The new year makes me think a lot about the passage of time. (Being a year older probably doesn’t help, either.) Time has been weird for a lot of us for quite a while now, feeling like it’s been both a million years and nothing’s changed at all. And in a way, that’s what I wanted to channel a bit when I talked to the writing team about this new edition.

I used to work on Vampire: The Masquerade, and I remember the days of metaplot, where a later book had to take place chronologically after the previous ones. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but it can make someone feel like the new edition is “required” or that you must know everything that came before to understand the new version. And that’s not what I wanted for Realms of Pugmire.

That said, some things have changed. I have if nothing else. I’ll let you in on a secret: When I first wrote the original large chunks of Pugmire back in 2016, I didn’t know what was coming next. I really wasn’t sure if this was going to be the only book ever about Pugmire. So not only did I try to cram as much into it as I could, but I also didn’t bother to plan out what would come next. I left threads for my future self to pick up on. And while I did pick up on most of them, there were a few I’ll probably never come back to, and a few I’ve changed my mind on. (In particular, I used “rats” a lot when I clearly meant “rats and mice.” I don’t know why I had rats on the brain!)

I knew I’d have to reframe some things when I did this new edition – call it a “soft reboot,” to use modern parlance. I wanted to present the same amazing world everyone loves, but with all the bits of errant discontinuity smoothed away, and a few things I wanted to ignore tucked under the carpet.

And the easiest way to do that was to set the new book a few years in the future.

Yes, I know what I just said, but this isn’t a metaplot in the traditional sense. This isn’t five years in the future, or ten, or even one. It’s just… later. Yosha’s a bit older, relationships between Pugmire and the Monarchies of Mau are a little more tense, and that scamp Kibu the Red has been busy uniting the badger tribes. (No, I didn’t forget about the badgers. I have plans. You’ll see.) Do you need any of that? No. You can run “classic Pugmire continuity” if you want and nothing meaningful breaks. If you’re really into the world, though, you’ll find a few easter eggs and references to show that things have moved on a bit, though. Hopefully that’s a good sweet spot between enforced canon and exciting reinvention.

Speaking of time being weird, the crowdfunding campaign’s coming up soon! Next week I’ll show off one specific part of the game that I’m really excited about: random character creation. No, really! It’s cool!