EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 62, for Summer 2026! We're past the halfway point of the year and deep into the middle of summer, but despite the heat there's still plenty to show you in our creative updates.

We've had one article in our articles section in recent months, with Indiekid continuing his world travels by heading down to Thailand, a key location for backpackers on which he reflects in . This is the first part of a two part series, so keep your eyes peeled for the next instalment.

If there's a theme to this quarter's updates, it seems to be nature and the natural world: we have building terrain and exploration RPG development in our game dev section, wildlife photography and poems about the sky and animals in our arts sections, and some soaring music resources for barren landscapes in the miscellany. As most of us live in very urban spaces in the modern world, it can be easy to set nature aside or build 'natural' spaces in our imaginations that are quite bare compared to the reality: but maybe these updates will give you some thoughts on how to enrich them in your creativity, one way or another.

And so - the updates!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Godot and Terrain3D
  • The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of... 2!
  • Indiekid's Game Dev Adventures
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Rob Haines' Photographic Print Club
  • Winds and Whimsy: Jubal's Poems
• Miscellany
  
  • Proso:portal
  • Latest Music from Eric Matyas

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Jubal has been working with learning Godot, the open-source game engine, over the past year, as a base for new projects. Using the 3D elements of the engine, he's worked through basic UI, camera angles, movement calculations, and more besides - and, more recently, has started writing up elements of his experience.

In his latest escapades, he's been using Terrain3D, a plugin for Godot that allows easy in-editor height and visual editing of terrain meshes. In Jubal's initial experiments, he attempts to make an island with a few different textures on the terrain, and to combine it with a shader for some surrounding water - and he's written about a range of the confusions and problems inevitable in using a new tool, so if you're looking for advice on building Godot terrains yourself, this might be useful for you!

Do you have particular bits of your favourite game engine that, or are there particular bits of game dev you want? The Indie Alley is always open for your thoughts and questions! In the meantime, do check out Jubal's progress:

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Hobbyist game dev couple and studio EntangledPear (who I'm now only just realising are therefore an entangled pair, that really should have clicked years ago) are building a sequel to their lovely old-school RPG The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of! The first TSFTAMO follows a scholar, Paul, who undertakes a quest to bring the sunlight back to the fantasy realm he lives in. The second instalment will return to an older, married Paul, this time facing a new and equally fairytale challenge: a plague of deep, irretrievable slumber, the sort that could cloak a realm for a thousand years, which is inconvenient when you'd been planning to live a settled family life in that time.

The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of 2, like its predecessor, has classic JRPG style systems including turn based combats and classic pixelly art styles. It also features an ingredient collection system, puzzles, an emphasis on exploration, and lots of NPCs to interact with around the world (at least you're not the only one still awake!)

You can already get the demo on Itch, so do check that out and provide the team with feedback here on the forum:

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Indiekid has recently been providing - as well as writeups of his actual travel adventures - some of his latest adventures in boardgame development and ways to approach it. In his latest post he's been writing about the different ways we produce and consume information and advice - the difference between blogs and books, and why actually you might want to physically print out a lot of blog pages sometimes. We also have his adventures to a Lego event, as a tabletop-adjacent hobby with quite a lot of potential uses and overlaps for the design-minded brain, and highlighting a friend's recent kickstarter of Bots 'N Pieces, which describes itself as a "Robot-Fusion TTRPG" and is still accepting late pledges.

If any of that sounds interesting, do check out his blog at the links below:

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We've long known that Rob Haines had an eye for a good shot in virtual or physical worlds, given his amazing ingame picture projects, but now his photography is coming up to a new level with his print club where you can purchase or subscribe monthly for his latest photos. He's recently obtained a professional grade printer so he can produce physical copy prints of some of his best work - his own favourite being some gorgeous bluebells, but there are also bees, a heron, and this beautiful wren to choose from too.

Nature photography both captures and changes the world it shows - it gives us insights both into the natural world we see through it, but also what we find beautiful in that world and why particular contrasts or subtleties appeal to us. Why not have a look and think about what you get from seeing the creatures around us, and why?

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Sing high, you little lost wind,
Sing high where the air is thin,
Where all our breaths escape and soar,
Our lips grow cold and lie no more,
So scattered where the cloud-wisps stray,
Our lives and sins, wind, cast away.

