First up — sorry for the delay. This has always been a less-than-part-time, squeezing the work in around our full-time jobs, kind of job.
Secondly, we are starting to change that. With yet more staff changes! Chris Kennish (he/him) has left due to other projects — thanks for all your hard work Chris K. Rowan McLaughlin (they/them) has come on board and will actually be doing one day a week of salaried work for Serpent King Games, in hopes that they can turn things around with some of our long-delayed admin tasks*, then get on with finalising the layout for our upcoming releases (see below!). Brunnhilde Przibram Sturrock (she/her) is also on board to help with writing and editing. Both will also be helping me with social media updates so you should get more of those. I’m still trying to provide some overall direction and fill in the gaps where needed. I think we may try to recruit an artist at some point as a fourth staff member, possibly Chris Cade who we’re still chatting to.
Thirdly, let’s get to the news that you’re really interested in… What happened to all of those overdue releases?!? Let’s go through them below with a summary. But we will release a more detailed updated about each of them over the next few weeks.
The Cursed King. This has been a tricky one as most of you know by now! And it’s still a little tricky — we are not quite out of the woods yet — but we are getting there, and are aiming for an October 2024 release, with I think a very good chance of that. I’m hoping to have the print and PDF files with DriveThruRPG by the end of this month so even with some processing time at their end, mid October should be fine.
The Summoner’s Tale. Also a tricky one in some ways, in that the author (and Dragon Warriors superfan!) Shaun Hately got us a first draft some years back, and we loved it, but for whatever reason it didn’t quite make it out the door to a PDF release. I am pretty sure we got this good to go some years back, other than layout, but we are going to do a final check on the manuscript shortly and then aim for a release later this year.
Brymstone. I personally have been waiting for this one for more than 30 years, having bought the first few issues of Red Giant magazine as a teenage Dragon Warriors fan. I’ve been in conversation with Robert about it again this week and we’re agreed on the direction for it. I’ve seen part of a first draft and it’s looking amazing so far. We’re aiming for a 2025 release.
*Getting us a new bank account set up rather than us relying on PayPal for everything; getting our Amazon Marketplace account sorted so we can get some years of back-owed royalties paid in to our new bank account, and then get Dave’s and Oliver’s royalties sent to them for the Amazon sales; etc.