Hello everyone. I know it's been forever since I posted here or on twitter and some of you are probably wondering what's going on and if I'm okay. I've been working hard on a project unrelated to Absolution and wasn't sure how long my motivation for it would last, if I would finish it or if it would ever become my focus, but a few months in I'm pretty confident in saying that my focus has switched, at least for now.

I am pleased to finally announce:

I'm writing a homebrew campaign for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and will publish it here on itch.io once it's done

Yes, you've heard it right. I have once again switched mediums and am writing an RPG book. While this may be very exciting to some of you, I'm aware that most of my visual novel audience doesn't play (or hasn't played) DnD or any other RPG games and would get no enjoyment out of reading a book written for one, regardless of the author. To those people I can only say that it's fun and you should get together with some friends and try it if you're considering it (maybe not with this book as your introduction to the game, though, I write tough fights).

And to those who read "Dungeons and Dragons" and want to know more about this project, here's some information:

• the book contains a brief setting guide, an introductory adventure and Heart of Darkness: a full level 5-10 campaign, as well as 58 (as of now, more to come) NPC and monster statblocks, new spells and magic items to keep things fresh and interesting,
• the setting is a relatively low-magic world, more so due to the political climate than the lack of magic itself. Dragons, elves and the Archfey feature prominently.
  
• the campaign is a true sandbox that encourages exploration and adjusts the flow of events to the players' actions, all laid out in a way that's first and foremost comprehensive and helpful for the Dungeon Master,  which means no more (or significantly less) endless flipping between pages instead of actually running the game,
• genre-wise, it's a mix of horror (mostly cosmic/gothic/psychological, but what's a DnD campaign without some spooky body horror), political intrigue and character-driven drama, but as always in a DnD game, there's room for heroics and comedy as well, though you may want to read the content warning list for this thing before you commit to running it (I'll provide it once the campaign is done, but it's pretty long already),
• this isn't really a feature of the campaign per se but I really like the characters I wrote for it and if you like Absolution's cast, you'll probably like them too,
• all the writing, art, maps and monster design have been done by me over the course of the last few months.
• once it's done, it will be released on itch.io as a .zip file containing everything you could ever need to run the campaign - the bookmarked campaign PDF, most likely around 150 pages long (with a possible print-friendly version for personal use), a player primer PDF for you to send to your party (which I will release separately for free on itch.io, but it's nice to get everything in one place, I think), as well as folders containing all maps, labeled and unlabeled, and art of the different NPCs and monsters for you to show to your party without having to awkwardly show them a whole page of the book along with spoilers or crop it out of a screenshot (I've been there, it's not nice). I am seriously considering trying to set up physical copies to ship to anyone who's interested, but I'll need to finish the PDF before anything else. Physical copies would come with a QR code or some kind of password to access the entirety of the digital download as well, of course.

Release date

I currently have an Introduction and three chapters out of six completely written and furnished with art, maps and statblocks, which in theory means that I'm more than halfway done with it after a few months, but I wouldn't bank on me having a consistent work pace after my experiences with Absolution. I do think the book should be done by the start of winter, if I'm to give a cautious estimate, but if I keep going at the pace I've been at now, I might finish in October or November, but, again, no promises.

Stay informed

If you'd like to know what's going on with the book's developmentI mean writing, you can join my discord server here:
https://discord.gg/J7hGPW3KWu

Well, this has been a weight off my chest.  I'm not sure what this means for Absolution as I would definitely want to get back to it and release it, but I've found that forcing myself to work on something I have no motivation to is just a waste of my time and energy, so I try to use my resources for whatever I'm the most motivated for at the time. Let me know what you think of this announcement and definitely leave any questions you have about Heart of Darkness in the comments below.

Lots of love,
~ Navypink