New Year,
New NNW
As we move into the new year, there are some exciting changes afoot for Necromancers of the Northwest. In addition to shuffling our weekly article schedule again, we’ve also got some big changes coming to our schedule of published products. But first things first: the articles.
The New Lineup
This time last year, we announced that we were temporarily retiring our weekly magic item article, Magic Market, and replacing it with Exotic Encounters, an article introducing new monsters which was based on our at-the-time weekly product featuring variant versions of monsters. Exotic Encounters has evolved a bit over the course of the last year, but we feel it’s been a great success in our lineup. That said, we’re always looking for ways to keep our content fresh, so we’ve decided to shake the schedule up once again. For the year of 2015, we’re going to be retiring Extraordinary Feats, and bringing back Magic Market.
Fans of Extraordinary Feats need not worry: it may be gone for now, but, like Magic Market before it, it’s not truly dead. Just…dormant. We didn’t make this decision lightly. There were several factors that came together to help us determine that it was time for this particular article to take a rest. Part of it is simple fatigue, as this article is one of the most creatively demanding: not only is it hard to come up with good article themes that can support 5 or more feats, but feats themselves are more difficult to write and balance than magic items, spells, and similar things. We also feel that, of the five potential articles in question, the feats from Extraordinary Feats are generally the hardest to use in your game, as they require more player commitment that nearly any of the other options, and, in some ways, even more than the archetypes from Best in Class.
Another change that we’re making, for reasons that should become apparent later in the year, is that we’re shaking up the order of articles throughout the week. Exotic Encounters is jumping up to the Monday slot, pushing Best in Class back to Tuesday. Obscure Arcana keeps its Wednesday slot, and Magic Market will be taking Exotic Encounters’ old spot on Thursdays. Fridays will continue to be when we release our weekly product, which brings us to…
New Weekly Products
In 2013, we started producing a weekly product, called Exotic Encounters, which provided variant versions of classic monsters, in an attempt to reimagine them and also make them available at a wider range of CRs. When 2014 rolled around, we decided to move Exotic Encounters onto our website, and put a new product Mythic Mastery, in its place. We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to expand on and support the mythic rules introduced in the Mythic Adventures book, but throughout the year, we’ve frequently found ourselves wishing that we had more freedom with our weekly books—specifically, the ability to step away from mythic rules for a while.
So, in 2015, we’re cutting back on Mythic Mastery, reducing it to one book per month. Because we’re committed to completing what we start, we’ve decided to make completing the Missing Mythic Magic series a priority, so every other month, our monthly Mythic Mastery product will be the next installment in this series. This frees up three books a month (on average), which we can use however we like. We’ve already started work on some of these, and I’m pretty excited with what we’ve put together so far, and we hope that you’ll be excited with it as well. And speaking of changes to our published products…
Focusing on Larger Products
We have some pretty ambitious ideas here at Necromancers of the Northwest. We’ve had some pretty big projects in the past, like our Deluxe Guide to Fiend Summoning and Faustian Bargains. The thing about these books is that they take a lot of man-hours to complete, especially from an outfit as small as ours. Even our annual Advanced Arcana books are worked on for more than half the year. Our monthly products take up most of the attention and time that we have left over after articles and weekly books are done, and that doesn’t leave much time to work on these larger products. As a result, we have a couple of ambitious projects that we’ve wanted to start on but never really had the time to get much traction on.
So, we’ve decided to cut back a bit on our monthly releases, at least for the time being, and see how it works out. As a result, we won’t be releasing a new monthly product this month. Those of you who are looking forward to our annual A Necromancer’s Almanac will be happy to know that it will still be being released at the normal time, in January of next year. After that, we’ll have a new book out in February, and after that, we’ll see where it goes, but we’re aiming for roughly one book every two months.
Of course, all that extra time and effort will be going into some big, exciting things. And because they’re so big and exciting, and because they take so long to make, it’s going to be really hard for us to keep all the excitement to ourselves, which means that you should expect to see much more in the way of previews, announcements, and (dare I say it) public playtests for these projects. So, stay tuned, because we think 2015 is going to be a very exciting year!
Happy Holidays
Finally, one other thing that we’re doing a bit differently this year is that we’re giving ourselves some time off for the holidays. Necromancers of the Northwest will be back with our new and exciting 2015 lineup on January 5th. Since this is the last update we’ll be having here on the site this year, please let me wish you all a happy holidays. Please note that while the site won’t be updating, we’ll still be putting out new weekly products during this time, including another mythic alien race, a collection of myth-ified versions of wondrous items, and, on January 2nd, our first new weekly non-mythic product, a book devoted to spider-based bloodlines.
On That Note
Do you have strong feelings or opinions about anything mentioned here? Let’s not fool ourselves: this is the internet, of course you do. So why not share them? Whether it’s sending e-mails to myself at ariggs@necromancers-online.com or Josh at jzaback@necromancers-online.com, or it’s dropping by our forums, or posting to our twitter or facebook accounts, we’re interested in what you have to say.