EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Hello and welcome to another issue of Updates from the Forge, your Exilian newsletter of geekery and creativity!

Whilst last season was a news-heavy one, the summer has been a quieter time for site-wide news. We've been happy to welcome two new voting members, Rob_Haines and The Seamstress: our citizens, or voting members, comprise most of the more active members of Exilian, and get a full say in how the site is run including electing our council and being able to vote directly. If that's something that interests you, you can find out more about becoming a citizen here.

We've had one new article in our articles section, Apocalypse Now Or Never: Apocalypse Always, in which Jubal takes a dive into why apocalyptic ideas are so common in modern fantasy fiction and especially modern fantasy gaming. This is the second part in the series: in the first part, he covered the development of apocalypses as we know them in fiction today. Do drop into the comments over there if you have thoughts on the utter destruction of everything in existence!

Our range of topics in this newsletter is as ever packed and varied for your edification and delight, and we've curiously ended up with a theme, for this is the tavern special: two of our games are set in taverns and another one involves a spa, and our other topics can even provide musical accompaniment, pub activities, and online space for you to kick back and put the world to rights. Also there's some spaceships. Without further ado, here's some updates from the forge!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Find the hidden art of Innkeeping!
  • Melon Head: a game about a guy with a melon for a head
  • The less hidden art of... more innkeeping?
  • Playtesting with Indiekid
  • We've done inns - what about a spa trip?
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Meeting Luxorian's Crew with Vicorva
  • Rob's Piano Music
  • Exoskeletons and elfin aliens in the World of Infinitas
• Miscellany
  
  • What have you been modelling and painting?
  • Off topic chat in the WBU

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New Exilian member Sea Phoenix has released The Hidden Art of Innkeeping, a game where you fix up a dilapidated farmhouse in a little fantasy village until it becomes a five star travellers' rest! After your character, an experienced innkeeper, has a terrible stay at a coastal hotel with a monopoly on the area's travellers, a chance meeting leads her to set up a competitor, and eventually to becoming the centre of a regrown community. The whimsical and varied bunch of guests and things to do features seashell collecting, an angry peacock, Homeric references, a grumpy carrot farmer, very amateur archaeology, Jane Austen novels, and a mouse called Branka - there's a lot to discover and explore.

The Hidden Art of Innkeeping is the sequel to Sea Phoenix's previous game, The Lost Art of Innkeeping, and features the same protagonist, Elinor - but can be played entirely stand-alone without knowledge of the previous game and its plot. The game is available on both Itch.io and Steam, where reviewers have been praising its 'hilarious and heartwarming' dialogues and comfy vibe.

If you want to see more for yourself, here's where to find out:

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New Exilian member Miggo has arrived with something completely different. Something completely different to what would be a valid question, were it not for the fact that Melon Head is completely different to just about anything one cares to name. A point and click adventure with a world of deeply strange beings and a psychedelic colour scheme, Melon Head developed from an initial isometric plan to a classic point-and-click view as it developed.

In the story itself Melon Head is a sculptor who must produce a great piece of art for the glory of the king. He also has a head shaped like a melon. And a wall-mounted food machine who talks and deals with things by you putting them in its mouth. And that's really just the start, as their hunt for parts for a perfect sculpture leads them to dabble in an alley-man's forbidden romances, discuss wistful romanticism with subway ticket salesmen, and amplify sports game broadcasts - all rendered in the most vivid EGA art style pinks, blues and greens imaginable.

Melon Head has just been released, so you can find your way around this madcap adventure yourself - more info below. Good luck finding your way around the stranger parts of the human - or melon-brained - imagination!

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Yes, if you thought we were done with inns after Elinor's tale above, you are about to be amazed because there is more tavern news to come! This one involves less cutesy pets and a considerable amount more spying on guests and dubious food subsitutions because we've reached the wayside rest of Innkeep, the game where you run a grimy fantasy tavern in full guest-robbery Master of the House style. Whereas Elinor starts her tale with a successful business, a bad queue, and a missed train, the protagonist of Innkeep starts out as a vagrant who is drafted into running his inn after wandering in when the previous owner is in the process of getting decapitated by bandits. No matter where you start from, the desire to build a fine inn is the same - but how you get there might be more than a little different.

