Hello hello! Pushing this out publicly for a change as I look back on 2022 and what I’ve been up to finishing this first campaign setting. Whether or not you’ve supported me financially, or if you’re just browsing this page, thanks so much for your interest!

At the top level, Atlas of Central Fao is now 77.70% percent complete—in total, I’ve completed 530 out of 686 total writing tasks, and 111 out of 139 artwork tasks. This book is far from small, and it’s possibly going to clock in at 250,000-300,000 words…or more. Ouch! That’s what you get for going for breadth. Going forward, I’m more liable to release single regions as expansions, but I’m hoping this very large setting guide will serve as a foundation for Nivost as an in-depth world overall to build out from.

Stats: 2022

  • Writing Tasks Complete: 175

These writing tasks were all over the place, but have focused on nearly entirely completing three out of my six regions: the Songstress Forest—North, the Palm Corridor, and the Cerulean Fields. A lot of other foundational elements, such as creature design, were almost entirely done this year, but many of the remaining artwork tasks as for painting them up.

  • Art Tasks Complete: 34

For artwork, I focused on doing concept art for subregions and (finally) completing the book cover! Some of the art releases have been quiet this year because it’s less of the high-profile, breathtaking work and much more focused on the nitty-gritty, establishing its basic elements. I’ve had a tendency to work top down, and that means the excitement has cooled as I’ve worked, rather than the opposite. Hopefully that all pans out to the work being more mature. Much of my completed artwork has been done in the past 3 months, too, and my pace will likely accelerate as I switch over to a massive 24-inch drawing tablet, away from my smaller current model, which I’ll be receiving tomorrow.

I’ve also got the internal formatting of the book worked out, and bugs fixed up this year; some of the pacing this year has been slow as I developed a lot of those internal frameworks, and also as I edited some early writing tasks to be as comprehensive as my more recent tasks.

  • Overall Productivity: Middle of the road

To be honest, this has been a really tough year. I completely fell apart in the summer and that severely restricted my productivity for three months out of the year. On the upside, my best month in 2022 was October, and overall I’ve been significantly better since getting out of that rut. 

Going Forward

Now that I’m in the last quarter of the book, I’m looking forward to finally finishing this behemoth and getting it out there—and building out from there, too! Because I’ll be releasing this for free, I really appreciate everyone who’s given anything at all to this project, now or later, and you’ll see it here and elsewhere when it’s done 🙂

Thanks so much for reading, and Happy New Year!

– Audrey