Recently, I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole with Violence, a lean-n-mean system by Luke Gearing focused on brutal violence, and a number of the modern day scenarios for it (like Glass Men, My Friend Mike, and more).

While I’ve seen systems attempting to do the same broad mechanical things Violence is going for, I’ve never really experienced many scenarios, much less things you’d call “adventures,” in the style of the works by Gearing and Gromb I linked above. These are grimy, brutal characters set in sad and downright disturbing locations. Many of the darkest and most memorable aspects come as brief altercations, odd encounters, and small but white hot details. Mandog, while statted for OD&D, is another scenario in this grimy modern day milieu.

While I wouldn’t bat an eye at a film (Sicario, Blue Ruin, Seven, etc. all feel at home here) focused on drugs, poverty, coercion, sex work, etc., I can’t say I’ve ever much considered these aspects within the realm of tabletop roleplaying - at least not like this. There’s a sort of cartoony, over-the-top version you may see in a superhero game (“Beat up the EVIL drug dealers and save the mayor’s daughter!”), but the darker tone here combined with Violence’s down to earth mechanical approach means it all feels much more real to me (not to say that it is realistic, but that it rings more true to life to me than those more exaggerated/cliche depictions). There’s rarely good guys here and even more rarely is there a clean way out for those who deserve it most.

One of the pieces I enjoy most about Violence is that because you’re operating more or less the real world, it allows us to remove the need for most of the mechanical layers between us and the world. You easily understand what you can and can’t do, how the world will likely respond, etc. because it’s the same world we are all living in - we’re all experts in the lore here because we’ve been studying it our whole lives.

This means that when it comes to writing a scenario, I get to focus entirely on the words themselves, the characters, the odd little details on the edges of the scenes, etc. and have to think far, far less about stat notation, deciding a weapon’s range and damage, creating special abilities or unique relics, etc. This allows me to flow into this really unique headspace where I’m channeling my lived experienced through this dark, grimy Violence filter and pouring a new version of the world onto the paper. It’s really liberating!

So much time in adventure/TTRPG writing is spent on mechanical stuff, it just feels great to get to leave that behind and just write. And I think there’s a reward for the reader and players as well that’s evident when you read these, a sort of life you don’t find in more by-the-books TTRPG fare.

Check out my first Violence scenario below if you don’t believe me and see what you think (and definitely check out the others I mentioned above).

FREEBIE: AMELIA

Harbour Grace’s bronze Amelia Earhart statue sits unattended and unnoticed during the long winter months. Rent just went up—but so did the scrap price of bronze.

Benny is a childhood friend or you both worked at the same gas station a few years back or maybe he’s your second cousin or maybe you even crossed paths during the half semester he did in town at Memorial University before he dropped out. Either way, he knows you and you know him.

Benny wants help with Amelia. He needs help with Amelia.

AMELIA is a 10-page Violence scenario including a rural Newfoundland town, a bronze statue, and one man intent on stealing it. What happens next is up to you.

Download the scenario (including maps) HERE or grab it for free on Itch!

BLOGGING CONTINUES

Over on the MCGW blog, I dug into using social media profiles (Bluesky in particular) to quickly build your own galactic sci-fi setting and embarked on a solo play adventure in Wolves Upon the Coast (expect the next entry on this one very soon)!

• BLUESTAR: Using Bluesky to Build Your Own Galactic Setting

• Wolves Upon The Coast - Solo Play #0: The Tale of the Free Thirteen

• Wolves Upon the Coast - Solo Play #1: The Flesh and the Fruit

MORE COOL STUFF

Rust Wings, the new game from worlds by watt (of Cloud Empress fame), is crowdfunding now! I have done some early development work on this project and will be doing even more in the coming months as the project continues!

Explore abandoned cities on an endless ocean. Rust Wings is a Ghibli-inspired adventure roleplaying game compatible with Mausritter.

“Ghibli” is a super overused (and often misused) buzz term for roleplaying games these days, but watt is one of the creators I feel truly does understand what that means.

Check it out HERE!

The No ICE in Minnesota charity bundle has now raised over $500,000 for Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. The bundle includes two releases of mine: FIREDROP and THERE IS A GOBLIN ON THE LOOSE IN ICARUS STATION. Beyond that, it includes 1,437 more items, and it only costs $10.

Check it out HERE!

Cairn 2e, which I’m a big fan of, recently released a Barebones Edition which removes the implied setting of the original release and removes the art, giving you the most versatile and leanest edition of the game yet. If you (like me) enjoy homebrewing your settings and have the most hackable version of something in your toolbox, this is the edition for you. Oh, it’s free too.

Lin Codega over at Rascal has been publishing daily diaries from her time playing OVER/UNDER back in October. This “game” or whatever you’d call it absolutely floored me and consumed tons of my time, and it’s really cool to relive some of it here and see it all from an entirely different perspective.

Norgad’s latest Mothership module, Roach Motel, is out now. I haven’t read it or played it, but I’ve really enjoyed Norgad’s past output so I’m excited to dive into it soon!

I’m editing Joshua Justice’s latest Mothership project, Last Light Station.

At the end of the only jump lane into the Hekate Sector sits LAST LIGHT STATION. Criminals, Corpos, and those just trying to eke out a living fill the crowded space station. Whether your Crew need a place to recover, a base of operations, or just to lighten their pockets of some credits, Last Light Station is the place to be.

It’s crowdfunding now. Check it out HERE.

Thanks for reading! See ya next time! - Christian

I’ve found myself growing increasingly frustrated with the state of whatever we want to call how the internet discusses TTRPGs. Maybe that’s “critique.” Maybe that’s “reviews.” Or maybe it’s another better/worse third thing. Regardless, I’ve been less and less happy with what I’ve been engaging with on that front for the last several months (longer, really).

It feels like, too often, folks are talking past one another, write unclearly, choose to review a hypothetical product rather than engaging with the work itself, and refusing to really identify and address what they mean about almost anything they say. Without clear definitions and context, very little can be communicated.

I’m talking about a review in which someone read an adventure and spends their review criticizing it against a hypothetical box set edition - aw, how much better that would be! This is, largely, valueless as a review/critique of what actually exists (though it could be a portion of a piece about how you enjoy box sets over zines or something, I suppose). I’m talking about a review in which it’s very clear the GM has a preferred style they are unwilling to shift away from (and also unwilling to come to terms with), even in the name of reviewing a system that explicitly asks them to play in a specific way. I’m talking about the idea that a reviewer MUST have played a game or adventure to review it, even when those reviews in turn rarely offer detailed play reports or choose to contend with the players, their table, or even themselves as participants in their experience of turning the book into the game/play—whatever happens at the table (again, definitions are too fluid here).

I don’t believe we can easily use other medium’s critique as an analog for roleplaying games. People often compare TTRPGs to film. Recently, I saw someone says “system doesn’t matter” (a larger forever-argument I have zero interest in speaking to specifically, but go with me for a moment) is akin to saying “cinematography doesn’t matter,” but of course, TTRPGs are nothing like film and systems are nothing like cinematography. When I am playing a game at my table, almost everything is up to me and my group. If anything has a comparison in film, TTRPGs—the books on our shelves, the products, etc.—are perhaps most like scripts because, at the table, we are required to translate and often transform vast amounts of a work.

And yet, I also believe that it is the uniqueness (or perceived uniqueness) of TTRPGs that allows us to stunt our own growth. It’s the teenager screaming “no one understands me!” when, in fact, anyone who has ever been a teenager understands quite well. Too often, we (and by this I mean, me) have used this as an excuse to avoid deeper learning and simply attempt to sidestep the problem entirely, just as its easier to scream "I’m misunderstood” than it is to understand yourself.

In the past, I never wanted to engage with the academic or theoretical aspects of tabletop gaming. I would rather spend my time creating and playing them rather than argue over semantics and theoreticals online (which is how I was often exposed to this side of the hobby)—but now I am seeing the other side of that double-edged sword. We do not, widely, understand how to speak with one another. We do not, largely, understand how to speak to (and value) our own experiences, the impacts we have upon the games we play. We do not, often, understand how to speak to ourselves.

Despite the TTRPG-iverse’s judgement (like my own above) that we have too little critique and too little theory happening in the space, there is, in fact, a large amount of academic, critical, theoretical, etc. writing about tabletop games, much of which applies well to TTRPGs. It’s worth remembering that tabletop gaming is very old, especially in comparison to both video games and film.

I don’t have a grand solution to any of this yet, but I do have the means to hopefully uncover a solution in the months and years to come: read, learn, engage in good faith, see who has done the work, and follow in their footsteps.

My vow for 2026 is to finally do the damn work and dig into some of the more critical and academic writing that’s been done about games. I think you should too. This way, we can build a shared foundation of knowledge, create more universal definitions, and more fully and actively engage with our games, our selves, and each other. To do anything less is a disservice to all involved—and we deserve better.

I will be starting later this month with The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola via MIT Press. It’s freely available HERE.

THE BLOGGING CONTINUES

This last month, I tossed another Stranger Stars design diary up on the MCGW blog along with some house rules for a new Cairn campaign I started with several coworkers who were looking for a more traditional DnD-type fantasy experience in their first game but I wanted to run Cairn (so much easier to learn)!

• Stranger Stars #03: Building Factions & Creating Planets

• Cairn 2e: Trad Fantasy Ancestries

ZINE MONTH IS HERE

Once again, Zine Month, Zine Quest, Zinetopia, and any other zine-related monthly crowdfunding initiative I may have missed have arrived! Here are a few projects I either had a small hand in or got a chance to check out early:

Twisting Unseen by Chris Airau, 5 Million Worlds Press

Way back when I did developmental work on this really unique Mothership adventure where the players, in universe (and at the table), build the environment around themselves using tiles and a big, blank map. It’s very cool and it’s crowdfunding NOW.

I’ll let Chris sell you on it further:

In Twisting Unseen, the players build the map, using cut-out map pieces while their PCs use the Gate Diagnostics Tablet, and configuring the facility's sectors and connecting tiles as they explore. Traveling their newly-built corridors exposes them to devious Incursors, biomechanical beings from other realities, while the Kagami sectors remain under the influence of the colony's descendant factions, who have forgotten skies exist.

Can the crew reach the Prime Gate before the continuum twists beyond their reality?

Von Hynd Manor

I got a chance to read the final version of this adventure and really enjoyed it. In fact, you’ll find a quote from me about it on the crowdfunding page:

"A gothic adventure of beasts in the woods human and otherwise, dripping with atmosphere and presented with clarity. There are dozens of reasons to visit Heivdorf and its surrounds but the one that most appeals to me is to enact justice, however difficult it may be to achieve."

It’s a deadly, creepy gothic adventure written to be played in any game of your choosing but they are offering up a bunch of conversions as part of the backing so even if you don’t feel comfortable running system-free stuff, they’ve got you covered.

This campaign is simply looking to finance a print run of an already digitally available (and complete) adventure. Personally, I think these kind of small, focused campaigns are much more in the original spirit of crowdfunding, and as such, I like to support them whenever I can. You should too.

FREEBIE: Relics of Arret Avon

I have been playing and thinking about Cairn a lot lately. Here is a collection of five new relics created as part of one of my new campaign settings, Arret Avon - a Newfoundland-inspired fantasy setting for my campaign blending Cairn with a few more traditional DnD-ish elements. That said, these relics can easily stand alone in your core Cairn experience (or almost any fantasy game of your choice). Enjoy!

Download the full-quality version HERE!

