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[EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS]

Issue 63: Autumn 2026

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Late summer is never the most packed time on Exilian as members are often getting on and travelling and doing more outdoor things, but it's been a productive few months with some interesting things going on around the forum. We've got a good batch of updates below, with some big things on the way in other forthcoming projects as well for the coming months.

We've had one new article since the last Updates from the Forge was released, with Jubal writing a piece on alternative warlock patrons for your TTRPG campaigns. He goes through possibilities from ultra-chaotic and ultra-lawful warlock handlers, to patrons who are in fact just very powerful mortal heroes, to musing on the possibility of the warlock contract also being a country's social contract. Do check that out!

There's a lot to look forward to in the coming months too. We'll be getting on with planning some other events, we'll be keeping running monthly meetups, and we've also got more travel writing in the works among other articles, so there'll be plenty to read as well!

If there's a theme to this time's updates, it's about finding home in strange places: we've got adventurers asking who deserves, the question of whether modern horror classics are now oddly comforting, explorations of building homes underground in games, and when you should make friends with a mysterious voice in your fireplaces. For all that and more besides, read on!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • TTRPGs, Tricks and Politics
  • Kavis Work Continues
  • Five Nights... where, exactly?
• Arts & Writing
  
  • ForgeFyre: The Voice Revealed
  • BeerDrinkingBurke's Brilliantly Bound Books
• Miscellany
  
  • Cave Building in Games
  • Medieval History Explorations on Exilian
  • Middle Ages in Modern Games 2026

GAME DEV

TTRPGs, Tricks and Politics

Tricks' blog! Which is not a trick blog. It is a real blog, by Tricks, that does not play tricks unless Tricks plays tricks through Tricks' blog. Hopefully that's clear.

Trickthegiant has been posting about her TTRPG blog, where she has a range of experimental ideas and posts for your games. Her most recent post has been about political ideologies in TTRPG worlds. We often make these quite direct reflections of the ones we're used to in our own real-world countries, but historically and in fantasy settings there have been a very wide array of political factions and movements that don't map neatly onto modern concerns. The role of technology, how economic concerns mesh with the state, agrarian issues, and can all complicate a simple world of left and right. And that's before we get onto the fey and the elves whose politics might have some radically different underpinnings...

If that sounds interesting, do take a look at her forum thread and her blog!

Exilian Thread

Trick's Tales Blog

Kavis Work Continues

Jubal's sporadic work on his Kavis setting, which he uses to run games in the Savage Worlds TTRPG system, has had some updates lately. His recent devlog has had him revisiting a task from three years ago, but making new progress on providing statlines and structure to the creatures of the heart of the world of Kavis. Writing a bestiary is a multifaceted task, from the mechanical work needed to get the statblocks in line to the creative work of building the monsters and creatures and peoples who might inhabit such an imagined world.

Recently he also ran some test games at Vindiecon, the annual Vienna Indie Tabletop RPGs convention. This was Vindiecon's second year: it includes an artist alley and a range of test games, so for anyone from the area do keep an eye on that for future autumns! Jubal's test games included an unexpected candle salesman, an inheritance dispute where nobody got to inherit and the correct quantity of Goblin Shenanigans (which is to say, a lot of them).

All that and more can be found on the Kavis forums on Exilian:

Kavis Exilian Forum

Five Nights... where, exactly?

This is probably the single most serious looking screenshot we could get and should not be taken as representative.

New member scarzehd brings some updates on their game Five Nights at Sh*thouse, originally built but now being upgraded with level generators, an overall goal, and other such improvements. The game is in the homage/conversation with, of course, Five Nights at Freddy's but also more particularly with The Joy of Creation in the animatronic horror and jump scares world.

That said, as its creator says, FNAS*H is "not really meant to be scary" and its aesthetic is much more deeply embedded in Weird Internet Horror Comedy than it is horror in the true sense. It's built around its lighter palette in its creepy abandoned building, the MS Paint level cutouts of the enemy images and shotgun firing popup, the odd little noises and voiceover moments: it's the 2004 internet's reaction to its material, rather than a part of the same genre. It revels in, rather than shying away from, the fact that animatronic creatures are, whilst creepy, also kind of silly. Perhaps it's a reminder that in the face of the true elder gods of whimsy and familiarity, like Dracula and Cthulu before him, Freddy Fazbear too is mortal.

Anyway that may be more philosophical reflection than a game where you run away from enemies in a building and shoot cutout versions of pop horror characters with a shotgun was intended to provoke. If it sounds like your cup of tea, do check the thread out below:

Five Nights at Sh*thouse: The Exilian Thread

ARTS AND WRITING

Ever feel your thoughts... cascade?

ForgeFyre: The Voice Revealed

Jubal's episodic multimedia story ForgeFyre has been continuing to receive updates through the summer months, with one video update and a number of weekly text updates. ForgeFyre is part of Jubal's wider Guns, Swords and Steam setting, a pastiche of gothic, folkloric, and clockpunk-steampunk ideas that brings the fantasy early modern continent of Sarpedonia to life.

ForgeFyre was originally released in the 2010s at one point had its own website but, as that no longer exists, is now being released again as a forum thread on Exilian so you can enjoy Jubal's writing and concepts along with the art of Hannah Milburn across the two released chapters. The story is now coming to the end of Chapter One, The Strangest Creature, which tells the tale of a girl who makes a mysterious - invisible - friend. Ninette is not, however, the sort of character to be fazed by this, and it becomes the puzzle to start a lifetime of puzzles.

Have a read and see what you think of our young heroine's attempts to discover who, or what, the Voice truly is...

Read ForgeFyre on Exilian

Mighty ancient tomes with heavy covers: actually, quite a bit of work to make.

BeerDrinkingBurke's Brilliantly Bound Books

Game developer and BeerDrinkingBurke has recently been getting into book binding and showing us all some of the arts and crafts he's been producing as a result! He's been building the necessary tools, including a book binding cradle to hold the pages, gathering materials, and working out some of the mistakes that can be made. The simplest binding process is taking the pages - which are folded into "signatures", the single-sheet size or single-bundle-of-sheet size sections of a book - and using an awl and thread to bind a single signature into a cover made of card. There's a lot more between that and a full book though, as having multi-signature stacks bound with particular stitches like the "French Link" are needed for longer projects, and there are myriad more techniques and binding options.

BDB's most recent project has been doing a hardcover book for the first time. The greater protection of the hard cover requires some new techniques to make it work, with a "swell" around the spine bulked out by stitching, the need for pressing the cover during creation, and having enough gap for the hinge all being important quirks to work out.

If you'd like to have a go at book binding or if you just want to read up on what's being tried by BeerDrinkingBurke and see some pretty handmade stationery, the forum thread is here and well worth taking a look at:

Book Binding Exilian Thread

MISCELLANY

Cave Building in Games

Sometimes it's secret underground library time. We don't make the rules. But if we did we'd make this one.

The forum has seen some screenshots of creative building ideas across a couple of different survival-crafting games, both of which involve the underground: Return to Moria, which offers an epic 3D representation of Tolkien's underground realm and the dwarves' retaking of it in the Fourth Age, and Vintage Story, which has a much more voxel-driven aesthetic and which certainly doesn't require you to dig much but if you can build a huge underground library, why wouldn't you? The comparison is interesting: RtM of course has a much smoother graphical overview, but VS gives a lot more capacity to build in precise ways, especially with its very detailed chiselling mechanics.

