Hi everyone!

This is a bit of an unusual one, but I think no one will disagree that we are living in unusual times. As real life events continue to unfold in unpredictable ways and disruptions to everyday life seem to be marching on, allow us to present a letter from Matt Mihaly, founder of Achaea and Iron Realms' CEO. We've copied it verbatim and added some follow up below the signature.

Greetings, citizens of the Iron Realms,

I hope everyones doing as well as they can in these plague times. I feel like were living through a really badly-run event in one of our games, and whoever is running the event has completely forgotten that theyre supposed to be fun.

In any case, while people are being laid off left and right (my wife was laid off last week), Iron Realms is in a position where our work hasnt really been disrupted. We all work from home offices anyway, and remotely working together is baked into our companys DNA. We havent had to lay anyone off because of Covid, in fact, for which were all grateful.

So, we want to do something to help. We looked around, and decided that we want to support a charity called RIP Medical Debt. It got some fame a few years ago when John Oliver bought $14m in medical debt for $60k and gave it to them to retire.

What they do is buy and pay off the medical debt of people for whom it is a large financial burden, at 1 penny on the dollar. In other words, $1 can pay off $100 of someones medical debt. For those of you who dont live in the US, our health system here allows people to go into crippling debt because they got sick or injured, to the point of financial ruin. According to one study from 2019, about 530,000 annual bankruptcies in the US are at least partly-caused by medical debt.

In this case, RIP Medical Debt recently started a fund the Helping Covid Heroes Fund - that specifically buys up and pays off the medical debt of healthcare workers and first responders who are seriously financially burdened by the debt (so a doctor making $300k isnt getting her student loans paid off by this, for instance).

I saw that and immediately thought, This is what we want to support. The impact per dollar is just so high.

Were going to be doing two things for the rest of this month:

1. Each game is creating a minipet thatll be for sale on the website for $5. 100% of revenue from these will go to the Helping Covid Heroes Fund. https://ripmedicaldebt.org/campaigns/

2. Were going to donate 20% of our revenue (minus revenue from the minipets as were already donating 100% of those), up to a max of $12,000, for the rest of this month.

If we raised $12,000 from #2 and another $3000 from #1, thatd pay off $1.5 million in medical debt for Covid heroes!

Well announce how much was raised after the bookkeeping is done in early-ish June, and donate the money raised then as well. Its not a world-changing amount, but it could be life-changing for the people whose debt is paid off.

Finally, were also going to increase daily free credits available each day until the end of the month your game producers will post details themselves there.

Stay well,

--Matt/Sarapis/Aurelius
CEO, Iron Realms

As Matt notes in his letter, Achaea will be offering a limited edition minipet for the remainder of this month. The steelblue ladybird is a unique design with numerous effects, reactions, and fully configured scrapper capability. She's listed at a cost of $5, and all proceeds from this will be donated to the Helping Covid Heroes Fund.

In addition to this, we will be reducing renown-per-credit for the remainder of the month. This effectively means you'll get 28 credits rather than 20, but you won't have to gather any more renown than you did to hit cap previously.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and kind words over the last few weeks, and wish everyone the best as we hopefully move out of these difficult times!

Penned by My hand on the 11th of Lupar, in the year 829 AF.