The first relic here, The Old Way, is part of a small Cairn dungeon also set in Arret Avon that I’m hoping to drop as next month’s Freebie currently titled The House Among the Leaves. It’s the treetop lair of a perverted cult of wood watchers, known for raiding villages and capturing townsfolk to create a powerful army of their own using forest magic gone wrong. Stay tuned!

MORE COOL STUFF

MeatCastle GameWare Annual #3 is in stock now! The pre-order campaign was a huge success, allowing me to fund the print run of #3 and order a second run of Annual #2. Thank you to everyone who supported (your package is in the mail)!

Get your copy HERE!

FIREDROP, my microgame of Helldivers-inspired drop pod warfare, was named an Unsung Hero of 2025 by Hunter over at The Weekly Scroll! Check out the full episodes with all of their recommendations from last year HERE.

I was a guest on Chris Airiau’s Ansible Uplink podcast where we reviewed one of the most underrated Mothership modules out there - Lone Archivist’s What We Give to Alien Gods. Listen to the episode above or head HERE to check out Chris’s Patreon.

Chaoclypse started a new video series about a campaign setting blending OD&D with Roadside Picnic/Stalker (including tons of his awesome art). It’s a great premise, and I’m dying to see more!

Alfred Valley created a video guide for collecting textures from the world around you, anytime and anywhere. It’s a wonderful bit of inspiration and a good reminder that we should always be building our creative eye.

I joined Ryan over at The Weekly Scroll to review HAMMERS: Bell, Book & Candle Edition by Jon Davis/ Sivad’s Sanctum. I really liked a lot of what this game’s got going on, and I’m excited to see it develop into its final form.

Rascal published an extensive article digging into a bunch of things gone wrong with the continued production of Possum Creek Games’ Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. It’s an interesting, often frustrating, read in its own right, but it also shows the continued trickle down effects of the PlusOneExp/Brandfox situation I was caught up in several years ago. If you aren’t subbed to Rascal, I’d recommend it.

HERE are some good words.

In the last Missive, I said “one day I’ll figure out how to write a piece that the blog folks put in their roundups,” and almost immediately thereafter, The Explorateur did. I also got a shoutout in Explorer Design’s Top 5 Newsletters post which was another bit of fun news. So that’s cool!

Cameron Kunzelman wrote about A Land Once Magic over at The AV Club. I had a great time playing the game myself recently, and I think it’s great to see this kind of game getting this kind of coverage on that kind of site!

I enjoyed reading this cranky and interesting post over at The Foot of Blue Mountain about how great adventures/modules don’t need to be easy to bring to the table. For the author, there is joy to be found in engaging and transforming the adventure to fit your table/play style. It had me thinking a lot about what I prioritize in my designs and how I’ve engaged with adventures myself in the past.

And lastly:

Thanks for reading! This has been a tremendously hard month—a dark start to the new year. Help one another, be kind to each other, and FUCK ICE. - Christian

Subscribe now

When it comes to the Missive, that means a return to MONTHLY newsletters (with freebies) with more varied articles coming in 2026. One day I’ll figure out how to write a piece that all the newsletter/blog folks put in their roundups…

Anyways, here’s what 2025 looked like for the Missives!

MISSIVES - BY THE NUMBERS

• 6 Missives (so much for monthly…)

• 5 Freebies (still a lot of bang for your non-existent buck though!)

  • That Strange Old Island - Newfoundland-inspired Microsetting

  • Second Self™ - The Severance Chip for Mothership

  • The Star Fallen - Science-Fantasy Cairn 2e Background

  • Pawns of the Mind Masters - Cairn 2e Adventure

  • Transmissions from the Datacache - Intel Ops for Mothership

• 196 new subscribers (a 9.5% increase!)

• 2,403 total subscribers (let’s hit 2.5k soon - and 3k by 2027!)

• Most Read Missive (2,866 views): MOTHERSHIP FREEBIE: Second Self™

• Most Discussed: What Do You Create When Everything Wants You to Stop?

Newsletter 🤝 Blog

Recently, I started doing some more impromptu blogs over at my site. I never want to spam everyone’s inbox with Missives (though I do plan on getting them back to being actually monthly in 2026), and this lets me write more while making sure Missives stay juicy. Here’s what you can find over there so far:

• Stranger Stars - Putting Canon Back into the Anti-Canon: The first in a series of posts discussing my primary backburner project at the moment: a Mothership total conversion mod (a la something like Cloud Empress). Unlike standard Mothership, this game is built around a specific setting (and even a specific time within that setting). I discuss about how I’m looking to do that when Mothership very much does the opposite.

• Stranger Stars - Classes, Trauma Responses, and Abilities: I’m expanding Stranger Stars to include 6 classes and am looking to standardize trauma responses, add new abilities, and more. I talk through my plans (and tease some more setting details) here.

• Table Talk - Mothership’s Panic Table: I review, entry by entry, the standard Mothership Panic table to see what I like, what I don’t, and what plan to change (and how) in my own projects in the future.

Expect more from me over on the blog side of things. I find it really rewarding to chat with people as I’m working in this way, and it helps me work through my design thoughts and goals. Another Stranger Stars post (and more) is coming soon!

FREEBIE: MCGW ANNUAL #3

MeatCastle Annual #3 is a 24-page, full-color A5 zine collecting the third year of TTRPG supplements originally released in Missives from the MeatCastle, the monthly MeatCastle GameWare newsletter.

This year’s collection features 6 different pieces including a North Atlantic microsetting, two Mothership 1e supplements, a Cairn 2e adventure and science fantasy background, and a one-page Honey Heist hack about leftovers in the fridge.

Pre-orders for physical copies will be running for the next two weeks over at my webstore. Grab a copy while you can as this is likely to be a very limited print run (100 copies or less, probably)!

!!! PRINT COPIES are available for PRE-ORDER at the MCGW store !!!

MeatCastle GameWare Annual #3 includes:

• MICROSETTING

  • The Strange Old Island: A lost North Atlantic island

• CAIRN 2E

  • Pawns of the Mind Masters: World-ending illusion adventure

  • Star Fallen: Science fantasy background

• MOTHERSHIP 1E

  • Second Self: Severance-inspired cyberware

  • Transmissions from the Datacache: Intel op hacking

• ONE PAGE TTRPG

  • The Light in the Fridge: a tiny game of leftover adventures

Download your digital copy for free HERE (or over on Itch)!

MORE COOL STUFF

The Itch Winter Sale is here which means my digital releases are 25% off from now until January 5th! Plus, you can get everything (13 titles, including Tacticians of Ahm) for $50 total (that’s 35% off the regular prices). Get cool stuff! Support me! Win win!

I recently got some really nice feedback on someone’s playthrough of There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station. In the indie TTRPG scene, hearing “I’ve dropped my 4 year DnD campaign to focus fully on” the game I made the adventure for is pretty much the best thing I can ever expect to hear!

Chaoclypse is back making videos! This one is another wonderfully simple and smart way to easily and accessibly create killer grid-n-minis combat at any table.

Sam Sorenson put out more tangible tips for editing RPG manuscripts. For anyone looking to write almost anything for RPGs, these are great tips to keep in mind as you write and to self-edit after writing, even if you are working with an experienced editor. From a nitty-gritty writing standpoint, this post has the juice.

Chris Bissette is back with another advent calendar. This year, it is a dark n’ grimy dungeoncrawl novella. I’m toying with getting more into fiction next year so this is a great way for me to see how someone else in my corner of the game world is doing it. It’s well worth the price of admission!

Diogo Nogueira (of Primal Quest and Kosmosaurs fame) recently became Lead Game Designer at White Wolf (of Vampire and World of Darkness fame). I just think that’s neat! It’s cool to see someone from my corner of the indie space make the jump into the shadowy halls of more traditional TTRPGs. I’m definitely keeping an eye on White Wolf’s work much more in the future than I was before!

Aaron King partnered with Plus One Exp to release a free zine exploring Powered by the Apocalypse moves. I always make a point to read Aaron’s writing, and he’s an especially accomplished creator in the PbtA space. Plus, there’s also an ongoing game jam inviting you to create moves of your own, for your real life, as a standalone exercise, or as part of a larger game.

Thursday Garreau recently reviewed Across the Web, an older Mothership supplement that I’d never heard of but she loves. I came away from the review really smitten by a lot of its cool ideas on smaller, calmer slice of life moments set between the game’s usual alien horrors. You can pay-what-you-want for Across the Web over on Itch.

All of the other OVER/UNDER Canyonheavy Collective bosses got to hang out at Dragonmeet in London recently. I wasn’t there, but that didn’t stop us from putting my into the picture anyone (I’m the slightly too big guy with the way too long arm on the right side). Really sad I missed getting to spend time in meatspace with this crew!

Thanks for reading! See you in 2026 - a year I’m hoping to make bigger and better than 2025 in every way! - Christian

Subscribe now

In this Missive, I’ve got a review of Norgad’s Mothership module DEAD WEIGHT for you, a hacker-themed Mothership FREEBIE, and - as always - MORE COOL STUFF. Enjoy!

DEAD WEIGHT Review: Death Begets Death

⚠️⚠️ FOR WARDENS’ EYES ONLY - SPOILERS ARE IN FULL EFFECT HERE ⚠️⚠️

It’s been some time since I’ve run Mothership. I asked around for recommendations - new releases from the last year or so - and one module kept getting mentioned to me: DEAD WEIGHT, a 12-page, black and white zine from 2024 written, illustrated, and laid out by Norgad and edited by A Rat.

Something’s about to go terribly wrong aboard the Adamant Lapis. Amongst stacks of unremarkable rock samples, gravel, and ore, there’s a large and featureless sphere that does absolutely nothing;

Unless you’re already dead.

Cadavers are pulled inward with the force of a hundred starship engines, tearing through bulkhead and flesh alike. The hull groans from strain. Oxygen hisses through punctured metal. Every single member of the crew is a potential projectile.

It’s immediately clear, just from the module’s Itch page (the intro to which you read above), DEAD WEIGHT has a special premise at its center (the Pearl), weaponizing something Mothership has in steady supply - corpses - as an additional means of ratcheting up the tension and adding to the chaos of cascading failure.

The aspect of play I wasn’t expecting from this setup was how much it also created a situation where saving NPCs and PCs alike felt very valuable. Especially in one shot play, it’s easy to give up on characters you just met, but it’s another thing to give up on a character AND add another explosive hazard to the situation.

In my session, this led to player’s learning they needed to act a bit differently than usual - both in and out of character. When the first character dies and its clear what happened next, it becomes imperative to do what you can to rescue and stabilize those who remain.

This can also connect to the cascading failure of the ship’s systems: If the reactor is forced to power down, do the cryopods open? If so, how long does it take for any seriously-injured crewmembers kept there to die of their injuries? Suddenly, getting the power back online becomes even more important - and has another ticking clock attached.

But there’s more than a cargo hauler with a meat-missile-making pearl at its center here, there’s first act intrigue put into play by another recently-recovered specimen aboard the ship, one carrying a waterborne pathogen capable of killing an exposed human within 12 hours. In fact, the lead researcher aboard the ship just died of this alien affliction. Don’t worry, her body comes back around in several hours - unfortunately, its after the Pearl has turned it into a cruise missile.

This opening act sets up an infection thriller adventure, and truthfully, that is always at play here too. It’s just no longer the most pressing concern once a crew member accidentally activates the Pearl and the bodies (and meat) start flying.

This mid-adventure switcheroo was fun to see play out because the crew was focused on containing an infection but were failing to considering the many other alien samples onboard the ship. Even when it become clear something else was afoot, the average player’s mind will jump to “an alien creature broke containment” before “there’s a meat-pearl making bodies into bullets,” so there’s a lot of tense confusion and early scrambling to learn everything they can amid the growing chaos.