Do you have any fun ideas for how to build underground? From less to more vertical building options, tunnelling gives a whole new three-dimensionality to how one can build - but new potential challenges as well!

Experiments in Khazad Architecture (Return to Moria)

Vintage Story Exilian Thread

Medieval History Explorations on Exilian

What were the lives of our medieval predecessors like? What does medieval mean anyway? Much to ponder...

We've had a number of discussions of medieval history in the Great Library in recent weeks. BeerDrinkingBurke has been reading through Koenigsberger's Medieval Europe 400 - 1500 and providing notes on some of the things he didn't realise from this grand overview of the period, with occasional comments added by resident medieval history professional Jubal. We've also had Jubal's own notes and thoughts from the 25th International Congress for Byzantine Studies, which happened in Vienna in August as a once-in-five-years event that both showcases research and shapes the potential future of the field.

The Great Library also has a What Are You Reading thread, where the last post was a mini-review of Brian Ulrich's The Medieval Persian Gulf which traces the faiths, trade, and politics of that part of the world through the rise of Islam and the growth in different goods trades up into Asia and down through the Indian Ocean.

If you'd like to learn more about any of that, check out the threads below!

Medieval History 400-1500 Discussion
Reflections on the International Congress of Byzantine Studies 2026
What Are You Reading? (Non-Fiction Edition)

Middle Ages in Modern Games 2026

Continuing with the medieval theme, we've just had the annual Middle Ages in Modern Games asynchronous conference, hosted by Exilian, and it's all fully available to read online. MAMG is an asynchronous blog-conference, so participants write their thoughts as a 500 word or so communication that people can then respond to in the comments. This makes everything accessible to participants around the world, and also means that members of the public and interested game developers can get involved and ask questions.

This year's conference on the theme Possible Worlds/Possible Pasts had 27 papers with academics from countries including China, the USA, Brazil, Germany, the UK, and Turkey. Topics you can head over and read about include the Roman conflict at the heart of Fallout: New Vegas, the role of TTRPGs in exploring historical legal sources, the Chinese maritime imaginary in Uncharted Waters IV, whether it's time to retire paladins from TTRPG gameplay, using randomisation to explore historical sources for game development, and reports on developing games around the rewriting of medieval histories and the soundscapes of Icelandic meeting places.

With all that and much much more available to read, do check the papers out below and leave a question if you'd like to!

MAMG 2026 Programme and Paper Links
Exilian Forum

That is, for Updates from the Forge, another year over! Our updates for the rest of this year will be published in the New Year issue of 2027 - so we'll see you then. Until then, stay safe, friends, and keep creating!

MAMG2026 is now starting!

Programme can be found here, and papers will be progressively added over the course of the week. Any discussion, thoughts or notes, probably put in the comments of the papers over there, but you're totally welcome to discuss them here too

Would probably prefer these dates to the previous week when I'll have just got back from a short Norway trip.

Which would be better for folks?

Today I got to test a scenario called Stars and Fireflies with a couple of groups, based around the players getting drawn into an inheritance dispute of the mysterious Stargazers' Tower in a valley they travel to in the badlands just northwest of the Hierophancy.

It was all pretty chaotic but in a good way. All my players were great (and probably won't read this but if any of them do, thank you!)

Group one had a Hanau trader, who was a candle salesman (great character choice, so many opportunities for light-related play), a monk who was from a Doubting Monk order and became the slightly bumbling party leader (him having to be reminded to doubt his own theories by the rest of the party was a running joke in the making), a guard who hit things with a big hammer and opened doors for people when the door was dangerous, and a slightly unscrupulous wizard who wasn't awfully good at magic.

Group two had a gnome pickpocket and a goblin, and took a much more rogue/theft driven approach where the players were very clear that their aim was to walk away with as much loot as possible. They were playing them very much as not the brightest criminals, but that was a lot of the charm of the situation.

Spoilers for the scenario - mostly notes for my own benefit

Group one went to the local leader, she sent them to the tower with both claimants and handed the party wizard a note politely asking that the claimants not come back again (the wizard didn't reveal this at any point but also didn't act on it). They did the whole thing at night by candlelight, which gave lots of reason for the Delbar to stalk them, killing Perimin over the course of two attacks, with him being killed by a crit-failed healing roll after the second. They didn't take too much trap damage, but the party wizard did miscast a spell and drew a gryphon towards their location, which started prowling around the tower (something the party did not realise at all until much later). Meribar pocketed the real deeds while the party was talking the devi down from fighting them all: they then all went down to check the basement, and the Delbar attacked them once they opened it. The fight was slightly slapstick as the pacifist character tried to stop the Delbar fighting without hurting it, including by successfully jamming a pot onto its head, but the caravan guard ended up resolving the fight by beating it with a big hammer until it stopped moving. They then went in and the Devi offered to shut things down and rescue the goblins, which was accepted: they pointed out to Meribar that they could easily blame him for killing Perimin and also they had a big hammer and he didn't, at which point he left. He would have walked straight into Mares and her thugs but they had in fact all been eaten by the gryphon, which duly sated had flown up to find a new nesting site on the cliffs. It will suck to be a goatherd in this valley in the future. Endpoint: Meribar skipping town, though still with the deeds to the property, Mares dead so the future of the town is uncertain, the anvil-head Devi planning to turn the tower into a workshop with a staff of enthusiastic if not skilled goblin followers.

Group two got rejected by both claimants, and so (coupled with having a goblin) met a character not present in game one, a goblin who escaped from the tower. I didn't use the Delbar in this game, because I correctly figured that two non-combat characters would just get killed by it too easily. They then joined up with Meribar and a thug he'd hired, went to the tower with the goblin ally secretly trailing them, fired off all the traps and nearly got the party goblin killed, Meribar left the dying goblin and went up and got in a fight with the Devi. The ally goblin healed the player goblin then dropped back again, the Devi bolted after incapacitating the thug, Meribar got the real deeds which was what he was after, the party got the basement key they left to get medical aid for the thug and bumped into Mares' thugs who stabbed the goblin again and then chased Meribar off, the party reunited with their goblin ally who saved the goblin a second time and helped them kill one of Mares' thugs, they returned to the tower, managed through more luck than judgement to realise they needed to find the blueprints to work out how to free the goblins, did that somehow, looted the tower with their new goblin friends and then headed for the hills.

Endpoint: Mares "wins" (gets the tower), Perimin probably dead, Meribar possibly dead, party going off to start a new life with all the loot.

