Recap and Future Projects (Happy New Year!)

Hello everyone! Jonah and I both hope you’re doing well. As the year draws to a close, I wanted to do a quick reflection of our projects this year, as well as our plans for the future and things to look forward to. It’s been a really big year, and I wanted to take the chance to show some parts that have stayed a bit behind the scenes while we worked on them.

We freelanced on some cool stuff this year (or last year, and it saw publication this year). The biggest of the freelance stuff was the Game Master’s Book of Legendary Locations, written alongside legends like our ever-beloved Jeff Ashworth. We also spotted the Game Master’s Book of Instant Towns and Cities in stores for the first time this year, although it came out last year.

I also had the opportunity to make a heavy revision of the original Pine Hollow adventure from our first book, the Pine Hollow Packet (which is free to download in the lab right now). While it remains artless, we got some nice layout done from our friend Sofia Pereira. Down the line, we’d love to get some art for it and maybe a little example video/tutorial of how to run it, but for now this is a completed project you can use to learn the ropes of proactive play a little easier. I wrote the draft for an additional packet, the Iron Archivists, which went through layout, but hasn’t been made available yet. I think this is another big step in the right direction for “proactive adventures,” which has been my white whale since the first book—less adventure and more modular content organized by goals for easy adoption and implementation. Right now, it’s probably going to sit in development jail for awhile while we figure out what to do with it, but I’m hoping to put up some simple version of it for sale sometime in 2026 (but probably without art and a little scraggly looking).

In the summer, Jonah and I also finally had the opportunity to attend GenCon, which has been on our bucket list for years. It was an absolutely fantastic time—we played new TRPGs, board games, met new friends, saw some awards handed out, and finally met Ginny Di, who made the video that really got our book out there a few years back. This trip was probably my highlight of the year, and I can’t wait to head back if the opportunity arises.

Or maybe the second main highlight. This year was also the release of our second book, The Game Master’s Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design! We are so proud of this one, and I think it’s pretty clear when reading it how much we learned from the first. It’s been in the wild for a few months now, and we’re happy to see people enjoying it.

This upcoming year is looking to be another big one. I’ve been hard at work on a secret project for a publisher; I can’t chat about it yet, but it’ll be out this year. Jonah and I have a couple dozen hours of interviews to edit down, which we’re putting on Youtube and in the lab (as well as shorter clips on our social media pages). Folks should look forward to those in the very near future—I expect all of them to be fully released within the next four months. There’s some great advice in there from legends like Justin Alexander, Rob Heinsoo, and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, so look forward to those soon.

We’re also looking at bringing some cool events back into the lab. I have my heart set on some sort of proactive, West Marches-style game, probably using Blades in the Dark, but we’ll see how it works out—I’d love some games that demonstrate the principles of our books in action. At the very least, we’ll probably have monthly live Q&As, and some other events sprinkled in depending on what people are interested in.

On the back burner, we’ve worked lightly on a few board games, although I don’t expect them to see the light of day for a long time, if ever. We had time to playtest one at Gencon pretty extensively, and had a really good time with it, but those take a backseat to TRPG stuff. In that vein, I’ve had the completed draft for a TRPG I wrote over the course of the past few years, but it needs some pretty heavy revision. What will become of it is probably beyond the scope of this year, but I don’t want to let it languish too much, even if it takes awhile to get the ball rolling.

Jonah and I are having our big preparation meeting in the next day or two, and we’ll be able to plan out our 2026 roadmap for the lab. We’re looking forward to another year of learning from and sharing with you all!

Happy holidays,

Tristan

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