XINE

Today’s the day, it’s finally here! TorchLite is released into the world!

You can grab it at itch.io, which handles our downloads and traffic tracking. It’s pay-what-you-want and that can be free!

If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing and would like to see more, please consider supporting our Patreon or kicking a few bucks into our Ko-Fi. With your support we can make even more stuff like this!

Speaking of which, Lynn Jones’ Manual of Monsters, Minions, and Mountebanks is a truckload of monstrous challenge templates, all compatible with TorchLite!

I actually went through the whole TorchLite manuscript—and it’s not small—and counted them all by hand.

There is a ridiculous amount of design that went into our “small project.” Whether you use it as intended for dungeoneering adventure fun or you kitbash it into your own whimsical creation like a obsessive goblin tinker, we’re just excited to get all this good stuff out there into the community!

TorchLite ignites on Friday, November 15th!

Lynn Jones wrote a whole bunch of pieces to TorchLite, and also did a bunch of editing, and also did a bunch of art sourcing, and and and. But I’d like to focus on the one thing he brought to the table that completely blew me away

The Five-Scene Adventure.

This idea has roots that go back a long way, but Lynn wanted to plant the seed in TorchLite and cultivate it into a native bloom. Optimized for TorchLite, it positively blossoms.

The core idea is simple: to prepare a fun adventure all you really need is five solid scenes. Sure, you’ll play more than those five, but the others you can improv. These are the landmarks.

It sounds too easy, really.

But it works. It works so well it’s bonkers.

I’ve written a couple five scene adventures and I’ve run a couple, too, and I have never seen anything so simple generate so much incredible play. It’s not a stricture, it’s a springboard, and it is glorious.

Catch Five Scene Adventures and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff when TorchLite ignites on Friday, November 15th!

Here’s a fun little teaser for TorchLite character creation.

The core of every starting character is their three starting distinctions: one for their People, one for their Profession, and one for their Persona. You can pick each one right off a list, and modify it as much or as little as you like.

And we made the list names alliterate, because we just had to, you know?

These pick lists have a lot of old favorites plus a few new goodies. There’s something for everybody!

Mix and match to your heart’s content, and then customize your tait sets and SFX to make your character sing the exact tune you love.

TorchLite ignites on November 15th. Don’t miss out!

Let me tell you about working with Jeremy Forbing.

I’d be like, “Look, I threw this dumb thing together, it maybe sort of works, isn’t it funny?”

And Jeremy would be like: “Yeah, that’s great, Miriam, except it’s all wrong. This part should be shorter and punchier. This part should work like this. This part should appeal to the audience in this totally other way. This part demonstrates how you, specifically, have not been playing dungeoneering roleplaying games since you were a pre-teen, and you’ve got the vibe all wrong.”

And the worst part was that he was always right.

He also churned out reams of content of his own and threading it together with everybody else’s contributions made a tapestry so rich I can hardly believe it.

I am immeasurably grateful for the chance to collaborate with Jeremy on this “little project” that got way, way bigger than we ever dreamed. Jeremy made the project way, way better than I ever hoped.

Also I convinced him that we should include minotaurs as a playable character option, which is probably the most important thing, at the end of the day. I’m gonna play a valiant paladin named Moucau!

Folks, it’s been a long and winding road developing this “small side project” that we expected to be “oh, you know, something like 64 pages, no big deal.”

The deal, it got bigger.