Thank you all for believing in this and helping fund this. I'll make another update in about a week when I send out the PDF for Academia Arcana. These will be distributed via DriveThruRPG to the emails associated with everyone's Backerkit account. I'm not actually able to send out surveys until later on, so I don't have the ability to easily ask everyone if there's a different preferred email address. So if sending the DTRPG link to the email associated with your Backerkit account is an issue, then you'll need to let me know. 

The proofreader, Jonathan, is going through the PDF and is currently at around page 140. As soon as he's done, I'm sending the files to the printer! That means that you can also help clean up the book if you spot any typos. Send a message if you see something.

These should be ready to share within the month. I'm still waiting on a bit of writing from a contributor and to put some final touches on each issue, but these are close to done.

There’s just a few days left on the campaing! We’re funding, but there’s still stretch goals to be had. We’ve hit the one most important ones: digital generators to make it easy to adventures. And we continue to be on the cusp of getting a digital generator for PCs. But I’d like to add some more content to the Wizard’s Vault zines too! We’ve got 4 zines that are each 32 pages long so quite a bit of extra material if you’re wanting more to bring to the table. Anywho, I thought I’d share a bit about what makes Academia Arcana weird in all the right kind of ways. Inspiration for this post came from MattyBoomBatty’s review video, where he briefly mentions his son’s reaction at spotting a “machine gun” being included on the equipment table! Now, why would I ever put a thing like that there…

Well, the answer is simple: Planar travel. Students and faculty could come from a typical fantasy world just as easily as they could from our modern day. So adding a little modern, and a bit of sci-fi technology, to the equipment list seemed like a smart way to reinforce something that otherwise can go easily unnoticed. But this also is communicated through NPCs: one of the students is named Isaac Skye (like isekai) and is a mutant from the world of Terra A.D. (aka, Mutant Crawl Classics). But that’s not the only kind of weirdness that I included in the setting. 

I think the school’s attitude on demon summon and religious worship is also quite weird, but has a good sense of verisimilitude to it. Students certainly learn about demons and can learn how to summon animals and monsters, but outright classes on demon summoning are forbidden. It’s too much potential for trouble in the hands of students. But what teachers do in their own time is their business. And there’s so many adventures that we’ve all played that are filled with cults. Wizards have quite a disrespect for the deific figures of the many planes, preferring to bargain with patrons. So religious worship is banned. Join a cult on pain of death, or expulsion.

There’s also the concept of “living spells.” This is something akin to the original Vancian interpretation of spells. Random tables and spell misfire results occasionally mention spells escaping and becoming something like an elemental. And the patron included in the core book, the Phlogistonic Continuum, is something like a mass of living magic with a dose of Star Trek’s Q/ Bajoran Prophets/ Star War’s Force thrown in for good measure. 

Then we have some silliness. There’s a card game called delvers, which is vaguely implied to be only playable if you know magic to some extent. Feel free to depict that like whatever CCG is most popular among your game group. Lastly, my good editor, Jeff Scifert, encouraged me to write about other magical schools, which I’d only implied the existence of in the origin manuscript. So now there’s an overview of 10 other schools in the appendix. They range from hag covens, to mountain monasteries, to a school sat upon the precipice of hell which has a vampire for a headmaster.

So yes, Academia Arcana is a bit weird. I hope you like it that way.

Here's some screenshots from Wizard's Vault 1, 2, 3, and 4! I will say that (minus doing the legal stuff, credits, back cover) Wizard's Vault 3 is completely done! Issues 1, 2, and 4 are about 50% done. I need to do some editing on what will probably become 16 pages of material. Then I'm still waiting for about 6 more pages of material to be turned in from one of the contributing writers. So very good progress all around. 

Anyway, please share, share, share the project wherever you can! We've got some awesome stretch goals on the table. I've paid quite a bit out to the contributing writers and they've really delivered so I hope you are all eager to check out the WV zines.

As previously stated, Academia Arcana essentially all done. A proof reader is going through the PDF and finding mistakes that were accidentally created when going from manuscript to layout. That's about 30% done and making steady progress. Even if that's not 100% done by the end of the campaign, the PDF is still "done" enough to share it with everyone at that time. So still planning to send the PDF out very promptly.

I have received almost all the pieces for the Wizard's Vault zines. Only 2 remain: one patron and some separate spells. Those will be easy enough to edit and get into layout later on. Two additional pieces, an adventure and a PC class, need some editing. All the other pieces have been edited and been put into layout. Space has been left for interior illustrations but none of the artwork has been done yet. So really good progress on the WV zines!

Nov 5-8, 2026; Longview, TX

I'm running some Academia Arcana at Long Con! Those are the sessions of Weird Little Freaks, which is meant for Old School Essentials, but seemed easy enough to put in the mysterious "underschool" beneath the Eternal Academy. I actually ran about half the adventure with my 6-year-old son and it was a blast. Looking forward to running again for some folks!

So VTT tokens for everyone and bonus money to the contributing writers! Every piece of art in the book is either made just for this project, or taken from the public domain. And there's art on nearly every page spread so that is lots and lots of VTT tokens for folks.

The second stretch goal is even more fun though! Michael Spreadman hosts the site https://www.livetorole.com and has some pretty cool tools up there already. He actually jumped the gun and already made the generator too! Here's hoping that we get to the character generator. He's got a really user friendly format on the website, but I'll just post the pure text output of the adventure generator. This generator is also found in the Academia Arcana book, but the digital generator saves some page flipping.

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ACADEMIA ARCANA RPG: ADVENTURE

1. ADVENTURE PROMPT
   [d20=3] The Class Cultist
      > Components disappearing from class storeroom for ritual

2. IMPORTANT LOCATIONS
   [d10=10] The Squatch Spot (p. 125)
   [d10=7] Legendary Locations (p. 122)
   [d10=8] Liminal Spaces (p. 123)
   [d10=5] Coven House (p. 120)

3. SCHOOL OF MAGIC
   Elementalism (p. 126)
   [d4=2] All the ink pots in class become watery as the ink—
      [d3=3] demands to be given back to the squid from which it was milked

4. CLUB OR EXTRACURRICULAR
   Mixers (p. 134)
   [d4=4] The party has an ominous theme.
      [d3=3] the fulfillment of the founder's curse

5. CLUES AND ADVERSARIES
   Come up with 5–10 clues the PCs can discover, then choose appropriate adversaries from Professors and Peers and/or the Bestiary.
   See: Professors and Peers p. 136, Bestiary p. 148

6. PREPARE OR IMPROVISE
   Spend time further preparing the adventure or improvise your way through it, as best suits your style.

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Buuuuut, we have the digital character generator next. It will definitely include a text only output (assuming we hit teh goal), but I'm really hoping that we can link it directly to the character sheet, which I'll reveal right here. It's by the amazing Bruno Prosaiko.