The news from the games' dev is very exciting: they now have a new company structure, under the title of Boot Disk Games, and a new publishing arrangement with indie publisher Mythwright to eventually publish the final version. Hopefully these new structures and collaborations will help Innkeep move forward towards our screens - fulfilling our destiny, learning the truth, and cooking a couple of innocent rats along the way. Actual chicken is expensive, guys.

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From our range of fictional resting spots to something that can be done in a real pub: Indiekid has been travelling to test his game projects, not perhaps so far as some of his more wide-ranging adventures through the Americas which he's shared in our articles section this year, but Scotland and northeastern England are probably a little easier to find English language boardgame testing groups in! He's been running tests of Yarn Spinning, a collaborative storytelling card-game that creates some very much madcap situations for players.

There are some really fun anecdotes and useful information sets for those making and testing boardgames, including some thoughts on how to compromise with younger players who find the rules tricky but want to play with a group, notes on the comparative size and organisation of the different events involved, and some details of his preparation and organisation. If you're looking to make and test boardgames, some of this real-world experience might be useful to you in making your own tests happen and ensuring you get the best experience for your playtesters and the most useful outcomes for you. It's always worth remembering that game testing has to happen with real people, not with a sealed-box imagined ideal player, and listening to real experiences is a good way to see how that can work.

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Are you fed up with everyone's stupid requests? Find the cat? Retrieve the magic sword? Kill god? Maybe you need a spa trip - but it will probably end up being to the SPA OF DESTINY, which presumably appears in the title IGNIS UNIVERSIA: THE SPA OF DESTINY, a game in which the Chosen Sisters, having saved the world, are mildly frustrated that their mentor's plans to go on an adventure and save the world again will end up encroaching on their holiday time.

The game offers turn-based combat, a full character roster who remain in the party at all times, 12-13 hours of gameplay, a completely annoyingly generic male protagonist free zone, and if the available GIFs are to be believed possibly a beaver in plaid turning up at some point which we can all agree is very exciting indeed. It's gone through considerable development and a name change since a 2022 kickstarter, and the now available demo should give people a good idea for how the game will look and feel - and just how wrong an attempted holiday can go.

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Veo Corva's latest novella has been successfully funded on Ko-fi! Entitled Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew, this space fantasy novella brings readers to a world where dragons and their riders are key to travelling the galaxy, with the rider key as a voice to the crew. For Luxorian, a dragon abandoned by their rider but in need of money, this creates a dilemma: how to run a ship and crew without the rider whose job it was to captain them?

The tale promises spaceships, sneaky robots, horrors from the void of deep space, and working out how to heal when hurt by someone you trusted. V's readers have duly rallied to that promise and we can congratulate them on a 209% funded successful Ko-fi campaign! Using Ko-fi rather than things like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo offers creators a different model: V cited Ko-fi's low processing fees and separation of backer fulfillments costs as reasons for choosing the platform for this campaign, so this may be something other creators might want to look into.

If you want to get yourself a copy, the paperback book is expected to be released for non-backers to buy sometime in the next few months, with ebooks already having gone out to Ko-Fi campaign backers. We look forward to seeing how this draconic adventure through the stars unfolds!

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Our multi-talented new citizen Rob Haines has been doing piano music and arrangements over in the Artisans' Guilds! In 2019 he picked up the instrument again (presumably non-literally, but we can neither confirm nor deny the possibility of Rob's talents including super-strength) after playing it as a child, and he's been posting some of his pieces. He recently started trying arranging music for the first time, too, with a version of the main theme of Skies of Arcadia posted recently which is lovely to listen to.

If you're thinking of picking up an instrument for the first or second time, or if you never stopped, we'd love to hear what you're up to with it as well - the Artisans' Guilds provide space for all such bardic projects, and bards of all abilities are always very welcome. We hope to see you there, whether as a listener or to delight our audiences, someday soon!

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In the wide array of writings by BagaturKhan about his huge World of Infinitas setting has come some new entries on the Elfurr - Azolinti Eternal War. The Elfurr, an elfin alien species, and their arthropod-like foes, the Azolinti, fought for over ten thousand years of the setting's history: when Elfurr explorers reached the Taote galaxy and the planetary space owned by the Azolinti clans, existing antipathies and mistrust burst into conflict.

