Humblewood returns! But, where has it been? (Patreon)

Hey Humblepals, I know you all have a lot of questions about Humblewood 2 and this Patreon, so let’s have a little chat.

Hamlin Hurlwind by Xander Brown

It's been four years since the first Humblewood book was funded on Kickstarter, and with it, its million-dollar stretch goal: Humblewood 2 Alpha! We remember how excited the team was to keep telling stories in the Wood, and we rushed to expand the world, developing considerations for an expanded universe in the first book. It wasn’t long before we had mapped out all of the world of Everden, with a ton of new continents and places to explore.

Our excitement for it never went away, and we’ve been working on Humblewood 2 content for the past few years. Meanwhile, we explored other projects while we figured out the future of the Humblewood series. Heckna was our second campaign setting after Humblewood, and from that, we learned that we needed to focus more on the early drafts of a book and make sure that the text is locked before it goes to design. Fool’s Gold: Into the Bellowing Wilds was a huge success for us and our first attempt at adapting an existing setting to the page really pushed us to work at a more epic scale. 

On top of that, a pandemic changed how we all worked together and with our production partners. We’ve learned a lot about how to design, develop, and deliver great TTRPGs. It’s been a busy few years and we’re excited to be moving full steam ahead with this newfound experience on Humblewood 2!

What have we been working on?

We’ve revisited Humblewood and Everden a few times over the years—Humblewood Tales collects a ton of digital-only content into a beautiful hardcover that expands on the history and culture of the tree city of Alderheart along with fun adventures to keep your Humblewood characters busy. Our Free RPG Day adventures Wakewyrm’s Fury (2020) and Heart of Dako (2021) let us explore new and interesting locales. Heart of Dako is particularly important because it has the first major hints of the themes, mysteries, and settings of Humblewood 2.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been slowly hammering out the core structure of Humblewood 2—we’ve got a rough structure for the locations, adventure, and a slew of player options (new races and subraces, a new class!) that we are considering including. The team has been plowing through all this content that we have been building up to refine it and decide what to focus on. But how to start sharing it with the world?

Along came a Patreon…

We’ve learned a lot since the first Humblewood campaign, particularly the importance of rough drafts and playtesting. Turns out that if you share your works in progress with a bunch of cool RPG nerds, you get a lot of great feedback that can only improve your game—who knew?! Another benefit of sharing our work in its early stages means we have the time to make those necessary tweaks and changes, long before we lock in artwork and page layouts. Essentially, we want you all to be involved. If you like it, then we know it's on the right track!

We had always promised to share this playtest content with the backers of Humblewood 1, but we also want to make sure new fans have access to it as well.

That’s where the transition of this Patreon from Big Bads to Humblewood 2 content comes in—it's how we are going to share all this playtest content with you. We want this to be a place you can share your thoughts and ideas with us!

So, what’s next?

The year ahead is an exciting one—every month, we will be sharing brand new Humblewood content for patrons and backers of the first campaign to read, playtest, and give feedback on. We’ve created a fun collection of Humblewood content that we will be rolling out all through 2024. Here’s what the first few months look like:

January: New player races! Birdfolk and animalfolk are the heart of Humblewood, so we had to start with two of the new races to play.

February: An introduction to the Tanglewilds! There’s gonna be a mini-bestiary, some new feats to test out, and a new subclass to try!

March: A first look at a brand new class! This is new territory for us, so we will be very excited to get feedback from you all on it.

This year is going to be a very exciting one for us, and we can’t wait to show you all the places Humblewood 2 is going to take you. Let's get started!

— Jordan Richer & The Humblewood Team