The classic Mothership elements, Survive - Solve - Save, are all at play here, but they are more uniquely intertwined than in your average adventure. Seeing someone fail to Survive may be how the survivors are able to Solve the mystery, but now it’s even more pressing to Save everyone they can going forward.

The nice graphic design, clear layout, and smart writing is another hallmark of this module. Each spread features a minimap of its corresponding section of the ship. Straight lines (seen above) mark corpses’ paths through the ship. If a line goes through a room, you are given additional info about the now-damaged room right beneath its intact description (for example, General Storage may have new hazards after being breached and finding specific items may be far more difficult and time-consuming than before).

It just plays very smoothly - especially with Player and Warden handouts allowing everyone at the table to track crew members, time onboard the ship, what rooms are and are not damaged, etc. Cascading failure-type adventures in Mothership can sometimes feel quite confusing to track and picture for the players, but here, what is and isn’t failing is never a question as it’s openly and easily tracked - letting the players focus more on what they are going to try to do about it.

After reading DEAD WEIGHT, my only worry was that the zine didn’t nod to any potential resolutions. Typically, this isn’t something I feel like I need in an adventure, but for whatever reason, I was worried here that the players may not be sure how to move towards a resolution. I found myself wishing I was given a few ideas as to how things may be “solved” beyond simply getting the hell off the ship. But after playing, I didn’t miss those “possible endings” at all - players came to a great resolution and many other possibilities were all envisioned easily. So if this worries you too, don’t let it! Embrace the chaos, and those paths will become clear during play.

I ran DEAD WEIGHT as a single three-hour session with six player characters. We started play with a ten-minute montage introduction chronicling the opening weeks of the ship’s journey and began play with the Pearl’s activation. We ended more or less right at the three-hour mark with the surviving crew members (RIP Mickey) reentering the ship to attempt to stabilize the situation for possible future rescue but all the immediate threats were dealt with, mysteries uncovered, and the Pearl successfully tossed deep into the void.

As a one-shot, structuring the session this way worked quite well and retained most of the various elements of the adventure. Due to the lack of lengthier intro, most NPCs fell into the background. If I was running this again, I would roll Panic checks for every NPC whenever an explosive event happened regardless of their location on the ship and used the results to add to the cascading problems aboard the ship. Other than that, this module is a great option for one-shot play.

DEAD WEIGHT is a wonderful new addition to the Mothership third-party supplement “canon.” It features short but sweet writing densely delivered by crisp and clear layout. A wonderful “red herring” threat that need not be a red herring at all, if it is allowed to spread. A true threat so strange and inventive that players will be scratching their head for some time amid the chaos before they are able to figure it out. The warden and player tools (including some options like tabletop audio I didn’t even dive fully into) are top notch. And perhaps most importantly of it - it has a great primary gimmick: drawing straight lines over the ship’s map to show the path bodies take as they turn to missiles and which rooms are breached in the process. It felt satisfying to do, in a mean gremlin-y sort of way, each and every time!

Plus, the adventure’s central artifact is can easily cast a massive shadow over a space station, a planet, or even a whole campaign universe. I couldn’t help but imagine the Pearl being weaponized - or worse, replicated. A nondescript cargo pod left in a docking bay on board Prospero’s Dream… How long until the first death? How much damage is done? How many more missiles are created in that first event alone? How long until anyone is able to make sense of what is happening? Could a station or colony of sufficient size/density even survive something like the Pearl hidden at its center? Like any great module, there are a million possible and enticing ramifications to roll around in your head for days and days after play.

DEAD WEIGHT is available for purchase now:

Digital - $5 USD
Physical - $9 USD

FREEBIE: Transmissions from the Datacache

This month’s freebie intended for use with Mothership and is inspired by my time spent as a hacker cowboy in last month’s OVER/UNDER. These are my quick and simple house rules for putting a datacache in stations all across your universe, including how to buy intel/counterintel queries, how to hack them, how to spend tokens to offset your costs (or lack of skills), and more.

I wanted to create the minimum required mechanical scaffolding to create some of the exciting moments we had uncovering secrets and creating the “truth” as hackers aboard a space station. If you bring it to your table, I’d love to know how it goes!

Download the high-quality versions (including printer friendly) HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

Chris Airau recently started Ansible Uplink, a sci-fi TTRPG module review podcast. It’s got a slew of cool TTRPG industry folks reading and reviewing sci-fi modules for Mothership, Traveller, and more. Plus, there’s a very fun retrospective episode on OVER/UNDER featuring several of my Cowboy hacker crew reliving the glory days of that truly unreal gaming experience.

Check out the show HERE or in the podcast app of your choice.

There’s far too much stuff from OVER/UNDER to share it all, but here’s a pirate radio segment I created as my character, Denk “Freaky” Fontaine of the CanyonHeavy Collective cowboys. I’m still trying to come to terms with how to even being to explain or analyze my month-long obsession with O/U, but you can likely expect more on that later!

The new game from worlds by watt, Rust Wings, is coming in the new year! I did some early dev work on this Mausritter hack, and it’s got a ton of really interesting stuff going on. Much like Cloud Empress and its early connections to Mothership, watt is taking the well-tuned core of Mausritter and various Odd-likes but building lots of totally new, really inventive stuff on top. I’m stoked for y’all to see more (and to keep working on some of it myself soon)!

You can save the Kickstarter page HERE to get notified on launch!

Here’s what I backed during MOTHERSHIP MONTH. What did you back?

I recently had the pleasure of getting to play Chris Bisette’s A Dungeon Game with their adventure The Moss Mother’s Maze (and Chris ran the game too)! Both were great. I loved the really open-ended and creative magic system of ADG and found the dungeon at the heart of the Moss Mother’s Maze to be really captivating with an extremely memorable final treasure. My character lived… but at what cost?!

Thanks for reading! In the coming months, I’m hoping to finish up my work on Flatline on the Blocks, put out a small one-or-two page TTRPG, and keep at my current projects. See you later - Christian

Please check out the preview page, and give us a follow there if you are interested. Follower counts make a huge difference in how we are surfaced and seen across the internet by folks and how well the project does as a whole.

After that, you know I’ve got MORE COOL STUFF to catch you up on what I’ve found cool in the TTRPG space since you last heard from me.

Beyond that, I have finished up my freelance schedule and am focusing solely on personal projects going forward as I am able between immigration work, day job work, and life’s many continued trials and tribulations. In the past few weeks, I’ve been picking away at Tactician of Ahm’s next update (which includes the near final rulebook), Stranger Stars - my total conversion Mothership hack set, and Goblin Planet (which will be wild whenever I can get the manuscript finished, I promise).

- Christian

Have you seen our upcoming Mothership Month project, Flatline on the Blocks? Well, you should! I’m writing a Block, doing dev editing, and may be contributing some copy/line editing as well. My block, The Faucet, includes one of the district's only four cargo lifts, strictly controlled by a new Teamster splinter faction - The Order of Free Labourers.

Follow the zine HERE! Every follower helps us spread the word even further!

Xeno-plants crawl through the vents, noodle shop mobsters operate black markets, monobikes burn rubber down dingy streets, rogue slugtech creeps up out of toilets, a dead warship slumbers, scrappers chip away at the infrastructure underfoot, and crowds clamor for the new MindOrb cybermods unknowingly powered by a sinister source. In the Spinal Crux District, every Block has its secrets. Most bad, but some good—if you know where to look.

18 veteran Mothership writers (including me!), artists, and more bring their surgical precision to the Spinal Crux District in Flatline on the Blocks, a 52pg zine detailing 20 new Blocks on Prospero's Dream.

Plus, you can explore the Spinal Crux District organically while keeping your Finger on the Pulse, instigating encounters using a new procedure inspired by Mythic Bastionland's Myth Omens.

Check it out and sign up to follow the project HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

Pawns of the Mind Masters, my Appx. N Jam adventure for Cairn, was rated #24 out of #226 jam entries! It’s an honor to be so highly rated among one of the strongest jams I’ve ever seen on Itch. It means a lot! Also - because I am a fool - I still haven’t put a price on the adventure over on Itch which means you can still get it for FREE.

Go grab it and see what all the fuss is about.

The Shrike, written by Leo Hunt and published by Silverarm Press (and edited by ME), won Gold for Best Adventure - Long Form at this year’s ENNIE Awards. I’m really proud of this book and am so thankful Leo and Joel had to me to edit this beast of book. It’s my largest TTRPG editing job to date, and the fact it was so well received feels awesome! I plan to say I’m an ENNIE Award-winning editor now, even though they didn’t put my dang name on the website.

The Panic Table ran a 75-PLAYER version of The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station at GenCon last month. I'm so happy to see it went so well, and I'm excited for what the future of megagames at cons is looking like (especially from The Panic Table folks). I couldn't be too involved with this one (other than my initial zine and giving it my blessing), but I'm dying to be more involved for the next one.

Check out their write up and reflections on the game HERE!

I recently edited Saint Witold’s Bell, a Shadowdark-compatible adventure by Perplexing Ruins. I always enjoy working with PR, and if you ever need some art for your own adventures (or to just look at with your eyes and enjoy), his commercial use Patreon is still awesome.

Check it out HERE!

I recently dug through the archive and found the first time my name was ever published in a tabletop game-related publication. Here it is - in White Dwarf, Issue 258 from July 2001. I was 13 and REALLY into painting Tyranids.

If you’ve followed me long enough, you may remember when I briefly had my print items for sale via PlusOneExp and me alluding to a lot of frustrating behind the scenes stuff. Well, Rascal wrote a big story on some of what went down there that I think it a good cautionary tale for folks of an absolute mess. You’ll see quotes from me, folks behind MORK BORG, and others. I’m happy that some of this came to light, even if it took a while.

Read it HERE (requires a Rascal sub or $1)!

Alfred Valley keeps making dope “TTRPGs in 1 Rule” videos for Shut Up & Sit Down. Every time one releases, I take it as a personal challenge to predict the 1 rule that will get called out. This time, I was right!

In non-TTRPG cool stuff, I’ve lost over 50 pounds over the last several months (by getting back to running like I used to before COVID and eating MUCH better than I was). I think that’s neat. Feeling physically better than I have in four or five years!

Thanks for reading! See you in the next one! - Christian

Subscribe now

This Missive is pretty late, but I make up for it by overstuffing it with TTRPG goodies: An look at setting generation in Cairn 2e, a video essay about character backstories, a full old-school fantasy adventure, and more. Enjoy! - Christian

In this Missive, I wanted to try something a bit different. I decided to look at procedures aimed at similar goals from two different games—one new and one old—and see how they each pan out. For this first new/old matchup, I chose Cairn 2e which I recently received the wonderful box set of in the mail (and created the Star Fallen background for in last month’s Missive) and Technoir, a cyberpunk roleplaying game from ~2012 that was the first indie RPG I ever ran and one I still have many fond memories of running.

In each game, I’ll be looking at what I’ll widely refer to as their “setting generation” procedures. As the two games differ greatly, the exact shape of those systems varies, but both are aimed at helping you build a setting with factions and struggles with which your players interact. This Missive includes Part 1 - Cairn 2e, with Technoir coming in the next issue. Anyway, let’s get to it!

Region & Faction Building in Cairn 2e

First, I ran through the Cairn 2e Region and Faction generation, as close to “as written” as possible. I did a single small region with 2 factions, 3 biomes, and 5 points of interest. I’ll talk through my takeaways from the experience first, but you can find the full region and faction notes in the “Welcome to BINTARWYE” section below.