BagaturKhan's extensive notes on the war include details of the Azolinti battlefleet, the Fl'Taa, and the Elfurr special Expansion fleet that opposed them, including the different varieties of warship and commanders, as well as details of some of the most major engagements. It's a really interesting look into the huge but dedicated work of crafting such an extensive setting - do take a look!

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Tabletop gaming has always been a part of Exilian - we've always had a wargames or tabletop games section, and one of our first projects was the Warhammer: Total War mod for Rome: Total War, which brought one of the world's most popular tabletop games into the classic Total War Engine (well before Games Workshop came up with the same plan). One aspect of the tabletop world that our discussions on rules and ideas and settings don't always cover, though, is the physicality of it. Models are cool, and it's worth taking a look and having a think

As such, here's a highlight for our modelling and painting thread in the tabletop games forum. This is your place to let us know what you've been making and painting, and what. This neat little Stormcast Eternal was a recent first foray into painting by Zibbit, which we think turned out pretty well! Creating miniatures and bringing them to life through paint is a long-as-a-piece-of-string hobby where some people have highly professional skills and others get by with a simple bold scheme (and your correspondent writing this piece just makes a mess usually). That makes it especially helpful to be able to share and discuss it in a kind and welcoming space: there's always more to learn and more to think about, but equally it's helpful to get encouragement whatever one's level of ability.

We hope you'll join the discussion in that spirit - have you been painting or modelling anything lately? Please do let us know over in the forum's Game Room!

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The Workshop Booze Up thread, Exilian's general off-topic chatter space, has not been as well trodden a path as it used to be in the last couple of years, but in this tavern special it's time to give it a highlight. The WBU has been a feature of Exilian since the beginning - the first post of the first version of the thread was post #2 on the entire forum - and since then we've had 1000 posts per iteration of the thread before starting anew. We're now on the seventh iteration of this undertaking, with day to day life chatter, commemorations of the Glorious 25th of May, and everything in between happening there over the years.

Whilst booze specifically is very much optional, having a place to kick back and discuss how life is going or just throw a silly comment in and say hi to people is something very worth having. As such, we'll take this chance to remind you, dear reader, that all are welcome in the Jolly Boar Inn. If you'd like to tell us you forgot your cup of tea, check in on how everyone's doing, express a strong opinion about bactrian camels, or blink at the glory of a flower, the WBU is your space to do so - and we hope you'll join us there.

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That's all for this month! If you found any part of this useful or interesting, please do give us a shout to your friends or on your social media - it really helps support our many great creative folks if the word about their deeds is spread by bards and/or blogs to all corners of the land. Until next time, fair readers! May your ways be swift and the clouds light above you!

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Hello and welcome to another issue of Updates from the Forge, your Exilian newsletter of geekery and creativity!

Quite a bit of news this time as we've just updated Exilian to the Simple Machines Forum 2.1 software series. This is a big jump, we've been running the 2.0 series since ca 2011-12, and it will mean a few changes for how the site works. You'll be able to see some visual changes on the forum, and that we've got a much more responsive system for using the site on mobile browsers: we've also now got some useful new functionality for saving draft versions of posts, and there'll be other new features coming soon. That said, tech changes (and this is the first of several planned for the second half of 2024) can come with teething problems, so do let us know your thoughts or if you encounter any issues.

Do also refresh yourself on our new rules on generative language/image model ("AI") systems. As a community we've decided against supporting the use of these technologies – the very large environmental impact, the damage done to artists in our community, and the very difficult potential issues with intellectual property rights were all things we discussed in coming to that decision. As such, we won't be giving slots to AI-driven work in newsletters like this one or in Exilian competitions and social media, and we're committed to support projects in avoiding generative AI becoming something  that they use.

