2018 Announcements
It’s that time of the year again, and as we wrap up and bid goodbye to 2017, it’s also time to look ahead to 2018 and what the new year will bring. Here at Necromancers of the Northwest, we arrange our article schedule around the calendar year, and it’s customary for us to shake up our article line up each year, so things don’t get stale. But, it’s also a time for us to take stock of our overall strategy and product line-ups. So, without further ado, here’s what you all can look forward to in 2018.
Advanced Arcana and A Necromancer’s Almanac 2017
It may not be readily apparent on our site, but the Necromancers have had a busy year this year! Our designers have had an increasing amount of work for other design companies (such as Paizo), day jobs have gotten a bit more demanding, there’s been some illness, and two of us got married over the summer! As a result, we’ve fallen just a bit behind on our annual holiday releases.
Advanced Arcana Volume VIII is on track for a January 2018 release for the digital version, and we think you’re going to love what we’ve come up with. The theme for this year’s installment explores how spells are resolved, and aims to make spellcasting a little less binary, with a single saving throw (rolled by the other guy, no less) determining the full success or failure of the spell. We’ve got spells whose effects have their own hit point totals, with successful attempts to resist the spell causing it to weaken by losing hit points. We’ve got spells that require you to perform a certain challenge in order to cast them, and are more powerful than normal as a reward for succeeding. We’ve also got spells that make use of a new system for mental hit points, providing an alternative to the dreaded “save or die.” Plus tons of new spells not tied to any special mechanics. We’ve also made some adjustments to the overall way the book is organized which I think will make it far more useful.
A Necromancer’s Almanac 2017 is also on the way, and will have all the content from our website from 2017 all in one handy dandy place. Realistically, we’re hoping for a February release for the digital copy of this, as the organization and layout are time consuming (and, of course, we’re not done with Advanced Arcana yet).
Micro Products
Our weekly micro-products, such as the Weekly Wonders series, and our several new Starfinder series, such as Horizontech Catalogue and Traveler’s Guide to the Galaxy, will continue to be released on a weekly basis. You can expect a mix of Pathfinder and Starfinder here, and possibly even some others, besides, such as an occasional Mythic Mastery.
Monthly Books
Once upon a time, Necromancers of the Northwest used to put out a monthly book, rather than weekly micro-books. Averaging around 12,000 words, these books covered a wide variety of topics, and allowed us to go a bit more in-depth than our micro-books do. Ultimately, these were pushed aside in favor of focusing on smaller, more regular products, but we’ve decided to bring them back, and our aim will be to put out one of these books each month. The first two of these books will be Pathfinder products, but there may be a couple of Starfinder or even Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition books in these slots later in the year. We think you’ll like what you see.
Article Line-Up
As mentioned above, we had a busy year this year, and that caused us to fall behind schedule in a few places, which in turn caused us to reexamine where all of our time and energy winds up going. It turns out, putting out four articles a week takes a lot of effort! And, after a little searching, we realized that we couldn’t actually find any of our competitors who put out even close to the amount of free content that we do.
Now, don’t get us wrong: we like putting out free content, and we are committed to continuing to provide some amount of content free of charge, but it quickly became clear that if we want to continue doing all the awesome things that we’d like to do, we may need to dial back a bit on our article line up. As a result, we’ve decided that for 2018, we’re going to try scaling our articles back to 2 per week.
While this will reduce the overall amount of content, it won’t be by quite as much as you expect. We’re aiming to soften the blow a bit by packing the articles with a bit more content than what you’re used to. Additionally, by dropping down to 2 articles per week, we have a bit more freedom and flexibility with what we write. Instead of having two specific articles, we’ll have a rotating stable of several article lines, including Best in Class (featuring archetypes for Occult Adventures and Advanced Player’s Guide classes, plus a few Starfinder archetypes and some others), Obscure Arcana (with a mix of spells and a few new articles featuring spellbooks with unique benefits), Magic Market, Exotic Encounters (now featuring more templates, by popular demand), and the return of Extraordinary Feats!
As always, we’re interested to hear your feedback, so if you have any thoughts you’d like to share with us about these changes, please feel free to share them in an email to ariggs@necromancers-online.com.
Thank you all, Happy Holidays, and have a Happy New Year!