Updates from the Forge 57: Spring 2025

[Jubal]

Issue 57: Spring 2025

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

It's another belated edition of your favourite Exilian newsletter, which is also probably your least favourite Exilian newsletter because we only have one newsletter - welcome back to Updates from the Forge!

The first part of the year is always a busy one on Exilian, with Cyril & Methodius Day and Exilian's birthday passing as ever. We also had the results of our elections, where we welcomed The Seamstress to the volunteer team as our new forum moderator - big thanks to her for stepping up.

We also had the results of our ICEBOUND winter competition, which this year was won by Tusky with his game The Icebound Wildlife sanctuary! As well as his fun little wildlife-feeding entry, we had three pieces of short fiction and a diorama all of which you can check out at the linked thread. Thanks to GoldKarat and Clio Em, our guest judges, and to Vicorva for sponsoring the competition with a copy of their book.

There are two new articles in our articles section: in The Name of the Game Jubal goes into depth on naming games and how to do it, and in the Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator we had a bit of fun writing a JavaScript generator that pitches disconcertingly plausible romance-fantasy book ideas. We've also got a bunch of ongoing work from projects covered in other recent issues like the RPG Venleitche, the sci-fi world of Infinitas, and Eric Matyas' music, and no doubt plenty happening behind the scenes on upcoming projects as well.

This time we've got full-size updates from nine bits of the community - so onward to this season's forgecrafts!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Honorbound
  • Relentless Expanse
  • Rob's ETW Modding!
• Arts & Writing
  
  • These Hearts, Who Once Held Up The Sky
  • ForgeFyre Returns
  • The Earthwitch: Part Two
• Miscellany
  
  • Coding Medieval Worlds: Panel Videos Out Now!
  • Rob's Elden Explorations continue
  • Jump off at Exilian's Docks for a new project!

GAME DEV

Honorbound

New member jerodleupold has posted about his Zinequest 2025 project, which you can still get by late pledging on Kickstarter - this is Honorbound, a science fiction setting where in a galaxy purged of intelligent machines by the machines themselves, highly advanced social rules between the many alien factions and peoples are the foundation of interstellar peace - a world of negotiation and ritual duels to stave off the old fears of conflict and, worse still, corporations.

From the wasteland life of the Harven to the contemplative crystalline thought-spaces of the Iliod, the world of Honorbound has a diverse array of alien archetypes that must be kept in balance - and a diverse array of literary influences too informing how the setting can handle that. Drawing on not only Star Wars and Firefly but also the Three Musketeers and the works of Charles Dickens, the cultures of honour and civility needed to sustain a society that doesn't fall prey to greed and war again may themselves take considerable daring to maintain, or to skirt around for other purposes...

Take a look on Kickstarter

Discuss the setting on Exilian

Relentless Expanse

The Expanse! Behold its relentlessness!

New member ThreeCrowAudio came to post about Relentless Expanse, a top down 2D space RTS now in Early Access on Steam. You can send your ships between planets and upgrade production and defences to tangle with computer or human opponents. The stylistically simple galaxy map gives a classic pixelled flavour to your campaigns of galactic conquest.

The game is still in active development: recent additions include the ability to choose the shape of galaxy you play in, upgrades to the AI, and the ability to set keybinds and your preferred single player colour. It's a free game, too, so there's nothing to lose by checking it out!

Check out the Exilian thread

Rob's ETW Modding!

This early modern soldier isn't chicken. He just has a chicken.

Longstanding Exilian member Clockwork (aka Rob) has been making some mods for Empire: Total War, the early modern instalment in the classic Total War franchise. The aim of Rob's mod is to emphasise factional flavour - amping up the most key elements of each faction's military and systems to make them more distinct, even if this gives a less purely historical outcome.

This includes Russia getting access to a lot more regional troops from various parts of what was in this period rapidly becoming the Russian Empire, larger grenadier units for Poland, and the Dutch Republic moving towards a more mercenary-focused gameplay style and away from standardised line infantry. Desert Warriors are shifted towards more of a skirmish warfare style to emphasise their less rank-and-file nature, and other infantry units are tweaked for France and the Ottomans.

The forum discussion so far has focused on what to do with the Habsburgs: Austria itself doesn't necessarily have the strongest military identity, but the sprawling nature of 17th-19th century Habsburg possessions from Swabia and Bohemia to Hungary and the Balkans give them a potentially rather wide array of troops and cultures compared to some of their more nominally focused neighbours. It's an interesting problem for a Total War game - as the name implies, the game is continually focused on warfare, but the marital and interpersonal diplomacy and sense of recognition that often were core to the distinctive nature of Habsburg power are rather harder to model in this strategy game engine.

If you're interested in Empire TW and in early modern history more generally, this is potentially an interesting thread and discussion to check out at the link below!

Discuss it on the forum

ARTS AND WRITING

These Hearts, Who Once Held Up the Sky

We find each other on the road towards the failing Span.

The sky is still golden here, every star, every path and confluence a part of the greater whole. We each recall, together and apart, when our own skies seemed this indomitable.

And each of our backs bend in empathy beneath the weight of gold.

These Hearts, Who Once Held Up the Sky is a tale of exhaustion, hope, togetherness, and of what it means to be a god. It's a short piece of fiction that follows the imagined journeys of former gods - or beings with the burdens of gods - and explores the thinking and feelings behind their dealing. Fictional gods often focus on senses of omnipotence and power-madness, so it's really intriguing to look at a converse view that seeks to think about the burden, responsibility, and weight that can come with having the strength to hold the world together.

