The Foundry

The Foreman sits at a small table set against the wall of the the cabin. The air is filled with the crackle of the fireplace behind him and the scent of wood smoke and machine oil. With the delicate care unexpected of his large, calloused hands, he puts the finishing touches on a small, mechanical figurine in the image of a dwarf. Inspecting it as a jeweler would a rough gemstone, the Foreman puts a key into the back of the figure, winds it, and sets the figure down.

The little dwarf springs to life and begins to scurry around the table, climbing over loose tools and looking beneath other objects on its surface as if searching for something. After several minutes, a metallic clang sounds from the automaton as a gear dislodges, sending it whizzing past the Foreman’s head into the room beyond, the little machine tumbling into a bin of screws.

With a grin on his lips and a twinkle in his steel grey eyes, the Foreman chuckles to himself and says, “Not bad for a prototype. Not bad at all! A few adjustments and I think you’ll be ready for the world to see, my tiny friend.”

Hey folks! I hope you all liked the little scene. I forgot to write one for the last big Foundry update post I did, so have a slightly longer one than usual. It’s always fun writing them and I’ve had it kicking around my head for a while.

Anyway, it’s officially been a year since I “walked off into the woods”, so I figured I should creep back out like the Midwest cryptid I am to update y’all on how things are going, and most relevant to y’all, if I’m coming back. 

As with any hiatus I’ve taken, it’s been really nice to not have to worry about *gestures wildly* all this. But that’s not to say haven’t been working on stuff, oh no. I’m a creative at heart and I always will be, and when I’ve had the energy for it, I’m still makin’ shit. Most of it has been physical stuff. Props and things for cosplay, a hurdy gurdy I’m gonna learn to play once I get it tuned, random other nerdy projects using my new 3D printer, that sort of stuff. But there is something a little closer to what y’all might expect of me that I’ve been working on too, but I’ll talk more about that later.

So, let’s get the big question out of the way: Am I coming back to make D&D content? Short answer: No, I don’t think I will, with a possible exception I’ll explain later.

I threw myself into D&D pretty hard way back in like 2016 or so when 5e was new, and I’ve been up to my ears in it ever since. I love the game, I truly do, and I even like a lot of the updates in 2024. But it doesn’t spark the same joy it used to, and there are so many other RPGs I would rather spend my limited time and energy with. I’ve already exited one campaign I’m in, and the campaign I’ve been a part of for almost 5 years has just reached its end, so now that I’m free I have no plans to engage with D&D again except in a limited capacity like one-shots or short arcs. 

That said, however, the 5 year campaign is the one I was playing my Mourner class, and I never did get around to finishing the formatting for the most current version I’ve been playing. So I think in honor of our campaign’s end I want to try and get it finished. It’s still built like a 2014 class, and I’m not going to be updating it fully for 5.5e, but I might go through and see where I might tweak it to be a better fit for it. We’ll see how I feel. But after that, don’t expect any D&D content for a long time.

But now that our campaign is over, I will be playing a lot of new systems as my group is feeling some of the same burnout I have. Currently, we have plans for campaigns in Marvel Multiverse, Mothership, Runescape Kingdoms, Aether Nexus, and I have a friend who wants to give Daggerheart and maybe Draw Steel a go which I’m very excited about. 

Daggerheart specifically is a game I hopefully get to spend a lot of time with because few systems have grabbed me like it has. It seems perfectly tailored for the type of player-led, roleplay focused experience I like. Having read through it and watch a lot of play of it, it has me all kinds of excited to try and convert some of my bigger creations to it and maybe make it the game I create content for going forward. Assuming I don’t turn around and actually hate it after playing (Looking at you, Pathfinder 2e…). 

Speaking of content creation, I do still 100% want to keep making RPG stuff and sharing it with the world. Once I actually get to play some Daggerheart (and assuming I like it), it will likely become my new D&D and my primary homebrewing medium. But since I’ll also be playing a lot more systems, I might make stuff for those game too, but I have no concrete plans. Gotta wait and see.

And with all the new systems I’ll be playing, that means more opportunities for System Spotlights. I do think that I want to sort of have my own “Quinns Quest Guarantee”, for those who know of him, that I’ve played every system I showcase. That will encourage me to play more systems, and I’ll have more personal experience when talking about them. Luckily, all but Ironsworn I’ve played, and I plan to rectify that this year.

Speaking of solo games, a big thing I want to push myself for this year is more solo play. I hardcore dropped the ball on Dragon Staff of Maladoria. Never even made it out of the opening! I fully intend to finish the opening and continue playing it, but I need to figure out a way to document it that is faster and easier to write but still has some creative flare to it. I enjoy writing in the sort of story style I do, but it doesn’t come easy to me and I tend to agonize over it which makes it take forever. 

I also want to finally start an Ironsworn game, which hopefully if I can figure out a good way to write it down I can post about it here. Now that I no longer have D&D on the weekends, I want to use that time for Ironsworn, and other solo game shenanigans in the future, until our next campaign starts anyway. I don’t necessarily have plans to make it an official thing here, but Solo Saturdays/Sundays does have a nice ring to it. 

One final thing I really want to do is finally tackle a long held dream of mine and make it real, and I think I can do it. I don’t just want to play games anymore, I want to make them. I have a LOT of ideas, but for now I’m starting small with 1-page games, and later I might expand them into larger projects should they be worth it.

One such project I teased on my Patreon a LONG time ago. It’s a little cave exploration game inspired by Deep Rock Galactic and some other games I’ve come across in my internet wanderings. It’s had a rough development, as by the time I was close to a functional prototype, I realized I had just made pen-and-paper DRG, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t what I had originally set out to do. I’ve done some reworking of that project but partly though that rewrite I decided to go a totally different direction and make a completely different game instead, and test myself by making it one page. Development on that new game is coming along nicely, basic rules are mostly done and I need to populate some tables, but I’ll talk more about it in detail once it’s closer to a playable state. 

Anyway, that’s pretty much what’s going on with me and what my plans are for this place. I’m really excited about this new journey, and I hope y’all are too! Stay safe, don’t forget to love each other, and I’ll see you again (hopefully) soon.