January 2025 Update

Wait, it's not January anymore?

January was full of updates to Adamiir and a few other projects, including this very newsletter.

Let’s dig in.

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Adamiir

At the end of the year, I will be officially releasing Adamiir into what I’m calling α edition (or “alpha edition” for the plebs).

This will encompass the Mistlands region of the world and the core rules of the system (right now just called Adamiir, probably will be calling it something else down the line with a snappier title).

Here are the actual changes to the PDF you can download¹:

• Added Contents(⁎)

  • Actually sat down and mapped out where everything is going to live in the PDF

  • Early estimations has it somewhere between 50-70 pages which I realize is a huge fucking range but I genuinely have no clue how long the appendices are going to be — I’d err on the side of them being too long than too short

• Added Playing Adamiir(⁎)

  • This is the general idea of what the world is and how your characters fit into it. Comprised of “Six Truths” and some guidance on how to begin play, though the six truths need work

• Finalized Creating a Character

  • Character creation is heavily inspired by two things: Wolves Upon the Coast (chargen simplicity) and Caves of Qud (customization complexity)

• Added Pregenerated Characters(⁎)

  • The pregens are Crystal Mage, Cindervale Knight, Sister of the Moon, Ilanth Delver, Blackhand, Dreadlord Aspirant, and Adamiiri Vagrant

  • Put in more traditional terms, the pregens are wizard, paladin, druid, rogue, cleric, warlock, and build-your-own

• Finalized Characters in Action

  • Tests, Combat, Healing, Morale, and pursuing Trials are detailed here and more or less cover 90% of how the game plays

  • I’ve bounced between whether spellcasting and other more class-specific rules should be listed here or elsewhere, so this may go from ‘finalized’ to ‘WIP’ between monthly revisions

• Reorganized Appendices

  • Right now there are nine appendices:

    • A: Attunements (spells, magick items, and more magickal abilities that are more active)

    • C: Covenants (think factions you can join / gain reputation with)

    • E: Equipment (Armor, Equipment Quick Packages, Gear, Ingredients, Livestock & Beasts of Burden, Trade Goods, and Weapons)

    • M: Monsters

    • P: Proficiencies (tools, languages, and more mundane abilties that are more passive)

    • R: Rules

    • S: Scars (permanent risk|reward features gained when you lose exactly 6 HP²)

    • T: Treasure

    • V: Vocations (sort of like origins or backgrounds, this is what you did / do aside from adventuring)

  • I’m using this formatting structure of letters for appendices because I think it looks cool so sue me

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Life & Death In The Garden

I made a 36-word rpg for the, well, 36-word rpg game jam on itch. The theme of the jam was growth so naturally I thought animals and nature, but I wanted to take it more in a Redwall, Mouseguard, Mouseritter sort of direction.

• I also created a small, business-card adventure called the Rise of the Lich-Moth

  • Future adventures (called forays) in the Garden may come quarterly, since they’re relatively fun challenges to make

  • I’ve got a couple ideas that I would like to explore for these:

    • A raccoon “king-of-thieves” type who has a posse of all sorts of critters in his den of iniquity

    • An acorn of the Grand Verdant has been stolen by a gang of spiders and the squirrel-sages are losing their minds over it

    • A prize racing snail dies due to poison and throws the entire sport into chaos

    • A construct of magic and sticks goes haywire during the Autumn Festival due to a union of beetles unhappy with working conditions

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Downtime & Dungeons

I wrote a couple articles in January that had accompanying worksheets with them that people can download over on itch.io. These have proven very popular and I’m eager to see what else can be done with this format.

• Right now some of the ideas I’ve got percolating in my head:

  • Structuring NPCs

  • How to Write an Adventure

  • Player Agency

  • What Makes Good Prep

  • What Story Is (and Isn’t)

  • Hey GM: Stop Talking

• Not sure when these will come up, but they tangentially relate to a handful of previous posts I made in August / September 2024 on things I was ruminating about.

  • Speaking of, I should go back and mine those for article ideas…

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Grinning Rat Newsletter

It’s been a very busy month for the GRN! I published eight articles in January, basically two per week. February has seen that number cool pretty drastically, mostly because I wanted to reevaluate what worked and what didn’t.

• First of all, despite me being very proud with my Monster series, each of those articles performed significantly worse than the others (aside from the Seven Strange Items post, which I’ll get into later).

  • Two theories about this: 1) my audience doesn’t enjoy articles that are part of a series; or 2) my articles didn’t deliver on what people were hoping to get out of it

  • I believe it may be the first one, because I’ve done a series of posts on the same topic before to little fanfare. I think series articles are asking a bit more of people, because if you first hear about it on Part 2 of 4, you’re suddenly asked to go backwards and read a post or two before you can read what you wanted to in the first place.

  • I may tinker around and see what I can do with another series, but that will likely be far off from now.

• Meanwhile, my single topic articles (treasure, downtime, dungeons) are doing wonderfully and they’re driving traffic to other downloads off-site. Not only that, but those three articles are the biggest sources of new subscribers last month (aside from my note introducing myself that seems to still pull numbers despite posting it forever ago).

  • I mentioned above what I’ll do regarding this (and any relevant worksheets that go with it), so I’ll leave this where it is.

• The Adamiir articles, unfortunately, just aren’t pulling numbers the way I’d hope they might. I get why — they’re esoteric, about a setting that’s not complete, and require a lot of reading with little payoff. But I do enjoy writing them!

  • I think the problem I need to face head-on is that all that creative energy should probably be redirected towards writing for actual Adamiir, not articles about Adamiir. As cool as strange items and locations are, it’d be better as a part of a book you can read on your own time rather than an article that gets buried.

There’s also been some really great articles elsewhere on Substack I want to highlight as well:

Why TTRPGs are Different

What makes a dungeon crawl good?

If it Quacks Like A Duck!

The Lantern Man of the Fens

2 rules for scenario design

The Caverns of Ooze

That’s it for January. See you all on the other-other-side.

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1. (⁎) represents work-in-progress content

2. Adamiir is a d6 system because I like simple dice you can find in boxes of “normal games”. Player characters start with 1 HD (d6 HP) and can gain more over time, but if a character loses 6+ HP (equivalent to an HD worth of damage) in one attack, they gain a scar.