It's time! We broke 3,000 backers exactly just now. (Okay I started writing this and then started feeling ill and laid down the rest of the day. Whoops!)

I will officially be going live on Instagram over on @PublishingGoblin on Instagram and on TikTok Tuesday the 12th! I will be live from Noon to 2pm MST and then 6pm to 8pm MST.

So that's Tuesday the 12th in just 3 days at:
EASTERN 2PM-4PM, 8PM-10PM.
CENTRAL 1PM-3PM, 7PM-9PM.
PACIFIC 11AM-1PM, 5PM-7PM.
GMT 6PM-8PM, 12AM-2AM.

During this time I will be doing general readings to show off the dice and how they are used, take reading requests (best as I can), and utilize the dice in conjunction with various tarot and oracle decks to show off the versatility of the dice. Please come join when you can, I'll post updates here before I go live!

The coin will be done in an Antique Copper finish. An early copy is being worked on soon, but like all other add-ons, it will be available largely once the campaign is over in the pledge manager. We're close to unlocking it (at 200,000), so I wanted to share now!

We've been fairly slow these last couple weeks, but I think once we hit the pledge manager and people can actually include add-ons, we'll jump up! So I will be counting the first two weeks on the pledge manager as part of the campaign for the stretch goals. So we may yet hit some of those later goals! : )

Fond regards all,
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We will definitely be breaking 3,000 backers today, I can feel it in my bones! When we do, I will announce when the day of Instagram Live Readings will be! :)

You all voted, and the results are in. The front cover will feature the 4 Seasonal Lords gathered around a table as the Gambler casts her dice over it, with the Caretaker whispering some obscene joke in her ear.

On the back cover, the Publishing Goblin, the Alleyman, and the Chronicler will be featured around the back-of-the-book-blurb!

If you follow my projects, you might know by now that I make a lot of things. Card games, board games, video games, novels, poetry, tarot, dice-- but one thing I pride myself in is using the artifacts of these various things to found items in my fictional worlds. The Maiden of Winter and the Heir of Earth are actually from unique cultures I made for my game world, Solare. The Maiden is an Ithcaian-- someone who was cursed with a finite undeath as long as her mortal life. She is pale as bone, has red eyes, and must survive on raw flesh and blood, ostracizing her from the masses and typically cursed into servitude. But she killed those who cursed her and lives in an icy palace of her own making. The Heir is a Naiar, meaning People of Grass in their language. They live in harmony with the natural world, but have within them an explosive and transformative rage, where they use the pelts of animals to become them to defend themselves and their lands. The Gambler, for clue-sniffing sleuths, is from the same world as the Alleyman, mentioned in one of the podcast episodes in relation to the Secret Halls.

In this way, the Lords are pieces of my various fictional worlds, and the dice and the cards themselves are artifacts from those worlds, the same way the Alleyman's Tarot was an artifact from the world the Alleyman Podcast took place in.

The last two of the original 14 dice we have to reveal are in this same boat. The Tarot Keeper, lord of the die of suits, is an Alfira, a ratfolk, who came to love the concept of tarot that humans brought with them from their strange other world. His depiction here is abstracted from reality, as are many of the lord's illustrations, but he loves his portraiture in the card as the Tarot Keeper. He has most excitedly added the card to his vast collection of oracle decks.



The Collector of Selves, lord of the relations die, is one of my original designs. They are an Umbran, a strange, 6-armed being with a bone mask for a face. Umbrans consider it a rite of passage to break the connections of their face plating and remove the one they were born with, choosing a new one for themselves. But the Collector never could make a decision, instead rotating through an ever-growing collection of masks day to day as they find who they are in this world, as related to the world, as related to other people, and as related themselves.



If you're interested in my weird game world, be on the lookout for Confluence news in the next year. I've been working with a team of people for over a year now to finish the journey my big tabletop roleplaying game, Confluence, has taken for years and years. You can follow up on this over on twitter, soon on our instagram, tiktok, and elsewhere! https://twitter.com/CosmicMirrorRPG
Or check out the old (old) playtest materials which are pay what you want over on my itch. The new mechanical system looks nothing like this now, but a fair amount of the world is still quite similar!

Someone asked if I could share the dice from the catalogue I picked from, so here we are! It's a bit slapdash, but until I have a set made this will be the best I can share.

Actions Die (Pink w black) 58 Natural light amethyst with black ink

Alchemist (dark blue with white/green) 44 Natural Amethyst with very light green ink

Autumn (Orange with black) 53 Natural Tiger Eye Color with grey ink

Element Die (Beige with black) 51 Natural Flower Green with white ink

Fate (Bone with Purple) 54 Natural Wood Grain Stone with metallic purple or red ink

Majors (Black with red) 42 Natural Obsidian with red ink

Mariner's (Teal with white) 43 Natural Lazurite with teal ink

Metamorphosis (Purple with orange) 5 Synthetic Wood Grain Stone with Purple ink

Obstacle Die (Red with black) 46 Natural Red Stone with black ink

Relations (White with black) 48 Natural White Jade with black ink

Spring (green with yellow) 52 Natural Indian Agate with Yellow ink

Suits (Gray with black) 41 Natural Cardinals with gray ink

Summer (yellow with red) 49 Natural Yellow Jade with Red ink

Winter (blue with white) 57 Natural Snow Stone with light blue ink

(And as good a time as any to remind people the colors and designs on the new dice are subject to change!)

