Brightnight Academy Update

 

Hi everyone! Welcome to my blog! Today I just wanted to talk about Brightnight Academy for a bit.

It’s almost ready to be published! It’s all formatted and ready to go, except for a little editing here and there and the beautiful cover needs to be formatted onto the front of the PDF. I’m extremely excited! The artwork for this game is lovely, both inside and out. The artists who worked on the illustrations really understood what kind of vibe I wanted this game to evoke.

It’s full of monsters and a little tongue-in-cheek humor, and totally kid-friendly. Despite the backstory of a massive war going on between humans and monsters, the game itself is modestly set in an adventuring academy for mercenaries and heroes called Revenants. This game is like the calm before the storm: Eventually, all of the training and studying the students are involved in will manifest as skills needed on the battlefield against humans, but Skullabelle the Skeleton can’t think about all of that right now, she has a paper on the zoology of shark dogs to write about! And Oliver One-Eye the Cyclops can’t think of anything right now with the way cute Hagga the Witch is looking at him from across the classroom!

It’s cute little moments like that which make an experience in an academy setting game really shine. Sure, it’s up to the players themselves to make those moments and interpret different tables and prompts, but the potential for those slice-of-life events is ever-present in Brightnight Academy thanks to its calm setting amidst a land riled up in the chaos of war.

Brightnight Academy shares many themes with Cozy MMUGS, and that’s intentional. While more action-heavy, Brightnight Academy is about life in the slow lane, taking each day one day at a time. It’s a setting where small events contribute to the larger narrative of growing older and improving yourself in and out of combat. Whereas Cozy MMUGS featured more customization, however, Brightnight Academy prefers to invite you into this world of monsters who just want to learn how to make their world a better place. It’s an established setting, unlike Cozy MMUGS, but like Cozy MMUGS, it would prefer you face each day with an open-mind and an open-heart.

Just today, my husband, a brilliant map-maker, made a map for Brightnight Academy. He made a map of the academy’s campus, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. It reminds me of the brochures you get when you tour universities and colleges. It’s bright and open and uncomplicated but made professionally. It’ll be available as its own PDF alongside the game and characters sheets when Brightnight Academy is published soon.

Eventually I plan to publish most of my PDF catalogue as physical books available (probably) through Lulu, and when I do, I’ll make sure to include the map with the book, perhaps on the inside cover. I always like it when maps are on the inside covers of books. It feels like you’re being welcomed into the book’s world right off the bat.

The character sheets for Brightnight Academy are also finished. They aren’t going to win me any awards, but they have all the pertinent information your monster student needs to graduate from the academy and become a Revenant.

And once you do graduate the academy and become a Revenant, the game continues, and I’ve made a character sheet for that as well.

I’ll make another post about Brightnight Academy when it’s all polished and edited and beautified and published on itchio and drivethrurpg. Stay tuned!