creative endeavours for this year's competitions!

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The rules are as follows:
1. Produce your entry. It can be a game, artwork, story, poem, recipe,  rules supplement, sculpture, dance piece, music, whatever - any sort of creative response to the theme.
2. PM your entry (or a link thereto) to Jubal, or send it by email to exilian@exilian.co.uk, and post in this thread to say you've put your entry in. Entries that don't have both the post and PM in will not be considered, and you must not post your entry publicly during the contest (so as to ensure judging is name-blind).
3. Each person is allowed up to two entries.
4. Entries must be in by 23:59 GMT, February 9th, 2025.
5. The judges will score each work out of ten on two grounds: how good a response to the prompt it was, and how well executed the result was.
6. Winners will be announced by or before February 29. All entries will then be posted in a public showcase.

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PRIZES

Main Prize:
An ebook copy of BOOKS AND BONE by the wonderful Veo Corva, a tale of a librarian in a town of the dead featuring an out-of-place historian, unexpected underground paths, Wandering Larry, unexpected career paths, ancient evils, and what it means to call a place home.

If you'd like to donate an additional prize and thereby sponsor the competition, please get in touch

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THE JUDGES

Clio Em is a weaver of imaginary worlds through many media including as a game producer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and vocalist. Her projects include being the author and performer of the cross-medium sci-fi work Gravity Wing, writing and presenting on building fantasy worlds through music including at our own Coding Medieval Worlds workshop in 2023, vocal credits on a range of major projects and titles, and being the game producer of the acclaimed Austrian modern-SFF dungeon crawler, Dungeons of Hinterberg. You can find more of her work at her website.

GoldKarat is a Twitch variety streamer with over seven years of playing through, reviewing, and discovering a wide range of games. His channel boasts over 8500 followers watching him play his way through titles from Undertale to God of War to The Exile Princes - so the full range from AAA titans they show statues of at conventions through to titles so indie their name is passed along on yellowed scraps of paper in underground taverns may crop up in his explorations of fictional worlds. You can find him on a wide array of social media, including of course on his Twitch channel itself and on Bluesky @GoldKaratTV.