Hello everyone!

We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.  With the holidays wrapped up, the team is hard at work continuing Fiendish Forge!  A lot of work still needs to be done, but we're hoping to start picking up the pace now that we've got our foundation and direction in place.

Let's break down the numbers:

There will be a total of 48 entries in Fiendish Forge. This does not include the Night Despot, our early adopter reward for our backers.  As you know, each entry will contain a description with regional effects, a stat block (sometimes multiple), a quest, a list of materials that can be gathered from the creature, and 2 pages of magic items.  Each entry, on average, has at least 6 items, meaning we will have 288+ Craftable Magic Items in this book.
We now have the confirmed list of creature entries! The creatures' entries are Aboleth Prime, Ancient Treant, Animated Armory, Voltaic Ankheg, Astral Tarrasque (Originally Winged Tarrasque), Axe Beak Executioner, Blast Beetle, Bloodmantle, Cerberus, Chimeric Cockatrice, Clockwork Spider, Condemned Hag, Couatl Hydra, Crab Legion, Cruel Hyena. Envy Dragon, Wrath Dragon, Red Dragon Turtle, Dretch Duke, Hurricane Elemental, Magma Elemental, Ettin Council, Face Stealer, Fallen Hero, Forlorn Knight, Gibbering Congregation, Berlugh Goblin, Hecaton Arthropod, Kaasma Spawn, Madam Hush, Mariyaga, Morass Lurker, Morelmind, Ogre Gladiator, Rat King, Revelation, Thunderhead Roc, Sarratos, Shadow Giant, Spinal Overlord, Sprite Mother, Stirge Broodmother, Titan Colossus, Troll Grafter, Troll Terror, Vampire Lord, Wyrmech, Wyvern Queen.

What creature entry are you most curious about?  Comment below, and perhaps we'll release updates about them!

We're making excellent progress with everything we can put in the layout to show how many pages we're looking at. The book will be at least 320 pages, but perhaps more, so it will be massive.

Writing Report: We currently have 48/49 creatures written for - including descriptions, region effects, and quest rough drafts.  We have all material names and descriptions written out and currently have a list of pitched items for every creature entry.

Design Report: Originally, the book would be a standard creature compendium - with legendary and lair actions and following the standard 5e formula.  Before Fiendish Forge had its Backerkit, I ultimately decided that this was an opportunity to go beyond standard 5e combat - and bring our Phase Combat mechanics into the fold - something we've been running in our streamed Io games.  With that, creatures have become more complicated to design - needing more time. This also included re-writing all the stat blocks I had written to follow this format.  Crafting also received a significant phase life from when the project began - as we tried to streamline the system to be powerful and comprehensive.  This involved reworking items to fit recipe formulas for crafting - which has added more time to the creation process. Materials are essentially done since they follow a specific formula and format and are created as needed when we work on magic items for a specific entry. Right now, what is needed most is writing our Magic Items out - and fortunately, with our writing team having pretty much wrapped up writing their descriptions, region effects, and quests - some of them are moving over to help with magic item creation.  We're also actively looking and bringing on new writers to help with this - so I'm hoping we'll have made more progress next month.

Art Report: Our art Progress is coming along!  The creature entry art themselves is mainly done (82% complete!) with spot art right behind (67%).  Much like with the writing, once all the creature art entries are complete, we'll be moving over artists to work on Material and Magic Item Art, which we currently need more of.  We're also on the look out for more artists with experience in prop art - so if that is something you think you'd want to be a part of - send you portfolio over to [email protected]

I feel confident we'll be compatible with both 2014 and 2024 versions of 5e. We received notification in May that SRD 5.2 will include the updated ruleset for 5e - allowing us to work on this commercially - but we also understand that a lot can change with that. We should get this new SRD in February 2025 and better understand what we're working with.  Contingency plans are in place in case another OGL Debacle occurs with the newer SRD - so rest assured this book will still be completed - it may just take extra time.

Currently, we do not have an ETA, but we hope to have the book completed by this year. The changes from a standard creature compendium - to an in-depth book about boss fights in 5e with comprehensive crafting toolsets have added more work and time to the book - but ultimately, I feel it will elevate the quality quite a bit.  Once the book reaches review state - we'll be charging for all preorders - but you will be notified when that occurs.

The playtest information we received has been phenomenal, but we're slowing down on playtests for now as we flesh out the book. We'll continue them in the future with higher CR creatures - which will require more work as 5e tends to get a bit unstable at higher levels above 10. So stay tuned!

Be sure to leave them in the comments below! And thank you for your support!!

-Brett