In Case With Grace: August 2025

Author

Grace Lewis
August 20, 2025

Hey! Hi! Hello! It's been a minute, I'm sorry. My last newsletter was in December, and things got really rough shortly after that. My income dwindled to the point where I could no longer afford rent, and I lived in a friend's kitchen for about 2 months trying to find affordable housing. In the end I had to move back in with my mother, which has been less than ideal. I can't drive (still disabled!), live in the woods, and my only option for transport is someone who works 80hr weeks. To put it simply, I'm isolated.

It's only now that I've gathered the energy for a proper report, though I've tried many times in the past month to do so. So sit back as I go over 8 months of work:

These past 8 months, I…

  • Wrote, Designed, Playtested, Laid out, Illustrated, and released my solo boomer shooter TTRPG: GUTGUN for both digital and print! (You will need to get the game to see all the art! I’ve only attached a FRACTION of it here!)

  • Made this year’s Holiday Letters.

  • Made holiday avatars for Christmas and New Year’s.

  • Wrote my final World Anvil article.

  • Did 2024’s Roundup.

  • Made WORDSWORD for the 36-Word RPG Jam.

  • Finished designing APRA’s new logo.

  • Doodled a few things.

  • Tabled at a local zine fair, for which I made 2 new zines that collect various poems and hypoems I’ve done over the years. (I’ll make these available digitally when I get over the nerves)

  • Designed a surreal minimalist piece.

  • Did Art Fight…kinda. Only ended up drawing 1 piece again.

  • Launched my new blog! (And wrote a few posts for it.)

  • Designed SUMMER/CAMP for the One-Page TTRPG Jam 2025, and the 1 Hour or Less Jam.

  • Started working on a new website for APRA.

  • Helped organize and launch Chimera Hearts, a community focused on solving a few key issues with the TTRPG industry. Also designed our logo. You can join us here.

  • Designed 12 logos for clients. (I am not sharing them all here, too many!)

  • Designed a character sheet for Arsene-Inc’s Where The Magic Never Ends?

  • Experimented with halftones, chromatic aberration, and other retro effects.

  • Added 2 color variants to The Accessible Design Survival Guide.

  • Made a smiley emoji.

  • Made a new logo for my private friend’s server.

  • Started prep work for a 2nd APRA TTRPG.

  • Outlined a Secret TTRPG that I had to shelve (So the APRA game could be done first.)

  • I am probably missing a thing or five.

GUTGUN

GUTGUN is a solo TTRPG (table-top role-playing game) that translates the blood-pumping fun of a classic PC shooter to tabletop. You are a lone force of nature tearing through whatever gets in your way.

I spent nearly 2 years making this thing! I did everything but playtesting on my own— that’s art, layout, writing, game designing, marketing, etc. etc. etc.

There are ~40 unique illustrations I did for the book! That’s not even counting icons, vectors, and other graphics!

You can buy it NOW in digital or print!

ICOG Blog

It’s my own blog! Replete with an RSS feed and everything! Whenever I write a new post, you’ll see that linked in these newsletters— but if you’d like to see them first, follow the RSS feed!

SUMMER/CAMP

I designed a 1* page TTRPG for 2 game jams at once! SUMMER/CAMP is a duet TTRPG that seeks to emulate the thrills of classic slasher movies. One player takes on the role of a fearsome slasher, while the other plays 5 unwitting campers that must attempt to escape with their lives...

*It’s double sided ok don’t sue me.

Cool Things

Warframe 1999

Warframe CONTINUES down its second golden age with 1999. Fantastic writing reinforces the decade-long story’s themes, introduces new characters that are further fleshed out via the KIM system, and gives us some fascinating lore insight.

The stakes for the new saga have been set, and I’m excited to see where they go!

The gameplay additions were all fantastic, as well. Great new toys to play with, a (mostly) killer tileset, and plenty of the Weird I love so much in this game.

Deltarune Chapters 3 & 4

Do you want to have hope in humanity again, if only for a few hours? Play Deltarune. Toby Fox is able to inject pure heart into his work in a way that is hard to replicate. His characters are very real in a way that makes it easy to care about them. I want to see them grow and find happiness, and when things go south…my heart hurts for them.

There’s subtleties to the core cast that speak volumes to who they are. The way they speak, the way they act, even the little moments found in optional observations can reveal so much about them.

Toby Fox’s work deftly weaves both gut-busting comedy and gut-punching emotional beats, and it’s something that’s gotta be experienced if you can.

Vinland Saga

This long-running historical fiction manga finally came to a close last month, and what a note it closed on.

Vinland Saga is a story about violence, and the ripples it has on individuals, families, communities, and whole nations. And while is espouses pacifist values, it also acknowledges that in the real world— or at least, the world we have now— violence is always near. It deeply, truly, wishes this wasn’t so— in fact, the series mourns this fact.

But it doesn’t choose to wallow in this mourning. It chooses instead to hone in on what beauty can still be found after the battles have been waged, and the survivors have begun to carry on. There’s still sorrow, yes, but life must go on.

It’s aware that its ideals are perhaps naive, but it doesn’t give up on them.

There’s a beauty in its tenacity, I think.

Prompt

Each month I provide a prompt to inspire you to create something in any medium you like!

This month’s prompt: Back to it.

Readers can share their work in the #sharing-grounds channel on my Discord server!

Interested in a commission? Contact me!