Election Results

The regular annual Exilian elections for core volunteer staff positions have happened, and our new committee has been duly elected as follows.

Regularly Elected Staff

Jubal (FIF) re-elected unopposed as Basileus, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
Tusky (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Sebastokrator, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
The Seamstress elected unopposed as Spatharios, 8 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Spritelady (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Tribounos, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention

Ratification of Permanent Staff

Jubal (FIF) ratified as Megadux, 8 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Glaurung (Ind) ratified as Sakellarios, 7 votes to 0 with 1 abstention

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Thanks to everyone who voted and to all our staff: the next regular elections will be in January 2027. There are still vacancies for staff members, for both content creation and technical matters, and we welcome volunteers for these posts.

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 60, for Winter/New Year 2026!

We've had plenty happening across the community as ever. Besides regular events like our monthly online meetups, we also had a new article out in our articles section with Jubal interviewing Matthew James Jones, author of the brutal fantasy-realism Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures which draws on the author's own experiences to give a surreal viewpoint on the rise of drone warfare in Afghanistan. There's also still time to sign up for Coding Medieval Worlds, our annual workshop on game dev and medieval history, so do check that out too.

As usual, thanks for bearing with us with the perennial lateness of these issues. We run Exilian with a very small group of volunteers, and that inevitably leads to certain elements of our work slowing down when people face unexpected challenges or need to catch up with things. Some of the things we'd often cover in a winter issue are also delayed at present, but do keep an eye out for news of our winter competition and election results in the next week or two. We'll also hopefully soon be doing some new calls for volunteers, so if you could help out a community like ours, stay tuned for that.

And now, onto the updates!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Minerva Labyrinth Released
  • Resonance
  • Updates from Kavis
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Space Dragons Kickstarter Success
  • The Earthwitch Returns
  • The Boar of the Gods
• Miscellany
  
  • Painting with SOTK
  • Stardews and Seamstresses

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In our first headline of this last quarter, Minerva Labyrinth by Midnight Spire Games has been released! The game gives the player a group of protagonists who must work as a team to face down the strange horror known as the Hate. In a mid-sized city in the southeastern USA, a few decades from now, your magical-girl style transforming warriors must enter into increasingly strange and twisted labyrinthine environments to battle the terrors that lie within. The game is graphically 2D, and built in Godot.

The gameplay focuses on a tactical, turn-based combat system, with a six-person party and a two-row formation system that gives the player a wide range of possible tactical configurations and options to try out throughout the game. Classic pixel-style graphics and palettes, along with a driving, computer-feel original soundtrack all give a certain retro-futuristic feel to the affair, with bold enemy designs that play into the possibilities of a more stylised medium.

You can get the game on Steam or Itch and test yourself against the labyrinths within - why not take a look?

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Jubal has started a new modding project! Resonance is his first foray into making mods for Skyrim, and promises a new story based around the location of Deep Folk Crossing, placed in the far western reaches of Skyrim where it borders the province of High Rock. Skyrim is well known for its highly flexible, albeit sometimes bug-riddled and awkward, set of modding possibilities, and these will be very much on display in this new quest mod.

When the Dragonborn crosses an ancient Dwemer bridge, they encounter an odd sight: besides a single solitary plinth and a couple of ancient arches, there is a small lean-to in which a soft-spoken, bearded man sits, contemplating but not quite daring to touch the ruins around him. Some may pass him by, or leave him to his cold existence. Others, though might be led on by his curiosity to discover more about the past of Deep Folk Crossing, of the Dwemer themselves, and of the recent past and sacrifices that brought a bard out to this existence on the farthest parts of the Reach. The magic of the dwemer and the music of the bards may resonate in ways nobody had predicted - or remembered.

If you'd like to find out more, check out the development thread in the links below and let Jubal know what you think!

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Another Jubal update to round out this section, but this time from the TTRPG development side - Jubal has been running more test games in his world of Kavis, an early-medieval folkloric fantasy setting that has played host to several of his tabletop and computer game projects in the past. For the last year or so, Jubal has pivoted to focusing on the "Heart of the World" - areas of the that bear more resemblance to the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, east Africa, or India, rather than the sort of Europeana more traditional in medieval settings. His recent game tests have explored more of those areas, with a somewhat hapless group of adventurers facing Gerfaunts, Dusk-cats and poisonous intrigue on the coast of Dulshan, and another group caught between two armes as the Murtec kingdom in Palictara attempts to expand its borders at the expense of the hill peoples to its northwest.

