Shewstone Year-End Upate, 2024

The Chariot Card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck

2024 was Shewstone Publishing’s eighth full year in business (founded June 2016), and this is our fifth end-of-year update (which I suppose should really be called a retrospective) on the shewstone.com blog. I keep expecting these updates to become boring—but that would require an uneventful year. For my part, I’d be happy to have an uneventful year, but I don’t expect I ever will.

The Chariot card from the Rider-Waite taror deck represents promise, energy, and adventure, coupled with managed risks and the need for a firm hand to keep the chariot under control.

Regular Publication of Drintera® Magazine!

Drintera® is Shewstone Publishing’s original fantasy TTRPG world, inspired by our love of history and mythology and created by a large, diverse international freelance team. We’re publishing Drintera in magazine form, because we know most gamers are more interested in reading cool fantasy lore for inspiration than in starting a new TTRPG campaign in a new world. The magazine format also gives us a chance to feature different authors from our excellent pool each month.

We’ve published a new issue of Drintera Magazine every month since March 2024. Only the December issue is running late, and that’s due to failure to account for my travel schedule, not any major problem. Nine issues means we’ve released far more products in 2024 than we did in all previous years combined. Publishing a magazine requires a level of discipline that will serve us well with future products. I consider us to have leveled up again. (If you’re keeping track, that means we’re now a seventh-level TTRPG publisher. I hope Fund Kickstarter is on our fourth-level spell list!)

The work of the Drintera freelance team is nothing short of amazing. My favorites from our first year include the gods Zuvinar and Azboran by Jessica Lévai; Twin Moons Empire by Shu Qin Tan; the Secret City of Ivondar by Deborah D’Antonio; and dwimmers (magical auras) by Scott Mackall Gilman. The team is only just hitting our stride and there is much, much more we can do! You can buy single issues on DriveThruRPG.com or Shewstone’s own online store, including our free sample, Issue #1.

The best way to see excerpts and teasers of Drintera lore is to follow our Patreon. It’s free!

Drintera Needs You!

So far, Drintera has been a creative success but not a commercial success. Single-issue sales and our Patreon haven’t been nearly enough to meet the costs of artwork, writing, and editing. I’ve decided to switch to Kickstarter to finance the second year of Drintera Magazine. Backers get a 6- or 12-month subscription to the digital magazine for just $4 per issue. Back issues from 2024 will be available as an add-on. If you’re interested in reading some fresh, deep, original fantasy lore and supporting a diverse professional freelance team, please follow our Kickstarter and pledge when we launch!

At this time, I’m trying to decide whether to launch in late January or postpone till March. It depends on how marketing efforts go.

101 Adventure Frames in Enchanted England is coming — slowly

The Magonomia product line is still my pride and joy and work is still in progress. I would be dishonest if I said Drintera hadn’t taken time and money—mostly my time—away from Magonomia product development. I already postponed the Kickstarter launch for our next book, 101 Adventure Frames in Enchanted England, from October 2024 to May 2025. It looks like that will slip further to later in 2025. I don’t like it, but I would rather delay the Kickstarter launch and deliver on time than the other way round.

Production is coming along well. All 101 adventure frames have been through one round of revision and editing, and about 40 have completed a second round of revisions after I raised expectations (and pay) for our patient, professional authors. The authors and I are very proud of our work. We’ll be posting occasional samples of playable adventure frames on our blog: we can preview a full adventure frame every couple of months and not risk spoiling this book of 101 of them. (Check out or existing samples, The Angel of Stone and The Gullimore Ghosts, in the Tales of Wizardry category on our blog!)

Magonomia Core Rules Featured in Bundle of Holding

We had a windfall opportunity in November. The kind manager of the Bundle of Holding approached me and asked if we’d agree to include the Magonomia core rules PDF in December’s bundle. Shewstone’s share of the revenue was a nice boost and it actually made 2024 the best sales year for Magonomia since it was crowdfunded in 2020. Equally important to me, the Bundle of Holding put our product in the hands of hundreds of new gamers. Some of them are going to want to play it. Others will read it and be impressed (everyone who reads Magonomia should be impressed!).

Most subscribers to this newsletter already own Magonomia. In case you don’t, and you missed the Bundle of Holding, I have some good news. Magonomia core rules is permanently marked down on DriveThruRPG.com, to $20 PDF / $53 hardcover.

Newsletter Back to Quarterly

Effective immediately, our newsletter, the Shewstone Scryer, is going back to quarterly publication. There’s always cool stuff to share about Drintera but we can better keep the Drintera fans up to date with our Patreon (free to follow!). For a company our size, a quarterly newsletter is more appropriate.

Looking Ahead to 2025

The TTRPG business is a chicken-and-egg problem: you need to build an audience to sell enough products to become profitable, but it’s hard to build and audience if you have no products to sell. In 2024, we really nailed making products: 9 issues of an awesome magazine, soon to be 10. The challenge, now, is clear. We have to sell them.

My presence on social media isn’t very strong. I’m not interested in becoming a social media personality. I do think I am finally starting to get the hang of marketing, though. The future of Shewstone Publishing will be shaped by the results of our marketing. We’ll either have a successful magazine and a boutique wizard RPG on the side, or a boutique wizard RPG and some more free time.

