State of the Flame 2025 - The Hearthfire Tales Top 10 Highlights of the Year!
- Hearthfire Tales
- Jan 13
- 5 min read
Hello me Hearthies!
Dylan here with a very late roundup of my top 10 Hearthfire Things that have happened in 2025, and some sneak peaks at what we have in store for the future.
Before I begin, as always, thank you all for your support! it means the world and is directly responsible for our ongoing ability to keep creating content of all types for you!
So, let's get into some highlights of our year, in no particular order, starting with:
1. Cubicle 7 Collaborations
This is still crazy to us that we got to do these! Victoriana in particular really pushed us from a production level point of view. Prior to this we had only really dabbled in video projects, such as Everdale, or our brief, failed attempt for the first Mid Winter Tale! Retrostellar was our first proper attempt at bringing in real visuals into it, with Dylan and Ryan in costume, and then we brought it even more with "The Laundry". But then going to Victoriana with shooting on set, outside of our normal set up, with guests, in a location with terrible acoustincs, was a real challenge, but the results were totally worth it! We're super grateful to Cubicle 7 for giving us the opportunity to put the Hearthfire Tales spin on their work, and hopefully we get to do more cool sponsored games like this in the future!
2. Year of The Madlibs
2025 started us off on a journey of Improv in our live shows, to never before seen levels! As far as we're aware, we are the first group to do live D&D games in this way, fully randomising the characters, and using mad libs in a way to create the game.
We started off down in WARPcon with Sullivan from No Rolls Barred, and then continued it at Athventure Con, Dublin Comic Con, and Cork Comic Con, bringing guests with us along the way. It really was a year of collaboration huh!?
3. More Baldurs Gate 3 actor crossovers
Speaking of Live shows, we also did a live show at MegaCon Dublin at the start of the year, with 3 more actors from Baldurs Gate 3, Neil, Andrew and Tracey, voices of The Dark Urge, Raphael, and Jaheira respectively! This was a last minute thing that we ended up falling into, but it was super fun and chaotic (like most of our shows).
Oh, how about a sneak peak at the near future?! We are going to be playing with another actor from the game very soon! They're more well known from a different game, but that's all the hints we'll give out for the moment, as we've to keep this under our hat for now!
4. Fake Swords Beanies and Caps
Speaking of Hats (yikes, what a segue), we also sold our first Fake Swords Branded Hats this year! We're hopefully going to do another run of different merch (tshirts or hoodies anyone?) for Empire again this year, so let us know if there's anything you'd like to see specifically!
5. Maps!
Continuing the collab team of 2025, Jog Brogzin very kindly made a map for us! Taking time out of his busy schedule doing actual work for actual companies, to make a kick ass map of Dolina, which we've posted about before here!
6. The Youtube Relaunch
While things have been a bit slower than originally planned, due to the dreaded real life catching up to us, we have indeed relaunched our Youtube Channel, combining all of our brands into one central hub! While we're not quite Jeremy Renner levels of hubris and making our own social media channel, it's a lot easier for us to manage, maintain, and feed the algorithm when there's only one channel to look after! If this super takes off and we want to break things up in the future again, we may look at that, but as it stands now, it just makes sense for us to keep things together! We hope to get a lot more content up there in the coming months, so stay tuned! We have a big video on Jims time at Conquest, a huge LARP in Germany, and a special secret oneshot that hopefully will start coming out soon! (and yes, that's separate to the one with the secret Voice Actor).
7. Whispering Ashes
Speaking of both Youtube, and Collaboration, and Video, of course, a huge highlight this year was teaming up with Ails AKA the IrishPandaQueen to bring you Panic on Prom Night, a 3 part Video Whispering Ashes Adventure. We really pushed the boundaries on this one, introducing dynamic backgrounds to the mix, which, again, is something we haven't really seen in a TTRPG Actual Play! Jim worked some literal movie magic to make this happen, and it's a huge credit to him! And that's of course only in service of Ryans great story! Those props and handouts worked so well for the visual medium!
8. Collaborations
Ok, obviously this has come up a lot in the post so far, however, we just wanted to give a huge shout out and thank you to everyone that we've worked with this year, it's been truly insane. Here is an attempt to list them all, even though we will surely fail.
And probably more that we can't think of now! A huge shout out and thank you to all these people, go check them out!
9. Find your Tribe Camp
For our penultimate highlight, while not strictly Hearthfire Related, and we didn't make any content about it, we once again took park in the Causey Find your Tribe camp, which is a D&D camp run for young teenagers, and it was a really great experience to be a part of. If it weren't for our experiences with Hearthfire, opportunities like this wouldn't exist for us, or would be much harder to come by, and it's a great way to give back to the community and help usher in the next wave of D&D and TTRPG Players. We'll be running it again this year, and we can't wait for that!
10. Our Patreon
Our final highlight has been seeing our Patreon go from strength to strength! We almost doubled our members over on Patreon (or here, if you're reading this here, hello!) and we're so grateful that you have chosen to support us in everything we do! We hope to continue giving you first looks and listens at all of our stuff where possible, and to let you all in on behind the scenes content and bonus episodes! As always, if there's anything in particular you'd like to see from us, do let us know! Conclusion
Ok, that's all for now, there's more we could talk about, (we didn't even get to properly mention being on the radio to play D&D?!?! That's crazy!) but this post is already way too late for a 2025 recap, that should have been 2 weeks ago minimum! Ah well, mediocre things come to those who wait, we guess.
Anyway, hope your 2026 is a great one, and that you continue to support us, and more importantly, continue to enjoy what we're doing!
Buh-bye!
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