Not every game needs a campaign, a huge rulebook, or hours at the table. Sometimes you just want something quick, silly, and strategic!

Adapt is a game you can play between RPG sessions, at conventions, or with family and friends.

This is a fast-paced survival card game where you play alien space cadets competing to prove who is best suited to survive the hostile environments of another world. You’ll change your arms and legs to survive floods, earthquakes, freezing storms, crushing gravity, and more — all while trying to outlast the other players.

Quick Facts:

• Hand management, 15–30 minutes playtime
• Fully playable solo
• 1-4 players (all ages 5+)
• No app, no moderator, no setup hassle
• Everything fits in one small box

Each turn, a new environment appears. If you can adapt to survive it, great. If not, you or take damage.

Last cadet standing wins.

Simple, right?

Adapt is now live on Kickstarter! So join us there: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shadesofvengeance/adapt?ref=e342ey

– Ed

Hi everyone!

When things move as fast as they do around here, it can be surprisingly hard to remember what happened at the beginning of the year. That, I think, makes it even more important to occasionally stop, take stock, and look back. We have done a huge amount of work this year, delivering multiple projects and laying the groundwork for several more.

I wanted to take a few minutes to walk you through what we have delivered, and what is coming very soon.

First, I delivered Era: The Consortium 10th Anniversary Edition, alongside Time Travel Campaign’s Part 6. I am still working on the Armoury, which is now about 50% complete, and the Company Handbook has proven more challenging than I initially anticipated. I am hopeful both will be finished and delivered not too far into the new year.

Secondly, I delivered a game that was completed at the end of last year: Era: Sharkninja. In this game, you play a genetically modified humanoid shark fighting dieselpunk robots that have enslaved humanity. You are not doing it out of altruism, though: humans taste better when they are free range!

I also completed another year of The Era Zone, with two issues – Era: Soulmist and Era Pex. The latter may see an expansion in the future, but for now my creative focus is firmly on the Consortium expansions mentioned above, as well as the full Core Rulebook for Era: Soulmist.

This year also saw the completion and delivery of Era: Survival 8th Anniversary Edition. I am particularly happy with how that one turned out, especially the final cover image. That release closes out my immediate expansion plans for Survival. I will continue supporting it with new campaigns and materials, but if you are looking for the definitive version of the game, the 8th Anniversary Edition is it!

I would also be remiss not to mention Era: Crueltide. This slightly mad game, involving Jack O’ Lanterns attempting to stop Christmas with help from other holiday mascots, was funded in November and is already delivered to backers.

Looking ahead, the new year brings brand new games, including Adapt, a card game I originally wrote during COVID and am finally bringing to release, and Era: Marscape, a Doom-inspired roleplaying game.

Outside games directly, I completed two more books this year: the novel The Dark Reaches In, and Voices from the Void, a practical guide to writing, directing, and producing audio drama.

Aside from a small booklet of additional material for Era: Crueltide, that rounds out the game-related work. That said, I have also been busy in comics and audio, which I will cover in separate posts following this one.

All in all, 2025 has been a hard year for many people, myself included, but I am proud that I did not let that get in the way of creativity or productivity. If you have managed the same, you should be proud of yourself too.

Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support – I could not do any of this without you.

I hope you have a wonderful new year, and that the things you are working toward come to fruition.

– Ed

Hi everyone!

It has been a full week since Leo and I last plunged headfirst into new levels on Doom Eternal which means I have forgotten absolutely everything about the game.

Pretty sure quite a few things exploded. Pretty sure the Marauder guys were really annoying. Pretty sure I missed a collectible and we had to teleport back. I remember making a joke about Doom Patrol in the title and having to explain it to someone who was unimpressed with my sense of humour (to say the least).

Also, something about Samuel Hayden telling us what to do and me not being even slightly suspicious of his plan. Because I trust him. He’s a brilliant scientist, and he was so helpful on Mars. 10/10 ethics, zero red flags. That’s my memory of it.

I did mention the memory problem, right?

Anyway, today we return to the demon slaying, the complaints about first-person platforming, and whatever impossible enemies the game wants to throw at us.

Join us at https://www.twitch.tv/shadesofvengeance to experience the fun first-hand!

– Ed

Hi everyone!

Stretch goals are a funny thing in crowdfunding. I always get the balance wrong.

I get excited about any project I bring to Kickstarter, and my stretch goals end up being: too ambitious, too time-intensive, too expensive… and I never feel right about charging people extra to unlock them.

From a strictly business perspective, that’s “wrong”. And you could easily argue that I should be more measured or more commercially minded.

But here we are with Era: Crueltide, and we’ve now unlocked 20 pages of stretch goals. This is material I’ve written specifically for this Kickstarter, still committing to deliver everything (including the extras!) in time for Christmas. Maybe that’s too ambitious. But I’m confident I can make it work.

So should Stretch Goals even be a thing?