We've also got some really interesting new site content for you to check out if you missed it: this includes the various entries for our Hibernation creative competition, which was won by the excellent Spritelady, and also three new articles, both the second parts of two-part series. The first of these was a discussion of travel in Mexico by indiekid, covering reflections on the later parts of his journey through the country down to the southern border: the third, in much the same vein, has been a fascinating travelogue on indiekid's journey to the isle of Chiloe and the 'edge of the world' facing the Pacific ocean If you'd rather mystery instead of discovery, though, we have you covered there too: Jubal's "The Problem of Focus 2: Focus and Magic" is an article for writers and developers on how to use what he terms "low focus" magic, constructing magic systems based on ideas of miracle and virtue instead of magic being a reliable, studied toolkit. If that sounds good, do give those things a read!

Finally, we have a couple of recent welcomes, where Exilian has now started sponsoring independent academic groups by providing them with web space and infrastructure. Two organisations, the Medieval Caucasus Network of scholars who work on (shockingly) the medieval Caucasus, and the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference, now  have Exilian-hosted websites. If you're in a similar position with a network or collective that needs a small amount of online space, then do have a chat with us and we'll see what we might be able to do to help.

And with all that said - it's time for a bunch more updates from the nerd forges of Exilian. Do take a look at what's going on below...

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Set off for the stars in Cepheida: The Exploration Game
  • Where does the Devil Hide?
  • Tusky's TTRPG GM-Pad
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Microfiction on Exilian
  • Jubal's Writing Blog
  • The Earthwitch Approaches...
• Miscellany
  
  • Summer game fest discussions on Exilian
  • Elden Ring Explorations with Rob Haines

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Jubal's game setting Cepheida has been knocking around on Exilian for a number of years: it's a sci-fi setting that focuses on a quirky, less human-centred, more exploration focused approach to spacefaring. It was originally conceived in the early 2010s to be the setting for some sort of skirmish wargame, with randomised planetary. It's been given sporadic world-building updates since then, including one published short story, but now there's some significant new development going on.

As of recent months, Jubal has been adapting the Hetairos ruleset to produce a new Cepheida exploration game. The new game and rules will include a range of different alien factions and asymmetric objectives: as crews of explorers, playing aggressively at the expense of your real aims might spell disaster. You can find out more about this project at the Cepheida forum, and learn how to make your way across hostile environments as dedicated S'ruba recon missions, lordly Verwynn out to carve out new homes for their subjects, or strange Tangalak cyborgs, among other inhabitants of the Cepheid star cluster.

That's not all the updates either, as we've had some new little bits of concept art released, including not only some alien sketches of Jubal's but some lovely new banner art with a planet by the talented Adriana Pasierb, as seen above. Stay tuned - more updates will come along in the next few months!

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From the maker of the zany sci-fi Twilight Oracle comes a much darker adventure in Devil's Hideout, still in the point and click genre but with a classic cultic horror feel and story. When Lauren, the protagonist, learns from a mystic that the little sister she once thought dead is still alive, she must return to the hospital where her sister was once cared for and unravel how a mysterious cult wove a web of false deaths, disappearances, and devilry...


Devil's Hideout promises immersive, horror-saturated pixel art settings for Lauren and her friend Atticus to explore, with an abandoned hospital and its surrounding town brought to live with chilling sound effects and seen from a first-person perspective. With classic item/inventory gameplay and other staples of the point-and-click genre very much in place, this looks an interesting piece for horror adventure game fans to check out.

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Tusky has a new project for folks running sci-fi TTRPGs: he's aiming to create an updateable tablet/laptop app to allow game masters to beam information through to an interactive "ship's computer" or pip-boy or similar for players at the table. Originally designed to work with Mothership it should also work well for Starfinder or other SF space-crew RPG settings.

The testing version of the software already has a good range of features, including not only log messages with image support but also a flexible system for editable mini-maps for the players to use which can include variably visible icons and visible/invisible region designations. If you're interested in getting an early look at the project and being able to get in on the early features discussion, do head over to the relevant thread below.

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From very long form to very short form indeed: new Exilian member Rob Haines has been posting about his microfiction writing! Microfiction, often seen as a format on microblogging sites like BlueSky and Mastodon, is the art of writing extremely short minimalist stories or vignettes that imply much of the surrounding tale. It's a great exercise for writers in what can be done with very limited word counts and how to imply the surroundings of a story quickly without providing long information passages.

