Hello there, Mark Della-Croce, Lore Link Product Lead here with a New Year’s newsletter! Let’s recap last year quickly, then talk about what we’ve got coming soon!
Our streaming team really expanded our game in 2025. We kept our planning and actual play series, with me playing M:tA 20: The Victorian Age and Monster of the Week, Mike taking us on delightful adventures through Adventures in Middle Earth, Pendragon, and Dungeons and Dragons, and even our Communications Director Tony kicking the rust off and joining in by taking us through a mission in Star Trek Adventures: 2nd Edition. I covered a wide range of GM topics from chase sequences to introducing kids to TTRPGs to sneakily getting your mech miniature friends interested in adding a little bit of roleplaying to their giant robot battles. But what I’m most proud of our team for pulling together was our Indie Creator Series. We talked to independent creators of small independently published or crowdfunded games over the second half of the year, and got introduced to some great games and amazing people. Laurie O’Connel showed us the thrills and dangers of mountaineering in their game Full Send and I also got to take the team through a cyberpunk thriller with creator Alex Vigna in Bite the Hand. Additionally Mike sat down and talked with unique creators like Emily Fraser to discuss what inspired them to create unique and interesting games! That’s just a partial list of all the cool creators we talked to in 2025. You can see more of them over on our YouTube channel.
Coming up on Twitch in 2026, we’ve got Mike continuing our Indie Creator series, sitting down with Jonathon Lavallee to talk about We Used to be Friends which is a collaborative teenage detective drama game that tasks the players and the game master with creating an interlocking series of mysteries in a city of their own devising. I’ll return from a brief break to sit down with Joshua Simons to talk about the dynamic superhero roleplaying game Paragons, after which I’ll be back to talk about the limited action system Gravity with writer Chris Longhurst. As always, there will be breaks for games and planning, but you’ll have to follow our Twitch channel to get notified of when we go live to find out what we’re streaming each Tuesday.
Development-wise, there’s even more to talk about. We opened up all of the features of Lore Link for all users to experience the full features set of Lore Link, including features like hot spots mapping, templates, and of course, sharing their campaigns with other players. After that, we put our noses to the grindstone and made one of the biggest changes we’ve made to Lore Link: the Lore Data Refactor. We upgraded every user’s data model to data version 1.0, enabling them to use Lore Link however they want. Hierarchies on Creatures, Maps on Items, or even just linking transportation to Timelines. Additionally ,with that new base data, we can also do something even more exciting for our users: give them the ability to name the relationships between data!
And we’re not done developing yet! We’ve got two huge new features releasing in the coming weeks: Import and Export, and Encounter Management. Import and Export is designed to allow users to keep ownership of their data and share their data with others both inside and outside of Lore Link! Encounter Manager is going to help you manage that complicated moment where all of the elements collide in a clash, be it of swords or words! Both of these features are just the tip of the iceberg (sorry, crossed the Atlantic on a boat recently) leading to even more exciting features down the line. So, if you want to take full advantage of all of those features, you’d better sign up for one of Lore Link’s full-feature plans today!
With that, we’ve got the ball rolling in 2026! So ‘til my next newsletter, may your players’ New Year’s Resolutions be to follow the plot at least once this year…