First, I rolled up the region’s theme: A culture of inventive wealth with an abundance of horses and a scarcity of livestock. I love the combination of inventive + wealth as it instantly created this idea of their being unusual elements to how this region has cultivated its wealth and power, but the horses/livestock combo didn’t work as well for me. I imagine horses are used for meat in place of traditional livestock here, and it’s a fairly wide region with horseback travel being much more common than the surrounding regions, but I wasn’t immediately inspired to apply this resource element to the future factions I was about to roll.

Next, I created two factions. I blended my first roll of “cultists” and the faction’s primary agent being a “jailor” with the “inventive wealth” theme to create a sort of proto-cargo cult funding its operation through paid imprisonment—accepting prisoners from neighboring regions for payment and this tying into their beliefs that punishing the sinful would bring them closer to attaining heavenly wealth. From this, the BARRED BANKERS OF BINTARWYE were born.

My second faction came together a bit more muddily but ended in an interesting place. A “merchant” faction with a “farmer” agent combined with the “judicious” and “deceptive” traits led me to imagine a dictatorial guild of farmers and merchants, playing off of the region’s wealth of horses to feed a strong network of transport. THEY OF THE IRON LEDGER are—in many ways—the de facto governance of the region, protecting roadways for their members, forcing new farmers, artisans, and merchants to pay into their dues structure, and more.

Faction creation worked well, but ultimately, not all of the agenda prompts were able to combine nicely with others on this small of a scale. I think in a grander campaign setting this would not be an issue, but here—with just two factions—it felt odd to have agenda’s like “revenge, but another faction has the same goal” when the only other faction did not have that goal. Of course, there are ways to remedy this myself - either by adding it to the Barred Bankers agenda list as well or tying it to a future, neighboring region’s faction. But some of these bumps stood out—often because of just how well others blended together.

For example:

The Barred Bankers want to establish a new order but need a relic. They also wish to infiltrate another faction (the Iron Ledger, in this case), but an internal schism (the group attempting to establish the new order) threatens the faction from within. Additionally, the Iron Ledger is collecting artifacts but needs a key piece of information. The relic the internal Barred Bankers faction members need to establish their new order is held—or about to be held—by the Iron Ledger.

With these my two factions created, I dove into the dice drop region map creation. This procedure sees you through a number of drops and rolls to determine the topography (based on where the die lands), landmarks (based on what was rolled), draw rivers and lakes, roll for weather, drop more dice for points of interest, and so on until you’ve gone from determining the broadest environmental characteristics to the individuals paths between dungeons and cities. From there, the book invites you to brainstorm further using all the details you’ve collected.

My region, Bintarwye as I decided to name it, became a strange, ethereal landscape of dells and foothills meeting lava fields, strange artifacts of past ages, shifting buildings, and strange weather. Wyelen, the region’s heart, was a city at the edge of two worlds. One was pastoral and idyllic, full of horse farmers and caravans, while the other was deadly and unknowable, prone to adventurers and expeditioners sure they knew the correct path through the lava flows, that they knew the correct calendar to get inside the crystal spire. This blend of mundane and extremely not mundane elements creates a very interesting (and appropriately fantastical) setting where it feels grounded enough to be far afield of more gonzo settings but much more intriguing as both a GM and a player to explore on its face than more stock standard fantasy settings like Westeros. The procedure created a map filled with possibility, one where I could imagine a campaign going deeply into traversing the fields to unearth lost treasures and another campaign stopping jailors and leveraging trade factions against one another without ever delving deeply into the ancient ruins or shifting lands. This kind of possibility space (while retaining specific, actionable info for us at the table) is great!

There is one small nitpick that’s really more about me being frustrated with our physical reality than with the game, but I often find myself sending dice all across the table and onto the floor when doing dice drop procedures like this. Even from a very low height, it was hard to keep the dice on the page! While the game called for these dice to be set aside and rolled later as additional point of interests (I believe), I just re-dropped them in the moment to help give myself more to build around. If I really stuck to my initial drop, I’d have had only two biomes across the entire map. It’s also worth noting I named everything during this generation, and the book itself did not provide any suggested names in this section (that I saw, anyway).

Overall, I found the region and faction generation provided in the Cairn 2e warden’s guide to be quite strong, if fairly typical in its structure (but varied in its table entries)—and that’s not a bad thing as tried-and-true procedures are often tried-and-true for good reason. It’s also worth mentioning these procedures fall firmly within the avenue of pre-session GM prep. Rolling, writing, thinking, and otherwise generating this region and its factions took over an hour all told. This isn’t something I would do just before, or certainly during, play.

That said, I could now dive into play in this region with a good level of flavor and background to play from—which is certainly a sign of successful procedure.

Welcome to BINTARWYE

(pronounced bin-tar-why)

Heart: Wyelen, The City of Coin (pronounced why-len)
Culture: Inventive Wealth
Resources: + Horses, - Livestock

Weather

• Spring: Mild, Sunny

• Summer: Hot, Humid

• Fall: Chilly Stormy

• Winter: Mild, Clear

Special Weather

• Siren Stones: Figures moving in your periphery, but nothing is there.

• Broken Sundial: Shadows disappear nearby, and animals are wary.

• Sinkhole: Days are erratic, sun moves backwards before springing to night.

Faction: THE BARRED BANKERS OF BINTARWYE

• Cultists

• Agent: Thomas the Generous (Jailor)

• Connected & Repressed

• Advantages:

  • Members

  • Resources

  • Wealth

• Agenda: Establish a new order, but a relic is required.

• Agenda: Infiltrate another faction, but internal schisms threaten the faction itself.

• Agenda: Spread a belief, but another faction stands in their way.

Faction: THEY OF THE IRON LEDGER

• Merchants

• Agent: Martha Highwheat (Farmer)

• Judicious & Deceptive

• Advantages

  • Information

  • Force

• Agenda: Destroy something, but first an alliance must be brokered.

• Agenda: Revenge, but another faction has the same goal.

• Agenda: Collect artifacts, but a piece of information must first be discovered.

NEW VIDEO ESSAY

I recently created a short 4-minute video essay about pondering having children, creating TTRPG character backstories, and how hope is changed by experience throughout our lives. Folks have been enjoying it - maybe you will too!

My next essay topic: How Moving to an Island Reshaped How I GM Overland Travel

Freebie: PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS

It came with the rising of the full moon. ECKTA THE MIND MASTER, one of THE FOUR, crawled from thin air and overwhelmed the minds of every man, woman, and child in the remote village of HWEN.

Now, the village is awash with activity, as its citizenry—lost in a twisted dream of their everyday lives—gather the final components for THE PSYCHOGATE, the ultimate instrument of oppression.

Across the region, rumors spread of dark dreams, lost caravans, and an ethereal titan visible only under the light of the moon. None but the bravest adventurers would walk into the danger growing in the heart of Hwen.

Can you free the PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS?

PAWNS OF THE MIND MASTERS is a 4-page fantasy adventure of illusion and confusion, created for use with Cairn 2e but easily playable with any fantasy game.

Downloads include Page, Spread, and Printer-Friendly PDFs.

Get your copy HERE or grab it FOR FREE over on Itch.io!

MORE COOL STUFF

The pre-launch page for Twisting Unseen, a new Mothership adventure from Chris Airiau that was a part of The Meat Grinder—my short-lived (but very productive) TTRPG writing group—and that I had the privilege of doing some development work on, is up now on Backerkit. This adventure has some really cool board game-style tile placement elements connected to a great in-world premise where the PCs get in on knowing they are building their surroundings, much like their in-real-life player counterparts. It’s cool and pretty unique!

The Star Fallen, my Cairn 2e background and last month’s Missive Freebie, is now available to grab over on Itch.

HOME by Deep Dark Games, a game of Kaiju vs Mech battles that I had the privilege of editing, was recently featured on CNN. I have to admit: that’s not a sentence I ever expected to write! It’s fun (and interesting) to see how the reporter here described roleplaying games for a mass market viewership.

The 2025 ENNIE nominations dropped, and I had a hand in a few of them! The Shrike by Leo Hunt (featuring art from Jantiff Illustration, Meredith Silver, and Glynn Seal) which I had the pleasure of editing was nominated for Best Adventure - Long Form. Very happy to see this one getting some love.

Triangle Agency (by all the fine folks listed above), which I had the pleasure of writing an adventure for in The Vault - the game’s companion adventure book, is up for Best Game, Best Rules, Best Writing, AND Product of the Year.

Voting is open now! Vote HERE!

It’s been a long, trying two months. In many ways, I’m floating in limbo between the old world and the new, between the old work and the new, between the old country and the new—you get the idea. And floating in limbo is tiring. Days seem too short when it matters and too long when it doesn’t. And things often are so stressful and tiring that the ability to create feels as if it’s been entirely removed from you, even if deep down the will remains.

But it’s worth pushing through. It’s worth taking the weekend trip even though you are so anxious to leave the cats behind. It’s worth pushing your drone a bit too far into the fog even though you could crash. It’s worth overextending the bank account ever so slightly if it means regaining that fire at the center of your soul.

I’m not here with any big takeaways or words of wisdom—not yet anyway—other than to say: I think it is important to make time, even when it seems truly frivolous and even downright foolish to do so, to create. Create something. Anything. Just create.

Maybe it sees the light of day and gets released or maybe it just keeps you company for a few hours after a tough day and spends the rest of its days on a stack of unfinished ideas, but either way, you and the world will have been better after than you were before.

Without further ado, please enjoy my weird little star man player class for Cairn 2e. It brought me a lot of joy in the few hours I could spare to create it!

The Star Fallen - Background (Cairn 2e)

I recently got my Cairn 2e boxset in the mail and was feeling inspired to create a background. I love games that let you hone in on a custom style or vibe of character fairly quickly without also requiring you to spend eons building an entire bespoke kit for this character from levels 1 to 20. It’s was fun in Troika, it’s fun in Mork Borg, and it’s also fun here!

Because I’m me, I made it spacey so the Star Fallen is exactly what it sounds like with a few curveballs thrown in. You are a being of strange, mostly unknown—even to yourself—origin, cast out as a babe from some distant star, and you have likely lived much of your life in Vald (or whatever planet your table is playing) as an outsider. The star from which you fell determines a special proclivity you’ve had since birth and being in this unnatural (to you) world you now find yourself in has summoned a sense in you your fellow adventurers don’t seem to possess—sometimes useful, sometimes not.

Download the high-quality files HERE!

The Star Fallen’s art is by Perplexing Ruins, who offers a slew of great royalty-free art via Patreon AND just recently went full-time with art and TTRPG creation—so go and show him some support!

Roll up a Star Fallen and tell me what strange little guy you got. Or—even better—if you take this to the table, I’d love to hear about how it went!

Leave a comment

More Cool Stuff

Stories from the Slip Vol. 1 for Cloud Empress is live for less than 48 more hours! This is a cool zine campaign limited to 1,000 physical copies. While I’ve had a hand in Cloud Empress development in the past (including the upcoming Life and Death expansions), I wasn’t involved in these zines which makes me more excited than ever to explore them alongside everyone else. I particularly love watt’s monthly newsletter expansions and the almanacs bringing them to print.

My two action kits, Slasher Horror and Fantasy Crafting, are now available for OddFolk, Maxwell Lander’s modular RPG! And if that’s not enough, there are also kits from Aaron King and Kaitlin Tremblay (and the game is pay-what-you-want)!

