As mentioned in our blog post last month, work on the in-development Dolmenwood campaign setting is progressing really well. We estimate that we'll be ready to launch the Kickstarter for the deluxe, 3 hardcover set around Q1 2023. (2023 sounds a long way off, but it's really quite close — we're already almost half way through 2022.)

The Dolmenwood Campaign Setting Books

The full Dolmenwood campaign setting will consist of 3 hardcover books packed with fairy tale magic and eerie folk horror:

• The Dolmenwood Player's Book: Player's setting intro, 8 new classes, new magic, new equipment, herbs, pipeweed, beverages. Around 115 pages.
• The Dolmenwood Campaign Book: Setting lore, 7 detailed factions, 12 in-depth settlements, 200 pages of fantastic locations throughout the Wood, around 100 detailed NPCs, loads of hooks and rumours to drive adventure, appendices of new spells, fungi, herbs, and brews. Around 400 pages.
• The Dolmenwood Monster Book: 62 new monsters, each with a colour illustration and lots of juicy tables for generating quick encounters, lairs, and monster traits. Around 100 pages.

The Evolution of Dolmenwood

People who have followed the development of Dolmenwood for some time are probably familiar with the Wormskin zine. The 8 issues of the zine (published Dec 2015 to Feb 2018) were the first exploration of Dolmenwood, with a series of piecemeal articles describing some scattered bits and pieces of the setting.

It soon became clear that a zine series isn't a very effective way of publishing a setting — while Wormskin is enjoyable to read, the scattered and piecemeal nature of the issues makes the material very difficult to use at the table. So we decided to shift focus onto publishing Dolmenwood as a complete setting, rather than continuing to elaborate it piecemeal via the zine.

The full campaign setting books include almost everything from Wormskin (in a revised and updated format) plus much, much more material besides, all logically structured and formatted for ease of reference and use at the table.

The End of Wormskin

As the full campaign setting books near completion, we've decided that it's time for Wormskin to drift once more into the otherworldly realms of Fairy. From July 31st 2022, Wormskin will no longer be available. So if you want to grab a copy of any of the zine issues, now is the time.

If you want to get into Dolmenwood right now, your best bet is to join our Patreon, where backers can support the ongoing development of the setting and get access to PDFs of the in-development books. For €5 ($6.50 USD) you'll get access to over 440 pages of material — more than enough to start running a Dolmenwood campaign right now! (And way more material than you'd get buying Wormskin.)

If you want to get into Dolmenwood but are not in a hurry, just wait for the Kickstarter. You'll get a lot more for your money than you would buying Wormskin.

If you're a collector, you might want to grab Wormskin as well, for the historical curiosity of seeing the origins of Dolmenwood, before it was developed into its final, complete form.