Explore Orn, a world where adventurers delve into ancient alien shipwrecks in search of magical ink which is used as both currency and spellcasting fuel. Due to fluctuating global shipping rates, we will be charging shipping fees at a later date.
Hey!
This month has been a bit more busy than expected, so the December update will be coming in the first week of January :)
I want to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy New Year, and thank you again for your support throughout 2023!
Talk soon!
- Emiel
Hey!
The writing is done! I finished the remaining bits earlier this month and I have passed over all my writings for issue 02 over to Ava for editing! Even though there is still much to be done before the zine is finished, it feels like we are in the final stretch, where most of the work left is making it read well and look pretty AKA the fun part :)
I've spent the rest of this month making some more illustrations and drawing the final map for The Grafter's Tomb.
Speaking of the Grafter's Tomb: except for some layout things I will finish in the next few weeks, it is completely finished. So I will be uploading it as a new Playtest PDF to the Backerkit next month (like the TEA 02 Rules PDF you got in June)! I'm very excited about getting this in your hands after working on it for so long :)
Besides getting the Grafter's Tomb PDF ready, I'll be working on the zine's remaining illustrations while Ava will be editing the text we wrote. The remaining illustrations include the map of Titan Port, one of the illustrations I've been looking forward to most!
In related news, The Electrum Archive Issue 01 was selected as one of the winners of The Awards 2023! I'm a big fan of Ben Laurence's Through Ultan's Door zines which were among the winners this year and the year before, so having TEA 01 featured alongside those was a big honor :)
That's all for now :) Thank you so much for your support!
Talk again soon!
- Emiel
Hey!
After the burst of progress last month, October feels slower in comparison; I took some time to visit family this month, and a nasty cold got its claws in me, but despite those slow-downs I’m really happy with what I accomplished in the time I managed to dedicate to TEA this month.
Besides doing some small edits over the stuff I wrote previously, and moving some things around in the layout files for Issue 02, the main thing I worked on was rewriting the second adventure.
The second adventure of the zine is a heist. The players are tasked with getting their hands on a voidglass blade for House Ker Onar. This blade can be found in the private collection of Tursar Settru, a warlock and the twin-brother of House Settru patriarch Rodall Settru. To get the blade, players must find a way into the warlock’s tower and into the vault where he keeps his collection of elder artifacts and expensive curios.
The initial draft of this adventure was more focused on the tower itself and treated it like a dungeoncrawl, something I quickly realized wasn’t the right way to go about it. That’s why I took this last month to basically rewrite the adventure from the ground up and lean more into the heist-ness of it. Adding more emphasis on the planning phase beforehand and providing the Seer with more details about different approaches players could potentially choose. This was a completely alien experience to me since I’m used to writing more location-based dungeon crawl adventures (like the first adventure in the zine “The Grafter’s Tomb”), so it was interesting to try and experiment a bit. I feel really proud of what I ended up with and how it fleshes out the inhabitants of Titan Port, but I’m also nervous for you all to get your hands on it, since it is so different from what I usually write :)
Here is a little peek at the revised sketch for the tower (an earlier sketch of it was showed in the May Update):
And a very rough sketch of the puzzle floor used to open Tursar’s vault:
I plan on finishing up the last bit of writing in the next month and knock out some of the remaining illustrations. I’m really excited that the project is slowly moving into its finishing touches stage, where I can hopefully share another beta PDF with you all near the end of December.
Thank you so much for your support!
Talk soon!
- Emiel
My friends Ava and Nick are soon Kickstarting the first official adventure for the Errant RPG! It's called Sanctimonious Slimes vs Expired Epicures and after reading it I can tell you that it is definitely worth checking out! Nick has created a great dungeon filled to the brim with crazy memorable NPCs and shenanigans. You can follow it to be notified on launch here!
Hey!
September was a busy month, so let’s jump into an overview of the important bits.
I’m incredibly happy to announce that my editor and friend Ava Islam is now a co-author on this zine and other The Electrum Archive zines going forward. This means that besides editing my writings, she is doing additional writing and design work for it, allowing me to focus more on art and the bigger lines of the setting and game system. I was stretched thin over all the tasks of completing this zine, but due to this change, I am able to focus on the quality of the zine a lot more. Ava’s own work on Errant and her editing on TEA 01 and DURF is stellar, and I cannot think of anyone I would trust more as a co-author for the world of Orn :)
While I worked on making illustrations for the zine this month, Ava did a big rewrite of some sections of the zine’s first adventure, The Grafter’s Tomb. Her writing has made the tomb's inhabitants a lot more engaging by filling in more about their background and motives. The adventure is nearing completion, and I’m incredibly excited for you to get your hands on it when it is done.
With Ava as co-author I have the freedom to pour more energy and time into the illustrations for this zine. So I’ve spent this month commissioning more art, but also drawing a few pieces of my own.
Here are some of the new pieces done for the zine this month:
Even though a lot of progress was made this month, the project isn’t moving as fast as I had hoped. The adventures prove to be the hardest part of the zine. We want them to be good and that takes a frustrating amount of time. It's easy to just draw a dungeon map of ten or so rooms and write "2d4 skeletons" next to it, but that isn’t something you couldn't have done yourself in your game prep. It is frustrating (I’d love to just have this zine finished already), but sometimes you have to sit with an idea for a while to really make it shine.
Here is a chart of where the project is at right now.
As you can see the estimated delivery has shifted into the new year. I worked hard to prevent this and there is still a chance we blow through the last hurdles before the end of the year, but for now I think it is better to calculate for a little extra time to make TEA #02 the best it can be.
Thank you so much for your support and bearing with us while we create this zine.
Talk soon!
- Emiel
Hey!
I've spent the whole month writing the remaining bits for the zine and handed them over to Ava for editing and rewrites! So over the next two months she will be editing them and filling some gaps I left, while I'll focus on making art for it (besides doing some rewrites myself), something I'm very excited for :)
While we're on the topic of art, here is a new piece for the included Grafter's Tomb adventure:
I've also received some of the first audio sketches for the soundtrack stretch goal! They already sound very cool, and I hope to share a bit of them in a future update, once they have had another layer of polish :)
That's it for this month's update!
Again, thank you so much for following along and supporting this project!
Talk soon!
- Emiel