Thoughts:

• Getting across the basics of the setting was fine and both groups reacted pretty well to it, I should probably be better at forefronting that element when running convention games as it's maybe more meaningful than just "Savage Worlds".
• One of my problems writing scenarios is having too many moving parts. The first game ended with me having to decision-tree run some remaining bits.
• That said, probably the main thing is not actually streamlining the whole scenario, it's working out a system for what to drop under what circumstances. This is perhaps mostly an experience thing: I was right to drop the extra monster in version 2, I wonder if dropping the city leader plot element would help (though it wasn't actually that relevant here). Dropping one of the two "claimant" characters could make the whole thing very linear, but if they had everything in the tower to face plus the local leader subplot then maybe that would actually work fine as a way to do it.
• The balance of morality is kind of complex - giving more scoundrel parties enough to do without making the choice-path for standard good too linear (I think I can usually disregard full-on evil parties, or at least they can make their own way). I think I need to sometimes add more temptation into the mix - giving the party something immoral that they might find useful, rather than something that feels morally easy - such as at the end in the basement. Conversely the choice between the inheritance claimants is almost too easy because there's one likeable one and one that nobody ends up liking. I think maybe I need to make the latter's case a bit more effectively, and possibly make him better at dealing with the stuff in the tower..

[Overall thoughts]

A few short notes on the ICBS 2026, which was a month ago here in Vienna. For those unfamiliar, the ICBS is a rotating, once per five years conference, this was its 25th iteration.

Overall thoughts

Overall I'm glad I went. It was a really interesting, exceptionally packed week. I went to a lot of talks, by no means every session but I got to most of the sessions on most of the days which is plenty enough for anyone. Highlights of stuff that was very new to me included a great plenary talk by Rebecca Darley on the imaginaries of Byzantine-South Asian interactions, and one by Verena Krebs on how Ethiopia saw Byzantium more as something to be interacted with in theory than in practice. There was a great comparative talk on China which discussed some of the first grid-style maps in the world, too.

In more down-the-line Byzantine work there were some really interesting reassessments of the Pronoia system and how it allowed the Empire to extend more control over a smaller body of elites rather than necessarily being a reduction in central power, and some work on the theory of Empire and what some of the thornier terms in the discussions mean. Closer to my Caucasiological home, I'm quite excited by an ambitious new Black Sea related project planned by Erekle Jordania providing place and 3D model data for sites along the eastern coastline, and there's a lot of forthcoming work on bits of the region's architecture that will be interesting to see when it comes out. Nikoloz Aleksidze's joint historical-ethnographic project work on Svaneti, proposing that rather than a 'safe haven' for things from the lowlands its medieval history was actually defined by warming climates turning into a heavily contested, unstable thoroughfare through the Greater Caucasus range, is also going to be a must-read when it's available.

The Caucasus was in general really well represented, and I mostly went to Caucasus papers for the whole week with strong Georgian and Armenian contingents. In both cases, art history and especially building archaeology were somewhat dominant topics, and then manuscript studies as a close second which makes sense considering these are the topics that most overlap with physical heritage preservation but it would be good to try and get more work that broadens out into thinking about wider historiographical issues in future.

There were a couple of quirks with the event organisation: reducing to one paper per presenter as is done in the Leeds IMC would be sensible, and the day structure had some odd elements like the breakfast baked goods not appearing until the second break by which time I was past "need food" and into "not really able to focus".

These are pretty minor things though, and in general the organisation was a triumph. The committee should be justly proud of running an event that large without major hitches, and the add-ons were well picked, I managed to make use of my free ticket to the Vienna papyrus museum which had some great stuff in that I'd not seen before.

Concerns about the future

My bigger concerns and things I'd lose more sleep over were about where we are and where we're going as a field. We is of course an odd term here: I have Masters-level training in Byzantine history, but I'm really a Caucasiologist and DH specialist. That said, I am now on the AIEB's Commission for Prosopography, so I guess if I'm a Byzantinist enough for that I can have some opinions.

I have three major concerns in terms of discussions not being had: one is around precarity and education, one is around digital work and especially AI, and the third is around public engagement with the field. Whilst all of these had some presence at the ICBS, and many of the organisers in particular did say all the right things on the precarity issue, they did all feel very much like sidelines for an event that is intended to shape the future of the field. Can we do that, if our internal discussions are out of sync with the external forces acting upon us?

Regarding precarity: there were good words said decrying the problems of junior academic precarity, but railing against it sadly doesn't do a lot. We need to think more about how we obtain public support for better public funding of our field, and also how we safeguard against losses of institutional knowledge in harsh funding environments. We need to do better at pooling educational resources to help retain skills, and at engaging interested people outside academia to expand that skill base further beyond the professional academic community. Those are the discussions I felt were somewhat lacking here.

On the topic of Digital Humanities, there were some but not a lot of DH papers in general, and I think many of those were focused on particular database approaches so the Congress may have missed some opportunities to try and engage everyone else with the ways that digital work is changing the field: I worry about the extent to which digital Byzantinists may get cut off from the rest of our colleagues. Most problematically there was one session in the entire congress about LLM/AI technologies, which was solely focused on exploratory DH methods using these systems (which is to say it was mostly a list of "we tried to do this, here's the data showing how much it isn't working yet"). It seems to me that this misses enormous aspects of the potential effects of these technologies on both education and public interest in the topic.

That brings us onto said public interest issues. I think mine was the only talk which touched on modern far-right use of Byzantium and Byzantine imagery, which is sadly an increasingly significant element in modern reception of Byzantium. Byzantine Studies as a field still seems to consistently think of the reception of Byzantium as centred on a sort of orientalising, Edward Gibbon descendant idea that the Byzantines were in some way not really Romans, and that emphasising the Roman nature of Byzantium is important to rescue the historical Byzantines from that. The trouble is that the idea of a proto-fascistic violent Roman state as a historical model people want to emulate (which, in a very good plenary talk, Rebecca Darley dubbed 'revenant Romanitas') can, rather than being challenged by the complexity of Byzantine history, actually then be directly drafted into Byzantium which creates a more explicitly Christian model for the modern far-right activist aspiring to a Christofascist republic. I think a lot of Byzantinists, especially younger ones, are aware of this line of thinking, but we still collectively lack structures and spaces for tackling it.

That's the sharpest end of our public reception problems, but other changes are absolutely happening, especially as regards things like games creating a new wave of Byzantine reception. In Turkey, historical dramas are also producing new forms of reception of the period, and online spaces in general are changing who finds out about the Empire and why. One thing I would like to see from the AIEB in the next five-year period would be a move towards having a Commission for the Public Understanding of Byzantium, which feels like one of the largest elements lacking from its current set of commissions.

The Good News

There were some big positives too. Especial congratulations should go to Claudia Rapp who is now president of the AIEB and who, besides being the first woman to hold that role, is a powerfully competent organiser whose skills I have no doubt the Association will benefit greatly from. In general the AIEB is big enough that its institutional stability isn't at any risk, it's continued to grow as of this Congress, and the effective engagement with Austrian politicians around the Congress should be good for the field's future too (it's hard to imagine a relevant government minister actually coming to a conference session of a 2000 person history conference in the UK, but I guess Austria is a rather smaller country. It was still a nice touch that it happened here.)

The presence of new commissions for Digital Humanities and Prosopography will hopefully also help the development of DH work in the field in the coming years, and I look forward to joining the Prosopography commission going forwards. I think there's a lot of work to be done here, and in some cases I suspect the commissions will largely be formalising already ongoing work. I am often nervous of the tendencies of these sorts of bodies to attempt to push for standards proliferation rather than trying to take a more practical approach, but in these cases I am very hopeful that they have the right mix of people available to become productive.