- From Sin-Eater, by Jubal

Being one of our resident poets as well as a game developer, Jubal often regales Exilian with new rhymes, riddles and the like, and recent months have been no exception. His works this year have leaned in many cases towards a nature theme in different ways, from reflecting on the different landscapes in his travels to Norway, to meditating on the theme of sin-eaters and thinking about the way a wind or other moving landscape could act as them, to much more whimsical ideas about why snails don't sing and what a hawfinch would eat if it had the capability.

If any or all of that sounds up your street, do check out Jubal's Exilian thread, which includes most of his poetry going back over most of the last twenty years - there's lots to find from blank verse to rhymes to song lyrics, and thoughts and discussion are always welcome. Maybe you'll find something hidden in an unexpected corner that speaks to whatever's going on for you: there's only one way to find out.

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A new independent academic project, Proso:portal is a website for aggregating and finding humanities datasets on the premodern past and for helping users to understand them. It currently offers some "data bibliographies" with links to key datasets around particular themes - either across a particular method or type, like prosopographies, or across a particular area of history, like the Byzantine world - as well as some regular bibliographies providing teaching materials and core reading suggestions for finding out more about data methods on the premodern past.

These resources are just the start of the plans for the website, which aims to help not just provide access to resources but to explain the data models and other underlying information involved.

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Composer Eric Matyas regularly creates huge banks of free sounds and images to use in creative projects, all of which can be used entirely for free! No-attribution licenses and custom work can also be purchased, but for both commercial and hobby projects, there's a huge amount you can access on the SoundImage website and it's been continually expanding for many years now. He's also been moving progressively more tracks into higher quality OGG format, which especially helps get smooth looping in game engines for those of you out there who want some music for your latest gamedev projects.

Recent new tracks incorporate a certain high airy theme, including Stratosphere, originally designed for high drone videos, and Unforgiving Himalayas, a cold and airy piece to give the impression of soaring mountaintops. It could also be a great video backing, or perhaps the backing track for an especially barren or desolate RPG location?

Either way, you can find these and much more besides on SoundImage:

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And that's all of summer's updates! Check back here in Autumn and we'll no doubt have a host more writings, games, and resources for your creative projects. But until then, take care!

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 61, for Spring 2026! We're a mere five days after the theoretical line this time, which is an improvement, and we've got a very solid set of updates coming up for you.

As for community announcements, we've as ever had our birthday on March 18, our Cyril & Methodius Day celebration on February 14, and we're delighted to be able to congratulate all of our committee on choosing to stand again and being re-elected to run Exilian during 2026.

In the updates there's something of a dissolute theme to this edition: our games and stories feature drunks, wastrels, and conniving tavernkeepers across a wide array of different worlds and facing problems from giant goblins and fish-worshipping kobolds to needing to rob their tavern guests or even fool the Emperor of Japan. If you want some busier work, though, we've also got industrious yarn-spinning, books to read, and our yearly academic workshop to report on.

With all that and more - on to the updates!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Legion: Arcane Origins
  • A Tale of Tails
  • Design Updates from Innkeep!
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Spinning with the Seamstress!
  • Genesis Lacrima
  • Thurazur's Further Field Notes
• Miscellany
  
  • What are you reading now?
  • Coding Medieval Worlds videos
  • Jubal's Budapest Travelogue

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New Exilian member Goury has arrived with a new game - Legion: Arcane Origins, an anime dungeon crawler in which you explore ever further through a forest maze battling goblins and other enemies. As you progress you'll find new enemies, characters to unlock, and weapons to make your journey smoother... though the number and power of enemies will increase as you go too.

If you liked fast-paced, room-by-room games like Son of a Witch, this might offer some similar action-packed fun, offering a similar sort of roguelite style gameplay, some silly light plot starting with your character being a slightly hung over amnesiac, and a diverse array of different enemies to get the hang of and fight.

A demo is now available on Steam, so you can check that out, and it's a great time to give early feedback to the developer and shape the sort of game you want it to become!