Some of Rob's archive of over a hundred microfiction pieces include the sci-fi vignette While We Run, exploring the image of being hunted in a futuristic-tinged world; Song and Sonnet, a tale about what might happen to a sword long un-used; and For Having Been Broken, a story of repairs to shattered things and of the giants we might make of them. You can find all of these and more at his collection – links below:

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In any case, Jean-Jacques: I'm wearing a wedding ring, and have been since we met."

"I've worn wedding rings plenty of times! They were just from other people's weddings!"

"You are a dreadful thief and a scoundrel, d'Alvaratanne. You know that?"

"In this life," said Jeanne, leaning back in the punt and gesturing with an imagined wine glass at the world, "we're all scoundrels in our way. Or ruffians, or weirdos, and I know which of the three I'd rather be."

"In my professional opinion as a weirdo," Ansaler began, and Jeanne burst out laughing before he could finish the sentence.

After finishing a (still as yet unpublished) children's book in 2020, we've not had much in the way of updates on long-form fiction writing from Jubal for a few years, as he's focused on game dev, academic writing, and short stories among other formats. Recently, however, his writing blog has creaked back into life, with a few new snippets from a story recently appearing with a cast of paladins and scoundrels taking shape.

The as yet unnamed story will be book-length and currently sits at a bit over 10,000 words in its draft form: we know that it will be a fantasy adventuring tale, and the snippets posted reveal a concerned council of holy warriors, a linguistic mishap over explaining the birds and the bees, and a discussion of weirdos and wedding rings. If that all sounds like the sort of thing you might be keen to read, why not take a look at the thread?

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A new story from rbuxton, The Earthwitch is a short tale of environmental damage given a magical twist. Two children have a companion, Maxwell, a beach-spirit of stones and pebbles: but when something goes wrong for him, the children are drawn by a mysterious figure into a far more deep and fearsome world of spirits, pains, and fears than they could have imagined.

In a world where we're all very aware of the potential dangers humans pose to the planet, the idea of the planet fighting back or being corrupted into our own destruction is a powerful one, and the questions of danger, sacrifice, and what we can ask of people are very real ones even if approached through the fantastical.

Read on to discover more of this witching tale – with its deeply uncertain ending...

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Regular game fests throughout the year are often interesting showcases of what's coming out in the ludic world, and we've had some good recent discussions on the forum of upcoming games and game projects which might make a good read for some recommendations. Rob, Spritelady, and Jubal have been discussing things including fantasy revenge tales from South America, a generation ship city builder holding the last remnants of humanity, and a cosy castles and glades builder among other upcoming titles. If you're looking for some new games to play and want to uncover a few titles you never realised existed, this may well be something to check out:

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It's an exciting issue when we get two new projects from a new member, and we have just such an eventuality here as Rob Haines, whose microfiction we report on above, has also been doing a really lovely screenshot project in Elden Ring. Taking on the mantle of an in-world recorder of place and aesthetic, Rob delves around the world and find places and spaces that maybe even the devs might not have thought of as a vantage point or angle on the setting, recording the lavish game world with a photographer's eye for vistas and settings as he goes.

This isn't Rob's first game screenshot project: he's also done a similar adventure for the cosy environmental horror sci-fi puzzle game Outer Wilds (yes that's a lot of adjectives, and arguably self-contradictory ones, but some games defy easy tagging). This sort of game art and appreciation is something we're keen to support and see more of, so if you're thinking of tinkering with something similar, do let us know about it!

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And that's all this issue has to offer! It is, of course, only a taste of what Exilian as a whole has to give: we hope to see lots more developing projects across our new-look forum space in the coming months. If you've got something you're working on, whether big or small, practice or profession, a little new hobby or a grand design - we'd love to see it here and help support and encourage your creativity. That's what we do here, and we're very keen to host and help more of it happen in the months to come. See you then, and see you in autumn for another set of updates from the Exilian community's creative endeavours!

Dear all,

After some recent tech issues, we're happy to welcome you back to a slightly new-look Exilian, now running on the SMF 2.1 series of software rather than the old 2.0. This is a once-a-decade level of tech upgrade: the new version of SMF will come with a slightly different mix of features and, most importantly. This is the first part of a series of tech changes we're hoping to make, with the plan also being to move Exilian onto a new hosting package later this summer.