Idraluna-Archives continues to put out huge, extremely cool hexmaps on Itch. My personal favorite so far is the terraformed lunar surface (seen above). I’d love to build an entire game world around this one day. There’s also an entire 6-mile hex map collection for the entire Earth, an ice-less Antartica, and a fantasy Martian map.

Greenhorns, Spicy Tuna RPG’s weird space RPG, is now out digitally! The rulebook includes The Mad Mystic, a bounty hunt mission I wrote featuring my take on a Destiny villain. Here’s my short pitch: A witch long beyond her time. A land of ancient traditions. A people yearning for a place in the ever-growing universe. A planet hijacked by resentment and envy.

Fellow St. John’s local and noted TTRPG recommender Mint-Rabbit (aka There’s a TTRPG For That) is currently running a Canadian creator game jam all about Canadian inspirations. I’d love to get something together for this, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to - either way though, I’m excited to see what the northern folk cook up!

There’s a massive version of The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station coming to Gen Con this year thanks to Cameron from The Panic Table. 30+ players will all be playing in the same mega-sized arena of Wren Sinclair’s infamous Bloodfields at the same time! I’m so sad I won’t be in attendance this year, but I’m DYING for all the play reports I can get!

Prismatic Wasteland recently dropped a blogpost all about divine magic in fantasy TTRPGs, and it has a ton of cool ideas in it! My ideal twist on some of these ideas are clerics focused entirely on prayers and rituals, the vast majority of which should not even be miraculous or with immediately known pay off. They may shift rolls slightly, widen crit windows, give dreamlike visions of info, things of that nature.

Golden Achiever recently released Issue #2 of The International Player’s Review, their “magazine for gamesmasters, players, and anyone who spends more time drawing dungeons than doing homework.” It includes a lot of great stuff and cool old-school era appropriate advertisements of modern stuff - like Tacticians of Ahm!

Perplexing Ruins recently started a blog and the first post digs into solo gaming structure. How much is too much? And how much isn’t enough?

Lastly, please enjoy this weird system-free TTRPG weapon I created off a quick prompt from RA Creedon over on Bluesky:

Dead Man's Hand: A bog-preserved hand of a forgotten gunslinger. Pointing at a target & squeezing the hand kills the target's father on their 29th birthday. If the target was not born at that point in time, they vanish. A finger falls from the hand w/ each use. When none remain, the hand rots away.

See you on the next one! Stay safe, stay strong, and take time to play whenever you can. - Christian

Share

Second Self™ by MENOS

In a bold step forward for both cyberware and team management across the galaxy, MEMOS recently debuted Second Self™, a minimally-invasive brain implant capable of creating a secondary self within a single mind—a self with their own memories, job titles, skills, and personalities.

With Second Self™, a crew of four becomes a crew of eight, capable of handling twice as many employment objectives and working in an exponential array of personalities. Second Self™ crews are able to work twice as long (on average) between shore leave periods when compared to traditionally-Selved crews.

Second Self™ is a 5.5”x8.5” bifold pamphlet detailing a cutting-edge piece of cyberware, capable of creating two unique Selves within one body. This implant can be taken at character creation, implanted into an existing character as part of an employment arrangement, or even purchased outright for those wealthy enough to do so. It has the potential for some huge implications at the table with some particularly fun dramatic moments mixed in there when things go wrong (or you need to use your Secondary Self to rescue your Primary Self in a moment’s notice).

You can download the full-version (with printer-friendly option) HERE!

If you’d like to pick it up on Itch, you can find it HERE!

This is obviously hugely inspired by Severance and its upcoming Season 2 finale, which I’ve been having fun with, and also inspired by Mickey 17, which I loved. Enjoy!

Share

MORE COOL STUFF

Oddfolk, Maxwell Lander’s new modular roleplaying game, is still itchfunding! My two action kits for it, Fantasy Crafting and Slasher Horror, are nearly complete.

Check it out HERE!

Spicy Tuna RPG’s latest game - Blackthorn: A Pulp Horror RPG - is live on Backerkit as part of their Pocketopia crowdfunding event. The art and style here is really wonderful, and Marco’s got some great writers contributing as well.

Check it out HERE!

The Faction Rolls came to a head in my ongoing Mausritter campaign! The Dedratz completed multiple objectives off some great rolls coupled with the party largely ignoring the group for the last 3 sessions. Excited to see how Pinesgrove and the Acorn Alliance get out of this one!

For the first time in decades, Mongoose Publishing is released an official new book for Classic Traveller. I think that’s neat!

Over the last few months, I’ve been running a large-party, open-table Mausritter game and posting about it occasionally on Bluesky. Folks were interested in how I’m structuring the campaign to support regular 6+ player, 2.5 hour sessions.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Step 1: Invite A LOT of People.

If you are willing to run a game, you can always find people to play. And I mean always. Running TTRPGs is like being a drummer in a world full of punks—you’ll always have a band (or two or three) if you want one. You just need to put yourself in the middle of folks.

In my case, I opened invites to my entire workplace: “Hey, I’m going to be running a game for people. It’s like D&D but you are mice going on tiny fantasy adventures. Want to join?” That’s it. Post it in your restaurant staff text chat, drop it in a slack channel, put up a flyer at your local library, or put it on your most used Discord. Try to build a sizeable pool of vaguely interested people (10-20 folks is good).

Step 2: Start a Group Chat. Pick a Time to Play.

Find out what social media or messaging apps the interested folks use, and pick the most common one. If you don’t use it, you do now. Meet people where they are.

For my group, this is Facebook Messenger. It’s where our work chat was so we just migrated over to a new group chat with the interested folks. From there, I put out feelers for a good time for Session 0 the following week. “Alright folks, I’m free Tuesday and Thursday night next week. Who wants to play from 7-9 one of those nights?” See what folks say, and pick a single time with the most crossover. Set the date, and communicate it to the group. It’s okay if not everyone can make it. In fact, it’s very likely.

If I get commitment from 2+ players, I play. You may want to set a high end cap as well, but I don’t. For lightweight games like Mausritter, running big groups works quite well for me. Session #2 of this campaign had an 8 player party, and we still wrapped a full dungeon in 2.5 hours.

If there’s not enough commitment that week, I either adjust the date if possible or postpone a week. No big deal. We’ve all got lives to live.

Step 3: Ask Which Quest They Want to Play.

Now that you’ve got your time and some committed players, post a poll about what quest they group would like to play. Give at least 3 options. Whatever wins the poll is what you run.

For ease, I recommend utilizing any of the huge library of great pre-written Mausritter adventures. This lowers your need to prep and keeps you stocked with great quests for players to choose from. We started with Stumpsville from the core rules and then moved into adventures from The Estate (with others in the mix).

Step 4: Play the Game. Keep It Snappy.

Before playing, do whatever prep you enjoy doing. I don’t enjoy prep so I often just read through the adventure once or twice. That’s it. Most good Mausritter adventures can be easily “sight read” during play.

Keep your sessions to 3 hours or less. For my campaign, we play from 7-9:30pm with the first 30 minutes being more or less catching up, doing little bits of campaign admin work like making a first-time player a new character, etc.

The rest of that time, we play. I let me players know up front the adventure needs to more or less be wrapped up by the end of our session. They don’t have to resolve every strand or beat every baddy, but we need to get to an exit point at that time. Once everyone has that in mind, it’s never been hard to find that conclusion.

Step 5: Wrap Up the Important Stuff. Save the Rest.

Take the final 10-15 minutes to wrap up the important bits of post-adventure admin: How much gold does each player get? How much XP does each player get? Make sure folks note it down (and note it down yourself). After the session, drop these details into your group chat as well.

Anything else, like shopping, how the actions of today’s quest resolve back in town, etc. will all come up later - so for now, tell everyone goodnight!

Step 6: Do the Faction Turn. Report the News.

Using Mausritter’s faction turn system (including in the core rules), I build out a list of factions. For the first turn, this will take a bit more work than any of the following turns, since you’ll want to include any aspects of your starter adventure - from the enemy faction, to the citizens of your central mouse city, and anything else you may have mentioned or that may be teased within the adventure itself. In the future, you’ll just need to add a new faction or two as you introduce them through play.

The faction system is a great way to reward players for what they did during the session and to show the consequences of what they didn’t do.

For example, my players were meticulous about scouring Stumpsville for hostages and loot. At the end of Session 1, they had to hightail it back to town without saving many of the remaining mice (yet). During the faction turn, I added “Rescue the kidnapped Stumpers” as a goal for Pinesgrove which, when completed, brought a rival adventuring party into play. Now, my players have another group gunning for the same glory and gold they are, but they also got a lot of XP for their approach (and made close allies with the few mice they did save).

The Faction rolls and information (as seen above) is hidden from my players, but—because time does pass between sessions in the game world—I do report how things develop and resolve in a post-session news bulletin (as seen below). Each item is a result of faction rolls, translated into how the players hear about this in the world. Some aspects wouldn’t be known to them and, as such, aren’t included here at all.

Next, invite your players to use this time (in the group chat) to let you know what they’d like to buy in town or see if they’d like to check in with an NPC, have a character moment, etc. Essentially, treat small moments between sessions almost like a play-by-post, but nothing done in this time should require rolls. It’s all character moments, world flavor, and bookkeeping (like shopping).

Step 7: Repeat Steps 2-7 (and Repeat Step 1 As Needed)

Now, you’ve done the full cycle. Laid out like this, it may seem like more work than it really is. In practice, you ask people if they want to play, start a chat, offer times, play, do your admin, turn the world state, and go again.

If you lose interested players or feel like having a bigger pool would help make for bigger and better sessions, then repeat Step 1 but if you’ve got a good group, just keep repeating Steps 2-7.

Everything here is just a matter of removing all barriers from actually playing so you can… actually play! With all that said, GO PLAY!

NEW RELEASES

Update #3 is out now for Tacticians of Ahm! It brings big (and hopefully final) rules changes, more examples of play, more guidance, and new art! Get it HERE!

MeatCastle GameWare - Annual #2 is in stock and available now over in print!

The Light in the Fridge is a one-page TTRPG where you play leftovers in the fridge with one night to reach the top shelf and fix the fridge light before their world is plunged into darkness. I recently wrote this Honey Heist hack in under 24 hours for a job interview writing test. Since I got the job, I decided I’d put it out in the world as a free download. Check it out!

FREEBIE: THAT STRANGE OLD ISLAND

I’ve been looking to kickstart my creativity again recently so I decided to go with something small and recently jumped on board the Tiny World TTRPG Jam, a micro setting jam of 8-pages or less. There are some optional challenges for the jam and one is to make your book diagetic (essentially, existing within its own universe) so I took that on as well.

This zine is a weekend’s work of fun, weird worldbuilding born out of a long-ago Newfoundland and Labrador-themed bit of early European exploration folklore. Enjoy!

In 1508: Johannes Ruysch's fleet of exploratory vessels were beset by harsh winds and demon attacks near an unknown island in the north Atlantic.
In 1542: Marguerite de La Rocque, a french noblewoman migrating to the New World, washed ashore Isola de Demoni after being set adrift at sea, with her two children and her lover, by her distraught and vengeful husband.
In 1725: The Isle of Demons is removed from all New Worlds maps by order of both the Catholic Church and the Church of England.
In 1881: I left my home, the Dominion De La Rocque, to explore the outside world and attend an American University.

This small book contains but some of the records and studies of my home, an island where the living and the dead coexist and where no one ever truly leaves. One day, I will return to that strange old island, but today is not that day. - Frederick Reid

That Strange Old Island is an 8-page micro TTRPG setting inspired by the history and folklore of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is system-free and diegetic. It works well with games like Cthulhu by Gaslight and Liminal Horror but could be widely adapted to anything capable of supporting late-19th century play.

