Hello everyone and we hope you’ve had a good solstice!

As this year comes to an end we wanted to take a moment to go over what we worked on for Pious Rot during 2025, what’s new this month and a bit of what’s coming next year.

Recent updates

We’ve been catching on Pious Rot this month after some time working on other projects as of late. Lizbeth is making updates to the website and adding a lot of the writing and lore that we wrote this year in order to make it accessible to anyone who’s curious about the world. The navigation to those sections ha also been added to the homepage to make it more obvious that all that world-building was up there on the website, updated as we work on it.

This year of Pious Rot

Starter kit and ready-to-play adventure

After a first round of feedback from people interested in Pious Rot and potential playtesters, we noticed that there was a lot of comments regarding having more adventure hooks, more characters, and more information on the politics and tensions of different areas.

In reaction to this feedback we decided to put together a starter kit which would contain a subset of a region’s folklore, locations, and characters, a simple ruleset adapted from the Cairn rules, and a ready-to-play adventure which would serve as the entry point to the world.

Doing the layout for this starter kit also inspired Lizbeth to push the design and typography for our books and zines a bit further and it was really worth it.

Map of the North

Lizbeth finished illustrating the elaborate map of the North, adding all the roads, villages and key locations on it. This map will serve both as a reference for us while writing about the world but can also be used to give a sense of place to the players during a game.

New areas

Sedge wrapped up most of the writing for the Plains and the bogs of the East this year, fleshing out a lot of the history, culture, and politics of those two areas. There’s still quite a bit of editing and illustration to do for these areas to be complete but getting them to that stage was a big accomplishment and really contributed in building the larger world of Thiusland.

Plans for the next year

The main focus for the next year is to get the Starter Kit finished and ready to print and open up a pre-order for it. Lizbeth started looking into the printing process and the papers which we’ll use to make the 3-zine and map package as tactile and beautiful as possible.

Sedge will be working on the South and West regions of Thiusland and we’ll be sharing the history and lore of these areas in this newsletter as it takes shape.

We also have plans to potentially take part in the Montreal Expozine event and selling those in person in addition to some previews of what the full books will look like.

As always your feedback and comments are always welcome and if there’s something you’d like to know more about the world or the adventures you can reach out to us on instagram or by email.