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In this 56-minute deep drive, Shewstone creative director Andrew Gronosky talks with Paco Garcia-Reed Jaén about the world of Drintera, its vision to promote diversity in fantasy TTRPGs, the gods of the world, the creative process, and more.
Note: As Paco explains in the introduction, the Kickstarter for the 2025 magazine is cancelled. We are trying again to build an audience via Patreon. If you believe in Drintera’s vision, follow us today!
The January 2025 issue of Drintera® Magazine is running a bit late, and it will be the last issue of the magazine for the foreseeable future. We’ll be suspending publication after January 2025 and looking for a new way to finance continued development of the Drintera setting.
The Kickstarter for the 2025 magazine is cancelled. The full cost of publishing the magazine was over $1,500 per issue. 12 issues would then cost more than $18,000. I didn’t feel we could raise $18,000, which meant we’d be facing the prospect of succeeding at the Kickstarter and still losing significant money.
We have every intention of continuing work on Drintera. The vision of a heroic fantasy TTRPG setting with broad cultural representation has huge potential. Follow our Patreon to see where we go with it!
Shewstone Founder Andrew Gronosky—and his cat!—are featured on the StoryComic podcast. We discuss the design principles of Drintera and the power of a diverse creative team.
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.
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!
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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!
A 53-minute interview with Andrew Gronosky of Shewstone Publishing is featured on the Roll Play Grown podcast. We discuss the secret origins of the Magonomia RPG, a good deal about magic and wizards, and how Drintera is becoming a vehicle for diverse creative voices.
093: Bringing historical magic to game development with Andrew of Shewstone Publishing