The reality is that even though £10 for a full tabletop RPG is an excellent deal, many people want further incentives. There’s a belief that stretch goals increase total funding. I don’t know whether it’s dogma or backed by hard data I haven’t seen.

Era: Crueltide hasn’t been my biggest ever success on Kickstarter, but it’s done respectably well, and I’m proud of what it’s become. And the stretch goals matter to me because the community helped create them. From John McClane to The Guilty Snowwoman Ava Launch, backers spoke up about what they wanted to enhance their game and the world.

The result is a 20-page booklet: Digital for all backers and Physical for anyone who wants it. Physical copies do cost a little extra because of print costs, but many people have still chosen to add it.

I suspect any marketing expert would tell me I’m making a mistake giving so much away. Here’s the reality:

I care more about creating an amazing game and a brilliant experience than I do about squeezing every pound out of a campaign.

Maybe that’s wrong.
Maybe I should be more “business smart.”

But I’m willing to be wrong. I’m willing to put the time and effort in to make something special.

Era: Crueltide ends in just over 24 hours, if you’d like to get these extras.

– Ed

At a recent convention, I ran a Creator Clinic to help people improve their games and storytelling. One thing I had to emphasise several times is rules are not an afterthought.

If your entire game doesn’t hang together through its rules, it’ll be unplayable for most people. A good test is:

Can someone read your rules once, set them aside, and still play the game correctly about 80% of the time?

That’s what you should aim for.

I’ve seen players who couldn’t find a specific rule, made something up, and later discovered their version was exactly what was written. There’s no higher compliment for a designer.

When you build a game, you should be constantly asking yourself: “Do my rules strengthen my world, or fight against it?”

Art and visuals draw players in. Rules and playability make them come back for more.

– Ed

Hi everyone!

Hi everyone. Today I want to talk about one of the most important moments in a tabletop role-playing game: the moment you enter combat. You’ve realised the enemy is too much, you’re not going to be able to negotiate – you’re going to have to fight.

Then… you do whatever initiative mechanic your game calls for.

Sometimes that breaks you so far out of what you were doing that you lose the feeling of the moment. You’re no longer excited: suddenly you’re doing arithmetic or scrambling for a deck of cards.

I do want to recognise that the way the Games Master presents it absolutely has an impact. The way it is presented can promote the excitement is not to be underrated.
It’s worth mentioning that I believe a good GM can fix almost any game! I just believe that they should not have to!

But a lot of games (and I’m somewhat guilty of this myself) simply do what everyone else does, without really thinking about how to promote the best feeling in gameplay.

So that’s what I’ve been revisiting! I’ve never been totally happy with my initiative rules, which are more or less the same as everyone else’s: roll one die, add your initiative number, that’s the order.

From the very first times I introduced RPGs to brand-new players, I noticed it was a problem: they’d done a few non-combat rolls and then bam! Initiative!
“Why is this the mechanic?”
It made no sense to them in context, it didn’t fit. I did it because it’s what everyone does.

For years I’ve been asking: What can I do better about initiative? and What feeling do I want to evoke by changing it?

I’m not going to tell you what I’ve come up with because it isn’t final yet! I’ve got ideas, but the point I want to leave you with is this:

The feeling your mechanics evoke is everything, initiative or otherwise.

Good luck out there, whether you’re a Gamer, a Creator, or a Games Master.

Don’t forget: the vibe is everything.

– Ed

Hi everyone!

I’ve recently been running a couple of workshops at MCM Comic Con, attempting to create Tabletop RPGs in an hour.

These have been generally successful and tend to go the same way: there are loads of ideas, and some of them can be combined together into something that’s really quite interesting and exciting – Era: Sharkninja actually came from this process!

I thought I’d take you through briefly what it is that we do, just in case you’re someone who may decide to turn up to one of our future workshops. I think that we’re improving every time (we’ve run three so far).

So I start by asking the attendees of the workshop, the people who are going to work together on this game, for some ideas on what we might do. So I take the ideas and I combine them together to make – and this will be of no surprise if you listen to my general advice about creativity – is a project paradigm.

Then we split up into groups! Each group has a set of things to work on and decide:

One group works on mechanics, weapons, what equipment is available and such.

One group works on the world – what is it like to live in it? What locations and factions are of note?

And one group works on the character aspect – what do people play as, and how do they play?

The next big part of it is actually the world building groups – sometimes one table, sometimes two – stand up and explain to everyone what it is that they have decided only a few minutes in, so that everyone can align.

At the end of an hour, we have a fair amount of material, and we use it to go over well, we go over it briefly before ending.

From there, it’s up to me to put together the ideas that we have, make sure the mechanics are sound and tweak when necessary, and then get artwork, put it together and deliver a game like Era: Sharkninja.

It’s a great process, and I’m really pleased with the way it helps people understand their own creativity.

So if you’re around in London or another MCM when we’re doing this workshop, drop in, join us! Let’s see what we come up with.

– Ed