A Review of 2021 and the Coming Year

This year has seen a series of successes for Dark Realm umbrella. As we head into the new year, we feel the momentum of our two recently successfully funded projects pushing us forward.

War Within RPG – On our DR Games Kickstarter account

Our first full RPG is developing nicely. We have the text complete and are just working on the layout. This has taken us longer than predicted but the project has grown substantially during the funding period and has been enriched by comments and feedback that has focused our vision. This is part of the reason why we are so keen on the Kickstarter format. The month of funding exposes the product and people ask questions that you just have never considered. We will have this completed this month and look forward to sending it out.

Murder at Morley’s Workshop One Shot – On our Dark Realm Roleplay Kickstarter account

There is just over 24 hours left on this digital product over on Kickstarter.

It is a Dungeon and Dragons one shot adventure in digital format. It has been very successful (thank you everybody who is supporting this product) and we have nearly 1200 backers which is amazing and is over twice our biggest project, Rad Zone, earlier in the year. Murder at Morley’s Workshop has been a big surprise for us in the sense that it will help support the business in so many ways. We will be working on a new adventure to be Kickstarted when this one finishes. The new one will be part of a series that will run throughout the year (see below).

These two projects have put down a foundation for the business which is exciting and frees up more of Toby’s time to create new products and pull together more content. We have also been able to work with a professional editor and buy and commission more art, enriching DR Games and Dark Realm Roleplay. It is simple. It is people backing our projects that makes the difference. It is the community working together to bring more content.

Rad Zone

Our roll and write, print and play, solo game has been successful for an indie product. We were successfully funded on Kickstarter and the Facebook page is doing well. We have had Youtubers review, and do play throughs, see a couple of links below:

We have also released a Christmas expansion for the game that added new maps and content.

This can be found here if you are interested in some festive fun!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/381420/Rad-Zone-Christmas-Expansion–Radioactive-Reindeer

The RPG Maps Zine – Issue 1

This went down very well and we are pleased to have created our first actual physical zine and of course it had to be through Dark Realm Maps. It is very satisfying to actually thumb through a copy and see it presented as a final product. This has been sent all over the world and we are always delighted to hear the positive feedback from backers. There has been a lot of feedback this year just generally and we embrace it! We welcome all comments and take them onboard.

The Coming Year

2022 will see a ramping up on the Kickstarter front. We will be starting with The Goblin Tower, an adventure for Dungeon and Dragons focused around some highly detailed hand drawn maps. This is Book 1 of the Abandoned Buildings Adventures that will be running through out the year. The goal being a collection of adventures in a range of formats including hard back Letter format books. They will all focus down on one repurposed terrifying, or monstrously overwhelmed, building into which a party of adventurers can be lured.

Rad Zone will be receiving a major update with new rules and maps. This will also be Kickstarted later in the year, but on our DR games account. And dare I mention we have a Rad Zone board game in development. This could take all year to work up but also depends very much on how Abandoned Building Adventures goes as to freeing up funding and time for time to develop the game.

We will also be looking at reskinning Dark Force Incursion and have War Within RPG completed in January. At this stage we do not want to commit to too much more as this seems like so much exciting stuff already but as with any small indie family company we work from month to month making decisions based on the success of the current project.

Your support, whether as a backer on a Kickstarter project, a patron at one of our two Patreon pages (Dark Realm Maps and the Dark Force Incursion Support Page) or as someone who leaves comments or provides feedback is vital and we can not bring this content without it.

Thank you all and happy new year!

Toby and Jo