A few notes on the changes that you might notice, or that are coming down the line:

• We are going to return to a dark theme as default, though the current light theme, 'Skyclad', will remain available when we build the dark theme.
  
• One major new feature that's now available is post drafts! You can now hit the "save draft" button to keep the text of a post safely squirreled away for whenever you get time to finish your thoughts
  
• We'll be looking at other new features to be made available - the 2.1 series allows for tagging other users in posts and some improved notification systems - so do stay tuned for more updates there.
  
• You can't currently create multiple polls within a single thread: the mod we used to do this doesn't function on the 2.1 series, and we're actively looking for a replacement.
  

Most importantly, we're keen to have your thoughts and opinions on the new system: it's important to us that we're getting the look and feel of the site right going forwards, so if something doesn't feel right or there's functionality you're missing then please do let us know.

New Hosted Projects: June 2024

Today we're very happy to announce two projects that Exilian is now helping support with web hosting. Part of our mission here is to support independent academic as well as creative endeavours, and we're delighted to be taking the chance to help two really great scholarly events/networks have a stable, workable home online that can ensure their work reaches more people and is more accessible than ever before.

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The Middle Ages in Modern Games is an online asynchronous conference where participants provide ideas and discussions of medieval worlds in gaming in a short written format. The conference's first to fourth years were as a Twitter conference before the format changed in 2024 to a WordPress site hosted by Exilian. This week is the fifth Middle Ages in Modern Games conference itself, which will see academics from across the world provide thoughts and ideas on a wide array of aspects of games and game dev. This includes sessions on Warfare, Empathy, the Fantastic, Aesthetics, and the Dev process, among others: it should have some really interesting reads for developers, historians, and members of the public alike.

We're excited to welcome MAMG to Exilian alongside our existing work in this area which includes hosting the Coding Medieval Worlds workshops every year!

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The Medieval Caucasus Network is a group of scholars from around the world which exists to help connect people and expand understandings of the Caucasus and surrounding regions through the medieval period. Their work includes organising conferences, running a mailing list to connect scholars, putting scholars in touch with potential funding sources for conference travel, and much more besides. Their work includes not only academic staff but independent scholars and graduate students, and covers a wide range of disciplines and areas including archaeology, digital humanities, and art history as well as historical approaches to all parts of the region.

Exilian has long had some links to this area via our executive officer's work on Caucasiology, including us hosting some of the earliest versions of what was then the Caucasian Prospography Project and is now known as the (still unreleased) Prosopography of High Medieval Georgia database. Whether you know something or nothing about medieval Caucasia, there will doubtless be much more to discover!

We're now well into spring in the northern hemisphere and that means it's time for our Hibernation themed winter competition to be complete. Thus, it's time to share our showcase of results, which you can read below. We've got a lovely cosy little set of five miscellaneous project on the Hibernation theme with some lovely bits of work for you to look at, and the most important thing as ever is adding more to this great showcase collection. There can, however, only be one winner (at least, there is only one winner in this case).


The judges called this one a "psychologically smart first-person narrative " and "suspenseful, well-crafted writing" - you can read the result below! Spritelady wins a copy of Priory Games' medieval life sim Under the Yoke, which follows a peasant family through the subsistence needs, tithes, and village life of the high middle ages, and a copy of Jubal's RPG book Rockpool, which is a mini tabletop RPG system for being tiny little weird creatures that live around the eponymous rockpools and must content with the tide, dangerous whelks, and other such perils.

Thanks also go to our judges, Yvonne and Daniel, and to Owen of Priory Game for sponsoring the competition. But more important than the winning is the creativity, as ever, and we're delighted to be able to share with you below the full showcase of all five contributions, from computing puns to poetry to photography. Do leave a comment and let us know what you think!

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WINNER: 6 of Telochi, in the year 647 - Spritelady

Quote6 of Telochi, in the year 647

I have returned to face the beast. This is my third attempt to defeat the creature, and the first that I have made in the cold season. I hope that what I have learnt will be enough. I pray that I have the strength to destroy it.

