Insomnia 0.2

Boom! Thirty extra pages of Insomnia!

Blackpost

This month, we've got everything about Blackpost -- a terrifyingly distant corner of the Dark Matter universe, complete with blaster rules, factions, and so forth. Fleshing out just one little colony as its own setting has been a rewarding challenge, since everything gets to be zoomed in and more personal. For once, your Dark Matter game gets to be grounded on one planet, rather than jet-setting across the 'Verse!

Monsters

We've also got the first two monsters, ready for you to playtest! These two are both Undead -- the Slasher and Vampire -- neither of which are exactly what you might expect. 

The monsters in this book have a number of extremely cool, extremely dangerous features that should catch your players off guard. First and foremost, each one comes with three different tiers, allowing you to scale monsters for your party all the way from 1st to 16th level. Minions, similarly, have a scaling system built into the overall package. 

Secondly, each monster has a streamlined and more dangerous version of Legendary Actions called "Dread Actions." Very simply, Insomnia monsters act between every single player's turn! I'm confident this will help make every combat encounter in this book an intense life-or-death struggle. (Though, they might be a bit powerful at the moment -- it's something for us to investigate more closely in playtesting!)

Plans

I'm hesitant to make hard-and-fast promises about where we're taking Insomnia in the future, since the entire D&D space is likely to be in transition throughout 2024, but I would like to give you an idea of what's next on the work queue for this project. 

Subclasses. We're working on a lineup of horror-themed subclasses to be spread between each of the three settings. They're not all going to be brand new additions -- certain entries from Valda's are simply too good of a match to pass up -- but most will be.

Monsters. I've got art and writing finished for a total of six monsters, and we're aiming for a minimal viable product of twelve, divided into three sets of four. We could easily scale the number of monsters if we bring this project to Kickstarter, however.

NPCs. Every setting needs a comprehensive grab-bag of NPCs for you to drag-and-drop into any given encounter. That'll definitely be a beefy section of each entry, but as far as I'm concerned, it's essential if we intend to follow through with our goal of making each setting as easy to run as possible. 

And that's sort of it! I reckon this will be about 150 pages in total, when all is said and done. 

It's also worth mentioning that we've been working very hard on the Book of Extinction for the last couple of months, so next month might be a lighter release than normal, as we work to push out the next big update for that and finalize the accompanying Last Owlbear adventure. Moreover, part of the coming month probably needs to be a week off!

I hope you enjoy!