I founded Shewstone Publishing to bring thoughtful design and deep lore to gamers who love that sort of thing. We’re living the dream. Our freelance team is as good as any in the industry. I’m deeply grateful for the support of our friends and fans. It’s been an enriching journey so far, and the future of this company and our fan community has never been brighter.

Have an excellent 2025!

Adventure Frame for Magonomia - The Gullimore Ghosts

As a preview of our upcoming Magonomia supplement, 101 Adventure Frames in Enchanted England, here’s the completed text of another of the 101 frames” “The Gullimore Ghosts” by John Tibbetts and Mark Lawford.

I promise not all of the adventure frames are about ghosts or cemeteries. We are posting this in October, so we couldn’t resist.

About Adventure Frames

Many game masters don't play published adventures as written, but rather use them as a source of ideas for their homebrew games. An adventure frame is just the essential plot structure for a one-session adventure—the part people are most likely to use. It's the spark to set your imagination running. Details of specific scenes, characters, and challenges can be filled in as the game master wishes. An experienced game master should be able develop an adventure frame into a customized story in about thirty to sixty minutes.

Shewstone Publishing's adventure frames are presented in "hook, line, and sinker" format, originally developed by Jolly Blackburn in Shadis magazine in the 1990s. The hook is the opening scene or scenes that motivate the player characters to participate in the adventure. The line is the set of fun events and challenges that make the adventure worth playing. The sinker is a surprise, usually a plot twist, that makes the adventure unique and memorable. The sinker can often be omitted if you want the plot to be more straightforward. Finally, preparation notes give you an idea of what homework the game master should do to get ready to run the adventure.

The Gullimore Ghosts

Stock image from 123RF.com. Used with permission.

by John Tibbetts and Mark Lawford

Summary: Find out why ghosts are congregating at the town of Gullimore

Content Warnings: Death, desecration of graves

Genre: Mystery

Place: A small town

Time: Any era

Length: Medium (2-4 hours)

Hook

The (fictional) market town of Gullimore has a ghost problem. Ghosts arise every night, screaming and pleading for peace. It started six months ago with a single ghost, but now there are at least a dozen. No one has been harmed, but the villagers cannot get any sleep. Gullimore is at a crossroads that many merchants travel, and the disruption to trade has become so severe the sheriff (a high official responsible for public safety) has offered a reward to anyone who can put the ghosts to rest.

Line

Arriving in Gullimore to investigate, the PCs find that they aren’t alone. Others have heard of the problem—and the potential reward—and have decided they will solve the problem.

If the PCs have any particular rivals, they may be present and ready to make trouble. Other, less experienced investigators try to tail the PCs to learn what they know and to try to get the jump on them. Others still are there to sell charms to the townsfolk to ward off ghosts and to ensure a quiet night’s sleep. It’s as though the investigators are as much a problem as the ghosts themselves.

As for those ghosts, they appear to be recently dead—within the last six months or so, which aligns to the length of time the problem has been ongoing. There is no shortage of witnesses, and the fear and dread has turned to annoyance. At night, during the witching hour (between 3 and 4 o’clock), the investigators flock to the streets to try to commune with the ghosts, to catalogue them, and to ward against them.  All the while, the ghosts wail and complain at their disturbed rest.

Speaking to the ghosts is not very informative. They know their names and something of their former lives, but they’re obsessed with being unable to rest and are fruitlessly searching the for what disturbed them.

If the PCs ask the townfolk who the ghosts are, they find the spirits are not local, but there are witnesses who recognize them. One identifies old Rob, a stonemason from yonder town. Another identifies Meg, a farmer’s wife from the other end of the county.

Following the trail to those locations, the PCs can find the ghosts’ graves and can determine via magic or physical inspection that those final resting places have been robbed and the bodies removed.

Sinker

The ghosts are rising because body snatchers have been digging up graveyards throughout the area and stealing the corpses to sell to physicians in the nearest city (likely Cambridge or Oxford or somewhere with a university or medical school). The hauntings are directed toward the body snatchers, who must be caught and the bodies returned to their graves to end the nuisance.

The body snatchers are Bill Tanner and his son John, and they have some limited magical power bought from a theurgist, specifically a kind of ward that hides them from ghostly attention (see the attached spell description). The Tanners live in a quarter of the town that the ghosts mysteriously avoid, and their tanning business takes them across the county collecting animal hides and bringing them back to Gullimore for treatment—a perfect cover.

The bodies have been sold to the medical school, studied, and then buried in unmarked pauper’s graves in the nearest large cemetery.

Preparation Notes

You may need a few fellow investigators, each with their own motives and methods, some of whom are schooled in the magical sciences. You’ll also need to note that there is a small district of the town that has remained free from the ghostly invasion. When asking questions in that area, the PCs will learn that the neighborhood is actually where the haunting started, which suggests someone has done something to change things there.

Keywords: Ghosts, body snatchers

101 Adventure Frames in Enchanted England is coming to Kickstarter! Follow now to support a strong launch.