He's also continuing to slowly release notes and information about the world, most recently including some details on the sorts of heroes that figures in the Heirophancy, the old empire at the centre of the map, might tell tales about or refer to in speaking and writing. From the monster-killer Zard to the founding rulers of their realm and the peasant heroine Curimae, there's a wide array of ancient figures there who one might discover relics of or end up stumbling across legacies or tales of on quests in those parts. You can find all that and more at Exilian's Kavis forum:

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Friend of Exilian Veo Corva has successfully run the kickstarter for Cosmic Survivors, the second book in their Space Dragons book series. In this sequel tale Lux, the eponymous Space Dragon at the centre of the books, finds themself on the wrong side of the mighty protectors of the galaxy, the Cosmic Defenders - the heroes who save travellers from the Void Horrors beyond. That said, there aren't a lot of Void Horrors these days, and there are a lot of Cosmic Defenders still, and what was once a saviour's weapon might increasingly be being turned inwards as an iron fist. To avoid it, or even to get through loaded but inane interrogations, Lux must rebuild alliances and friendships and work things out with their crew.

Veo describes Space Dragons: Cosmic Survivors as being a tale for people unsure how to trust again, for people who crave both independence and belonging, and for people who think Space Dragons are fun. If you want a blanket-and-tea on a cold day book this winter that takes you out into the wilds space and possibility, then this might be the read you're after...

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She half-climbed, half-stumbled back to the rock where she had left her coat and bent over, her body heaving. Mina and Roy climbed off their rock and cautiously followed. The clattering of the staff as Roy negotiated the rocks echoed around the lake. By the time they reached Idil she had coughed and spat several times, and her breathing was more controlled.

"Thank you," she gasped, "Thank you, children. Thank you."

"Why did it attack you?" demanded Roy.

"It was testing me," she replied, "But it is satisfied."

We've recently had the third part of Indiekid's ongoing story The Earthwitch. In this tale, two wandering children in circumstances of desperation are saved and then adopted by a mysterious magical figure, Idril, whose task it is to bring the spirits of the earth into calm and balance despite their frequent rage and pain at the destruction caused by mankind. The two children's skills and personalities develop differently through the tale, giving a range of possibilities and tensions alike.

In part three, Idril is forced to confront the fact that, in choosing between the demands of vengeful spirits and the children, she is increasingly emotionally bound to protecting the latter. The three wanderers travel to confront a great spirit of the hill lakes, exploring their powers of direction, over animals, and in engaging with the spirits themselves. However, reckoning with their own past and the way they met may be lurking as an even greater danger thereafter.

If that sounds of interest to you, or you'd like to help the tale along by providing some more feedback, do check it out!

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The fantasy webseries Ren: The Girl With The Mark will return for its third season later in 2026, and over Christmas some of the team's patreon posts were made public to show fans what they might be getting if they sign up for paid updates from the production team. As well as behind-the-scenes footage, the Patreon offerings include a wealth of short stories, expanding the world in a variety of ways and giving additional depth or angles on the characters and legends of Alathia.

One such short story now available for public viewing is Jubal's The Boar of the Gods, set before the show's first season: in this tale, Ren's mentor, the mysterious woodsman Karn, tells his young protégé one of the myths of the god Legart, the trickster of the old gods who was instrumental to ultimately bringing about their downfall and the rise of the twin deities Nirith and Nardaeth. This story of boar-hunting makes use of the actual relationship between boars and robins in our own world - the little birds often follow boar herds in places where both are present, in order to pick up worms that the boar disturb rootling in and overturning the soil - and gives it a certain mythic twist. Both the ancient myth and the story of our two heroes hearing and telling it give us some more insights into Ren and her world in advance of the next season of her story.

