Putting this out here not as an announcement, but more as a public way to hold myself accountable: I’m making an early resolution to, sometime in 2025, complete and release a second Nua Gazetteer. It will focus on a different region of my D&D-related fantasy planet, collecting new maps I created and refined circa 2022-2023, based on designs in the first volume that I started about 30 years ago as a teenager.
Like Volume 1, this will be a maps-plus-vignettes book, with broad overviews for most of the locations, but with considerably more detail on at least one of the region’s main settlements—a place called Nevela, the City of Knowledge. Also like Volume 1, I’m playing fast and loose with things like logic and continuity, both “because fantasy” and because I don’t expect this thing to sell much (Volume 1 has maybe moved about 10 copies, which is more a tribute to the kind loyalty of friends/family than any inherent quality).
Ideally I’ll be able to cram in another, bigger city as well—both because I love worldbuilding and lore as well as my long-term goal for a Volume 3, which would collect in-depth surveys of six more new cities and their surrounding realms, for which a two-city practice run of Volume 2 might help lay groundwork. It would all be system-agnostic, since the tabletop role-playing hobby went bonkers in 2023 for umpteen dozen reasons, and I’m not a game designer by any stretch of the imagination. I just dig lore galore, you know?
Anyway, during this feast-or-famine decade of my design career I’ve rediscovered that it’s good to set goals in both professional and passion projects, so that’s what I’m doing here. But I will put it out at some point, because what better way to mentally combat not only the real world’s myriad large-scale insanities, but also my own personal real-world middle-aged oblivious follies of design-biz irrelevance, than by dreaming up amazing places and inviting people to come play in them?
