Update on Rise of the Guild Master's Status (Patreon)

Good and bad news edition.

I know a lot of you have been waiting for news on this, and there's a reason I've kept quiet but it's not because I was working on it in the background of anything I'm sad to say. More like I've had some changes in my thinking that have demoralized into not wanting to publicly talk about them. Allow me to elaborate. When I was first thinking up ideas for the reboot, I wrote a pretty big list of ideas that had some really outlandish shit as far as the Guild Master's powers were concerned. Rather than making the scale more manageable- which was one of the main things I wanted to accomplish by rebooting it- I came up with tons of random shit like unlocking skills and powered up forms of the girls that I am just not vibing with anymore.

The new origin of GM's powers will still remain the same as what my notes entailed, but it got extremely far away from what I wanted to accomplish. It became about gaining the ability to evoke desires and manifest them in his girls, which undercuts the core theme of RotGM being about personal growth and nurturing the talent to develop on their own. In order to still tie into his powers being related to the Demon Lord of Lust, I'm thinking his powers will be rooted in evoking his own desire to guide, train and oversee his girls and cutting out all the other shit- on top of naturally keeping his slight bonus to charisma and seemingly inexhaustible sexual stamina that comes from having a piece of Zehesiel inside his body.

I'm currently thinking that there might be a pivotal moment early on when he expresses what he wants more than anything, and his swelling desire activates the dormant power within him and it then takes on a form that will facilitate a personalized manifestation of that desire. One that is scaled back, not rooted in skill trees or unlocking abilities. I'll figure out how he acquires new uses of this tactical ability, but the point of the whole story was for him to be a tactical mission-control type character who provided guidance from afar. Anything that doesn't fit that initial idea of the Guild Master being a magical idol manager should be cut.

I know a lot of it sounded cool, but after dwelling on it for a few months, it just doesn't vibe with the kind of story I wanted RotGM to be and I'm not sure why I even came up with most of it. I should've been focused on trimming down elements to better facilitate the slice-of-life, growing stronger a day at a time theme and instead I just kept thinking up epic, crazy shit. That's why I've been quiet on RotGM, since a lot of you were hyped about the stuff I came up with.

Now that I've opened up about it, though, I plan on putting in some work again soon. At the very least I'll iron out the remaining development wrinkles left shortly after Coye vol 4 is finished up. I'm still a lot more interested in working on Coye currently, but I'm hoping that the really expensive dictation mic my friend is getting me will help drastically increase my work speed and if it does that will obviously free me up to work on multiple things. Also, you guys already know I've been feeling like shit lately so that kind of put a damper on my plans to work on two series at once.

Thanks for reading this though and I'm sorry if this is somewhat of a letdown, but let's put it this way, do you want me to work on a version of RotGM that I don't like the direction of, risking me getting burned on it again by trying to make it a huge epic, or one that I've put loads of proper thought into with a more manageable scale? I thought as much.