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As part of Coding Medieval Worlds VI, Jubal, along with Adam 'Ludohistory' Bierstedt and narrative designer Finn Taylor, came up with a new little text adventure game! A Tale of Tails follows the progress of a wastrel from a noble family in Japan in 1000AD who instead of making his way in the world fell in with a kitsune, a fox-spirit, some time ago. Unfortunately, he now needs to find some way to make ends meet, and ideally get recognition from the Emperor - but how? Well, by trickery, it turns out...

The game is thus focused on your efforts to pass, with several different sorts of courtier you can try to purport to be as long as you can find the right clothes and accoutrements to have some idea of what's going on. The adventure is text-only and is played with classic text adventure commands - GO, BUY, TAKE, TALK, and do other activities along with a range of characters including the Emperor of Japan, a drunken ronin, a court wizard, a priest, and other folks besides!

It's a short game experience, but there's possible scope for the game to be enlarged in future, so if you play it and like it then do leave some feedback!

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BeerDrinkingBurke's game Innkeep is developing apace, with blogposts looking at developing different core mechanics for theft and cooking on the game's website turning up recently. For thieving and inventories, we hear how shifting from a conventional inventory system to a more 'open bag' structure might provide an alternative to more conventional grid-style inventories and how this helps the feel of the theft systems he wants to build for the game. As for cooking, he discusses how part of Innkeep's core design philosophy is to make things feel tactile, dragging around actual items rather than moving them into abstracted inventory boxes, and how that affected the menus and setups for cooking stew, including where a slot-based menu section was nonetheless needed to keep order.

Innkeep follows the tale of a light-fingered vagabond who becomes the proprietor of a rural inn after the untimely death of its previous owner, and finds that he not only needs to make ends meet in potentially very dubious ways but might need to engage with things very far beyond his pay grade because there's more going on around this particular than meets the eye. If you've not done so yet, you can wishlist it on Steam and get updates via BeerDrinkingBurke's email list!

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The Seamstress has recently been updating her crafting thread with new adventures in, well... thread! Or adding a new yarn about yarn, that might be happening too.

She's recently been adding to her crafting accomplishments by learning how to use a spinning wheel. There's much dispute about when the first spinning wheels arose, probably in some part of early medieval or late antique Asia, though the spindle and distaff that in most places preceded them as the main weaving method were often still in use as the late 18th century in parts of Europe. Wheels significantly speed up thread-making, meaning they're an important factor in being able given most people nowadays prefer to have lifestyles that don't require them to reserve one hand for a drop-spindle pretty much their whole waking life.

But that's all theory and history, and there's practical experience to be had as well, so do head over and find out some notes on types of wool, lengths of fibre, and the practical issues faced when spinning gets mechanical:

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Science fiction writer BagaturKhan has posted the thread to open a new work in his huge Infinitas. There are few details yet about the new book, other than the title Genesis Lacrima - or, written in more literal terms, the birth of tears (lachrymose is a good word to remember for those of you who). BagaturKhan has also hinted that the new book may be part of a rewrite of the wider history and mythos of the Infinitas setting, which spreads across many thousands of years of galactic space and time with tales of the deeds and folly of the numerous wars that tear worlds after worlds apart.

You can read many of BagaturKhan's writings already on Infinitas' dedicated Exilian subforum: if grand space opera is your thing, why not go take a look?

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We opened the chest. Inside we found a collection of exciting finds; a greatsword which seemed to smoke which Grugnog wasted no time in taking, an interesting hat which seemed to shift form as you look at it from different angles, a wand which Cynthia tells me contains a daily charge of a heal spell, and some potions. The most interesting finds however were right at the bottom. There was a letter written in a kobold script which none of us could make out, an old map seemingly of some kind of castle, and the rest of the egg which we'd been finding pieces of all the way down.

Gently I picked up the egg, which was a mottled, mossy green colour, and quite thick and solid to touch. I ran my fingers over its rough surface, and suddenly the dawning realisation burst into a full understanding. I've seen pictures of such eggs in books before, but I never expected to see one in person. None have been seen in these parts for generations. I looked at the others, my face pale...

We've had more recent updates from Son of the King's post-game writeup of the pathfinder 2e starter game - incidentally run by fellow Exilian member Othko97. Written in the form of field notes, we only find things out fairly obliquely about Thurazur, our narrator, as after all he knows who he is - but we find out rather more about a large band of angry unemployed kobolds, a fish deity, and when to use "but we need the bottle" as an important excuse for some much-needed day drinking.