It was also nice to be able to get a lot of Caucasiologists together - over 25 of us at the Medieval Caucasus Network meeting, which is a lot for a small field. It's tricky bridging international gaps for this sort of work, but the AIEB provided a really nice space through which to do so and I think we managed some things we can build on well in future. I did a short writeup of that for the Medieval Caucasus Network website, which can be found here.

Final thoughts

So overall assessment: some big challenges facing the field, some positives and some great people doing great work, but also some conversations that need to be had for dealing with them. I think steps are best being taken on the digital side, though there one of the largest challenges is going to be connecting that up with the rest of the field. Thinking about Byzantine studies as a larger endeavour than the ruminations of academics to one another is difficult in a field that has built itself on the understanding that Byzantium is almost defined by its long-term treatment as a historical backwater, but that's a challenge we have to face too.

I really do think Byzantium and its reception matter: much more so than thirty years ago, Byzantine history is getting picked up and used, often in ways that are quite opposed to how we as scholars would want those topics to be handled. It's an important part of understanding the premodern world in general, and some of the things that otherwise don't make sense about the medieval world click into place much better when Byzantium and its neighbours are given their appropriate roles. As such, I really hope we do deal with the issues facing us: there's a lot of interest and complexity to be found, and the more we can develop a collective, inclusive understanding of what those past worlds were like, and the more we can explain that to people, the better the legacy of the Byzantines in all their own complexity can be retained and considered.

Since we keep coming back to this topic, I thought I'd at least have a thread to keep interesting links or updates in.


Another recent post in the "AI killed my ability to program well and now I'm stopping" genre:
https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html

A thing I do worry about is whether these are actually relatively isolated cases in an industry where very very few people are going to buck the trend. But these sorts of things are definitely persuading me that coding with LLMs just isn't something I want to do at all even if it does become the sole long-term norm for how people write computer code.

A thing I find odd, conversely, is how little any software I use has increased its utility to me in years. We now apparently have faster coding than ever, but I don't think my own use of any software has improved since 2010 except that I can now play some games that hadn't been written yet then. I guess there must be a lot of software engineering that's about building weird proprietary business systems, but I've talked to very few (not zero, but few) people who've mentioned their workplace computer systems really getting noticeably better in recent years either. My workplace got a whole new academic reporting system and it's maybe one step per entry quicker than the old one but most of the effort seems to have gone into looks rather than functional improvement honestly. I guess the point here being: does coding faster actually solve anyone's problems/is that the actual bottleneck?

Fifteen Less Common Warlock Patrons

By Jubal

The Warlock, as they appear in various popular D20-style role-playing games, is redefined from the general sense used in other media to mean a magic user who has a patron providing their magic.

A Warlock has a different relationship to their patron than the chosen of a god, and this matters. Their relationship is fundamentally contractual: they are not required to express devotion, nor have they been chosen for moral or cultural qualities, only as smart investments towards a goal of some kind that the patron is working towards.

In fifth edition D&D, warlocks can be engaged in their contract by heaven or hell (Fiend and Celestial), by beings from other planes (the Archfey for the Feywild and the Hexblade for the Shadowfell), they can tap into the aberrant power of Lovecraftian horror (Great Old One), or pick from two elemental themed patrons (Fathomless and Genie), and two undeath themed ones (Undying and Undead). Surely, though, there are plenty more beings out in the cosmos trying to get things done who might need a go-getting fool to lock into a bad contract?

Thus, this article gives a few other thoughts and possibilities on what sort of beings might offer you a power-for-service deal. You could do some of these with existing concepts - I've focused on ideas and plot hooks rather than stats, not least given I don't usually run D&D myself, and in some cases I've opted to read bits of lore the way I want (some versions of Slaads give them actually quite a lot of societal structure, whereas I like leaning into them being more ultra-chaotic). In any case, I hope you find these interesting - onto the examples...

A Wilderlord has little need to look human.

1: The Wilderlord

Most Warlock patrons offer power from some other element of being. The Wilderlord offers the power of the Prime Material Plane in all its own strangeness and majesty.

The Wilderlord's warlocks may have some things in common with druids, but druids have their own innate connection with nature. The warlock has someone else's connection with nature, and may not even particularly like cute fluffy animals, let alone horrifying crawling ones, but is still obliged to fight for them because power has a price and sometimes the price is seeing things from a giant centipede's point of view. The Wilderlord in representing nature does not of course have to represent it as an eco-warrior either: the beasts of the wild fight one another all the time, and the shifting realities of the world change. A Wilderlord of the woods might send a warlock to help trees that are encroaching on and drying up a swamp or vice versa, dragging the players not just into conflicts between humanity and nature but conflicts within nature itself.

2: The Mage Ascended

Your warlock patron could literally be a guy. Gods have statblocks in this game and they're not impossible for sufficiently epic-level parties to reach – so why wouldn't a mage so powerful they could just give power to random non-specialists do exactly that? They might be pursuing more traditional mage goals like obtaining magical items, or they might have much larger and longer-term plans in which you are just a small part.

There are good reasons why the Mage Ascended might choose to make a warlock rather than simply training wizardlings. For one thing, it gives them safeguards: training a wizard who actually understands their magic may be someone they see as more of a future threat, whereas if they contractually bind the warlock to not harm them then they might see that as a safer bet. They might, of course, eventually be willing to see their warlock as more of a potential partner in their schemes to save or revitalise the cosmic magical order – or they might see them as a pawn to be tossed aside, which may become more difficult than they'd realised given contracts work both ways.

What lurks in the shadows of the night? You do.

3: The Night's Oracle

Several of the original warlock patrons could have some association with sleep: the Shadowfell for example has an obvious nightmare connotation, and the Feywild has a lot of the dreamlike qualities associated with ideas of Faerie. The Night's Oracle would, however, be a patron who leans into this role much more explicitly, one solely concerned with dreams. It has often been the bringer of prophecies to the slumbering minds of the material plane, but its domain is far wider and more fickle than the simplicity of the truth.

The Night's Oracle is as multifaceted as the minds of all beings that dream – which are many – and seeks through its realm of dreams to experience and imagine the physical realms that it can never reach. Empowering a warlock as its interface with the Waking World gives. It may act in contradictory ways, as it acts inquisitively but without much consideration for morality: it is unlikely to want mass death, but may act in ways to either quell or prompt darker dreams among the living as it tends the grand psychic gardens of the sleeping world. Curiously, it particularly dislikes psychic and control spells at least when it does not control them: it will give these to its warlocks as extensions of its own power, but in the hands of others it sees these as an encroachment on its own domain to be met with all possible resources as a threat.

4: The Greater Sheddu

A powerful good-aligned patron with a twist. Unlike a celestial, a Sheddu is tied to a particular site of worship: they are guardians of heaven on earth, not agents of heaven in its purest form. This gives them a very different priority order: reducing damage to their temple is paramount, and the warlock has been empowered as an additional agent to achieve that goal first and foremost. If the Sheddu's temple is a ruin, this might tie the player to a strange place or give them a specific responsibility for clearing out a dungeon. On the other hand, it might be at the centre of some great city, with the Sheddu maintaining its own staff of warlocks as agents alongside the temple staff.

