1st Stretch Goal Down and a Message from Brian Yaksha!
12 months ago
– Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 06:09:28 AM
Greetings, Stretch Goal Surmounters!
It's been a busy weekend -- after a surprise shout-out on both the Dieku podcast and the official Necrotic Gnome newsletter, we got enough of a bump to push us over the €8,500 mark. That means every single copy of Duginthroat Divided will now feature a d100 treasure table and set of procedural tables for the rippled realms by award-winning writer Brian Yaksha. We'll let Brian give you all the details:
Duginthroat Divided is one of those rare instances of getting work on a project and still finding myself to be proud of it after the fact. Bear with me, as this is not some self-deprecating angle that exists for ad metrics. The project has already reached its goal, the stretch goal I am associated with has just been achieved. I have no cause to gild the lilies.
I was brought aboard this project about a year ago, maybe longer, maybe less — time is an illusory menace — and I am glad to have been given the chance. What began as a mentorship on how to target points of weakness in the work shifted into a proper camaraderie. We achieved that so rare and precious meeting of the minds on the work. I was given the chance to collaborate, to flesh out tools, and to explain their importance.
I cannot voice to anyone who does not work in this field the validation felt in being able to exist outside the context of a proverbial gun-for-hire. It is that role I find myself so often in that prevents me from desiring to play the wheelerdealer, which prevents me from being proud of what I've been able to create in hindsight.
I exalt the labor, but what comes next is always going to be better — and thus the absence of pride. In this project I still feel that pride though. In Duginthroat Divided I was able to put-up-or-shut-up about some long-standing bugbears regarding tools.
I think the mutations I've written, tailored to the horrors at play across a number of intersections, will be of great use. I think applying the modalities herein for location aesthetic as well as entity aesthetic, have merit which might give insight into greater future works.
At the very least it isn't gonzo for the sake of being gonzo; a gnawing quibble I have with too many products because of how my specific brain maladaptation fires off.
The Rogue Renderer was a spot of fun as a refresh mechanism, to either bring in new player characters or further flesh out any nameless rapscallions you stumble across. It was a good lesson in brevity for me. Sometimes refreshing the fundamentals gives greater cause to appreciate them.
All emotionality aside, I wish to speak of further work now coming to fruition:
The Loot Listing for Duginthroat Divided is something of an enfolded table — that is to say, a table built of tables for the sake of novel output nuance. It is the sort of treasure table design I enjoy as it allows for tailoring emergent narrative design.
In the case of this module, loot is divided among the treasures of the Keeps prior rulers, the treasures from a lifetime of plundering by the bandits within it, treasures from more recent muggery and skullduggery, and more corruptive ephemera from the cruel cosmos beyond the veil of perception.
It should make for a nice tool, regardless where your game take you.
The Rippled Realms are something a bit different. Portals that glimpse into uncanny realms that operate off more esoteric concepts. A chance for me to get incredibly strange and invoke that which provokes your curiosity. I am not yet certain the depths of nuance that are feasible for this task, but as with tailoring specific mutations to tone — I find enrichment in unspooling such puzzles.
As in all things I work on, my hope is that even should your adventures take you elsewhere you will still find use for these tools.
— Brian Yaksha
That's all for today, but we've got a very special update planned for tomorrow — it is a monumental occassion, after all, and we hope that our celebration of it will extend to the entire TTRPG community. Also, if you like OSE and old-school gonzo adventures — which you do, if you're reading this — make sure to check out Wildendrem Volume 2, the newest OSE adventure supplement from the award-winning publishers of Valley of Flowers. They're shaping up to be some truly beautiful books, as we've come to expect from everything Phantom Mill Games puts out.
Until then, mark your calendars and get out your graphing paper!
-DAI