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It's been a little while since we last had a flurry of miniatures painting going on among forum members, but SOTK has recently contributed this very pretty Warhammer paint job of a Dark Elven knight. Despite the Dark Elf background of this Cold One Rider, he's ditched the commonly used black armour and red-purple cloth sections and instead gone for a bright silver and blue colour scheme more reminiscent of Ulthuan's High Elves. It's really interesting how much this changes the whole tone of the model, from the brooding menace the typical paint jobs seek to evoke to someone who might be a differently equipped but more complex character. And who still has a cool dinosaur to ride. Whether this is an evildoer who refuses to dress stereotypically, or a more heroic take on what someone can do with a lance and a cool dinosaur, we're very much here for it.

If you do any sort of miniatures gaming, please do share your latest paint jobs and kit-bashes with us in the game room - we'd love to see them, whatever game system or model-making setup you have going.

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We've had a range of gaming updates, especially from The Seamstress who in October shared many of her adventures with the famed cosy farming sim Stardew Valley. Unutterably large blue melons, ostrich farming, a bear who likes syrup, and a family of raccoons living in a tree-stump with an actual door and a fire all seem to be things she's found in the game, which may or may not be an entirely accurate portrayal of rural life.

Who is the mysterious Mr. Qi who The Seamstress has been doing quests for? Is there a purpose to giant blue melons? Should we be worried about who gave raccoons the secret of fire? What other games have people on Exilian been playing, and do any of them have fire raccoons or unusually friendly bears? (Baldur's Gate 3 players, yes, we see you, please sit down now). Find the answers to all or at least some of these questions in The Arcade, our general gaming forum:

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And that's winter's updates from the Exilian community! Whether you're approaching your next round of curiosity and creativity with a notebook, a pile of python code, a paintbrush, crochet hooks, or something else entirely, we'd love to know about it and feature it next time, so do get busy and do let us know if we can help. Community, creativity, curiosity and kindness have rarely felt more needed out there, we're hugely glad to be able to play our part in helping you all build those things - there'll no doubt be much more to come in the weeks and months ahead. As for our newsletters, though, we'll see you in early April for the next set of Updates from the Forge!

It's the shortest day of another year  - happy solstice to all of you! Here at Exilian we wish you joy and happiness for any and all elebrations you might have for the ending notes of the strange little song that was 2025. We hope that with the cold fogs of the year's ending creeping around the door, you're all able to find some cosy places and warmth and company for the end of the year.

Keep your eyes peeled, and do join us for our end of year virtual meetup on the 28th - ask in the comments below for the joining link if you don't get our regular emails.

All best and warmest wishes,

The Exilian Team

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Coding Medieval Worlds 6 will be on February 20-22, 2026!

A core challenge of making more interesting medieval worlds in game formats is sharing and building the different processes needed to create them. Historians and game developers have different ways of representing, exploring and constructing the material we get from medieval sources. How, then, should we approach this, and how can we share and synthesise our different methods? How do we take the particular affordances of games and engines and how do we develop mechanics and systems to best present historically inspired material in them? Coding Medieval Worlds 6 is a workshop and discussion forum for sharing developers' and historians' perspectives and finding solutions to these shared problems!

When:
Main Sessions 21th-22nd Feb 2026, 1pm — 8pm CET
Evening Events 20th, 21st, 22nd Feb 8:30pm-10pm CET

Where:
Wherever you can connect to a video call!

How to participate:
Email exilian@exilian.co.uk or james.baillie@oeaw.ac.at by January 25th with your name and a sentence or two on your background and interest.

We have a limit of around 40 people, half spaces for developers and half for academics (independent scholars, early career researchers, and hobbyist & indie developers are all welcome). We examine all applications and ensure places are available for scholars & developers from diverse & marginalised backgrounds.

Do get in touch with any enquiries at the above email addresses.

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EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 59, for Autumn 2025! This issue is even later than usual and a little shorter than usual due to our one newsletter writer being unwell: thank you for bearing with us and many apologies for the delays.

In Exilian community news lately, we do have one recent problem that we'd like your thoughts on - in recent years, imgur.com has been one of the main image hosts for lots of forums and websites like ours. Unfortunately, due to recent authoritarian legislation passed by the UK government, they no longer think it's viable to operate in the UK, and that means that UK users may not be able to see images in a lot of our older articles, newsletters, and forum posts. For a lot of official Exilian content we're likely to move to on-site hosting, but we're keen to find other image hosts to recommend to people so our UK user base can have an uninterrupted experience going forwards. If you've got thoughts on what we can do, please let us know in the comments below.

