EXILES + CRESCENT MOON ☾ 2e. Feelings-delving role-playing.

The Crescent PDF is out! 🌝✨💚
about 1 month ago – Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 03:43:45 AM

CRESCENT download codes await in your inbox!

Hey all, I'm thrilled to announce that the Crescent 2e page is up and running. As of a few minutes ago, Itch.io codes have just been sent to your email.

Rather than making a new page for this edition, I decided to instead update the original 1e page: this means that the update is free for everyone who already owns the original, backer or not! If you already had access to the game on Itch and have a spare key as a result of this campaign, feel free to gift it to a friend.

Making this game has been a labor of love for me, and I can only hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it. As a reminder, this edition includes all-new art, all-new text and rules to match EXILE's system, a bunch of new items and rollable tables, and a remake of Mikey Hamm's Farmstead adventure. If you're a diehard fan of the original, rest assured 1E will always be available in this legacy page.

Let me know if you run into any troubles when accessing your keys! Just make sure to check the email you filled out your Backerkit survey with.

Book Release

At the risk of not living up to the hype, I will go out on a limb: Right now I'm signing off on a partnership with some folks many of you know and love, and all pieces are falling into place for a 2025 Spring physical release. Eager as I am to tell you all about it, we're still in the early stages; but you can expect an official announcement with all details to come by late January or early February. :-)

Let me know what you think of the new edition! This one is my personal favorite out of the two, and I'm pumped to see people playing it in the wild. As always, thank you for sticking around. I'll catch you early next year with the physical release announcement!

Have a wonderful holiday,

em

🐎🪕🪃 Crescent almost finished + 🩸 Exile 1.1 Update
3 months ago – Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 06:20:24 AM

Hello everyone!

I am very pleased to tell you Crescent is almost done :-) All big illustrations have been finished, and all that remains are a couple of spots at the back of the book. Here are some of the most recent pieces!

🩸 Exile 1.1 Update

ICYMI, Exile got a quality of life update at the start of the month! It includes:

• All new playsheets! Both the player sheets and the GM sheets have been reworked for clarity and ease of use.
• A Digital Play Template for Figma, so you can easily kickstart online games.
• A small update to The Moon section, featuring tweaks to the 'Setbacks' and 'Delve Moves' rules.
• Typo, pagination, and layout revisions.
• Clarity tweaks to the Table of Contents.

I hope you enjoy the update—I think the playsheets combined with the new template makes it easier than ever to get started with the game. 🌜

Looking beyond the PDFs

With Crescent's digital release looming in the near future, the time to gear up for physical manufacturing is nigh. That includes preparing the games for print, communicating with suppliers, and so on. I'm starting to move the pieces to make this a reality, and will share a more concrete timeline once Crescent is released.

Anyway, that's it for today. You can expect to hear back from me before the year's end—hopefully alongside Crescent's release. Thank you for your continued support, and have a happy halloween! 🎃🦇

warmly,

em

🥚🥬💫 Crescent art + Exile patch in the works
4 months ago – Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 10:23:17 AM

Hey all! I hope the transition into Autumn is treating you well :-) Over here, the Summer has decided to give us one last heat wave...just as I also fished a seasonal cold. Bit of weird combination! Anyway, here is some of the newest Crescent progress.

You may have picked up on the fact that I have run out of ways to say "I'm working on it". Luckily for me, there's not much else left to do, so I only have to squeeze out 2-3 more inventive variations of the phrase. The GM chapter is now fully illustrated, which leaves all but the starting the game / supplemental material sections ready for publishing. Just writing this out makes me really excited for what's to come. 😊

🩸💀 Exile is getting a 1.1 patch

I'm really busy, but on the odd couple of hours I can spare every week, I've been chipping away at a 1.1 patch for Exile. This includes quality-of-life updates like a more granular TOC, typo fixes, some rules clarifications, and the like. Most importantly, I decided to redesign the play sheets to be more detailed and useful during play (As in retrospect, I realized the 1.0 sheets leaned a bit too abstract). As Hedgemaze patrons know, this may or may not have been kickstarted by the fact I'm gearing up to write and subsequently run some adventures. Fun times!

Here are the new sheets for The Moon. Sometime in October I should be dropping the patch proper, including also the player sheets, and a Miro template for digital play.

If you've followed development closely, you may notice these are much closer to the spirit of the Beta sheets, which were really popular among playtesters.

Signing off

Thank you so much for following along. I'll be in touch in October with—yet another!—fun way to say I'm working on the game and, hopefully, an announcement that the 1.1 patch is out. Onwards and upwards!

waving across the screen,

-em

🏰🌙 Crescent art midway through!
6 months ago – Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 02:16:10 PM

Hey all! Much like last month, not a lot going on this month other than the fact I'm still illustrating Crescent. :-) Slowly but surely! Here's a couple of the most recent pieces.

In terms of raw amount of art, I'm about halfway through. That said, as I move into the second half of the book, more of the pieces become simpler and looser, so I should be able to pencil through a bit faster. So far, I'm really happy with how everything is shaping out. I hope you are too!

Given that I've gone so ridiculously over the timeline (my god, just typing it out makes me want to crawl into a burrow), at this point I'm gonna spare you of any predictions of when the book will be ready. Instead I'll focus on keeping up the weekly progress and distributing the PDF as soon as I'm done—with print and shipping to follow thereafter. Stay tuned!

I'll spend half of next month on vacation and the other half catching up with life (I'm moving onto a studio space what!?) so you can expect to hear back from me come September 🌝

P.S. The new Crescent tees are in the wild!

The Print Social run from back in May has successfully wrapped up. Thank you to everyone who got one! Have loved seeing the pics 🖤 Here's some detail shots featuring none other t-shirt than the one belonging to my Mom (legend). 

(Should I do an Exile tee in the future? Like one of those intelligible metal font ones? Have heard some interest so I may go for it. Eye emoji eye emoji wink)

vibrating from the other side,
-em

🐍✨ More Crescent art!
8 months ago – Mon, Jun 03, 2024 at 04:44:57 AM

Hey all! Not a lot to report this month. Slowly but surely I'm chipping away at the Crescent art :-) 

When I started the illustration phase, I was presented with two choices: Either I could make ink-only or grasycale illustrations (similar to Exile), or I could go full color like in the original. After experimenting with both, I stuck to the later. It's significantly more time consuming and as result I can only make 1-3 illustrations a week, but I think it fits Crescent to be all colorful—and I'm really loving the pieces so far! I'd say I'm about a third of the way done. 🌞

I'll check back in in July with more art. May also work on a wee game on the side! 

Happy pride 🌈

em