Beyond the neXt: Two More Tales From My Table
- KaCee Bunn-Smith
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
When I finished writing Echoes of the neXt, it felt like crossing the finish line on a journey I’d been walking for years. That book was a passion project—a slow-burn epic woven from questions about memory, recursion, and the cost of evolution. I poured a lot of myself into it.
But once it was done… I discovered something unexpected.
I hadn’t stopped writing.
In fact, I’d been writing steadily—just in a different form. Every week after running my long-standing Dungeons & Dragons group, I would sit down and turn our session into a narrative chapter. Not notes. Not summaries. Actual story. Characters. Dialogue. Action. Consequence.
When I looked back through it, I realized I had a book’s worth of material.
That became The Titan Gambit—a dramatic retelling of our campaign in story form. You don’t need to be a D&D player to enjoy it. It’s dieselpunk meets high fantasy, told through the eyes of flawed heroes navigating a crumbling city full of ancient secrets and malfunctioning magic. It’s gritty, fast-paced, sometimes heartbreaking—and always rooted in character.
Then there’s the second book. Something slower. Stranger. More reflective.
What the Roil Remembers is a collection of short stories—slice-of-life moments drawn from across my homebrew world. These aren’t world-shaking events. These are quiet, human snapshots. A bard trying to keep a promise in a city that’s forgotten music. A dwarf haunted by memories that don’t belong to him. A fisherwoman staring into the sea, wondering what the magic took and what it left behind.
The Roil, in my world, is a reawakened force—part storm, part signal, part memory. It changes people. This book is about what it leaves behind.
Both The Titan Gambit and What the Roil Remembers came about because of community. Because of players. Because of stories told around a table and expanded later in the quiet hours after.
So if you’ve read Echoes of the neXt and want more—more world, more emotion, more lives affected by signal and silence—I invite you to explore these too.
Different formats. Same heart.

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