DURF Expanded will go live on Kickstarter the 3rd of October! Go follow the pre-launch page!
Okay, with that important bit out of the way, what have I been up to for the past two months?
For most of my time, I’ve been chipping away at the mountain of illustrations that need to be done for DURF Expanded. It is incredible to see the book taking shape after writing and designing it for so long. Here are some examples of what it will look like:
The book will be a 200-page hardcover that is the same height as an A5, but slightly wider:
It is really fun to put this thing together since it already has the most illustrations I’ve done for a single project, and I’m not even halfway through the book yet. It is my love letter to the DIY spirit of the OSR which pushed me to pick up illustrating for original DURF, back in 2021.
So go follow the Kickstarter campaign if you’d like to get your hands on this thing once it is finished :)
Over the past two years I’ve struggled a lot with finding the right balance of work time and recharge time. There have been multiple times in the last year when I’ve felt overworked and ran out of “creative juice”. Recently, I’ve adopted a new daily schedule to give some more structure to my days and schedule blocks to recharge. It involves getting up around 5:30 am and getting my work (be it writing or drawing) for the day done before noon. Then in the afternoon I have an hour to do some admin work and the rest of my afternoon is spent either getting some housework done or reading and listening to music, before getting ready to do some grocery shopping and preparing dinner.
I’ve never been an early riser, so getting up at 5:30 has been rough, but this schedule has been good so far. Aside from just having most of my work day done by noon, (which, if that would happen before, I would have just used it as an opportunity to get more additional work done in the afternoon) the scheduled time to read and recharge has been essential to making this sustainable. I used to do some reading before going to sleep each day, but that never really was enough to cross books off my reading list at a reasonable pace. Now, I’ve been getting a lot more reading in, which not only trims down my TBR list but also has done wonders for recharging my “creative juice”. For years, I would do a project, get burned out near the end, take some time to recharge and read a variety of stuff to gain new inspiration, and then repeat the process. Now it feels like the juice tank is never running too low since I have a scheduled moment to top it up every day. This probably feels very obvious for some of you who read this, but it honestly is eye-opening to experience this change.
Anyway, here are some top picks of what I’ve read in the past weeks:
I finally sat down to read down to read through Wraithlands by Leckie. I picked this up during Dragonmeet last year, after backing it on Kickstarter in 2023. It is really fucking cool. The system inside is super light and uses a PbtA-style resolution mechanic without the other trappings that usually come with a PbtA game, like playbooks. The backgrounds in this just ooze flavor, and a lot of the setting is conveyed through item descriptions and short location descriptions. The art by Paul Jon Milne is great at selling the vibe of the island. Really inspirational!
Ave Nox by Alex Coggon and Charles Ferguson-Avery. A cool system-neutral megadungeon which I’ve already been mining for ideas for my ongoing DURF megadungeon campaign :)
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Good stuff. Go read this one.
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin. This one had been on my TBR for a long time, ever since reading A Wizard of Earthsea, but I never got around to it. So it has been great to finally sit down and read this one.
I’m putting together a little warband for Frostgrave, after a friend and I decided to play a campaign of it together. I haven’t done much miniature painting or sculpting since my traineeship with Games Workshop in 2020 made me a bit disillusioned with the hobby as a whole. So it feels nice to rediscover this hobby that was very dear to me far a long time.
Here is a little hand I sculpted for my wizard that I’m sculpting and kit bashing:
I’ll show the rest in a later newsletter if I’m happy with how she turned out :)
My vegetable garden has given me its first proper zucchini last week!
For a few years now I’ve had a small curated box of unsleeved magic cards I could take places and play some casual magic with friends using a shared deck and graveyard. It has now been upgraded with some custom sticker sheets. At the end of every game, the winner of that game gets to permanently alter one of the cards they’ve played with that game using these stickers. Here are some we have so far:
That’s it for now, thank you for reading and stay safe!
Talk soon!
- Emiel
PS: I’m always told I should promote my work more. So, uh… go follow the DURF Kickstarter if you haven’t already!
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