Rob Haines shared this, his first bit of professionally published short fiction, with us recently. It's out in Factor Four magazine, a monthly magazine of speculative flash fiction stories. Rob sharing it on the forum is not the piece's only connection to Exilian, though: he came up with the idea for the story after one of our monthly virtual-moot discussions about burnout and working out how to deal with it, so that's a brilliant outcome for one of our events as well. We're always glad when this community helps shape and grow people's creativity, and we hope you enjoy the wonderful tale that Rob has made!

Read the tale

Discuss it on Exilian

ForgeFyre Returns

Jubal's multimedia story ForgeFyre takes us into a folklore-inspired gothic clockpunk setting, a world of fey folk, gremlins, da Vinci's wildest creations, religious wars and duelling desperados. Amidst it all, in an overlooked village somewhere in the mountain kingdom of Aloen, a young woman with an unusually sharp memory makes a particularly strange friend - and they will discover a lot more about the world around them together. Take a look at the video below and see what you think!

The story was originally released between 2014 and 2016, with two short chapter-stories taking place focused on its heroine, Ninette. Jubal's Guns, Swords, and Steam setting. They have been unavailable for a number of years, but are now returning here on the Exilian forums, to be re-released in episodic form over the coming months. Do follow along if you'd like to discover more of this world and its strange - human and otherwise - inhabitants!

Discover ForgeFyre

The Earthwitch: Part Two

Indiekid has returned with the next instalment of his story The Earthwitch, which combines environmentalism, children's horror, and fairytale in a unique package. The first part of the story brought the children and the mysterious Earthwitch together in trying to soothe a part of the earth's pain - at no small cost. This second instalment sees our protagonists and their new mentor discover new magic, learn what to do and what not to do with the earth's strange gifts, and face conflict over how to deal with the pain that humans directly inflict upon wild creatures.

The Earthwitch is an unusual figure, a considerably more unsettling and at times morally conflicted figure than some of the classic fairytale mentors, in a way that hopefully will build compellingly as new stories continue. What is she willing to sacrifice for her attempts to soothe the earth, and how should she, or we, react to horrors that we cannot fully repait? This tale of the relationship between people and the earth made manifest touches on a wide range of themes and is sure to be an interesting, and at times multifaced, read.

Do check it out at the link below, join the discussion and let Indiekid know what you think!

Read The Earthwitch Part 2

MISCELLANY

Coding Medieval Worlds: Panel Videos Out Now!

One of our biggest annual events is Coding Medieval Worlds, an academic/game dev collaboration workshop run by Jubal that seeks to connect historians and developers and build new ideas for how to tackle core challenges of presenting medieval worlds in game formats. This year, the theme was power and instutition, and we had groups discussing how to make game dev guides on social-economic systems, the way power could be better presented through clothing in games, and how to make instutions in games feel like real complex political structures rather than simply pyramids of henchmen leading up to a boss fight.

As well as the main discussion format sections, we have a range of key expert speakers on different topics - this year there were panels on power outside the state, power and cultures, and courtly power, as well as a keynote on using early medieval law as a way to look at power. We're excited to say that we've now got all of this year's video content - thanks as ever to Jafeth for doing the video capture work - onto YouTube where you can watch several hours more inspiring CMW discussions! Do take a look and let us know what you think.

Video Playlist on YouTube

CMW Forum on Exilian

Rob's Elden Explorations continue

Besides his fiction writing, Rob Haines has been doing a long-running set of ingame photography projects, with the main focus for the past year being exploring the world of Elden Ring and finding new ways and angles to capture its different environments visually. In February he shared his explorations of The Rot & Ruin of Caelid, a classic of foetic swamp design that resonates with other blighted landscapes in game visuals, and in March, two new albums covered Mountaintops & Snowfields (above, pictured) and Miquella's Haligtree.

Finding new ways to envision fictional worlds - sometimes angles and imaginaries that go beyond the imagined use-cases of the developers - is a really interesting sort of sub-creation because it can highlight and explore how intentional and unintentional decisions are made through game design and sometimes even reveal threads, connections and ideas that an original designer might never have consciously realised they were in conversation with. If you're interested both in the aesthetics and discussion of what's behind them, do also check out the discussion of Rob's work on the forum, where we've been having some interesting looks at how some of the different landscape features feel and resonate with one another.

And, of course, there are many more beautiful in-game landscapes to enjoy!

Galleries at Rob Haines' Creative Space

Exilian Discussion Thread

Wearing ruffs during Exilian debates is, nowadays, optional.

Join the debate in The Philosophers' Plaza

The world is not, as has often been observed, so nice a place as it should be. The quest for how to make it a better place - the world of politics - is likewise often (and not always unjustly) maligned for the very real problems. In such a world it's vital to have space where we can focus on the creativity and community that make the world worth living in despite its problems, and we always support people who need Exilian as such a space.

However, we're also always keen to support people approaching the world's problems in the curious, kind, inqusitive spirit that runs through the heart of this community, too. Our space for that is the Philosopher's Plaza, a subforum for politics, philosophy, and often psephology that has been an active space for attempting to set the world to rights from 2008 onwards. If you need a place to ask other interested people what they think's happening in the world, to talk about your own country's elections and politics, or to theorise about where we might all end up in a few years time, the Plaza is the place for you.

Recent discussions have included the state of America, the new government of Austria, previews of how the Australian and Canadian elections are shaping up, and ongoing notes on the politics of Portugal, France, Poland, and more besides. If that might help you keep informed, why not check out the discussion?

The Philosopher's Plaza on Exilian

That's your lot for Spring! We look forward to seeing you again in summer, when we'll have yet more Exilian updates for your perusal, edification, and entertainment. Until then!