A New Year's Dawn

Happy New Years everyone!

Before I get into all the Stonecrest releases I want to do a project recap considering we have a new year of exciting new stuff on the horizon.

2023 was a big year, it started off strong with the amount of people on this Patreon,  me and Pascal, the original 3D artist, were in a good groove of releasing the two monsters a month and the Discord group was slowly growing with one live game going (thanks a lot to Rose for being the first Sol'Kesh DM!) The year took a bit of a personal turn in spring as the gaming industry was rocked by layoffs (700% increase this year) and my studio closed down, while job hunting sucked, the good news is that I had a lot more time for Sol'Kesh and got a lot of creature art done and tried my hand at environment art to better show off the animals living in their biomes. While going through all of this, Pascal needed to spend more time on his own Patreon and had to stop with Sol'Kesh. I was fully going to just close the Dweller Tier and MInis, focusing on only art and D&D rules till I mentioned this to a 3D artist that randomly poked me on Discord when he complimented Sol'Kesh's models. That artist was Kieth (Worldshaper) and after I saw the quality of his creature designs, joined in as partner on this project and has been kicking ass ever since. Kieth's addition has easily been the better part of this year. By summer I was fortunate to land a new job, still as an art director in the gaming industry and thankfully one that allows me to still keep Patreon going (I was also interviewing with Epic and they frowned on side projects like this) Once I saw how well Kieth helped with keeping the community going, I wanted to expand on that an opened the floodgates to Sol'Kesh by allowing free members on Patron and Discord to join in, this really got the channel going and brought in so many wonderful people, especially those on Discord that share their art, memes and music recommendations of the day. Seriously it's been fun just having you all there to talk to all day. And now after 6 months of Kieth's models and more people on Discord, this project is really taking on a life of its own with a bunch of different DMs running the game for players on Discord, which makes me feel like book or not, this project is 100% a success with people already playing it.

That then takes us to 2024, this book is happening and the Kickstarter Campaign will be out this year! It's taken a little long because I always wanted to have the book nearly complete and fleshed out so I wouldn't be one of those people that get backers and then fail to actually finish things. I'd be lying to say I wasn't intimidated by all that goes into Kickstarter planning, but "fear kills more dreams than failure ever will" so it's time to do it! 

And speaking of a completed book, I also wanted to share some progress on where that's at.

So far we have:
-  68 of the 72 creatures have completed D&D rules and have their pages completed (which is already at 134 book pages!)

-  34 of those 72 are already on the Patreon PDF

-  62 of 72 have final art

-  The completed features written are the Map, Timeline, Biomes, Hunting, Trapping, Resource Gathering, Fishing (half?), Scavenging,  Journal Completion (thanks again so much for that idea guys) 

- The features still being written are, taming, crafting, and a few secret others that will be Kickstarter stretch goals

It's all been going at a steady pace and there's still a lot of harvestable item and environment art to do, but the drive to finish is strong and I want you all to eventually have this book in hand. 2024 is going to be a deciding year for this project and I'm so unbelievably thankful you're all here to be part of this with me and Kieth.

I wish you all the best year you can get, do your best and find some moments of joy whenever you can.
-Terry