Get all the files, including pages, spreads, and printer-friendly versions, HERE!

If you’d like to tie the download to your Itch account, you can find it for free HERE.

MORE COOL STUFF

I am working on Blood in the Snow, a short adventure for the Cloud Empress Winter Jam—although I missed the deadline of the jam itself! I’m still planning to finish this one off since I’m 60% of the way there already. In the meantime, you can check out the jam page HERE!

If you’re interested in my thoughts on non-TTRPG things, I did a GOTY thread about video games I played and love in 2024 over on Bluesky. Check it out!

I also did a year-in-review thread of all the books I really loved last year. Check it out here!

Maxwell Lander recently launched his new game: OddFolk! I’m creating two new action kits for it - Artifact Crafting and Slasher Horror! Check it out!

Spicy Tuna RPG announced their newest game, Blackthorn - Pulp Horror RPG, and launched the Backerkit sign up page! I’ve seen a bit of the behind-the-scenes on this, and I’m really excited to see more. Check it out!

My cousin, Jared, recently launched his own webstore with a weird and wild comic, dark and crazy art, cool stickers, and more. Check it out!

The Panic Table has Dog Eat Dog, a new Mothership actual play series, coming up, and this one looks really interesting for a few reasons: it’s only two players, and it’s explicitly competitive (which I haven’t really seen in an AP before). I love small player count play, and I think having it be competitive means we are likely to see some really cool character decisions and drives. Plus, it looks nice too!

A few folks have been putting out some really cool year-in-review zines you should absolutely check out (and then make your own): Aaron King’s Favorite Books of 2024 and Chris Air’s Weirdo Faves of 2024!

The Shrike, Leo Hunt’s weird and wild hellcrawl for Old School Essentials that I edited, is out now digitally over on DTRPG! Check it out!

Thanks, as always, for your time and support! Thank you as well to everyone who has shared the last few Missives, left comments, and added to the discussion themselves! It means a lot and brings even more subscribers into the fold! We are now over 2,200 subscribers which is HUGE! - Christian

For over three years, I ran a monthly DnD 5e campaign where no one ever used gold. The player characters didn’t have it. It was never given as a reward. Characters in the world didn’t carry it and didn’t spend it. Still, there were new and interesting items and services in the world to discover and make their own, but it was never as simple (and as boring) as buying it.

When I first sat down and started creating the campaign world, I wanted to create something that felt substantivally different than our real world. Some of this made itself known in the government and political structures of the PCs’ homeland, but the aspect that most regularly impacted play was imagining a world without cash, without currency or capital. Too often we limit our fantasy worlds to adhere to our own conditioning and what we feel are the borders of possibility within our own society, and truthfully, it is something that is very hard to break yourself out of and often requires a good faith exploration of history, other cultures, etc to un-learn. It is worthwhile work, of course, because I choose to venture into new worlds and embody new characters to leave our world behind, not to discard all of the unpleasantries of our own reality but to learn how to best imagine other ways of being.

In that campaign, PCs aided NPCs with long-term projects in exchange for room-and-board when they were in town. They learned what NPCs liked and disliked, what certain regions of the game world had in abundance and what others had need of, how to track down those specialized traders of rare and unique items. They navigated the world more richly, intelligently, and—perhaps most importantly—more socially because of the lack of currency. Gold acts as an abstraction and often a quick and easy paving over of the labor and those involved all along the path of a thing from its base parts to its final creation.

In our both our real lives and our fantasy ones, this abstraction may save us time and effort in purchasing something, but it also alienates us from the entirety of the process and allows that seperation to be weaponized against us—all those people involved, even the shopkeeper at times, are removed from our concerns, sometimes for better but often for worse. This does not lead to richer stories, only richer men (something we have an unfortunate abundance of these days).

On a purely mechanical level, removing currency from your game makes moments of supply and demand into bespoke social interactions. You are removing easily forgotten bookkeeping and replacing it with situations in which your players need to learn what NPCs have what they need, what makes them tick, what they have too much of and what they need. They can choose to spend any of their myriad resources to get what they want (rather than just one)—offering services, spending time, exchanging labor, passing along favors, and more.

For small purchases and basic needs, lean on the inherent kindness of others (this may vary from setting to setting, of course). If a man truly arrived at your doorstep dying of thirst, you would give him water to drink before you would ask for his credit card. Most of the denizens of your game world would react similarly, especially in a world in which they are far more used to dealing with and relying on one another than we are in the real world.

In the years since I ran that campaign, other games like Cloud Empress (and Eco Mofos, to some extent) have eschewed traditional TTRPG currency for something like barter or even simple social dealings—favors owed and favors granted. Just as I discovered in my DnD campaign, the interactions that result from throwing out currency in this way are so much richer and memorable (and at times impactful) than any shopping trip in a more traditional world/game.

In one Cloud Empress session, I can distinctly remember a wonderful scene between a hotel owner with a spare room and a party of exhausted travelers. They had little to offer and the owner was fairly demanding. It was the last weeks of the traveling season, and she wouldn’t let her last room be filled for free—winter was coming after all. The party left the first interaction empty-handed. The trinkets they hoped to swap weren’t of interest to her but they spent time in the bar, chatting with patrons and discovered her love of fresh veggies (especially onions and garlic) and how she rarely felt comfortable enough to barter for such precious ingredients for her own meals. Suddenly, something the group hadn’t even thought to trade, some of their special provisions, became a top currency. It secured them the room, and they had a new, memorable home base within the city… as long as they had more onions to trade, of course.

In another case while traveling far from Tack Town, another character traded one of their own valuable item to an NPC of questionable character for their last bullet—making a friend of them in the moment but allowing the party to follow the character and, if things went sideways, act against them with the knowledge that their gun was not loaded.

Outside of gold-for-xp, old-school dungeoncrawling where it is baked into the core gameplay loop of the systems and adventures, removing traditional currency (or at least taking time to consider its place within your game and its world) can be extremely valuable, especially for story/narrative-first styles of play. Plus, we worry enough about money in our real lives anyway. Let’s imagine something different.

MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2

This month’s freebie is MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2, in recognition of it being another full year of TTRPG freebies here as part of the Missives! This is a 44-page, full-color, A5 zine combining the last year’s freebies all in one place.

This year's collection includes two games, a dungeon, two Mothership supplements, a full awards zine, and the two most popular articles from the Missives’ second year.

• Manifest Memory: A solo game of items out of time

• Twelve Damned Coins: Do not play this game

• Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale - Part One: An experimental five-room dungeon built to bring your other TTRPG books off the shelf and into play (system-free)

• Goblin Class: Be a green little freak in a scary human universe (Mothership 1e)

• Party Development Procedure: Backstory seeds for your crew (Mothership 1e)

• 2023 Meaties Awards: My favorite TTRPG things of last year

• Thinking about Feedback: When engagement can hurt and hinder

• In Defense of Fiction: Good games deserve good fiction

In keeping with the freebie spirit, you can download the zine on Itch.io now by paying what you want (which, of course, includes FREE)!

Get MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2 digitally HERE!

If you’d like to pick it up in print, I’m doing a limited print run and pre-orders are available now (shipping out ASAP after I order the print run on Dec. 1st) over at the MCGW store:

Get MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2 in print HERE!

MOTHERSHIP MONTH

Mothership Month is now in full swing! 21 projects are funding now over on Backerkit (including a new first-party book of bounty hunters from Tuesday Knight Games), and I am involved in several of them!

Beyond these three projects though, be sure to check out the full list because there are a lot of good-looking projects in that list. I’m especially excited for Not Enough Scoundrels, Awaiting the Burning Gods, and Devil’s Due, but honestly, it does not look like you can go wrong with any of the projects.

Parasitic Leeches have overrun Trellick Station, a luxury living space station built for white collar workers.

A young adult trans sex worker, Brianna Pilgrim, was murdered and a mysterious doctor running a practice in organ replacing leeches disappeared.

The system is on the verge of a war. Reactionary evangelists, radical feminist separatists, and corporate fascists are squaring up against the Interstellar Sex Workers Union.

Are you able to solve the murder in time? Can you find justice for Brianna before her death is used as a pawn in the political game?

I did some very early developmental editing on this really ambitious and unique project written by Violet Ballard. I had to step away due to lack of time in my own schedule as it developed, but that means I’m now just as excited as anyone to see it in its final form. There’s a lot of very interesting and new stuff happening in this one!

Check it out HERE!

Welcome to Operation Golden Cut, a military heist sci-fi horror adventure for the Mothership RPG. The war-torn moon of Bonaccio is a nightmare of violence and betrayal, with two mega-corporations locked in a deadly conflict over a mysterious metal simillar to gold, "FiboGold," which, due to its unique molecular structure, is valued way more then the old shiny metal itself.

You and your crew are not here to choose sides and be pawns in corporal chess; you're here to steal as much of it possible and get out safely.

I am editing this one! I worked with kin a while back on Karthian Manhunter, and I'm really excited to dig into their biggest project yet. Military stories are rarer than I expected they’d be in Mothership after some early scenarios like Ian Yusem’s The Drain showed how the horrors of war could be just that: horror!

Check it out HERE!

Harpy Tower is the former headquarters of Ferdinand Financial Holdings located deep within the Choke. Now it is a vault and stash house run by the Golyanovo II Bratva underboss Radmir the Wolf and his crew the Wolf’s Grin to hide their ill gotten gains.

Now you’re going to rob it.

I am doing developmental and copyediting on this one! It is really cool to see a module that is building on and expanding Prospero’s Dream, one of Mothership’s few well-known locations (from the classic first-party module A Pound of Flesh). Heists are wonderful setups for memorable TTRPG adventures because they are always brimming with lots of spinning plates, powerful factions, fallible individuals, and high stakes. I’m excited to help make this into the harshest pressure cooker possible.

Check it out HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

Housekeeping Note: I am now entirely off Twitter and have replaced it with Bluesky (and just less time in general on social media). Find me HERE!

The Song of Eastlake, a multiversal, system-free hexcrawl I wrote a world for, is now available to download for FREE (print-on-demand copies available to at cost)! Created by Stella Condrey, each writer started with the same bestiary prompts, wrote their own descriptions of each monster, and filled out the same hexmap with basic prompts befitting of the world their creatures would inhabit. My entry, The Wandering World, is a dark fantasy planet that escape it’s mother sun’s orbit and flew for thousands of years in the darkness between the stars before being caught by a new home. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written in a long time. Check it out HERE!

Rascal recently published an exhaustive (and darkly entertaining) investigation into World of Game Design’s exploitative business practices. This is a company that operated in the Mothership and indie TTRPG space for some time and, for some intangible reason, I’d always been wary of. This piece is one of the best I’ve read in the TTRPG space since the OGL debacle a while back. It’s well worth the read (and worth paying Rascal for)! Check it out HERE!

I recently posted a devlog for Tacticians of Ahm, giving a brief update on the upcoming update (and showed off the new piece of art above this very sentence)! Check out the devlog HERE!

PHANthasmal recently released the first fan expansion for FIREDROP, my quick n’ dirty game of drop pod warfare heavily inspired by Helldivers, for FREE! It’s still a work in progress, but it already features 12 new soldier abilities, 6 new mission modifiers, a new difficulty, and a larger/tougher map. It’s really cool to see someone engaging with the base game in this way and choosing to expand it for everyone (even me)! Check it out HERE!

