It’s been a minute—make that a year.

Don’t worry. Neither me nor my creative ambitions are dead. In case you were curious (or worried), here’s what I’ve been up to over the past 365-plus days:

Fall 2025

My next freelancing feat for Goodman Games focused on a series of quests set in a derelict dwarven kingdom. I started by editing three quarters of Old School Adventures #1. My familiarity with those good, old-fashioned dungeon crawlers put me in the perfect position to write four interstitial one-shots that were included as stretch goals for the crowdfunding campaign.

Accomplishments:

  • Edited Embers of Anvil Home, Blackened Veins of Starlit Doom, and Down Dimly Lit Halls.
  • Wrote To Catch a Kobold, Prospectors of a Shattered Star, The Greater the Risk, and Horrors in Hollow Mountain).
  • Homebrewed and ran a one-shot for my family titled Secrets of the Slime. I’m not sure if I’ll ever publish it, but it was a lot of fun to engage in shared storytelling with my ever-entertaining players.

Winter 2025/2026

My productivity took a long pause this past winter, but the season wasn’t entirely fruitless:

Accomplishments:

  • Joined a class action lawsuit, along with many other authors—including a few bestselling writers, who did the heavy lifting—against Anthropic. The prominent AI company was accused of using pirated books to teach one of their large language models. Two of my novels were among them. We won, and I’ll likely receive a cut of the compensation, though I participated on principle.
  • After some soul searching, I recommitted myself to finishing my proprietary tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) system and, possibly, the adventure meant to accompany it: The Last City of Mirth.

Spring 2026

Even as my enthusiasm for my own TTRPG system swelled, however, another freelance opportunity presented itself. Nonetheless, I managed to make headway into meeting my aggressive goal: finalizing the rule set for my unnamed game system and readying everything I would need to start playtesting The Last City of Mirth in January 2027.

Accomplishments:

  • Edited the Dragon Rider’s Primer, Goodman Games’ resource book for introducing flying mounts to 5E players as early as Level 1; the tome includes new subclasses, backgrounds, feats, spells, equipment, and a starter quest for airborne adventurers.
  • Completed “The Rules” and a reputation tracker for my TTRPG system and created 16 pre-generated character sheets.

Summer 2026

It takes quite a while for a writing project to transform from words on a screen into a physical publication, as evidenced by the recent release of two Goodman Games books I contributed to as far back as fall 2023.

Accomplishments:

  • Received copies of The Flumph’s Catalogue of Magical Curiosities and Dungeon Denizens 2, among my favorite game-writing projects to date. The first print run went to backers, but eventually both will be for sale at goodman-games.com.
  • Continued my progress on prepping The Last City of Mirth for playtesting in 2027 by creating cheat sheets for the eight unique species from which players can choose and a resource for common in-world knowledge.
  • Started mapping out the events that will transpire during the first of the game’s three acts.

If you’re wondering what lies ahead for autumn, I’ll address that in my next post—and I promise it won’t take me a year!