Life keeps changing... significantly

Dear ADOM community,

while I never have been known for regular updates and timelines keep changing I today would like to talk about a major change in my professional life that also will have profoud effects on my ADOM activities.

As some of you know I am one of three CEOs of a German IT company called QuinScape. QuinScape specializes in enterprise software development in the areas of data & analytics and business applications for large companies. I have been joyfully working in this position for the past 18 years and just recently we decided to make the next big move forward by onboarding a growth investor into the company (link to German page, only, sorry - but Google Translate should be helpful). This investor will allow us to grow the company to the next level and ensure that we can sustain our unique culture, deeply humane view on people and energetic approach to innovation and progress for a long time onwards.

Despite IT markets being pure gold right now, competition for small- and medium-sized companies becomes harder and harder and there is a big trend towards concentration and consolidation rocking the markets.

Often this means being devoured by much larger companies who wreck your own unique culture, just look at numeric ressources and cost synergies. This can ruin a life of work spent on building a unique company culture in a matter of months. We decided that QuinScape is not going to be a company someone else will devour. Instead we want to build a truly unique company group of similar minded organizations that also subscribe to our core company values of openness, competence, fun and loyalty.

With out new partner Auctus we have found a growth investor who takes the same view on how to develop healthy and growing companies while deeply understanding the benefits of a strong employee-oriented culture and holding to values we believe in.

So QuinScape now is facing a very unique opportunity to grow from a single location in Dortmund, Germany, to many locations spread over Germany and the nearby foreign countries... and maybe much further in the more distant future.

I am very happy for myself, the company and our employees that we have been granted such a unique opportunity and want to take it with all my energy.

Both me and my two founding colleagues now are very much focussed on continuing to grow the company to new dimensions - together with our new partner.

But this has a downside: I will have to focus my energy and resources even more and will have to get rid of distractions faster. Also I do not want to sacrifice my family - both my beloved wife and our daughter Hannah, almost 18 months old by now, deserve all the time and love I can give. So focus really has become even more important in my life.

Is ADOM a distraction? Not by any means - it is one of my three big loves (family, company, ADOM) and thus ADOM will not be sacrificed to this new development. But I will have to focus my activities to get by doing a satisfying amount of work despite more limited time resources available to me - which in turn will affect ADOM, ADOM RPG and Ultimate ADOM.

As this is the ADOM blog I will lay out the consequences for ADOM Classic immediately:

• Updates (which have been scarce in fecent months) will remain scarce. But they will continue as the investment into QuinScape also means that I have more personal funds at my disposal that I can invest privately into Team ADOM. Still pace will remain somewhat slow.
• Communication will also remain on a somewhat barren level until we have big things to announce.
• Our prime focus will be the development of Ultimate ADOM (which has made huge progress internally - we just need to be able to finally start showing things).

Feel free to ask questions. I'm deeply committed to the ADOM community and will try my best to keep the flame burning. As this whole situation is new to me, too, I will use the next three months to sort out matters and see where we can take this with my new life arrangements.

Both the ADOM RPG Kickstarter and the Ultimate ADOM blog will receive separate updates.

Thanks for listening & Axes High!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Maintainer

The ADOM RPG website has been hacked

Please avoid it. It's redirecting to scamming sites. We are working of fixing this.

Update 10th of March 2019, 1:43pm, GMT+1: https://www.adom-rpg.com is back and safe again. If you registered there, please change your password. None of our other sites have been affected as far as we know (and they don't exchange data). https://www.ultimate-adom.com seems to be under attack from Russia right now, though, too.

The ADOM RPG Kickstarter ends in less than 48 hours!

It's less than 48 hours to jump onto the ADOM RPG Kickstarter bandwagon. Having been funded on day 1 we also managed to unlock lots of new graphics for both rulebooks, 16 additional pages of Ancardian randomness to unleash upon the players and a Game Master screen (and we are close to unlocking the very first adventure). Additionally we managed to get famous RPG legends like Ed Greenwood (the inventor of the Forgotten Realms) and James M. Ward (the mastermind behind Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma world) to write short stories about Ancardia, the home of ADOM!

Now or never is the time to support us in order to unlock more stretch goals!

Big Release Day: ADOM 3.3.3 has been released everywhere!

Hi everyone!

While we are happily running our ADOM RPG Kickstarter we as proudly would like to announce the general availability of ADOM 3.3.3 everywhere:

• It's on Steam.
• It's on GOG.
• It's on IndieDB as a public release (but with less features - see the comparison chart). 

For all fans of the public version: There were many changes and tweaks in the past year. If you want to catch up check out all the changes listed in our change log since version 3.0.6. For everyone else: ADOM 3.3.3 just fixes two bugs found in ADOM 3.3.2 and adds a temporary reminder for our ADOM Kickstarter campaign (sorry for the extra click - but small indie publishers need all the attention they can get and we truly value your love and support).

As for the Kickstarter:

• We have been funded on day 1.
• We have unlocked stretch goals 1 (10 more pieces of art for the Player's Handbook), stretch goal 2 (10 more pieces of art for the Game Master's Guide) and stretch goal 3 (16 more pages of random Ancardian goodness for the Gamemaster's Guide). And now we are close to unlocking stretch goal 4 (the GM screen). Next after that are adventures and tons of background stuff about Ancardia.
• We are working on some good news related to print-at-cost. Stay tuned - hopefully we will have great news within two to three days.
• Help us to make ADOM RPG the best OSR RPG ever created!

And now: Happy hacking!

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

ADOM RPG has been funded in less than 24 hours!

We are funded. In less than 24 hours. Now we can unlock all the amazing stretch goals!

Dear ADOM fans: I have often said, but I'll repeat it - you are the greatest guys and girls on Earth!

Thanks so much for your trust - this game will rock!

ADOM RPG Kickstarter now live!

Hi everyone!

As planned our ADOM: The Roleplaying Game Kickstarter campaign went live minutes ago!

Please support us, help reach the funding goal and spread the news - it's so hard to reach people and your help is highly appreciated! Why is this exciting news for ADOM?

For three major reasons:

1. First of all it hopefully will help broadening the audience for ADOM in general. A wider audience always is good because it helps keep us going.
2. Some of the design points from ADOM RPG will find their way into ADOM (not all of them, mind you, and more of them will make their way into Ultimate ADOM because for that we are completely re-examining all aspects of the current system). But there are interesting new parts like racial abilities that scale with increasing experience level (similar to class powers) or new ideas for class powers (so a pending revision of the existing class power system), many new corruption ideas and similar things that are very interesting for ADOM and thus eventually will find their way into ADOM.
3. You finally can play ADOM face to face with other roleplayers. 

Additionally you in theory can affect the development of ADOM, Ultimate ADOM and the RPG in case you'd like to donate on one of the ultra-high levels - these will yield new factions and artifacts we design together with you. These factions and artifacts will make a direct appearance in Ultimate ADOM, in the ADOM RPG and (for the artifacts) also in ADOM.

You can find samples for the ADOM RPG here.

ADOM RPG is coming to Kickstarter - here's the date!

We are creating a new roleplaying game. It's going to be beautiful.

Two manuals. 600+ pages. Full color.

And it's coming to

Monday, 14th of January, 2019. 6pm German time.

Read the details here.