Either way, the Sheddu has a good reason to want warlocks because unlike the Sheddu, the warlock isn't tied to a particular place. As roaming agents looking for information and eliminating evils and other threats, the Sheddu's warlocks are contractually tied to it and its temple, unlike Clerics or Paladins who are tied to the deity more directly. This might be a source of tension with followers of the deity whose temple it is: the Sheddu's warlock need not be a follower of that deity, and might well be contractually bound to defend the temple much more than they are to follow the god's teachings more widely.

5: The Forgotten Wind

What if there was a patron who didn't ask anything of their warlock – what if there was a patron who didn't even think in a conventional sense? Well, that might be boring, but let's try and add some interest to it. The Forgotten Wind is a powerful but not sentient concept: it selects people at seeming random, granting them powers at a price it does not set out because it has no concept of itself. The "terms of the contract" are well known in the cultures where the wind may be felt, passed down as tales through the generations: the wind provides power, but it also blows you in particular directions, to particular places. What you do with that it leaves up to you, but you cannot reject it. Wind doesn't think, but it does act in patterns, through annual cycles, blowing more or less strongly at particular times. The wind in particular encourages the warlock to keep moving, perhaps cyclically, perhaps driven bit by bit around the world, always with a sense of where they are going next but without a sense of why – because in the end there is no why, there is only the song of the wind.

Maybe a slaad will eat you, maybe it won't.
Maybe this is just a frog.
There are no rules.

6: The Overslaad

The Slaad are beings from the Chaotic Neutral plane, beings of absolutely pure chaos that make very little sense indeed. This is pretty odd when you end up having a contract with one. Whilst you do have a binding pact with the Overslaad, you have no real idea what it says given the utterly chaotic nature of Slaadi language, and equally importantly the Slaad has basically no idea either. The things that may be required of you might be entirely at right angles to anything that anyone would deem logical: they may even be actively working to undermine logic itself by some means or other. Serve the overslaad. Be served by the overslaad. They're kind of the same thing from different angles, right? Go forth, warlock, and bring the world down about your ears because it was too round (or insufficiently round, the overslaad is not your boss except that it also is, it doesn't have to make sense, nothing makes sense) and needed to be messed up a bit.

The Overslaad being a rare example of a truly chaotic patron, it could be appropriate to factor in some mechanics to represent this. Something like "every time you pick spells, pick two and add them to a list, then you can cast a totally random selection every day" might be a pain at the table but could also be fun.

7: The Modron Lock

Converse to the Slaad, the Modrons are the computer-like pure logic creatures of the Lawful Neutral parts of the cosmos. What do the Modrons want? Order. But Modrons have a problem – prolonged exposure to the chaos of life outside Mechanus isn't very good for them, and indeed can drive some of them mad (as shown in Planescape: Torment). The solution, then, might be to hire someone, say by means of a binding contract that gives someone the power of Mechanus in exchange for being pressured to eliminate more chaotic elements that might threaten universal order.

The Modron patron is a way of really going in deep on what the contract nature of a Warlock's power means: they have absolutely no wish to do good or evil, they're not going to twist the contract at all, but they are going to enforce it absolutely, and expect you to do the same. It may be possible for you to wiggle around a contract more than with some patrons because Modrons struggle to even understand the concepts of untruth and imperfect communication, but they will expect any arbitration to be binding – on your soul if needs be.

8: The Archflumph

Flumphs, the curious good-aligned flying jellyfish aberrations, are perhaps hard to fit into many D&D campaigns particularly well. Their solitary, monastic lifestyles mean that they do not always interact with humans, often living deep in caves in the underdark or other secluded locations.
What if, though, one of these ancient flumph sages, these strange but good beings, wanted someone who could interact with the world for them? An asset, a follower, even a friend in the loneliness of whatever deep void they live in to contemplate existence? What if their years of contemplation have given them such incredible power that they could donate that power to others who could interact with the world on their behalf?

What if... the archflumph?

The Archflumph is a great idea for a good-aligned warlock patron because it immediately solves the question of why the powerful patron doesn't do a job themselves: they're not doing the job themselves because they're a weird enormous floating magic jellyfish, and the job requires talking to normal people who might react badly to an aberration turning up on their doorstep. Unlike a celestial patron, they're physical, fallible beings, and their lack of understanding of the world isn't based on a burning zeal, it's just based on the fact that they have literally been living under a rock. Possibly living under all the rock.

That doesn't mean that the Archflumph is going to be only setting you easy tasks – it doesn't understand how difficult anything is, and may think that a conversation is very difficult whereas hovering is a normal thing that everyone can do because it has not spent much time talking to anyone but certainly not to bipeds. Its inherently ponderous nature might make it hard to communicate with when you really do need an answer. Also, whilst it is undeniably on the side of good, it may take very particular philosophical views on what that means (a celestial as typically portrayed is unlikely to direct you to steal: an Archflumph that has decided that property rights should be a meaningless concept on the basis of its extensive personal theories of value that it came up with by reading obscure interplanar philosophy books in a cave for ninety years gives no such guarantees if it will help someone somewhere).

The archflumph is wisdom without practical knowledge, theory without application, the philosopher without the polis. You are the application, and that may be more than you thought you were bargaining for.

The Monk found inner peace. As you're not planning to, they have other ideas for you.

9: The Monk Ascended

Much like the Mage Ascended, the Monk Ascended is a mortal who has ascended beyond the ken of the world in perfection of their craft. Unlike the Mage Ascended, whose goals are about understanding the outside, the Monk Ascended is all about spreading internal understanding. Why would they make a warlock rather than training a fellow monk? Well, because a monk is on a path to enlightenment: they're the goal. You, their Warlock, are a response to things that threaten that goal.

The patronage of the Monk Ascended may well not be given to one who the Monk expects to find personal inner peace and enlightenment – after all, those people are potential monks. Instead, the Monk might well think the warlock is a lost cause, and therefore best used as a tool to protect the inner peace of others. What if all the mental clutter and torment could be loaded onto one guy who, after all, actually signed up for it? Well, now the guy is you, your boss wants a universe at inner peace, and there's a lot of nasty things out there that really, really do not spark joy. Good luck!


10: The Witch in the Woods

The hag to end all hags, a Baba Yaga figure who can create forests and lakes on a whim, bound mostly by wrapping herself in her own fairy-tale rules and the pettiness of her cruelties. Children she eats, mortals she tricks: she will do a deal, of course. Her deals have costs, and the costs are rarely ones mortals know how to bear.

The Witch differs from something like the Wilderlord above in that while her domain is the wilds, her concerns are much more human; and she differs from a devil in that her concerns are smaller, pettier, more persona. You are not a concern in some great war, she doesn't want your soul, she just wants to mess with you and everyone else as much as possible. You need not worry about the Witch in the Woods ending the world: she is too busy giving nightmares to the goats, drawing the blood from old men at night, and passing pestilence to expecting mothers. You, too, are bound to these things, the little hurts. Was it worth it?

It could become so, for if you do well, she will make you the nightmare that your enemies will fear most: the one thing you have over her is that you can think bigger than she, with all her power, knows how to. But her actions now mark your soul too, and if you break the rules, it will be your own essence on the line.