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When I first learned of people going missing in the Forest, I thought perhaps it was a Tiyanak, maybe a Wendigo. When I arrived at the logging base, the woodsmen told me that they had been there since the cold season, and had seen no trouble in those first months. But then members of their group began to vanish. There was no trail that could be followed, and their belongings remained in camp. The woodsmen began to fear walking among the trees, but they were stubborn. They needed to work.

In my experience, the patterns they had described suggested a creature that hunted those foolish enough to walk alone. Or perhaps that was capable of luring its victims away from the safety of numbers. This would hardly be my first encounter with such creatures, and I approached the job with confidence. Arrogance, I later realised.

I went to begin my hunt, as I had so many times before. The creature tore through me in moments, left me clinging to life. I never saw it, had not even known it was there as I began looking for its trail in the woods. But it had seen me looking. And it had not cared to be hunted.

Why it left me alive, I had no idea. I should have died from my injuries, but was saved by the grace of the Lady and the kindness of those woodsmen. I left their camp, promising to return to kill the creature, knowing that my advice to move camp would not be heeded. These people needed work, and there was little else to be found.

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I returned as the harvest season began. I had spent my time away recovering, regaining my strength, training until I was twice the hunter that I had been before. I was deadly in the woods, but my arrogance had been curbed. I knew not to underestimate my quarry. I knew it would take all my skill to hunt and kill this beast.

   There were fewer woodsmen than when I had left. Their numbers had dwindled as the attacks had grown more frequent. Even travelling in groups did not seem to deter the creature; it took its prey nonetheless. But they stayed and I admired their stubbornness. I felt responsible for ensuring that they could remain, that the threat would be dealt with. And once more, I entered the woods.

   At first, my hunt went well. Or at least, it lasted more than the brief seconds of my first attempt. I found traces of a trail and followed them deep beneath the canopy of the Forest. I tracked for hours, following hints and signs of its presence. The woodsmen had told me they had begun to see signs, trees scraped bare of bark where the creature had passed, gouge marks left in the dirt of the forest floor. At times, I lost the trail, searching before I found another sign, could continue moving further into the Forest.

I was stupid not to realise what was happening. The creature had been aware of me from the moment I entered the woods. It had toyed with me, leading me closer and closer to its lair. In the seconds before it struck, as I beheld its massive form for the first time, I knew I had made a crucial mistake.

I reflected on it later, as I recovered from the wounds it dealt me. It had taken all my considerable skill to escape, and even then I somehow knew, I could sense, I only lived because it had grown bored of me. Before I faced it again, I would need to be smarter. Need to understand more. To truly face this creature, to kill it, I needed to know everything I could about it.

   I left the woodsmen again, felt their sullen, resentful stares as I walked away, when their friends and comrades could not have. I knew they were losing their faith that I would handle this creature, as I had so many others. My reputation would only last through so many failures.

~

   
I returned home, and gathered every scrap of knowledge I could find about creatures that dwelled in the Forest. Last time, as I recovered, I had strengthened my body, my physical prowess, and had thought that would be enough. I had underestimated the creature's intelligence, its awareness. I would not make that mistake now.

   I read every piece of lore I could find, scoured libraries and archives for mentions of the creature. I compiled the best collection of ancient and forgotten tomes that had been seen in years, all in my attempt to learn something, anything I could use to fight this creature and survive.

Finally, after months of learning, I found something I thought I could use. I had forgotten the woodsmen's first stories. That they had lived and worked through the cold season undisturbed, before the creature had begun its attacks. At the time, I assumed that the creature had simply wandered into new territory, found the woodsmen's camp and begun its attacks. But as I read, as I learnt about the denizens of the Forest and those that came from its deepest recesses, I found a common thread.

   Hibernation. Almost all the creatures we knew of in the deep woods followed an annual cycle. They would hide themselves away throughout the coldest months, when food became scarcer, and wait until the rainfalls to emerge. Perhaps that was why the woodsmen had seen nothing of this creature in their first months at camp. Why they had become settled enough in their lives and their work not to be able to move on when it began to strike. It would almost have been funny, the irony of that terrible timing, had it not been so disastrous.

