Originally posted for Patreon in June of 2022.

Events and Announcements

DIGITAL EVENTS

You can find us streaming on Twitch:

• Saturdays @ 11:00 AM – Crypt Monkey Paints with Dawn
• Sundays @ 11:00 AM – Crypt Monkey Paints AND World Building with Dawn & Ty

All times at in US Central Time.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• This month we’re celebrating our first full year streaming! We’ll be doing a live giveaway on either the 14th or the 15th. So, we hope you join us!
• We’re also ramping up for special rewards this month! Gathering addresses from Crowd Forgers and ordering stickers for the packets. We estimate we’ll get the rewards in by end of this month or beginning of next month and start shipping out right away.
• You’ll find we added the new section below! It’s an excerpt from the Long Shore Courier newspaper. If you were Crowd Forging with us on stream when we were world building around an un-named lake town west of The Plain, Long Shore is what we have named that town! We hope this new addition makes you feel a little more at home on Kethar.

RECENTLY COMPLETED

This is an interesting section. By that I mean that sometimes I might talk about completed production content
or developed content, I might talk about some artwork that is done or additions to the stream or website.
Occasionally, I’ll talk about larger subjects that may just be notes that are ready for the next step.

Which leads me to: we have a pretty good set of notes together on Placement Advisors Sub-Guild! That
includes a great deal of notes, albeit brief, on the Web Guild. Including some crowd forged notes on the class
Stalker and other subjects that were related to the Web Guild.

As cool as it is to have gotten our notes on such a large subject to this point, I’m not sure what to develop
first from those notes! So I ask, what would you like to see developed first from this group? Comment to let
us know if we should work on the Web Guild, or one of the Sub-Guilds like Placement Advisors, Stalkers,
Information Brokers, or Bounty Hunters.

IN THE WORKS

It’s been a little while since I (Ty) have been able to work on the first short story I’m writing for The Plain,
which is about a loner among loners named Terra Oldes. All the “business” of working on The Plain and our
other day to day work, like miniatures, takes a lot of time that I would rather be writing or developing. That
being said, I am able to remind myself that we are laying the groundwork to make the creation process easier
and faster. Like a child though, sometimes I just want to pout a little and then go off and write anyway! So,
you can assume that it delights my inner child to be working on this story again!

I’m currently working on scene two, which I had started a few months ago but, well, see above for the list of
distractions. This scene involves the dangers of complacency on The Plain. In other words, knowing better
and doing better are not the same thing, and skipping the second one can get you killed.

Additionally, after the development work on Dog Oxen last month, I’ll be doing a little bit of rework on the
first scene before moving that scene to the next draft. I want to get some of those missing description points
added to Terra’s dog ox before moving on.

Either this month or next, we hope to share an unfinished draft of one of these scenes with Placement
Advisors subscribers. It was mentioned that you would be interested in this kind of content, so I’m excited to
share!

IN THE PIPELINE

Campfire Story Madness!

I know, that was silly but hey, you know me and I’m silly. 😛

Seriously though, we are looking forward to Campfire Stories being an important part of our content.
Something to give you tiny insights into the world of Kethar while hopefully encouraging you to learn more.

Dawn has been writing campfire stories and lists of ideas for other campfire stories for a few months now.
(I’m going to have to catch up!) We hope you enjoy them too, as we introduce bite-size portions of The Plain
and other areas of the Meera Dalal continent.

Ideally, we’ll be letting more of these out in a few ways over the coming months. Just to make this In The
Pipeline a two part-er, I’ll mention that updates to CryptMonkey.net will be one place for the publicly free
stories. We’re working on that site too so we can give new folks a primer on the world we’re building and
have another place for publicly free things to live.

When updates to the site are complete, we’ll let you know first!

CAMPFIRE STORY

“BLU”
by Ty Rucker

Do I know Shane Metrine? Works on the machines at Kesler’s Mill in Floomton?

Yeah, I know him. And if you’d have met ‘em, you’d know him by the blue tint of his skin. They call him “Blu”
on account of it, but it ain’t nothin’ to make fun of.