Three weavers... with a job for you?

11: The Weaver

Many become warlocks to escape fate: the moment when a mighty being offers you a contract is often the moment of weakness, the point when you will accept their power and aid because you do not think you have an other option. But a warlock could be made to reinforce fate, equally. You got a single opt-out from the weavers who create the fabric of the wyrd: to pay for that one hitch in the fabric, you will spend your life ensuring that none can challenge the ordination of the future.

The weaver's warlock will especially be tasked against wizards, sorcerors, and other warlocks who seek to meddle with the cosmos and act against its will: their cause may be good or evil, but the will of fate is locked, and you are a part of its great chain. Those who escaped death shall die, those who escaped, and those who were never meant to face justice shall be freed. It is known, it is ordained: the weaving continues, always. You cannot see the tapestry, but the small threads you are handed are power immeasurable. You will see the weft and warp bound.

12: The Master of the Revels

The Master of the Revels is the greatest showman in the cosmic order, and in you it has found a new side-character for one of its great productions. It grants you powers, you agree to play the role: fame and fortune await, but the stage is a fickle business.

This works particularly well with some of the more personal and creepy side of Warlock spells – Charm Person, Friends, but also Puppet have an obvious connotation set here. Important to make sure the props are all in the right place, after all.

There's something about the Master of the Revels that could get too meta-plot but also could work very well narratively, in that the patron has an enormous incentive to get their warlock into high drama, high tension situations, and doesn't need a tactical reason why, because producing the drama is the whole point of the thing. The show must go on!

13: They Who Were Before

We've seen patrons displaced from the adventuring party by space or the planar cosmology. But what about time?
They Who Were Before – whether they were an ancient race of dinosaur people, or of giants, or Atlanteans, or the first dragons who were slain by the emergence of the gods and now haunt the world in spirit – need to very much be defined by their ancientness. They may or may not ultimately want to reclaim the world or get re-embodied, but in practice that's an enormous plot to dump on one character, so their more immediate goals might involve finding their old artefacts, preserving or cleansing their old tombs, or rebuilding the memory of them in the culture of today.

Their warlock might be a scholar, but equally they might pick someone who reminds them more of their cultural ideals: perhaps their scholar wanted to be a fighter but then was chosen for their contract precisely on the grounds that the ancient ones valued those martial traits. They might also have difficulty relating to what the world has become (and your contract might produce some difficult technicalities if they ask you to "make it like it used to be"...)

14: They Who Will Come After

A more sci-fi twist on the timeskipped patrons: they come from your world's distant future and are granting you cosmic warlock powers to help stop the doom of their timeline. They're willing to promise you whatever's needed to achieve that, as long as you help them create, or avoid creating, the timeline that they're in.

There could be twists on this: the patrons' idea of an ideal future for the world may not be your own, and you might have some difficult decisions to make if it isn't. Their goals might be pretty brutal – assassinating certain people in your present to avoid them giving birth to future fantasy dictators – or you might literally need to go stop a butterfly flapping its wings in a forest (and fight your way past a bunch of strangler vines to get there).

I think playing these guys as a bit sci-fi could work: you might be in a pseudo-medieval setting, and having your future patrons behave in a much more anachronistic military or scientific way could be fun.

A rightful ruler's power may take many forms...

15: The Mandate of Heaven

We tend to think in quite capitalistic terms about warlock contracts – power granted by a negotiated legal framework wherein the patron is essentially your boss. Let's try a different framing. What if a polity or region – in the totally abstract sense – chose its leaders? If they accept the mantle of leadership, they are bound into a particular social role and all its requirements, they exchange the freedom of powerlessness for the burdens and responsibility of authority. In exchange they can have power, the sort of power no other member of their people can possess, perhaps the sort of power no-one else in the world can possess. They have, as it were a mandate to rule. That's a contract, in its own way. It's also quite like the royal farr of Persian legend, or the Chinese concept of Mandate of Heaven.

The Mandated warlock simply adds to a general sense of right-to-rule the ability to eldritch blast their disloyal subjects into next week. The charisma-focused casting of a Warlock makes particular sense here, where casting is not just about a relationship with the patron but also, because the patron is the polity, a collective relationship with the political entity as a whole. Of course, if they fail to rule well – if they breach the social contract – they risk losing the Mandate, leaving them very literally weakened and vulnerable to their enemies and the rise of a new ruler in their stead...


Anyway, those are my thoughts on some alternative warlock patrons. Please let me know in the comments if you make use of any of these ideas, especially the archflumph who I've not played a warlock of but would really like to now. And if you have more additions, thoughts, and comments, I'd love to hear those too!

[Update:]

Just to let everyone know, Exilian's Mastodon/Fediverse account will need to move shortly as our host, indiepocalypse.social, is moving to a new domain name, indieverse.social. I'm getting that move going now, and it should be processed pretty soon. The trickier bit will be that we need to update anything that points to our account with the new address. Obviously there's the front end website links, but if anyone can help me think of anywhere else we might have links to the Fedi account that need updating that'd be super useful.

Update: Move done, we've managed to get the vast majority of followers ported over, got a new main account set up with some intro posts, and I've updated the links from the BlueSky and from the Exilian homepage.

Which date would work best for everyone out of Thurs 17, Fri 18, Thurs 24, or Fri 25? All currently work for me.

I need a relatively early pub this month as the last full week is the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Vienna and I'm giving a talk etc.

So, Thurs 20 or Fri 21?

[EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS]

Issue 62: Summer 2026

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

GAME DEV

Godot and Terrain3D

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:

Terrain3D Notes

Jubal's Godot Experiments

The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of... 2!

One day... or once upon a time.

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:

Get the demo on Itch

Exilian thread

Indiekid's Game Dev Adventures

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:

Master of Olympus Blog

Indiekid's Updates on Exilian

ARTS AND WRITING

Behold, for it is smol and yet mighty.

Rob Haines' Photographic Print Club

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?

The Print Club on Ko-Fi

Exilian Thread

Winds and Whimsy: Jubal's Poems

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.

Read Jubal's Poems on Exilian

MISCELLANY

Proso:Portal

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.

Visit Prosoportal

Support Forum

Latest Music from Eric Matyas

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:

SoundImage Website
Latest Updates on Exilian

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!

So, a few months ago BeerDrinkingBurke kindly got me a copy of Vintage Story, a survival-crafting minecraft-like game with a lot of deep crafting mechanics, eldritch horror elements, and some interesting if odd plot. Here's a thread about the game! I'll probably post bits of my own building and progress but feel free to post yours too


My main world, which I dubbed Uniaeth, now has a base that's close to endgame, though I've still not tried to build steel production and I've got one more plot item I think before the game runs out of its current content (there's a lot more in the nominal plan, but I think it's one of these very slow projects where I'll be able to play the final version in, idk, 2040 maybe).

My spawn area was a pretty hills-and-canyons zone with a couple of nearby lakes and woods and a cold microclimate, but I didn't know most of that stuff then so I just got on and settled down. My chosen site was at the first major ruin I found, which I dubbed Tuath Aied: it's the remains of some sort of village, with stumps of a wall, a few buildings, some piping, etc. I started by constructing what can best be described as a burrow on the west side of the site, and that's ended up being my primary base.