Thank you so much, as always, for your continued time, attention, and support! Here’s to a third year of Missives from the Meatcastle, which I’m hoping will be our strongest yet. A lot of good life changes have come my way in recent months, paving the way for more creative time and energy that I’m excited to unleash on you all as soon as possible. - Christian

I have been reading a lot of fiction this year. Outside of TTRPGs, I’d hardly read anything over the last several years so I set a reading goal for 2024 of 8 books back in January, a small goal but one that I still felt I could easily fall short of given the last few years. As of this writing, I’ve finished 18 book so far. Due to this massive influx of mostly-good fiction in my life, I’ve been thinking more about the role fiction can play within TTRPGs (and how it feels often overlooked or intentionally left out of many indie projects).

I am a pretty staunch supporter of the idea that the TTRPG book, the thing I make and the thing we buy, is not the game. It is a book. The game is the thing that happens at the table, that unique blend of every player’s interpretations and choices which may have been in no small part inspired by the book but are in no way beholden to it. Because of this, it is reasonable (I think) to consider the role of every TTRPG book in inspiring play. Strong mechanics and well-written scenarios mean little if they never hit the table, if the game is never truly born, so a truly great TTRPG book is one that inspires play as much as (if not more than) it uses smart design to ensure (as much as it can) that play is captivating, fun, and rewarding.

Most commonly, TTRPGs inspire play with art. While art often aligns with good marketing (in so much that people like to pay money for pretty and cool looking things), good art quickly and dramatically inspires play. A single page of art can quickly communicate the vibe of a world, the type of situations that arise within it, the choices and abilities of its characters, and more. When I see all of that in a novel style/setting, it inspires play. It makes me want to create that type of situation at my table using the game, even though we may never recreate that exact moment and we certainly won’t create art on the same caliber for it even if it does. Beyond that, the art has nothing to do with the mechanical aspects of the game. Simply put, I do not need art to play the game—but how much more likely am I to play the game because the art is there?

I believe good game fiction can serve a similar role, but too often, we as designers—in pulling away from the massive hardback tomes of more traditional games, overflowing with words (most of them unneeded or unwanted)—cut out the entirety of a thing without examining its purpose more closely before we do so. We pull back so harshly from the boring 50+ pages of encyclopedic worldbuilding at the front of a 5e sourcebook that we miss the idea of a five-page short story or a two-paragraph piece of flash fiction. A good piece of properly-scoped fiction can communicate all of the same things a wonderful art spread can: the feeling of the world, the types of characters inhabiting this world, the situations characters face and their abilities to effect the world around them. Interesting situations, character choices and consequences can all be explored in just a few paragraphs. Additionally, writing can inspire actionable aspects of the game as well - things that the GM use or can aim to replicate, if they are so inspired: mostly, narrative voice and evocative descriptions. Because roleplaying is often just a story we are telling one another, having stories within the text can be quite helpful, especially for the aspiring GM.

In all of my reading this year, fiction—totally devoid of rules, mechanics, random tables, etc.—has regularly inspired my play (plus my writing, my further reading, etc., etc.)! And yet many games have totally excised this aspect of the traditional TTRPG book which I think is often a shame. I imagine there is a middle ground to discover.

Of course, now you will say “Okay, but if you think this then where is this kind of fiction within your own projects?” and you are right to do so! In short, I have until now very much been a “I don’t need that in my games!” type of designer. Now though, I am working on adding fiction to the scope of Tacticians of Ahm (likely a short story at the opening of the world almanac and smaller pieces within the core rulebook, where I think it will have the most impact out of any of my current projects), and I’m looking to incorporate shorter fiction (1-2 pages at a book’s opening and/or even lots of smaller bursts of “flavor text” throughout) into my upcoming adventures.

It may have taken me reading far more books this year than I expected myself to to re-discover this, but good fiction of an appropriate size and scope can greatly inspire play, just as much as evocative art, and we, as designers and especially as writers, would be foolish to overlook its place within our projects.

UPCOMING PROJECTS

I wrote an adventure for The Hands That Feed, Spicy Tuna RPG’s latest Mothership book! It’s an anthology of corporations, created by a number of awesome designers like Joel Hines and Diogo Nogueira, along with powder keg missions (like mine) where several of the corporations face off in an interesting location with the player character stuck in the middle. It’s launching soon on Kickstarter, and you can follow it here!

My adventure features one of my favorite creatures I’ve cooked up for Mothership so far: The Phyrixian Sage—a Prometheus-inspired, long dormant, and immensely powerful xeno on a mission of its own, sending it across a region overrun with three corps all vying for control.

FREEBIE: Party Development Procedure

In the Quinns Quest review of Mothership, Quinns made a great point when he said:

Where in almost every respect Mothership feels blindingly modern, there is one area where I think it feels actually regressive… Mothership understands that one of the tasks it has to succeed at ,and it does succeed at this, is to capture the kind of practical jeopardy that you are in. It has the critical hit tables. It has stress. It has your financial worries, but it has nothing—NADA—to help create or catalyze the emotional stakes to make you feel like your character sheet is more than an island. For example, to make you feel like you're one half of a relationship or part of a whole team that stands for something bigger than the fact that you all just spawned into the same level together.

All good criticisms are, if nothing else, wonderful bits of inspiration to those looking to hack and homebrew the game they love. I took this comment to heart and thought about how I could add a streamlined bit of party development to Mothership in a way that felt true to the rest of the game’s design but also got the table collaborating on their own stories in the style of other games I enjoy.

What I ended up creating is the aptly named Party Development Procedure or PDP: Three d10 tables, each of which are rolled on in different ways, to help add additional stakes and context to your party and characters prior to play. In ten minutes or so, you should come away from this procedure knowing what kind of collective your party is, how you feel about each of the other PCs, and something you are hiding from the group (for better or worse). Once you start playing though, how all of these things shift and develop is, of course, up to the players.

Download the full quality files (including a printer friendly version) HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas won a Silver ENNIE for Best Writing! I was so happy to see watt’s incredible writing and Roz Leahy’s always excellent editing getting appreciated on the biggest TTRPG award stage!

There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station and The Mole on PIRAD ONE have both hit Silver Seller status and ULTIMATE BADASS has hit Copper Seller status on DriveThruRPG! That puts them in the top 30% and 40% respectively of all products on DTRPG! I’ve been neglecting my DTRPG catalog for a while now, but I’m hoping to correct that a bit over the next month or two. Thanks for all the support!

HOME, a Mech x Kaiju mapmaking RPG by Nick Gralewicz, is out now! I edited this book (Nicks’ first TTRPG), and I think it is something really special. If you like mapmaking, collaborative storytelling, or Godzilla/Pacific Rim-style stories, you’ll love this. Check it out HERE!

As I mentioned earlier, Quinns Quest recently did a great review of Mothership, and it includes several nice shout-outs to some of the best third-party designers in the space right now!

On Mastadon, Tamewhale recently ran There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station with his group, and one of the players drew a vastly more detailed map than the one I drew in the module itself. It’s always great to see a creative, keen-eyed player like this at the table!

Sam Sorensen, one of my favorite people to talk TTRPG design/game theory nonsense with, put out his latest annual GenCon zine: Walls, Floors, and Doors! It’s a tightly designed little zine all about building a good dungeon from ten different dungeon pieces Sam has created. Cool and actionable!

I’ve been re-watching X-Files and some of the show’s best early episodes give some great guides to follow for mystery/horror adventure design! Here’s what I originally posted over on Twitter:

“I've been watching X-Files, and the thing it does that is a great reminder for anyone writing mystery/investigation TTRPG stuff is that there is The Truth and there is Someone Who Wants It to Be Hidden, often these two things are totally separate. That 3-way struggle is key.

The Truth is "There are Aliens" and the aliens may wish to be hidden, but also, you need another faction at play. The second force may be "The Air Force Wants It Hidden to Create Advanced Tech In Secret." The PCs are always fighting on two fronts. The knife can always twist.

And obviously, this doesn't have to just be a 3-way struggle. You can go more and more complex, but I think at its most basic structure, a good mystery or conspiracy needs the PC faction and 2 factions working against them (but often not working together).

A fun way to think about it: You are playing hide and seek. Your friend is hiding and you are seeking. Okay, that's fun enough but pretty mundane. Now, imagine a guy who is also playing who's entire job is just to make sure you don't find your friend. Now that's exciting!

And another bit from a following episode:

Another TTRPG Mystery/Investigation Thought (Inspired by The X-Files): Have at least one mundane threat that is just as dangerous (and possibly even more dangerous) than the supernatural/paranormal one.

Wait, the NSA is busting down doors looking for you and how you know what you know? Oh yea... the wraiths haunting the outskirts of town are pretty scary too.

Space Penguin Ink just released Nielsenauts by Chris Ramdeen, Jarret Crader, Sam Sorenson, and Yomiya. I’ll just let the game’s description sell itself here: “You are Nielsenauts, the artificial intelligence we’ve designed to create unscripted, budgetless entertainment in incredibly realistic CGI worlds. This groundbreaking process does away with actors, writers, and production crews, replacing them with disposable virtual workers, like yourselves! Thanks to this new form of tireless, free labor, profit margins now exceed anything in television history. So get to work, and work fast, as these next fifteen minutes will determine the rest of your lives—literally!”

If you have a subscription to Rascal News, this is a very good interview with Spencer Campbell and Will Jobst where Campbell discusses existing online as a designer, burn out, and moving away from TTRPGs. A lot of what he’s dealing with mirrors some of my own struggles I discussed in the last Missive.

Perplexing Ruins (in partnership with The Lost Bay Studio) recently released a print version of Gnome, his recent Tunnel Goons hack of gnomish adventure. I love the art throughout this book, and Tunnel Goons is a great, superlight framework to build a game of little guys doing interesting things on. Plus, it’s got solo play!

I’m still out and about exploring my new home. Summer in Newfoundland is a beautiful but fleeting time so I have been making my best effort to appreciate it as much as I can. Here are a drone video of the nearby Fort Amherst lighthouse and one of about 200+ shots I recently took during a boat tour to the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve.

Stay safe and have fun. - Christian

Over the last year, my wife and I upended our entire life, moved out of the United States, immigrated to Canada, and have been building our new life here. In that time, I became the primary source of income for our household, originally just focusing on TTRPG work for that until I was able to get things like my work permit to start working locally. Over those months, everything was more expensive than we expected, took longer than expected, and, honestly, was just simply more difficult, more tiring, and more work than we expected. Even now nearly a year in, we are still making slow progress on certain steps, planning next steps, and more (we move into a considerably better apartment later this month, for example). Rebuilding your life in a new place is exciting, fulfilling, and beautiful, but it is also utterly exhausting.

I’d wager that probably less than 50 people in the English-speaking world make enough income as full-time, indie creators in the TTRPG space to entirely support themselves and their family. For myself, I was able to spend almost two years doing games work full-time because I worked part-time in my previous day job and had a partner bringing in an equivalent income to mine (and did not have any big additional expenses like children). Even then, I felt extremely lucky to be in the position I was in and loved each and every day of that work. I was able to work on dozens of projects, put out substantial monthly pieces, and make sure and steady progress on my larger personal projects.

It was, in many way, the writer’s dream, but it was only really sustainable in that precise configuration. Now, that has shifted and I’ve spent the last several months mentally and emotionally floundering as I try to balance the scales on full-time day job work, full-time writing work, and more than full-time immigrating work (learning how new government systems work here, how taxes work here, how insurance works here, how sick time and vacation pay work here, what kind and when to apply for updated permits, etc.).