You see, old Blu used to be a guide out on the edge. He’d take them soft, rich sods what came from long since
dead berry farmers, and he’d show them a little of The Plain. You know, just a few months in then back out to
safety again. Anyway, he used to take them to see the southern tip of the Great Sand Slip. Camp there a few
weeks, show ‘em how fast things disappear in that sand by placing an old crate or a stone filled sack out for a
few hours, then bring ‘em on home, safe and happy as you like. It was a pretty easy gig as guidin’ goes.

But then this one time, Blu takes this mean, old bastard out and he didn’t wanna see no crate dip below that
yellow sand. They hadn’t spotted a single creature of The Plain the whole trip out, and a sack of rocks sinking
away wasn’t gonna do it for him. So, he orders Blu’s team out to catch a plains critter, thinking he can harvest
two agdal fields with one land barge; he was gonna see him a real monster of The Plain while witnessin’ the
mystery of the Great Sand Slip.

Blu and his team, they didn’t like it none but that nasty old baron was paying, so they spent a couple days out
and come back with a tunnel cat. It weren’t easy, but they netted a young one and tied its tendrils up so it
couldn’t lash out at ‘em. The old rich fella had ‘em tie the cat up so’s it couldn’t get off the sand. But it could
still move, so they knew it would take days for the thing to wear out and lie down to die in its sleep.

For four days that tunnel cat paced and yowled in sorrow. The old rich fart and his cronies didn’t care a lick,
but ever-one else felt for the beast. Its sad and sorrowful moan brought on a sinkin’ sense of guilt that made
you question your own self-worth.

On the fourth day, as it was turnin’ to night and a heavy and steady rain pounded the camp, it was all that
Shane Metrine could take. He told that old sadist he was lettin’ the beast go and if’n he didn’t like it, they
could part ways right then. In other words, baron richy could walk his party back to safety on their lonesome.

Well, old rich people do not like to be told “no”, and he started to lay into Shane with every foul word and
name he could summon to his lips. A strange and terrible thing happened just as that old, furious, rich turd
was threatenin’ to have Shane drug behind a reindar… he stopped talkin’. A final, wet, gurgly sound came
from him midsentence and then nothing for a few seconds, until his entourage started screamin’ and
squealin’ like a heard of stuck boars.

Shane turned to eye the event and saw his former employer slumped over and headless in his giant, pillowed
chair. Next to the chair, the largest tunnel cat Shane had ever seen was gnawing on the old man’s head and
roaring at the terrified people surroundin’ it.

As he looked around, there were at least twenty tunnel cats, working together, taking out people all over the
camp. They’d been taken by surprise and overrun before anyone could react. No one was standing their
ground; they were just sheep for the takin’, running around bleating in fear at the night and the rain.

With nothin’ for it, Shane turned on his heels and let out too. He had no weapons, not even a stick to protect
himself. Just run off, hopin’ to get lost in the dark, which he did.

The sounds of roarin’ and screams were just startin’ to fade when old Shane felt the ground leave out
beneath him. In the failing light, he realized he’d fallen right through into a night swarmer den. He didn’t see
none of the little demons around yet but he knew they were comin’ soon. Reaching under him, he found he’d
squashed one dead when he fell in.

That’s when he heard the rest of ‘em comin’, nearin’ on him to find out what made that commotion in their
domain. Knowing no better, he took that messy corpse and rubbed its inky black blood all over himself.
Meanin’ to make a camouflage, he covered himself from head to toe with the remains of that devil. Then he
laid back still, hopin’ against hope it’d be enough.

Them night swarmers horded into the tunnel and surrounded and covered Shane. Looking this way and that,
wondering where the enemy-prey that destroyed their home had slipped off to. Then they scurried off just as
fast without paying old Shane Metrine any mind.

He fell asleep and the next morning crawled out and made his way back to camp. Not a one ‘cept him had
survived. And the young tunnel cat had been freed by its ilk before they all returned to whence they had
came. His skin, he noticed right away, would not be cleaned of the demon’s blood. It stuck with him like he’d
been tattooed all over.

He stopped trying to cleanse himself of the dark-blue stain left by the black blood. Then Shane gathered up
his gear and some food and headed back to civilization. A few months later, he came to Floomton and took
on work at the mill. According to him, he won’t never go back on The Plain as long as he lives.

So that’s why ain’t nobody calls him Shane no more, just “Blu”. But it don’t bother Blu none, he’s just glad to
be breathing still.

THE LONG SHORE COURIER EXCERPT