Where Ive been! (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

It has now been the longest period on Patreon where I have not posted any content, something that's been eating away at me. I wanted to give everyone an update on what's been happening in my personal life and professional life over the last month. Some good news some bad but hopefully I'm at a point where I can get back into things once more!

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Surgery

At the beginning of the month, in perhaps some incredibly bad timing I had some surgery that left me pretty dead to the world for a few weeks. It was planned to some degree and my health is fine, not to worry! But it made me feel extremely weak and terrible afterwards.

I'm feeling much better now, which is good because there has been a lot of other things going on in my life that I needed to keep on top of.

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Moving Again

Perhaps the most stressful and sad news has been the fact that Ive had continuing problems with moving to Greece. Last year I posted about about moving and since then there have been constant struggles that have drained a huge amount of my energy and mental well-being.

To put it bluntly, its been a mess.

I'm from the UK which as many of you know, stupidly voted to leave the European Union in 2016. At the time I was vehemently anti Brexit as I was just finishing university and hated the idea that choices and job opportunities would be limited if we left. I voted to remain and tried to convince as many people as possible to do the same. Unfortunately that didn't happen and well that's history. At the time I didn't realize how much it would affect me personally in the future but well it absolutely has.

So back to the present, after spending a wonderful few months in Greece last summer, I flew out of the EU and into Cyprus. This was only a few days but when I tried to return to Greece.. well I was refused entry, effectively deported. This was perhaps one of the lowest moments of my life, where I was left shell shocked, broken and disorientated. I thought I had been doing everything I needed to live in Greece full time but as it turns out I wasn't. After returning to Cyprus and struggling to find somewhere to stay for a few days I then flew back to the UK, where I spent the next 5 months trying to figure things out.

I did eventually make it back to my little apartment in Feb 2024 thanks to help from an amazing immigration lawyer I hired from Thessaloniki but I now needed to make some really hard decisions on what I was going to do. It turns out staying in Greece would be another challenge, one that I don't think I can manage at this point in my life.

So, with all that said and done, and lots of details left out, tomorrow I get on a flight to move back to the UK. Thankfully Ive sorted out a lovely little apartment in London that suits me just fine and I'm looking forward to some much more peaceful times in the future.

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Ember Reveal!

Switching tracks to one of the most positive aspects of my life that has gone extremely well recently has been working for Foundry Virtual Tabletop.

I tend to keep a low profile on this most of the time, and the main reason has been that over the last 3 years I have been working with Andrew the creator of Foundry VTT as the co-lead on a game called Ember. At first it was just the two of us brainstorming in 2021. Coming up with ideas, planning thinking about how to push the TTRPG space forwards but it gradually evolved and turned into a real thing.

Now a few years later we are both extremely happy to reveal what we have been working on together, and now with a wonderful team of people working to create a fully fledged digital role-playing game!

Simply put Ember is an ambitious digital roleplaying game created by the Foundry Virtual Tabletop’s Ember Team. Ember is made exclusively for Foundry VTT and is designed to be a massive open-world roleplaying game made for players and gamemasters, with an expansive story, original setting, and features and systems custom-made for online play.

You can see exactly what we mean by this in the reveal page here: https://foundryvtt.com/ember/

And if this sounds exciting to you, check out the KS page here and follow so that you are notified when the KS itself goes live! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/foundryvtt/ember-rpg

I know I should perhaps try not to over hype, but this really is a game-changer. Foundry VTT has effectively made an in-house game studio, with writes, artists, composers, programmers and cartographers to create a game experience that is not only massive in scope and scale but doing so many amazing things with systems and mechanics its going absolutely blow people away. I really believe that.

We will of course be sharing more details on this over the next few months, and when we KS launches everything will shown off in all its glory, so stay tuned!

As you might imagine getting everyone ready for the reveal itself has been very.. "crunchy" and stressful, but now its out there calm can hopefully return.. (For the time being lol)

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Anyway, like I said before, some good some bad, I'm doing just about okay personally, hanging in there so to speak but I also wanted to take a moment to thank everyone currently a Patron for being so patient and understanding.

This Patreon is only one person (With some amazing help with marketing and organizing from my friend Jiggens) and my personal life is always going to have an impact on productivity but I really do appreciate the amazing support I receive on here and in general about my work. I think recently Ive had so many people complimenting my style, detail and approach to creating artwork and this has been an absolute joy to read and hear. So thank you all so much, I love you all and hopefully the next update is more content! :)

Much love and thanks for reading,

~Caeora