We've had one new article in the last few months, the long awaited fifth part to the Unexpected Bestiary series which gives details and folklore on seven more strange but real creatures with thoughts on how you could include them in fictional settings. This time we have the ominously named Hellbender, the bizarre Hoatzin, and the gruesome urban legends about Mexican Mole Lizards to explore, among other things.

As ever, there's lots more going on across the site than we ever manage to get into a newsletter. Do check out the Indie Alley, and there have also been some fun bits of chatter on gaming matters in The Arcade as well as plenty of forum games and the usual chitchat. For now though here are some updates on what's been occurring across the community recently!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • New RPGs from CrowberryCake
  • Improvise with Levity!
  • Barking Up the Right Tree with Indiekid
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Meet The Last Lady of Lună
  • A Traveller's Song from Klamath
• Miscellany
  
  • Latest Sounds & Textures from SoundImage
  • Helping Exilian Out

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Our newest member CrowberryCake has brought to us not one but two recent RPG projects! She's an Austria-based designer and writer who "plays games, writes words, writes games, and plays words", according to her blog (Information on whether she also writes plays, games words, and plays writing and words games to complete the possible combination set is not known at the time of writing.) Besides her blog, she also has an Itch page where you can check out her work, which include a bunch of small and quirky one-shot RPG projects including a slice-of-life about being a cat as well as the two new pieces we can share today!

Worldbreaker is a mini-RPG about life in a world where the great world serpent, Jörmungandr, is consuming all in existence and drowning the land to bring about the end of days. Your aim is to save your village - and you can be as creative as you like in doing so. Your problems might be solved with a suitable bar chart (if you can invent bar charts), the Hammer of Thor (if you can get your hands on it) or the Mead of Poetry (if you're too charismatic and/or insufficiently sober for other options. You might end up fighting to gain your prize, and the small bestiary includes Snakes, Bears, Actual Literal Odin, and also Very Angry Squirrels From The World Tree, so there are plenty of options available. Like wiht many mini-RPGs, it's the flavour and characters that will really make a game of this work, and the character creation questions are very helpful in directing three-dimensional approaches to gameplay.Which secret do you keep, even from the gods?

Meanwhile Solivago is a GM-less science fiction game about discovering new worlds. Imagining a world where humans are taking tentative, observation-only steps out into the galaxy - think perhaps something like Wolf 359 more than the developed starfaring of a Star Trek or Fireball XL5 - the game takes you through planet creation processes and charts for the place you discover, and also possible events and problems that might disrupt your communication back with earth. Inspired by books like To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers, CrowberryCake describes it as a shared worldbuilding experience more than an action game. What might be out there, we can only imagine.

If either of those sound up your street then you can get them easily via Itch, and discuss them at the Exilian threads below!

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Levity is a new pen and paper improv comedy roleplaying game from friend of the site and previous Coding Medieval Worlds speaker trickthegiant, of Swan and Raven studios. The game promises to potentially expose players to "survival horror in the Canadian woods, identical twins and their romantic mix-ups, and an evil demi-god sea cucumber with an exploding coconut". The game provides a variety of setting prompts that can be combined and sifted to make confusing, silly, and inexplicable situations for improvising comedy roleplaying. If things are starting to dip, there's also a table of twists to help poke the plot along. If you've got a session spare and some friends who'd like to try a more improvised style of collective storytelling, why not give it a try?

Tricks is also currently running a large bundle to raise money for legal aid societies in their home state of Virginia: entitled HELLO//GOODBYE, the bundle includes a chance to get Levity alongside its eponymous zine where a range of writers produced TTRPG responses to different collages made by trickthegiant herself. It also more widely offers 98% off the usual price of a huge array of TTRPG products including works by other Exilian members including our aformentioned newest contributor CrowberryCake and our longest standing member Jubal. The bundle will be available until November 5th, so do go check that out!

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Indiekid's latest boardgame devlog looks at Yarn Spinning, his lightweight card-based storytelling game that's under development. He discusses the problem of runaway mechanics in games, and judging player skill - giving more story cards as a reward might not be such an important benefit for an experience player who can twist any card into any tale, but for other players it might create an expanding success pile for those who win early rounds.

