Friday, June 27, 2025

This is the sixty-fourth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. June is Accordion Awareness Month, so increase your awareness by listening to some of my favorite artists and soundtracks! Find any you’ve missed in this easily navigable index.

Garden Story is an adorable little game about plant people fighting against the sinister Rot that threatens their peaceful grove. The vibes and overall themes are very much on-brand with my style, from four towns based around each Season, to most of the characters being named after obscure plant varietals. In other words, just about perfect. The soundtrack sounds just like a PS1-era game, in the best ways. Including accordion soundfonts!

For more, check out The Stacks.

Another week, another Florabeast! Did you know there are three Florabeasts considered to be the “starters” because of their simplicity in planting and handling? They’re also grouped together because of a certain culinary reason… All three are up on the World Anvil site, but only one of them has been featured before. If you remember what it was, you earn an extra piece of pie. If not, go ahead and check out this week’s creature feature.

Speaking of Frontier Flora, I recently made a little change to the short story collection. Previously I had used World Anvil’s Manuscripts feature, which is good for organizing and displaying stories, and for easily including audio content, but not so much for integrating it with the rest of the articles in the world. When you link to another article, you can mouse over the link and get a little pop-up with the details about the thing it’s linking to, which is very useful for a story that mentions different Florabeasts constantly. That only happens for actual articles, though, not for the Manuscripts. So, I changed it up and now the stories use the Prose article type, which has linking features, and a way for me to add the narration on top of all that. So there we go!

You can check out all three stories right now.

The expansion of the Frontier is progressing steadily, with 54 (!) Florabeasts currently available for perusal, plus 5 Gasts and 7 general articles. That’s enough to make a deck of cards plus jokers. Is a Frontier Flora deck of playing cards planned? I’m not going to say no…

It’s also an important milestone. If you’ve looked at the Handbook Index, you’ll see there are 108 total entries in what I like to call Generation 1. What you don’t see is the 26 additional Florabeasts that make up Generation 2, as well as the rogue’s gallery of Gasts that have barely been touched.

That’s a lot of numbers, but the important thing is that there is plenty ahead. Stay tuned for more Weird West creature-taming excitement!