Both books are finished.

Not "nearly finished," not "finished once we hit the stretch goal." Written, illustrated, laid out, done. ArcoMage 5E: The Outskirts goes live on Kickstarter on August 17.

What is in the box:

• The Player's Guide - the Crossroads Daemon, a complete new class carried through all twenty levels with three subclasses. 154 spells. 80 creatures organised by where you actually meet them. 40 relics of the verge. Five backgrounds and three heritages native to the Outskirts.
  
• The Game Master's Guide - sixteen chapters and six quests. What the roads are really for, who is waiting at the end of them, the Shadow Campaign, and a chapter of secrets kept deliberately from the players.
  

Both full colour hardbacks, 8.5 x 11. The GM book is a real print job, not a cheap black-and-white companion, because a screen deserves the same art the table gets.

It is fifth edition compatible and it needs nothing from the digital game. Drop the Outskirts next to whatever you are already running, or start there.

I have been building this world for a long time. This is the first time anyone else gets to walk around in it.

Follow the build and you will know the moment it opens - early backer tiers go first and they go fast.

See you at the crossroads.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share something I found recently that has actually been pretty helpful for me as someone who plays different games.

One problem I always have with games is that there is just too much happening all the time. New seasons, limited events, special rewards, updates, giveaways... and somehow I always end up finding out about things after they already started.

Especially when you play games like Monopoly GO, Diablo 4, Path of Exile, or other live-service games, missing a few days can mean missing some pretty good rewards.

A while ago I came across EZG's Facebook page, and I've been checking it from time to time. It’s basically a place where they collect gaming news, event reminders, promotions, and community activities in one place.

What I like about it is that it’s not only posting sales stuff. They also share things like upcoming events, new updates, and game-related information that players might actually want to know.

For example, when a game has a new season coming, a special event starting, or some limited-time reward available, it’s nice to have somewhere that reminds you before you miss it.

They also do giveaways occasionally, which is a nice bonus. Some of the events are really simple to join - usually just following the page, liking the post, commenting, and sharing. It doesn't take much time, and you get a chance to win something.



I’ve seen them post content for games like:

• Monopoly GO
  
  

• Diablo 4
  
  

• Path of Exile 1 & 2
  
  

• ARC Raiders
  
  

• FC 26
  
  
  

and more.

Obviously everyone has different games they enjoy, but if you’re someone who likes staying updated with gaming events or just wants to discover new deals and community activities, I think it’s worth taking a look.

Here’s their Facebook page if anyone is interested:

https://www.facebook.com/ezgdotcom

Hopefully this helps someone else who is tired of missing game events like I was.

I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on daemon horns this week, and I want a sanity check before these get locked into the book.

The problem: every tiefling I drew had different horns. Not slightly different - different animals. And since the Crossroads Daemon is built on inherited blood, the horns ARE the inheritance. Having them change between pages quietly undoes what the text spends three chapters establishing.

So there are three candidates.

1. Official style - low, thin, wide-set, sweeping back almost horizontally and hugging the skull. It is what the rulebook art does. My problem with it is that it reads as a headdress or as long pointed ears before it reads as horns, and it disappears into the hair at small sizes.

2. Tall vertical - planted forward on the skull, rising straight up well clear of the hair, with a slight backward curve near the tips. Gives the head an upward silhouette.

3. Crown - heavy, set low and close together on the forehead, sweeping outward past the temples and then turning up at the tips. Sits across the brow like a crown and carries real mass.

I have gone with 3 for now, for two reasons. It is closer to what the official art seems to be reaching for than it first appears. And it is the arrangement that makes anatomical sense on something that fights standing upright - a buck's antlers are built around lowering the head to spar, and a tiefling is not doing that.

But I have been staring at these for a week and I no longer trust my own eye. Vote, and tell me if I have got it wrong.

Detail I keep coming back to.

A daemon's horns come in heavy and low, the way a ram's do, and they are ribbed the whole way. Each ridge is a season of the trade, laid down like the ring of a tree. They grow in slowly over the first years, curling further with each soul brokered and each contract kept.

So an old daemon's crown is a full accounting that a stranger can read at a glance. This one has been dealing a long time, and dealing well.

The bit that makes it work: anyone who has kept sheep can count them, and on the verge a good many people have. Your professional history is written on your head in a notation every farmer already knows.

