NECROVENGE – A solo TTRPG

September25 – A short(er) one
7 months ago – Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 12:54:57 AM

The title carries a bit of a dual-threat. It’s both about my recent decision regarding the book and about the length of this update.

Last month I was sweating the details on the final act, Act 4. But after some play-testing, I realized that having four acts was a bit too long in terms of total playtime.

NECROVENGE is meant to be the kind of game I’d love to play on a free evening with no plans. Just me, a few candles, a great beer, some cards, and some dice.

My aim is for it to be a medium-length game. Something that leaves you wishing for just a little more, rather than dragging into a haul of an experience.

So I’ve cut it down to three acts and the ending (which I’m still working on).

Our baby girl is due any day now, so there won’t be an October update. I don’t expect the next month to include much book-creation. :)

See you in the November update. Reach out in the comments if there’s anything.

August25 — You got a bone to pick with me
8 months ago – Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 10:50:45 AM

Hi Internet,

It’s August, and holy-hell-on-a-stick has a lot happened in July.
I’ve moved house, and moved a lot of letters into my InDesign document.

But, let’s not bury the bad news, the original plan was to have this book in your hands by December. And if I’m honest with myself, that’s not going to happen.

It’s a mix of life changes, things taking longer than expected, the scope creeping, and me trying too hard to make everything “perfect.”

Could I have handled it better? Yes. For that, I’m sorry. I hate having to disappoint people. I hate letting you all down. There's not a moment of a day where I do not think of how amazing it is that so many people decided to "bet" on me in this race. And I want to deliver on that bet. I know I will. 

So, I hope you’re still up for following along, because rest assured — you will get a book. Just not under your tree this year. I’m not setting a new hard deadline yet, but if I had to guess, summer next year is feeling generous. That comes from someone who's about to become a first-time-dad and has no fucking clue what he's walking into.

All that said: there has been a lot of progress.

I've written the entire Appendix, Act 3 and most of Act 4, including:

• A bespoke "Arcane Catastrophe"-table
• Spell creator
• Minion creator
• Room creator
• Trap creator

Typing this, I guess the only thing missing now is a NPC/companion/rival creator ... so maybe I’m not entirely done after all.

Looking ahead:

In August, I plan to write and finish Act 4. The prompts are already laid out, so it’s just a matter of getting them written. After that I’ll go over the battles, create an ending, and adding a small section on how to prep your NECROVENGE-dungeon for your MÖRK BORG-table.

At that point, most of the writing will be done. And that’s when the real fun begins: artwork, visual polish, all the cool extras. Hoping to bring some talented artist on board.

I really can’t wait to get the PDF into the hands of actual players, and see what happens when people play through the whole thing.

So yeah, it’s taking longer than I hoped, but I’m still incredibly excited for what this is becoming. Currently sitting at 139 pages. Most definitely ending up bigger than that.  

So, thanks for sticking with me.

🔥❤️

July25 — Summer is coming!
9 months ago – Wed, Jul 02, 2025 at 10:39:57 AM

And while the heat is trying its best to kill any lust for doing, I'm writing, thinking, designing and playing to my dead heart's content.

June had a couple of really important playtests, one with my good friend Anders Kramer, who also helped me a lot in the days of Trapped Within. He struck the perfect balance of stroking my ego, pretending to have fun at the right moments, and laughing at all my silly jokes. 

After that, Matt Best did a complete leap of faith and jumped on a call with me. He spent 2 hours listening to me ramble on about why I did what I did, and then he also completed the playthrough after our call. A lot of really great thinking came out of the play session and the notes which Matt so graciously sent afterwards.

In-between the two, what might be the cheese of the burger buns ... And the beef is me. Or maybe Ian's the beef? Anyway. Ian SerVaas also jumped on a call with me and sparked a few intriguing ideas. One which I've implemented, which is to subdivide the story arc into just that — acts.

The game is, as of right now, divided into four acts, each culminating in a battle. The reason for telling you this is because I want to show you where I am with my writing. 

When put like this, it really doesn't look like a lot. And while that is probably still going to take some time for slowpoke over here (is that trademarked? Am I going to be sued now?) It bodes well for those out there who send weird DMs late at night asking why I'm currently sleeping instead of writing. (Please stop, Kevin.)

This spread is a great example of the "maniac" feeling I would love to have in the book. Throughout, I'm writing small notes in another voice, almost feeling like a mix between me (the author) and someone who owned this book prior. Is that perhaps the same person? How would I know ...

I'm positively freaked out by how great I want this book to be. And by the fact that I'm going to be a dad soon. Not in the weird author-kinda-way where, like, this book is my child. But to an actual child. A small girl. If anything, she'll probably learn early on that men can indeed cry. 

Anyway ... On a completely unrelated solo-note my good friend Pawel Kicman has whipped the even more amazing UnitSix into shape and is currently publishing the latter's new and updated solo-zine ... 