First Year

The first year is designated as Year 0 ingame, but oh well. I think this is my 'oldest' image of the site at Tuath Aied, when I'd just put my first plot of spelt grain in (still my primary cereal crop), looking away from the door.


And here's the first indoor tour, a lot of which is still the base layout now. The kitchen was my first refuge, and included my first straw bed and everything: the workshop started as storage and then became the workshop. Once I had a pickaxe I then went and constructed the storage room and the steps down to my room.

The next step was an indoor pool, which as things got towards winter meant I could do things like panning for metals without going outside in the fruzz.

Kitchen:	Workshop:
Storage room:	My room:
Further indoor shot:
Basement pool:	Basement storage:

First Winter

Winter is a pretty big deal the first time you hit it in VS. In following years unless you've been very lax you probably can produce enough grain to get you through it, but first winter can involve dying a lot. If you're living close to world spawn this isn't actually a huge deal, and my playstyle has definitely been far more death-avoidant than is actually sensible at times. Winter is also pretty and you can make snowballs.

About this time I built the first outbuildings: the main one immediately in front of the entrance has always been the leatherworking area, full of barrels of tannins and things. I'd also set up a covered area for pottery making and a charcoalling mound, which you can see just left of centre in the first screenshot below.

Second Year

Once the winter passed, it was time to expand things again. I tilled some more fields, built a raft for more exploration, and built a lantern tower at the top of the mound I'd made my home under, which helps make it a visible landmark if travelling at night (at least from the south - from the east you're in woods, and from the other two sides the hills get in the way). There are various permanent light sources in the game, the simplest being little fat-burning lamps, which are less bright than torches but having something that doesn't go out when you're in a cave system and accidentally stumble into a waterfall is hugely valuable. In this case though I'd managed to loot a lantern from an underground ruin and used that.

The tower light from a distance:	The farm expanding:
The east view, ruins at Tuath Aied:	The south view with charcoal mound, raft, etc.
The tower at night:

The other major drive of the second year was advancing in tech. I decided I wanted iron stuff before doing much plot, as the game says you should have bronze and I know I'm bad at the combat. First step was getting bronze in the first place. Copper is common, but tin I eventually found below a rather unsettling larger ruin:


I also decided that I wanted to know where I was going, which started me off on probably the silliest long expedition I've made in the game. I made it five thousand blocks south to the plot location doors, so that I could map out a route to get there without falling in too many holes - then I kept going out of sheer curiosity, and ended up getting far enough south that the flora were starting to change, including redwoods and sunflowers (one of my most prized things coming back being). I managed to get back to I think 4000 blocks south before falling in a hole and dying, but a few very long corpse runs later I made it back home.

Plot location doors!	A redwood trunk (dear goodness how did I not die at that point)
Redwood forests at nearly 15000 south	High woods on the way home

Second Winter

Now I knew how to get to the distant location, it was time to work on things I needed and things that mattered. Strictly speaking I did not need chickens, but chickens definitely mattered. I caught some wild chickens and got my chicken farming going.

The other thing to work on was mechanical power, which was less successful at this stage. I picked a tall spur of rock near home and converted it into a windmill, but my sails were two sizes too small to actually power the helve hammer, the device I needed to speed up iron working. So I did a lot of iron working by hand (I do not recommend this, it takes ages, you have to knock slag off every iron bloom voxel by voxel).

I also then needed actual iron, so I spent a bunch of the winter mining and cave-exploring. This winter was so much busier than the first, when I'd been generally hiding from scary things and the cold indoors: with a lot more food to fuel me I could be a lot more active. I also found some cool things like the below tapestry, which I could use to decorate at home.

A chicken shed and fence!	And some chickens...
The windmill version 1:	A rather sad helve hammer not running:
Finally some good iron!	Underground also has treasure to be found:

The Third Year

This was it - it was finally time to do some plot. This didn't mean I could ignore the farm of course, as I still needed to eat, but I was now doing extensive enough agriculture that not tending it much wouldn't be an issue.

The farm at Tuath Aied (nb started building better around the mill)

Some spring planting including sunflowers:

Then it was time to head south again, and do plot chapter one. Actual spoilers ahead.

Chapter One (Spoilers!)

The dungeon of Chapter One is the Resonance Archives, a space that you learn was produced as a knowledge store by an ancient people trying to fight back the Rot, an unpleasant black death like disease. The rough surface area allows you to set up a base, but then once you're in you can no longer build or destroy (which is a pity - one thing I find odd is when games basically take away their own core mechanics for the plot stuff). It's an eerie space, and includes a lot of unpleasant monsters, finishing with an immobilised metal giant. The game design is sometimes so-so, but the aesthetic design is fantastic.

For the first time I used a temporal gear, which resets your spawn point for the next twenty spawns. I used five or six, I think - for the final battle, the enemy didn't regen health with any speed so I did feel I was grinding it out a bit, fortunately my metal armour was just about good enough to not break before the battle ended. The archive rooms you get at the end are very pretty and let you get lots of books (books!) and other useless but pretty items.

Inside the doors:	A rough side-room where I decided to try and set up camp:
My camp and spawn point:	The way down:
A side-room with various clutter:	There's also giant mystery machinery...
Which can whirr into life!	What were they doing here? (How wrong can bell-making go? Very.)
This doesn't get across quite how eerie the central chamber is:	And the reward! Behold the archives!

With that done, the rest of the year's work was just ensuring winter food was available and starting to shape a space to put my loot in. There was no way I could haul it all back in one go, but I decided it was time to start a little archive for myself (sadly the game doesn't let you take all the books from the big archive, but you can take a solid thirty or so).

Here's the first view of the archive cave:

The Third Winter

The third winter was mostly preparation for Chapter Two, a significantly more distant location, but one where I (sort of) had an ace up my sleeve now, for having completed Chapter One I could get A TAMED ELK to ride around on which is great. The less great part is that the tamed elk is a bit janky, you need to not ride it down holes, and I did once console-command revive it because I turned my back and it walked into a pit kiln fire and cooked itself when I was like 12000 blocks from home. Nonetheless I love my elk, which I guess may now be my second elk.

Also in hoofed news, I had finally gotten some mouflon farming going. I actually just found a valley with some mouflon in it and built the pen around them rather than trying to capture them: the domestication mechanic works over generations and requires feeding them, which I have been doing. This hasn't been useful to me yet, because the mouflon tend to attack me and I'm trying to expand their numbers rather than cull them so far, but we'll get there.

I also found some weird glow things in a cave, proving that this game can still throw new things at me after over 100 hours of play.

Tuath Aied in the third winter	My elk!
My mouflon enclosure:	The winter snows:
Glowy cave things!	And from a distance:

The Fourth Year

The fourth year (that is, Year 3 in the game reckoning) would be the year of doing Chapter Two of the game plot. I don't think I have any shots from between the end of winter and the plot segment, so here goes:

Plot Chapter Two (Spoilers)

I also don't have very good views of chapter two. I started with a reconnaissance to get a halfway post to the first chapter two location and then did that journey. This place is the Lazaret, where people with the Rot went to die. This location also provides the plot reveal that this all actually used to be our world - I'm still not sure if I think that was a good call and I don't think it necessarily adds much, but it's sort of interesting. Unfortunately at one point I managed to die unexpectedly and had to do an on-foot corpse run to the Lazaret without my elk who was already there, that wasn't much fun. The lazaret is also rather small, but then points you to a significantly further location (ca 15k blocks from base, at least two days travel even if you're riding very hard day and night with an elk).