   If this creature did indeed hibernate, maybe that would allow me to approach. Other accounts described creatures that sleep deeply, barely alive as they wait out the coldest months. I could find my way back to the beast's lair, that I had been led to so foolishly. Perhaps I could remain unnoticed for long enough to dispatch it. I have prayed to the Lady that this will work.

~

I have returned to the woodsmen's camp. I can see they no longer believe I will be successful, though some seem to admire my resilience. I think they respect that I have returned, despite twice being left on the brink of death. They do not realise it is the same resilience that I admire in them. The same stubbornness.

Tomorrow, I will go into the woods for the third time. And if I should not return, if my guesses are wrong, my newfound knowledge is not enough, I ask whoever reads this to deliver my account to the collection of lore that I have built. Add to the knowledge I have hoarded of the monsters that roam the deep woods. Let someone else learn from my mistakes, and perhaps one day return to kill this creature.

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Overslept - A Microfiction by Tusky

Quote"Woah, 2235? I overslept. Where is everyone?"

"Dinner time was many cat-naps ago. You snoozed through tuna surprise time. Displeased."

"Wait, a talking cat! Am I dreaming?"

"Meow, please. You have awakened in a PAW-some future run by cats! Now, scritches behind
the ears, then can opener. Chop-chop, human."

"Huh. OK, dinner time it is then! Just don't judge the sleep wrinkles, your royal purrness."

"Wrinkles are beneath me. Tuna, however, is not. Now move it, hairless servant. The sunbeam won't wait."

Editorial note: the entry was submitted with an illustration, which can be viewed here. The illustration, however, was AI generated and so the entry was judged and included only on the original element, the text-microfiction above.

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Hibernation Database - A Database of Hibernating Creatures by Jafeth (Who is Also Here)

What it is
The Hibernation Database is a Java application that offers a simple interface to a database containing a table of animals that hibernate. It can be called to create new animal entries, and modify or delete existing ones.

How it works
The application uses the Spring Boot framework to provide REST functionality as well as database connectivity. Internally Spring Boot uses the framework Hibernate to do this. (Yes, Jafeth made this entire thing for that joke. You're welcome.) The programme is built to run in a Docker Container, which is a small virtual machine containing only what is necessary for the programme to run. It connects to a PostgreSQL database which can be hosted anywhere but is most easily run as another Docker container. (See the deployment.yaml file for an example).

How to access it
There are github repositories available for the frontend and backend parts of the system. Those who want to run a copy of the database will find relevant instructions on those pages: Jafeth kindly self-hosted an instance for the judges, but this is no longer operational.

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Thawing - A Poem by Jubal

QuoteAnd if there is a dream that is called spring,
Then we must intend to dream it:
Holding in a suspended mind's eye
A simulation, an imaginary of what was and could yet be,
For there are dreams, dear one, that enclose the dormant buds of truth -
Dreams that are a promise of the sun's return.

What spring brings we can only imagine -
That is, after all, what dreams are for,
The thaw, the rolling waves of blue sky after grey,
The bursting of each blossom in a cascade of trees
In patterns and patchworks that we cannot intend
Or know
Or guide
For if there is one thing that is true about the unimaginable seasons' turn,
It is that spring comes only with creation and the shape of new impossibilities
With old songs sung from new trees
By voices that know not how they know the tune
Only that they dreamed it, once
When the world was a dream
And beyond the dream was wintertide.

But there is a dream that is called spring,
As long as you intend to dream it:
As long as you intend to speak and to sing it,
As long as you come to know and to love it,
For the hibernation of hope is the stepless path through dormant time
That will end not with rage and crashing ice,
Or the creation in fire of a world burned into newness,
But with the slow revelation of spring-water
Of bough and breeze and the creeping hope of dreams
And, always, with life.

Editorial note: this entry was excluded from judging as it was created by a competition organiser.

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Crow - A Photo by Jubal


Editorial note: this entry was excluded from judging as it was created by a competition organiser.

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And that's our Hibernation set done and it's time to wake up for spring - and for Exilian's newsletters, articles and events in the coming months, where we're hoping to have more exciting and fun things to do as a community. Hope to see you for those, and that you enjoyed this hibernatory showcase!