1/26: Bleakest Pilgrimage

Hey, folks. Welcome to the first blog post of 2026! This year has already been off to a busy start, and we’ve dug right into a big visual revamp of our free Bleak Pilgrimage skirmish rules. The layout has been optimized a bit and we filled the book with full-color pics of our own cults and table builds in action. You can go and grab that free PDF at your leisure.

Things to come

We just wrapped up another Kickstarter campaign, which means we’ll have a couple more starter cults coming to the storefront. Our monthly subscribers got that stuff a while back as the beta release and we’ve got more coming to Patreon/Tribes that way in February with the release of some new rules and models. In addition to some much-needed reinforcements for the Watchers of Eyax, whose cult only starts with two (granted, decked-out) units, we’ve also got rules coming for a new (and very powerful) unit type: Demigods.

Artreya, Hammer of the North Wind (demigoddess) and the Watchers of Eyax

Kitbashing cults the old-fashioned way

Now that we have a good selection for the official miniatures range, we’ve been setting our sights on flexing the mini-agnostic nature of the game. Both Jeremy and I have started kit-bashing randomly generated cults from our massive sprue collection and we’re hoping to show off the final builds soon. With the “Scavengers" special rule, you can go wild with the dice rolls and build something appropriate to what you get as you go. Here’s a WIP look at my own cult built from various Games Workshop bits. If you play this way we would love to see what you come up with. We’ll have more news as this little hobby side-project progresses.

Much Ado About CRUX

ZineQuest 2026 is coming in February and we always strive to have at least one CRUX project ready. For this year, we’re going for a big one and tackling a fresh take on the core rules themselves. After working on a slew of smaller games using the system, we’ve learned a whole lot about what makes it tick, and we’re really excited to apply all of that to a new format of the foundational rules codex.

We’ll be bringing this work to Kickstarter first with a limited print run, but the new version will be made available in place of the old free rules shortly after that. We’re really excited for this one and for all that it means for our existing (and future) range of CRUX-based games. There’s not going to be any major structural changes to the actual rules, just a new coat of paint, better organization, and focus on things that have worked well in offshoots like Passage to Yondoor, MEAT, and (of course) Bleak Pilgrimage.

January Free Miniature: Jar Merchant

For this month’s free (and FDM support-free) STL, we have a People of the Clay-themed civilian miniature. As always, there’s also a pre-supported version included for those who want to print in resin. Happy gaming, folks,

• Dutchmogul and the Ill Gotten Games team

The original People of the Clay along with Tuhn Kiln-Born (demigod) and the Jar Merchant