Newsletter

Happy New Year

Lou Anders

03 Jan 2023 • 4 min read

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Kickstarter news, Pre-Orders, New Projects, New Year

It’s a heady feeling to have all your projects for the year and beyond lined up in January. Of course, I’ve been here before.

Last year, my big plans were to release a stand-alone Tier 2 adventure for my Norse-flavored country of Norrøngard in the Thrones & Bones campaign setting and a short story anthology of fiction set in the same land.

Then Meta happened (ie Facebook).

I started work in January for them, building a fantasy world (along with the brilliant Matt Bird, author of the highly recommended The Secrets of Story and The Secrets of Character). What I originally conceived as a a consulting gig that would take maybe half of my week rapidly evolved into the hardest and most time-consuming job I’ve had since my dot com stint in San Francisco in 2000. And I say that as a former editorial director overseeing a book line that got up to 30 titles a year! So, naturally, all my planned Thrones & Bones projects were pushed back.

By May, I was managing a team of a dozen freelance writers and half as many artists.

And then, as I’m sure you know, 2022 turned out to be something of a bad year for tech giants.

And I was let go in early November.

Now, what we built was truly incredible. And the project is still ongoing. But also evolving. I don’t know how much of what I worked on will come out or what form it will exactly take when it does. I hope you get to see it all one day. But…

I had an amazing time. I worked with amazing people. I learned a ton of new skills (relevant to videogames, management, running a writers’ room, etc) as well as discovering a lot of skills I didn't know I had.

And it’s kind of like a dream and a blur, like I walked into a fairy realm for ten months and now I’m back.

Which is why I Kickstarted the aforementioned stand-alone Tier 2 adventure, Vengeance of the Valravn, at the close of last year. That project is moving fast. It’s already in play testing and layout, with 99% of the artwork in, and all but two of the battle maps. I hope to have it to backers well in advance of the promised delivery date, and if you missed the Kickstarter you can pre-order it here now along with a bundle deal on all the books and a few extras from the prior Kickstarter.

Meanwhile, the entire time I was working for Mr. Zuckerberg, I wasn’t completely unfocused on Thrones & Bones. I did commission ten stories for the next project. Tales from Stolki’s Hall is going to be something really special. Thrones & Bones began life as a series of children’s novels before it leapt into an all-ages Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. Now it’s leaping back to fiction - but not children’s stories and not written by me! Tales from Stolki’s Hall features ten professional writers playing in my universe, writing adult fantasy fiction in the land of Norrøngard. You can’t overlap Kickstarters, but I’ll be launching this one the instant that Vengeance of the Valravn fulfills. (And announcing the ToC when it does.)

Looking further into 2023, the project after the next project is already underway. The first Thrones & Bones adventure not set in Norrøngard is outlined, and artwork is already being commissioned for it. This will be a new adventure, for 1st level characters, set in some of the locales from the novel Nightborn. It will feature new setting descriptions, new ancestries and character subclasses, new monsters, and it will be the spring-board into a larger campaign that will see a substantial area of the continent of Katerina revealed. I’m so excited for it!

(So of course last week I outlined another Norrøngard adventure that I want to do if I ever get time!)

Of course, having just described four different Thrones & Bones projects, I am expecting the phone to ring any minute with another tech giant wanting to pull me in an entirely different direction. Or maybe Hollywood? We’ll see!

As always, this newsletter is the best way to stay informed. Though you can always join the Discord if you want to ask questions or see smaller updates as things evolve.

I hope you all have a fantastic year ahead of you. I hope I do too! Love and good fortune to all of us, and, as the Norrønir say, Be Healthy!

Lou Anders