This second location is Nadiya, a village! An actual village and indeed the only village in the world (not presumed to be the case in lore, but it's the only village in the actual game). It's a bit far away to be very useful as a base or shopping centre, and there's some sidequest requests there I've still not completed. On the way to Nadiya I also came across a mushroom which, it not being registered as poisonous in the game system, I ate to interesting consequences...

Oopsie	I'm really glad I didn't get attacked by a bear while tripping out
First view of Nadiya	And a better view of the settlement

From Nadiya you get pointed to the Devastation, which is the actual dungeon for the chapter. It involves weird enemies including a giant bird, a bunch of odd time travel shenanigans, and finding a mysterious lens that may be able to look between worlds. You can then take it to Tobias, a mysterious hermit from before the cataclysm who founded Nadiya and, it turns out, is responsible for your weird out-of-time existence, pulled out of time from before the events happened (which is also why you respawn when you die!) As Tobias actually understands alchemy and tech, he has a bunch of mechanical servants and a really nice home in some caves under a cliff.

Rust-brown sky heralds the Devastation	It literally makes a dome you can see from a distance
I didn't catalogue the events, but this was the prize:	Tobias' cave has the glowy strands too!
#HermitLifeGoals	#Aesthetic
I also built myself a tiny home near Nadiya so I've got a bed to sleep in if I visit again:

And that's more or less that so far! My remaining objective is to build A Thing for which I need electrum that I don't have, but as the rest of the plot doesn't exist yet there's no hurry to build it.

Final recent stuff:

I've also been continuing the mouflon plan:	And I remodelled the workshop, which now has an actual window:
Some of the alchemical stuff now wants rare earths apparently:	And an autumn view from a trip south to collect more Resonance Archive loot.

30th is a Thursday, 31st a Friday. I think those are probably my best options, I could also maybe do Friday 17th.

Any thoughts welcome!

[Prosoportal Work Log]

Prosoportal Work Log

To do:

• Medieval Caucasus Data Bibliography
• Medieval Islamic World Data Bibliography
• Ancient & Medieval Iran Data Bibliography
• Medieval East Asia Data Bibliography
• Medieval Europe Data Bibliography
• On-site page on basic principles of premodern historical data
• First version of the chronological search
• First version of the map search

Possible additions (depending on overlap with other resources):

• Ancient and Medieval Arabia Data Bibliography
• Ancient Near East Data Bibliography
• Classical Mediterranean Data Bibliography
• Armenology Data Bibliography

First post June 29 2026:

Another of my very rarely updated project logs

As of today, the Prosoportal website exists! I've added two data bibliographies and a couple of regular bibliography pages to provide helpful basic information. I've also got a contributors page up.

Prosoportal is a project I've been hoping to do for some time and have finally started getting round to: there are SO many historical resources on the internet that are hard to find, especially in the world of historical data and databases, that having a location to start keeping tabs on them felt like something very needed that we were missing. Hence a portal for prosopographies and other historical data - prosoportal.

The initial aim of this project is basically cataloguing and keeping up to date links available for as many of these projects as possible. Beyond that, there are two main routes I want to go down. One is making metadata searches available, not searching within the databases, but just finding which resources might reasonably cover your areas of interest. The other is working on providing bibliographies and resources to help people understand this sort of data, a lot of which isn't clear for the non-specialist and even for specialist academics can be challenging at times.

Visit the Prosoportal Website

After CMW this year, the guys from Caves of Qud pointed me at a US-based event called Roguelike Celebration: in case it's of use to people, highlighting here that they're running a steam event and conference in October. I can't submit a talk this year (I have to be in Oslo on the Monday and juggling a conference with that travel would be a mess) but I'm going to submit to the celebration event and see what they say.

Event link in case anyone wants to submit to their CfP (open until June 28) or their Steam event (open until September) - https://www.roguelike.club/event2026.html

The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research at the University of Winchester presents The Seventh Middle Ages in Modern Games Asynchronous Conference (@MidAgesModGames, #MAMG26) on 5 to 7 October 2026.  The central themes of this year's event are 'Possible Worlds' and 'Possible Pasts'.

In a time of growing political and environmental anxieties, the Middle Ages are often sought as a source of inspiration for alternative futures. Ecologically-minded games like Of Life and Land  look to the medieval past to explore alternative, non-exploitative engagements with nature. Medievalist RPGs have long served as possibility spaces for players to interrogate and experiment with notions of sexuality, gender, and identity more broadly. Games like Scriptorium and Traveller's Rest imagine medieval pasts divorced from the logics of violence often associated with the period. Medievalist fantasy games like Metaphor: ReFantazio openly engage with utopian thinking and our capacities to imagine possible worlds.

This conference considers the Middle Ages and Medievalism in Modern Games. We invite analytical 'papers' (comprising 400-500 words of text or 5-minute videos) and sessions of 3 to 5 papers which address any aspects of the medieval period or medievalism in any and all forms of modern games. We particularly welcome papers addressing the central conference themes of 'Possible Worlds' and 'Possible Pasts'. The conference will be conducted remotely and there will be no registration fee. To promote accessibility and inclusivity, the event runs asynchronously across time zones.

We encourage submissions from medievalists, games scholars and developers at any point in their career— especially those from Postgraduate Students, Early Career Researchers and members of any groups under-represented within the academy and industry. We welcome pieces addressing any region globally, and within a broad definition of 'medieval' and 'medievalism'.

We are able to accept papers in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words, brief biographies, and indications of time zone and availability as attachments in Word to midagesmodgames@gmail.com by Sunday 3 August.

OK, this month is a bit of a mess for me. I'm going to suggest we do a midsummer pub on Sun 21: I appreciate this is tradition-breaking in various ways, but from my end I kind of need it to be before I leave for the UK for my usual summer conferencing, and I can't do the 18th or 19th.

Would that work for people?

We're overdue a Friday rather than a Thursday, would this work for people as an option?

I'm looking for someone to commission for a bespoke map of a real world area with particular locations illustrated. What I'm imagining is a slightly stylised map with some sort of sketch/colour picture of a particular building or object for each of the highlighted places (of which there will be twelve or so I think, possibly one or two more). I can provide photo references for the things I'd like drawn in each case, though in some cases I'd like to be able to discuss what might work best.

I'm especially interested in slightly more old-school art styles: given the theme of the project this is for and given how I write, I'm looking for things that are sketchier and softer colour tones, rather than big vibrant colours and bold lines.

I'm happy to discuss costs and pay reasonable commission fees. It will be a precondition of the commission that no generative AI of any kind should be used in the process, and I would strongly appreciate mid-work shots to help show this. If you think this is something you can do, please get in touch with your commission rates and ideally portfolio/examples of previous work, either in this thread or by email (james (at) wavcott (dot) org (dot) uk).