People also watch for filed-down horns. A daemon ashamed of their crown is either the most dangerous kind to deal with or the only kind worth trusting, and nobody agrees which.

Problem spotted in testing. Recall is a 2nd-level class feature and it carries you and nobody else - deliberately, because the daemon is the safest scout on the verge and the worst rescue.

Except a party with three or four daemons in it does not need a party bus. They each just leave. So the encounter you built ends with the room emptying in one round and everyone shrugging.

The fix that went in: a Recall tears the place you left out of true. For 1d20 rounds nobody can Recall out of a 300 foot radius centred on where you departed from, until reality settles. The caster is not exempt.

What I like about it is the tax scales with the actual problem. One daemon leaving pays nothing, because they were only casting it once anyway. Four daemons leaving pay everything, because the first one out pulls the road up behind them. Arrivals are untouched, so you can still Recall in - and you can still beat it with 300 feet of spacing or with Gate at 10th, which are both plans rather than accidents.

The sign outside says where every adventure starts, and the book takes that literally.

Jane's is the one warm room on the frontier. The important structural bit is that work is offered by the fire rather than posted on a board, which sounds like flavour but changes how sessions open. A quest board is anonymous. A person leaning over your table and asking is not, because somebody is always looking you in the eye while they lie to you about how simple this will be.

There is a card table in the corner, some of the people at it are not people, and there is a version of the ArcoMage duel your characters can actually sit down and play. It doubles as a way to settle things that would otherwise get settled with a sword.

Also the food is genuinely good, which in a frontier tavern is the most fantastical element in the entire book.

The engine is: quest, deal, collect, spend. Souls are the currency and they do not come back on a long rest. There is no refill. Every one of them came from a debtor who died still owing you.

Which means the class has a real, deliberate weakness that is worth understanding before anyone builds one: kobolds do not sign contracts. A dungeon full of strangers who owe you nothing is the one environment where nearly every feature you have is switched off. Collect needs a debtor. The ledger needs names. The hoard needs somebody desperate enough to trade.

Three sessions of taverns, funerals and desperate people, and you are frightening. Three sessions of corridors, and you are a lightly armoured archer with a familiar. Same character sheet.

That is not a flaw to be patched, it is the shape of the class, and it puts a real obligation on the GM to populate a frontier honestly.

Small decision, big effect at the table.

Eighty creatures, and they are grouped by region: the Kingdom, the Crossroads, the Cemetery, the Bog, Jane's Tavern, the Outskirts proper, the Card Table, and From Away.

The practical version of that is you are running a session in the Bog, something goes sideways, and you open to the Bog and everything on those pages belongs there. You are not hunting through the M's hoping something fits. It also means the geography teaches itself: read the Cemetery's monsters and you have learned what the Cemetery is like without a single paragraph of gazetteer.

"From Away" is my favourite section header in the book and I will not be explaining it.

At 3rd level you pick a Broker, and they are three answers to one question. What do you actually do with a debt once you are holding it?

The Collector takes it seriously and takes it in person. Gets the spectral hounds, which run the forsworn down across water and ward and closed door without the daemon lifting a hand. Kills and collects at range. Fights like a spider in a web.

The Hell-Broker has partners further down and sells the paper on. Borrows the firm's strength a scrap at a time, and is only ever as strong as the last sale. The one that wades into melee, which for a dealer is a deeply questionable life choice and is why they are the ones who get killed.

The Freelancer signs nothing they cannot walk away from. Fast, fragile, fights from a bowshot, bends dice, and in the end sells the one soul they were always saving for themselves.

They despise each other exactly the way experts in the same craft always do.

Because the book the table reads and the book behind the screen are genuinely different books, and pretending otherwise ruins one of them.

A player should be able to read the Player's Guide cover to cover without spoiling a single thing the GM is holding. The moment you bind those together you either spoil the campaign or you water down the GM material until it is useless. Most settings ship one book and a pile of swag; this ships the table's book and the secrets behind it.

The GM guide is not a thin appendix either. Sixteen chapters and six full quests, including a Shadow Campaign, a chapter on running the daemon at your table, and one called Secrets Kept from the Players that is exactly what it sounds like.

Both are full colour hardbacks. The GM book gets the same art the players get, which I would argue is the whole point of a screen worth sitting behind.