Wounds 59 Natural Colored Fluorite with red ink

Kindness 39 Natural Opal with gold ink

Attention 63 Natural Flash light stone with silver ink

Longings 47 Aventurine Jade with purple ink

Goblin 56 Natural Hematite with dark green ink

Alleyman 55 Natural Picture Jasper with bronze metallic ink

Influences 40 Finch Stone with off-white ink

Alright, talk to you all very very soon!

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First, a reminder that I will be doing a long day of Live Oracle Readings over on Instagram when we break 3,000 backers on the project! So, plugging the achivement here as a reminder.

It's time to vote on which of the Lords will be featured on the cover!

I'm sharing the illustrated ones here below. Please know that we will be picking the most selected Lord(s) to go on the front, and some of the second most selected might appear a bit less detailed on the back cover. That being said, you get only one vote here, so make it count!

A backer asked for the Stones from the catalogue I chose, and I can do that! Next update will feature the stones from their catalogues in image form, so people have a clearer idea of what we're looking at! : )

Thanks y'all!
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Backerkit has a new fun thing called Community Achievements, and we're tapping it when we reach 3,000 backers for a live reading session over on my Instagram! When we hit 3,000 backers, I'll announce in an update when the readings will take place, and probably break it up in two sections throughout the day for a couple hours each, so that people in various time zones can still take part.

The readings will be general for the world, or for whoever asks in the Instagram live!

You can follow the Publishing Goblin IG ahead of time here: https://www.instagram.com/publishinggoblin/

Seven lore time! I hold an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago, but I had other academic aspirations at one point in time (and still kind of do!). When I applied for Master's programs originally, I applied to schools for Poetry and Fiction writing, but I also applied to schools for Religious Studies and Cultural Anthropology. I have long been fascinated by the place myth, folklore, faith, and religion hold in our lives. You can see this clearly in the Alleyman Podcast, where I explore my desires to study modern myth through Doctor Ala Okoye. So I'd like to share a little about one of my favorite strangenesses of modern religions. Ha-Satan, the Accuser.

In Judaism, there was (and is) no Hell, nor a Devil. Many cultural factors helped form this demon over time in Abrahamic tradition leading up to Christianity's take on the tradition. Of note, during the Jewish exile to Babylon, they interacted at length with Zoroastrians, who had a clear good god and an evil god. It's not hard to imagine how the Jewish people may have been interested in this idea-- as it stood, this was their second exile and it was hard to keep faith when you believed your god did all things-- good and bad-- when you, the chosen people, were exiled from your city yet again. This being as the one who evil comes from was a helpful way to place blame of evil somewhere other than your beloved lord.

If we look into the old tales of satan, we find ha-satan. Literal translation as: The Accuser. Satan was not in opposition to God, but actually acted as God's accuser, testing and accusing man, holding them to their word and faith. At times the angel went too far, but never was it done in his own desires, he always worked on behalf of God. Who exactly Satan was, as an angel, is a hard thing to track. Fallen angels are named in some books and not others-- apocryphal texts with names like Sataniel-- and even the fall of Lucifer is unclear in the bible, as the passage most often referred to as relating to the fall isn't actually about that at all.

But I've always thought of this strange figure of ha-satan-- the accuser. One who accused on behalf of his lord, who crafted trials and questions to keep people on the right path, and all the mess that came after, until his accusations were mistaken for cruelty by an evil demon meant to torture us. Satan has often been viewed as a strange, tragic figure for this long path of his myth, from angel to forsaken demon, and the actual background is so much messier still.

(People can fact check me if they desire, it's been about a decade since I wrote a paper on the topic, and I'm definitely waxing poetic!)

So from the winding halls of collective cultural myth and faith, coming to accuse us to test our strength of will, never to damn us or harm us, comes The Accuser, lord of the Obstacles die.

In the next update, I'll be sharing a fun new poll, another fun new backerkit feature, of who y'all would like to see on the new cover for the dice set! We were going to just make the cover and show it by now, but czarfunkle actually thought it would be fun to do a poll after more lords were done and revealed, and I agree. So in the next update, I'll include a poll with a list of the lords shown thus far and we'll see by vote who all we want to see on the cover! I will likely include the most voted for on the front, and the second most on the back cover, just so no one feels left out!

Note that we are looking to have multiple lords on the cover, so no worries, it won't just be one of the 21! : )

Talk again very soon!
your Pub Gob,
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