Updates from the Forge 59: Autumn 2025

Started by Jubal, October 18, 2025, 02:02:13 PM

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Jubal

October 18, 2025, 02:02:13 PM
Issue 59: Autumn 2025

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 59, for Autumn 2025! This issue is even later than usual and a little shorter than usual due to our one newsletter writer being unwell: thank you for bearing with us and many apologies for the delays.

In Exilian community news lately, we do have one recent problem that we'd like your thoughts on - in recent years, imgur.com has been one of the main image hosts for lots of forums and websites like ours. Unfortunately, due to recent authoritarian legislation passed by the UK government, they no longer think it's viable to operate in the UK, and that means that UK users may not be able to see images in a lot of our older articles, newsletters, and forum posts. For a lot of official Exilian content we're likely to move to on-site hosting, but we're keen to find other image hosts to recommend to people so our UK user base can have an uninterrupted experience going forwards. If you've got thoughts on what we can do, please let us know in the comments below.

We've had one new article in the last few months, the long awaited fifth part to the Unexpected Bestiary series which gives details and folklore on seven more strange but real creatures with thoughts on how you could include them in fictional settings. This time we have the ominously named Hellbender, the bizarre Hoatzin, and the gruesome urban legends about Mexican Mole Lizards to explore, among other things.

As ever, there's lots more going on across the site than we ever manage to get into a newsletter. Do check out the Indie Alley, and there have also been some fun bits of chatter on gaming matters in The Arcade as well as plenty of forum games and the usual chitchat. For now though here are some updates on what's been occurring across the community recently!

CONTENTS:


GAME DEV
New RPGs from CrowberryCake

Our newest member CrowberryCake has brought to us not one but two recent RPG projects! She's an Austria-based designer and writer who "plays games, writes words, writes games, and plays words", according to her blog (Information on whether she also writes plays, games words, and plays writing and words games to complete the possible combination set is not known at the time of writing.) Besides her blog, she also has an Itch page where you can check out her work, which include a bunch of small and quirky one-shot RPG projects including a slice-of-life about being a cat as well as the two new pieces we can share today!

Worldbreaker is a mini-RPG about life in a world where the great world serpent, Jörmungandr, is consuming all in existence and drowning the land to bring about the end of days. Your aim is to save your village - and you can be as creative as you like in doing so. Your problems might be solved with a suitable bar chart (if you can invent bar charts), the Hammer of Thor (if you can get your hands on it) or the Mead of Poetry (if you're too charismatic and/or insufficiently sober for other options. You might end up fighting to gain your prize, and the small bestiary includes Snakes, Bears, Actual Literal Odin, and also Very Angry Squirrels From The World Tree, so there are plenty of options available. Like wiht many mini-RPGs, it's the flavour and characters that will really make a game of this work, and the character creation questions are very helpful in directing three-dimensional approaches to gameplay.Which secret do you keep, even from the gods?

Meanwhile Solivago is a GM-less science fiction game about discovering new worlds. Imagining a world where humans are taking tentative, observation-only steps out into the galaxy - think perhaps something like Wolf 359 more than the developed starfaring of a Star Trek or Fireball XL5 - the game takes you through planet creation processes and charts for the place you discover, and also possible events and problems that might disrupt your communication back with earth. Inspired by books like To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers, CrowberryCake describes it as a shared worldbuilding experience more than an action game. What might be out there, we can only imagine.

If either of those sound up your street then you can get them easily via Itch, and discuss them at the Exilian threads below!

Worldbreaker Exilian Thread
Solivago Exilian Thread


Improvise with Levity!


Levity is a new pen and paper improv comedy roleplaying game from friend of the site and previous Coding Medieval Worlds speaker trickthegiant, of Swan and Raven studios. The game promises to potentially expose players to "survival horror in the Canadian woods, identical twins and their romantic mix-ups, and an evil demi-god sea cucumber with an exploding coconut". The game provides a variety of setting prompts that can be combined and sifted to make confusing, silly, and inexplicable situations for improvising comedy roleplaying. If things are starting to dip, there's also a table of twists to help poke the plot along. If you've got a session spare and some friends who'd like to try a more improvised style of collective storytelling, why not give it a try?

Tricks is also currently running a large bundle to raise money for legal aid societies in their home state of Virginia: entitled HELLO//GOODBYE, the bundle includes a chance to get Levity alongside its eponymous zine where a range of writers produced TTRPG responses to different collages made by trickthegiant herself. It also more widely offers 98% off the usual price of a huge array of TTRPG products including works by other Exilian members including our aformentioned newest contributor CrowberryCake and our longest standing member Jubal. The bundle will be available until November 5th, so do go check that out!

Get the HELLO//GOODBYE bundle on Itch
Get Levity on Itch
Check out the Exilian thread

Barking Up the Right Tree with Indiekid!


But which tree is the right one? (Probably the one on the right.)

Indiekid's latest boardgame devlog looks at Yarn Spinning, his lightweight card-based storytelling game that's under development. He discusses the problem of runaway mechanics in games, and judging player skill - giving more story cards as a reward might not be such an important benefit for an experience player who can twist any card into any tale, but for other players it might create an expanding success pile for those who win early rounds.