Hope you still like me. And see you for the ever-exciting August update, where I'll probably have written a little more. Yet a little less than I'm currently expecting. 

May25 – Ugly Babies and Watching People Play
11 months ago – Mon, May 19, 2025 at 08:47:11 AM

May is running out of time. Just like April did. I think March suffered a fate equally dire. How does that bode for the evolution of a solo book you might ask?

None-of-your-business.

Oh, it's you, the backers. My patrons. Right. Sorry for the attitude. Ehm ...

So, the progress.

Writing this thing has been a proper roller coaster. April started well, but soon twisted with a nose-dive, creatively speaking. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, or if it was even worth doing. Then I clawed my way back with one simple trick (TTRPG-designers hate him!)

PLAYTESTING

Through May, I’ve been running the game with different players. Over and over. Watching the rules break, and bend, and occasionally do their job. Some parts are surprisingly solid. Some were absolute trash. That's normal, right? RIGHT?!

Never mind normality it's been rewritten, streamlined. I've created new prompts, cut fluff. It truly helped watching people get confused by stuff that made perfect sense in my head. (Surely that's THEIR fault.)

A particularly obvious problem: The prompts consists of different elements, depending on which card you draw you need to read certain parts. But which parts? Turns out when I wasn't there to explain it, it wasn't that obvious. So, I've changed the design.

What helped was this short video on playtesting. It was like getting slapped gently by femur. Brutal, hurtful, yet I only took d4 damage. If you're a designer, watch it. Especially the part about getting people "into playing" instead of reading rules. That's something I've tried to implement.

SO WHAT'S NEXT?

Playtests will keep happening. The catch is: I need fresh victims every time. Feedback gets corroded when people already know what’s coming (per the video above). So if you want to play NECROVENGE with me for ~2 hours, jump into the Discord here. I’ll be posting time slots there soon. If you want to participate, but don't have Discord just write me a comment.

But what about the public PDF the man from the previous update talked about? It won't be out right now. I need to watch people play (insert creepy sounding noises here). Seeing how players actually move through the rules is pure silver. A public playtest will come once the rules stop squirming around.

THE UGLY BABY

Playtesting helped me push through the horrible feeling I've had that this book wasn't really going to turn out as great as I had imagined it. I recently watched this lecture by Brandon Sanderson where he nails my fear:

.. you have this book that built over many years.

And you might run into the situation upon writing it, that suddenly your baby is ugly.

It's here and it's ugly and what do you do oh no? And it's even worse than the baby being ugly.

You know the baby is actually, well the baby was perfect in your mind, this book. It was gorgeous and beautiful.

And then you made it ugly through your fat fingers being unable to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Very deadly to new writers because they get stopped, because their skill isn't up to their aspirations yet.

You need to push through that and keep writing.

So I'm pushing. I'm foregoing my mind telling me that this resurrected revenge-monster isn't good enough. The book is currently sitting at around 12.000 words, and I have a couple of prompts written I haven't included yet. So that's awesome.

I love writing, but calling myself a writer might, as of yet, be a bit of a stretch. I look forward to the day that I feel comfortable wearing that badge.

Thank you all for your patience with me and this project. I'll skip the June-update and post at the start of July. If you have any questions, throw them in the comments. :) 

April25 – This isn't going to be a perfect book
12 months ago – Sun, Apr 06, 2025 at 01:01:16 PM

And that's sometimes hard for me to accept. 

I’ve been writing less than I wanted to. Part of it has to do with very good, happy reasons. Part of it is just my lazy ass procrastinating perfection.

It happens to the best of us excluding Stephen King and Pelle Nilsson. The feeling of dread as you sit down to write, because you haven’t solved something, or you don’t feel your solution is perfect. So you'd rather try to solve it in your head. You must solve it, without doing the work, before sitting down to do the work. That at least happens to me more often than it should.

When I write it out like that, it sounds stupid. Childish, even. Naive beyond belief. Like a necromancer thinking they’ll actually succeed at getting satisfying revenge.

Setting aside the bad reasons, we’ve also found out that my girlfriend is carrying a goblin around. Meaning that, before long, I’ll be a goblin king.

That's amazing for me personally. I'm truly happy. For the designer of this book, it sets a deadline that creeps closer every minute he isn’t writing. So he better get back to it.

Phew. That was a bit of a wave of apologetic sadness. How’s the whole thing actually progressing? Actually quite well, so disregard the whole sob-story someone wrote above. Sorry if you read that.

I’m at +75 pages and plan to launch the next version of the play-test document around the start of May. I need to do a sum up page of the rules, and then do a grammar read-through of the prompts before I release it. Once I'm ready I would love all the help I can get play-testing it. I really need some valuable feedback derived from playing! 

In other news, I’ve released a one-pager for MÖRK BORG set in an Alice in Wonderland-inspired setting. Go check it out if you want to. It’s potentially free. Potentially really expensive. Your call.

Let me know if you bring it to a table. 🔥