🎃 October Updates

Birds! Spaceships! Patreon! Excitement!

This is a copy of the newsletter sent on 31st October 2025

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As you may have noticed, we have restarted our newsletter! We've been quiet for a while. Last year was not kind to us on a personal / family level, and honestly, it took us until September to feel like we could finally take a breath. Recovering from stress and burnout takes time.

Anyhow, here we are, back in business!

This is where we are with all our projects

Geologist's Primer is fully wrapped up. All packages from Kickstarter should be delivered at this point. I'm pretty sure we were done with it about a year ago, but I tend to forget to write newsletters.

Mycologist's Primer, which we crowdfunded last year, has been written, illustrated, laid out, edited, and passed over to production. All the stretch goals are also completed on our side. As far as I know, our publisher is currently awaiting firm delivery schedules from our printers, so we can move to distribution as soon as possible. The distribution process, unlike in the past, is now entirely in-house, so our publisher will have better visibility on all deliveries, which should remove the growing pains of Geologist's Primer fulfillment. You can expect the fulfillment updates soon on our Kickstarter page!

What's next in this line?

If you follow us on social media (we're mostly active on Bluesky - here's the company profile and Jakub's & mine private feeds), you already know what's coming: we're doing birds now!

The bird book will be first in a four-volume subseries of Zoologist's Primer. We start with avian friends, then we're doing a book on mammals, then another on cold-blooded vertebrates (amphibian, reptiles, and fish), and the last volume will cover invertebrates (mollusks, insects, arachnids, etc.). It'll be fun! I am very sorry for people with arachnophobia and similar issues - feel free to skip that one! We put it at the end as vol. 4, so if you skip it, it won't mess up your consecutive numbers on the shelf.

(A side note to answer some of the questions we're getting: no, we can't call it Ornithologist's Primer, because while we could cover vol. 2 with mammalogy, this system falls apart in vol. 3 which would have to be both herpetology and ichthyology, and vol. 4 would be a nightmare of subdivisions of invertebrate zoology. I promise, we really did think it through.)

On the other side of our project spectrum, Aphelion is still under development. We're playtesting internally and polishing the rules before we share them with wider audience. Honestly, the world at large is currently rather hostile to releasing large TTRPG / board games without a well-known IP behind it, so we're taking things slow and hope to see a glimmer of peace on the geopolitical front of tariffs and global logistics.

That means we have some space to work on smaller projects meanwhile. It was fun working on Wayfarer's Decks and Globetrotter's Guides to Greenery, and we want to recapture some of that energy with self-contained projects that don't take 2+ years to complete. We'll let you know when we have something more substantial to share.

What's brewing in the background...

A lot of people also asked us if we'd be willing to make a Primer book on mythological and fantasy creatures & plants, and we've been considering that ever since... Is this vague enough...? Let's just say something is cooking. More news once we taste-test it.

Patreon revamp!

Meanwhile, it's high time I remind you that we actually have a Patreon, so if you want to get early (albeit unedited and subject to change) content from any of the projects we're working on, you may want to join us there. This month, we're getting you a package with the first five bird entries from the upcoming book, as well as a little Halloween treat: the first graphic from our new Wheel of the Year witchy project and a FREE Halloween adventure!

See you there!

(Or here, in about a month.)

Love, Anna 🐦‍⬛