He also discusses the problem of rules looseness: is a storytelling game something that needs or wants strict rules, or should groups be encouraged to find their own ways to tell stories? How would such encouragement work? From the loosely storied but physically structured tile-laying of myrioramas to more rules-intensive but diversely arranged games, storytelling games have been around for a long time - but there's always more to do and discover, because stories and the ways we tell them keep being reshaped with every generation.

If you've got thoughts on these and other problems of boardgame design, please do jump in and have a look at Indiekid's threads and devlogs. Here are the links:

Barking Up The Right Tree (On Indiekid's Blog)
Discuss the devlogs on the forum

ARTS AND WRITING
Meet The Last Lady of Lună

JessMahler's latest book, The Last Lady of Lună, will be out on October 15! This vampire romance is the first in a new series about the Lună vampire clan: its protagonist, Natalia, saw her clan destroyed when she was just a child, and now finds herself coming into her powers as the last head of a barely existent group of scattered and broken creatures of the night. In need of help and hoping to rebuild her lost clan, she turns to a group of human mercenaries, the sort of hired killers who might be able to fight back against her clan's persecutors - and might be persuaded to keep her secrets, too.

Jess is a prolific writer so there's lots more of their work to check out too: they specialise in queer fantasy that includes characters who are neurodivergent, aromantic, and just plain different in all sorts of ways. Their website at https://jessmahler.com/ includes details of lots of their other fiction works and writings on polyamory. If you like romance-fantasy that plays with and undermines common tropes in the genre, there's a lot there to check out!

Get The Last Lady of Lună
Discuss the book on Exilian

A Traveller's Song from Klamath


Oopsie, someone hit the wrong switch again: looks like the Enclave needs an electrician. Maybe also a nuclear scientist. And a time machine.

This piece combines a couple of things we reported on in the last Updates issue - poetic works by Jubal, and the Fallout universe - as he returns to music with a recent recording of his Traveller's Song From Klamath. The piece is a western-style post apocalyptic folk ballad that explores the setting of Fallout 2 and gives a time-worn wanderer's viewpoint on the events and places of that game and how one might feel about living in the Californian wastelands.

Jubal's music covers a range of themes, with particularly strong influences from the folk traditions of the British Isles but also material from games, history, and mythology woven into the lyrics. His music playlist on YouTube has over eighty videos, mosst of them original songs that range from classic folksy works to specific filk pieces about Middle-Earth, Dragon Age, and Narnia, and also less prominent settings like Blue Prince and Pillars of Eternity. There are also several of the original soundtrack pieces for his own The Exile Princes - and there may be more original game soundtrack items coming in the next year or two. Wait and see!

A Traveller's Song From Klamath
Jubal's Music (Playlist)

MISCELLANY
Latest Sounds & Textures from SoundImage


Another brick in a wall in YOUR project, perhaps?

SoundImage, Eric Matyas' huge online database of free images and music, has continued to grow in recent months. Above we've got some of the most recent additions, new seamlessly tileable brick textures for use in your games, collages, art, or anything else!

Recent music updates on SoundImage have also continued and include some funnier pieces, "Quirky Western Town", a bouncy backing track that will set jaunty tumbleweeds bouncing along the ground. There's also "80's Princess", a halfway house between a fantasy transformation scene and something you might find in Grease or a later Queen album.

If you have a bit of spare change, SoundImage is an enormous free resource that, like Exilian, costs money to run: you can donate to support Eric's work on his website.

Latest Music
Latest Textures
SoundImage Website

Helping Exilian Out

Running Exilian is a lot of work: our volunteer team is around every day of the year to do everything including the technical side of upgrades, moderation, and anti-spam, but also all the community things that make this place work like organising events, writing newsletters, editing articles, and generally keeping this a positive and creative space.

If you enjoy any of what we do - whether it's workshops meetups, articles, the forum, or anything besides - there's lots of ways you can give something back. At the smallest scale, just let people know about what we're doing. Send people links to these newsletters or our articles if you see a cool thing you think they'd like, or share our social media posts - these things all help spread the word and support the small creators we work with. You can also use the forum to give us feedback on what we're doing, so we can improve, and of course we appreciate hearing about what creative stuff you have going on - the more people are discussing their work here, the stronger a community we have.

If you'd like to give a little more back or get more involved, we could do with both time and money to support what we're doing. If you might be interested in getting involved as an article editor or writer, or helping run our social media, or if you have some other skill that you think we could use, please let us know. We also have a variety of ways for you to donate to Exilian if you have money that you can spare.

Thanks in advance for any help any of you can give. We as the volunteer team love this place and its community, and we're always keen to get whatever help we can to make it better and better for existing and new members alike.

Donate to Exilian
Get Involved


That's all for Autumn's Updates from the Forge - which, as winter updates generally come with the new year, will be our last of 2025! The years turn and we build everything we need for each new turn of the seasons, from the new little flights of fancy that give us hope and energy to the great ideas that will hold us together when it feels like the world is breaking. We'll see you all in the workshops of creativity - until then!
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...
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