Project Updates

Where Things Stand As of June 2026

Having returned from my recent trip abroad, I plan to dive back into the various projects I’d been working on prior to my departure, with the second edition of Thousand Suns being my top priority. However, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a moment to discuss the current state of all my projects so that you know where they stand as of this month. This is helpful to me as well, since I often find it beneficial to take stock of my progress, lest I fall prey to the despair that frequently assails me as I’m halfway through a large creative undertaking.

Thousand Suns 2e

As I stated above, this is currently my top priority. I have completed drafts of nine chapters out of a likely fifteen. I say “likely,” because, as I work on the draft, I continue to debate splitting or combining chapters. Some of this stems from my unfortunate combination of self-doubt and perfectionism, but some of it is also an outgrowth of my intention to make this new edition as accessible and easy to use as possible. Regardless, I’m now roughly two-thirds of the way toward completion, which is solid progress.

My present goal is to complete the first draft by the end of June, with July and August devoted to internal playtesting, both locally and with my patrons. The results of that will lead to a second draft that, I hope, will not be extensive, but, as with all such things, who can say? Once the second draft is done, there will be another round of playtesting — probably more open — to ensure that everything is where I’d like it to be before I give more serious thought to how to present and publish the thing.

Secrets of sha-Arthan

This project is actually very far along. I only stopped working on it, because I was overcome by my enthusiasm for the second edition of Thousand Suns. Were I to return to it in earnest, I think I could probably whip Secrets of sha-Arthan into a playtestable form in a month or less. Though I make no promises, I suspect that I’ll do just this once I’m a little further along on Thousand Suns. Right now, I’m trying to keep my focus on science fiction and I worry that a return to SosA would dilute some of my creative energy.

Even so, this is a project I very much want to see completed, if only because I’ve already done so much work on it, including the commissioning of a lot of art for the game, some of which I’ve already shared here and elsewhere. Furthermore, my recent visit to Rome has solidified my feeling that game set in a fantastic analog of classical Antiquity has a lot of potential. Consequently, I have every confidence I’ll see Secrets of sha-Arthan through to completion, even if the timeline is a little uncertain at this point.

Grognardia Anthologies

I’ll be honest: this project has stalled. Partly, it’s a function of the enormity of the project. Despite several passes at deciding on the format and contents of these anthologies, I’ve never been satisfied with my decisions. You can chalk this up — again — to my perfectionism and self-doubt and there’s no question these are strong factors. However, I really do think a bigger problem is simply that trying to distill thousands of blog posts down into a representative selection is much harder than I anticipated. What I probably need is an editor/developer to assist me in this.

The other reality of this project is that, at the moment, I’m feeling a little down about Grognardia in general. I haven’t really written consistently at the blog since April and, as my most recent post explains, I’m feeling as if I don’t have anything else left to say there. True or not, that’s had a negative impact on my ability to move ahead with the anthologies. I still think this is a worthy and even important project, given how much good material was written in the blog’s first few years. Right now, though, I’m just not in a place where I can do this the way I’d originally intended.

The Cursed Chateau

I initially proposed doing this at the start of the year, based on my feeling that it would be a relatively simple thing to complete. Indeed, I’d initially expected it to be complete by around this time, but that’s obviously not the case. What happened? In this case, what happened is that, as I worked on revising it, I decided to restore more elements of its original 2008/9 version, decoupling it from the historical context of the 2016 Lamentations of the Flame Princess edition. Easy, right? Alas, no.

Not only did this require more reworking and editing than I anticipated — a recurring theme in this post — but the process of doing soon ballooned into my thinking more seriously about revisiting another project, one that itself is filled with all manner of pitfalls, both real world and purely psychological.

Dwimmermount Designer’s Edition

Which brings me to this monstrosity. I’ve written enough about the tangled mess of Dwimmermount over the years that I don’t feel the need to rehearse it all again in this post. I’ll say only that, even with the benefit of distance, I still feel more than a little embarrassment and shame at how the original version of this project played out. It was not my finest hour by any means and, while I can offer explanations for why it turned out as it did, I will not offer excuses. I fumbled this and still feel some regret about it, more than a decade later.

Consequently, I have a strong desire to do Dwimmermount right — by which I mean simply in a way that fully satisfies me. I have a pretty good roadmap for doing that, one that intersects with the revision of The Cursed Chateau in places (hence why that project isn’t currently moving forward). However, as with the Grognardia anthologies, it’s a very big project and, honestly, I’m not 100% certain I can do it all by myself. However, after my screw-up with the original, I am not seeking collaborators, because I have no desire to let anyone else down again. If this project proceeds, it will do so as a solo project, even if that also means it proceeds very, very slowly.

Additional Thoughts

So, as you can see, I am working — provided, of course, that you consider thinking to be work. I remain quite committed to completing all these projects, but, of them, only Thousand Suns seems to be within easy reach. I’m quite confident that I’ll complete a draft of the second edition and begin playtesting this summer, even if the timetables slip a bit here or there.

The others, as I’ve explained, have proven a bit less tractable. I don’t know when — and, in some cases, how — I’ll be able to overcome the issues that currently bedevil them. However, they’re all things I very much want to do, once I can find my way through certain obstacles. I’ll do my best to give periodic updates on them as the situation evolves.

As ever, thanks for your continued interest and support.