He also discusses the problem of rules looseness: is a storytelling game something that needs or wants strict rules, or should groups be encouraged to find their own ways to tell stories? How would such encouragement work? From the loosely storied but physically structured tile-laying of myrioramas to more rules-intensive but diversely arranged games, storytelling games have been around for a long time - but there's always more to do and discover, because stories and the ways we tell them keep being reshaped with every generation.

If you've got thoughts on these and other problems of boardgame design, please do jump in and have a look at Indiekid's threads and devlogs. Here are the links:

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JessMahler's latest book, The Last Lady of Lună, will be out on October 15! This vampire romance is the first in a new series about the Lună vampire clan: its protagonist, Natalia, saw her clan destroyed when she was just a child, and now finds herself coming into her powers as the last head of a barely existent group of scattered and broken creatures of the night. In need of help and hoping to rebuild her lost clan, she turns to a group of human mercenaries, the sort of hired killers who might be able to fight back against her clan's persecutors - and might be persuaded to keep her secrets, too.

Jess is a prolific writer so there's lots more of their work to check out too: they specialise in queer fantasy that includes characters who are neurodivergent, aromantic, and just plain different in all sorts of ways. Their website at https://jessmahler.com/ includes details of lots of their other fiction works and writings on polyamory. If you like romance-fantasy that plays with and undermines common tropes in the genre, there's a lot there to check out!

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This piece combines a couple of things we reported on in the last Updates issue - poetic works by Jubal, and the Fallout universe - as he returns to music with a recent recording of his Traveller's Song From Klamath. The piece is a western-style post apocalyptic folk ballad that explores the setting of Fallout 2 and gives a time-worn wanderer's viewpoint on the events and places of that game and how one might feel about living in the Californian wastelands.

Jubal's music covers a range of themes, with particularly strong influences from the folk traditions of the British Isles but also material from games, history, and mythology woven into the lyrics. His music playlist on YouTube has over eighty videos, mosst of them original songs that range from classic folksy works to specific filk pieces about Middle-Earth, Dragon Age, and Narnia, and also less prominent settings like Blue Prince and Pillars of Eternity. There are also several of the original soundtrack pieces for his own The Exile Princes - and there may be more original game soundtrack items coming in the next year or two. Wait and see!

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SoundImage, Eric Matyas' huge online database of free images and music, has continued to grow in recent months. Above we've got some of the most recent additions, new seamlessly tileable brick textures for use in your games, collages, art, or anything else!

Recent music updates on SoundImage have also continued and include some funnier pieces, "Quirky Western Town", a bouncy backing track that will set jaunty tumbleweeds bouncing along the ground. There's also "80's Princess", a halfway house between a fantasy transformation scene and something you might find in Grease or a later Queen album.

If you have a bit of spare change, SoundImage is an enormous free resource that, like Exilian, costs money to run: you can donate to support Eric's work on his website.

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Running Exilian is a lot of work: our volunteer team is around every day of the year to do everything including the technical side of upgrades, moderation, and anti-spam, but also all the community things that make this place work like organising events, writing newsletters, editing articles, and generally keeping this a positive and creative space.

If you enjoy any of what we do - whether it's workshops meetups, articles, the forum, or anything besides - there's lots of ways you can give something back. At the smallest scale, just let people know about what we're doing. Send people links to these newsletters or our articles if you see a cool thing you think they'd like, or share our social media posts - these things all help spread the word and support the small creators we work with. You can also use the forum to give us feedback on what we're doing, so we can improve, and of course we appreciate hearing about what creative stuff you have going on - the more people are discussing their work here, the stronger a community we have.

If you'd like to give a little more back or get more involved, we could do with both time and money to support what we're doing. If you might be interested in getting involved as an article editor or writer, or helping run our social media, or if you have some other skill that you think we could use, please let us know. We also have a variety of ways for you to donate to Exilian if you have money that you can spare.

Thanks in advance for any help any of you can give. We as the volunteer team love this place and its community, and we're always keen to get whatever help we can to make it better and better for existing and new members alike.

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That's all for Autumn's Updates from the Forge - which, as winter updates generally come with the new year, will be our last of 2025! The years turn and we build everything we need for each new turn of the seasons, from the new little flights of fancy that give us hope and energy to the great ideas that will hold us together when it feels like the world is breaking. We'll see you all in the workshops of creativity - until then!