If that sort of bouncy fantasy storytelling sounds like your kind of thing, do head over and read about Thurazur's latest escapades (along with those of the holy Sister Cynthia, the mighty Grugnog the Orc. and the... Clive, who is a Clive). You could also share your own tabletop adventures in our storytelling forums if you have any to write down - we'd love to read them!

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We've had several recent little book reviews posted in Exilian's What Are You Reading? thread, as members across the forum let us know what they've been reading recently. We have recent recommendations for Umberto Eco's Baudolino, a classic tale of an unhappy knight and unreliable narrator who tells Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates of his travels and prompts many discussions on the nature of fact, memory and truth; Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, a struggle for a soul of a province whose very name and memory have been suppressed by tyranny; and Finn Longman's The Wolf and His King, a queer retelling of a medieval werewolf tale deeply steeped in the folkloric and medieval-romance storytelling styles of the text it's drawn from.

As much as sites like Goodreads haul everything into aggregated profiles, it can be good to recommend books and discuss them in a more shared collective space, and that's what our What Are You Reading discussion offers. If you've read anything good recently or have a particular recommendation for our community, do head over and check out out!

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As ever, February saw Coding Medieval Worlds, our workshop series for historians and game developers. The theme this year for our sixth even was Manuscripts and Mechanics, looking at historical source material and the processes we can use to go between our sources and game-worlds whether that's directly using historical texts in-game, representing the things they say mechanically, or transferring ideas to the player about the historic past in general.

This year's Coding Medieval Worlds videos include an exciting panel on research for games comparing the different experiences and ideas of medievalist and game studies scholar Rob Houghton,  Monster Man podcast host and TTRPG developer James Holloway, and Maxime Durand, developer of the Assassins' Creed: Valhalla discovery tour and expert on public-facing heritage gaming. There's also a great discussion with Caves of Qud developers Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew and historian and game scholar Yahuai Lu, discussing, and one with developer Steven Anastasoff and historian Vinicius Marino Carvalho discussing different ways to mechanise dynamics in the medieval Celtic world and its stories. With these and more to discover, do check the videos out and catch up on the great CMW discussions!

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As the world turns its eyes to Hungary in the coming fortnight, you might be keen to get some new viewpoints on the place and how it's developed over time. Well, Jubal has some thoughts for you on the city at the heart of it all and the ways that Budapest relates to power and nation. In his newly completed travelogue, entitled Capital Projects, we get a 2024 snapshot of modern Budapest, its museums and building sites, its food and feel, and the ways that it got to where it is today.

Along the way, we visit synagogues, restaurants, and 19th century follies, and we meet a medieval princess who did not want to be married off, the father of Israeli nationalism, and some hybrid ducks whose parents probably needed to be given a little more space. Find out about all that and more in this travelogue, and keep your eyes peeled because our ever-growing travel writing index has much to offer for discovering the world!

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And that's all the updates for this spring! We'll see you in summer for another round of Updates from the Forge - until then, take care, stay safe, and keep creating.

Yep, this forum is now eighteen years of age, having been started on March 18 2008. Thanks as ever to everyone who's joined us and contributed to this community in that time, and we look forward to another year of creative geekery ahead. Hope you're all staying well!

All the best,

The Exilian Team

That's right, it's Cyril and Methodius Day, February 14 - the day each year when we celebrate language and learning for everyone around the world to take part in!

It's an excellent day to tell the linguists in your life that you appreciate them, to learn a language, read a book, recommend one to a friend, invent an alphabet, or more things besides. We hope you'll join us for some of that - and do let anyone else know who might be interested. Have a brilliant and learned day!

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, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
Tusky (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Sebastokrator, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
The Seamstress elected unopposed as Spatharios, 8 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Spritelady (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Tribounos, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention

Ratification of Permanent Staff

Jubal (FIF) ratified as Megadux, 8 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Glaurung (Ind) ratified as Sakellarios, 7 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 2027. There are still vacancies for staff members, for both content creation and technical matters, and we welcome volunteers for these posts.