This is all to say: I am going to be taking a ninety-day-or-so hiatus from all freelance work and will be heavily limiting my personal project work as well.

Of course, I will be sticking to my existing obligations, and I am happy to be a part of them as I’ve already been a bit more selective in recent months about what projects I knew I could or couldn’t do. As such, I’m working on some great stuff, but I won’t be adding new freelance work to my plate in any capacity during this hiatus.

Tacticians of Ahm development will continue, albeit it on a slower-than-month update schedule so I’ll be updating the Itch page to reflect that fact. Other project work continues as well when I am ready and able to do so. I’ve been making progress in recent weeks and even have a smaller side project approaching a playable state which I’m excited about.

This Missive will continue as well, although it may not be hitting your inbox on a monthly basis. Freebies will come as inspiration strikes for now, but I won’t be forcing any extra work in this area. Still, I hope to provide more than enough free and inexpensive entertainment in the “More Cool Stuff” section to help soothe that temporary change to the format.

Obviously, creative work can happen during times of stress and hardship. Some of the best work often does, but there’s a huge difference between passion and inspiration-driven work that pulls you out of those hard times and aiming to make a day job of creative work. Too often, I think we see the two conflated (or rather all creative work being treated as entirely passion/inspiration-driven) when in my experience, they are two very different modes of creation: one is workmanlike, reasoned, structured, and the other is breakneck, happening around the fringes of the chaos or in notebooks just before you fall asleep. Even then, most projects will need that steady, even-handed approach to cross the finish line from manuscript to Actual Product. When I’m finding myself too burdened by a slew of mostly self-set or imaginary deadlines to actually be in the mindset to creative, something is clearly wrong.

My aim with this hiatus is to get the other aspects of my life, in a world that requires I constantly toil to survive, on track to better embrace those moments of true inspiration and build the structure around me back into one where I can (hopefully) return to the kind of creative output I had over the last few years.

In short, I’m taking a break from many things, but I love games and creating stuff for them too much to ever really stop, but I’m stopping where I can, focusing myself elsewhere, and aiming to come back stronger than ever when fate allows.

ENNIE Awards - 2024 Nominees

This year’s ENNIE Award nominations were recently released, and I while I maintain my overall standing on awards (see last year’s MEATIES), I was happy to see several great indie books (and folks) on the list, including two projects I had a very small hand in: The Bloom and Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas!

The Bloom is an awesome sandbox adventure for Liminal Horror. I proofread this one. Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives continue to do incredible work with Liminal Horror’s modules. It’s great to see that work getting the spotlight. Check it out HERE!

Land of Cicadas is Cloud Empress’s hexcrawl zine released as part of its initial crowdfund. I did development work on this one. I have felt for a while now that watt is doing some of the most interesting and heartfelt writing in the TTRPG space so seeing that recognized here (alongside Roz Leahy’s always tremendous editing) is awesome. You can check the zine out yourself HERE!

In addition to these two titles, I was also pleased to see Koriko: A Magical Year by Mousehole Press and Jack Harrison (one of my favorite creators in the space) getting a nomination for Best Product and Best Writing, VR Dead from Daniel Hallinan and Space Penguin Ink getting a nod for Best Monster/Adversary, and Exeunt Press’s Skeleton Code Machine newsletter getting a nomination for Best Online Content. '

Overall, it was a great showing for indie and small creators, and I think it led to an overall list of nominations much more in tune with the industry/community than we’ve seen in previous years.

Public voting opens on Friday, July 12th so go and show your support!

NEW RELEASE: The Thinking Fist

A Saboteur's Guide to Cidus II is a collection of system-free, in-universe artifacts that come together to create a player-driven adventure of an evil megacorp, a cutting-edge facility, and the rebellious faction that fights back against them.

Welcome to Cidus II, the first pamphlet, is the official LifeLabor BioSciences corporate welcome literature given to visitors upon arrival at their Cidus II facility. The Thinking Fist: A Saboteur's Guide to Cidus II, the second pamphlet, is a handout created by The Thinking Fist, a group fighting back against LLBS's gene drone program, outlining a number of vulnerabilities, high-value targets, and more across the Cidus II facility.

I co-created this pamphlet duo with Nyhur (Whispers in the Darkness, Alien Armory) as part of Outer Rim: Uprising and collaborating on the entire thing from concept to final form was really fun (and not something I had done in this way before).

Check out both CIDUS II pamphlets HERE or you can find the full ORU bundle HERE!

NEW RELEASE: The Vault

Haunted Table Game’s Triangle Agency recently launched digitally and that launch included The Vault, the game’s mission book collecting 12 different missions from 12 writers and 12 artists, one of which was me! My adventure is ROM Dump (featuring tremendous art from Sajan Rai): A missing couple, chiptunes echoing inside an old barn, glowing eyes in the cornfield. It’s a rural midwest tale of childhood loves and the dangers of holding on too long to old things.

There’s a lot of where I’ve been mentally in the last year hiding in this adventure: Pondering nostalgia and the digital death of early video game worlds (see Tacticians of Ahm for a different take on this aspect), watching both sets of grandparents fall ill and pass away, moving far away from the cornfields and barns of my youth, and more. In the end, this adventure ended up being about change, transformation, and what parts of yourself you give up to continue living (and who, if anyone, allows you to make those sacrifices). It’s a very special one for me.

You can check out Triangle Agency itself HERE and The Vault, the game’s massive (and awesome) mission book that includes my adventure ROM Dump, HERE.

NEW RELEASE: Outsourced

Spicy Tuna RPG’s latest Mothership 1e release, Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception, is here, and I wrote a bunker escape adventure for it! It’s a very weird, fun, and scary escape where you start locked in the dungeon and have to fight your way down before you can fight your way up and off world. It can be played all at once, piecemeal between other missions, or even on your own thanks to solo rules by Alfred Valley!

You can find the digital version HERE (physical copies are coming soon)!

MORE COOL STUFF

I’ve been creating modules for it for literal years now, but Mothership is finally out and publicly available in its proper first edition form! If you missed the Kickstarter, you can find both the core set, deluxe set, and digital versions HERE.

The folks behind The Panic Table are launching their first crowdfund, and it’s for a big batch of well-produced found footage audio and video files for use in your Mothership games. Plus, there’s a tie-in adventure by DNGN CLUB. It’s live NOW!

Sam Sorenson recently released a free “secret rainy dream-realm characters find by a following a map soaked in water.” I just think that’s an awesome premise and I imagine you do too! You can find it HERE.

They Won’t Cage Us, a new Mothership 1e module from Tim Obermueller and Josh Domanski, is out now as part of the Outer Rim: Uprising digital release! I edited it, and it was a blast to work on! You can find prison heist adventure HERE.

Aaron King recently dropped a free one-page RPG inspired by Jenny Nicholson’s recent video essay on the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. You can find it HERE.

Brandon Yu (known online as Chaoclypse) recently downloaded and added metadata to every single public domain image on Getty.edu. He then, in all his continued awesomeness, dropped them all in a well organized and easily accessible Dropbox folder which you can find HERE. This is tremendously helpful work for us indie folks who want to make great looking stuff but rarely have large budgets to spend on new art (from great artists like Brandon).

My Cloud Empress play-by-blog is ongoing, slowly but surely, over on Tumblr. Check out our full party (created using the game’s really cool solo rules) and first steps into the Land of Cicadas!

Chris Airiau has been dropping some BIG freebies at his newsletter, The Rokaner Report. Fans of my TTRPG freebies here should definitely go and check them out!

Lastly, I recently went and got to see some humpback whales just off shore on one of Newfoundland’s most unique beaches. It was incredible. I encourage you to touch grass whenever you are able.

Thanks for reading and your continued support! - Christian

FREEBIE: New Mothership Class!

I have been slowly continuing work on my upcoming Mothership adventure zine GOBLIN PLANET. This much expanded sequel to THERE IS A GOBLIN ON THE LOOSE IN ICARUS STATION is an open-world, player-driven adventure in the style of Dead Planet and Desert Moon of Karth.

While I don’t have an ETA just yet on when you can expect to pick it up, I do have this teaser player class (a version of which will be included in the final adventure)! Play as a goblin, born of another dimension, aiding a human (and android) crew! Create chaos!

Get the high quality PDF download HERE!

The Trauma Response for this class is a fun one I think, as it incentivizes you to keep your Stress levels high in order to keep yourself alive, only spreading further chaos and panic to the rest of your party, likely making the overall situation much much worse (but much more fun/memorable as well). Of course, everything here is subject to further playtesting and is likely to change before the final version appears in GOBLIN PLANET. In the meantime, enjoy!

Note: Part 2 of last month’s Freebie, Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale, will be coming in the next Missive!

Share

NOW AVAILABLE: FIREDROP

FIREDROP is now in stock and ready to order! In FIREDROP, you play as a Soldier dropped from low orbit to fight hordes of superflea’s infesting the planet. Each mission is unique, with its own objectives, Siphonapterian nests, and extraction point. Your job is to complete the objective and, if you can, extract with your life intact. To aid you in battle, you will have a number of clone reinforcements available upon your death as well as high impact firepower like sentries, orbital bombardments, and more.

The final print version of this hex n’ dice wargame brings with it the v1.1 update that includes full professional editing by Jarrett Crader, Phases of Play to make it even easier to track turns at the table, hyperlinks/bookmarks in the digital versions, and more. Plus, the soft touch laminated covers make this one a really nice book to hold in your hands.

You can order a copy (both physical and digital) HERE!

NEW UPDATE: Tacticians of Ahm

Monthly Update #2 for Tacticians of Ahm, my TTRPG of streamlined tactical combat in a digital fantasy world, is live! The single biggest addition is the 26-page, early access version of the setting book, The Ahmian Almanac, featuring a new class, new factions, new locales, and more!

You can get the game in its current early access state (including the core rulebook, Early Graduation starter adventure, and The Ahmian Almanac setting book) for just $20 USD and get all future updates including final art and layout for no additional cost!

The Ahmian Almanac is a setting book focused on adding as much new stuff for players and GMs to use at the table while exploring more of Ahm. There's lore and setting, but also loads and loads of stuff to fight, find, buy, learn, and more! It's a sourcebook with a setting!

Check out the game and its new update HERE!

In honor of the Mothership 1e box sets getting out to folks, all MeatCastle GameWare titles are now 20% off over on my shop for the rest of the month! Goblin on Icarus Station, The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station, Ultimate Badass, and more!

Check out the entire MCGW Mothership catalog for 20% off HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

Prepare for Write-Off, my stretch-goal adventure for You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked! is now available as part of Found Transmissions, the game’s pay-what-you-want expansion zine! Print copies are still in the works, but you can grab a digital copy now to check out this corporate horror misadventure putting you in the shoes of deep space theme park service workers when chaos breaks out at the park. Plus, it’s got stunning art and layout from the great folks at Dinoberry Press.

Check it out HERE!

Aaron King is running a pre-order campaign for new print editions of all of their various “bootlegs” (games directly inspired by another game or property). This includes the incredible Speedrune (Runequest), After the Bomb (Fallout), and Spice World (Dune)! Aaron is one of my favorite game creators in the indie space and any and all of these games would be welcome at my table any day.

Check it out HERE!

The Panic Table recently continued their Mission Control series of Mothership third-party creator interviews with watt of Cloud Empress fame! I genuinely think watt is one of the most interesting and conscious creators in the TTRPG space right now (and did even before my work on Cloud Empress) so it’s a worthwhile watch. Plus, the production values over at TPT continues to be absolutely killer.

Liminal Horror recently launched its own digital resource library (a huge archive of all the first and third-party releases for the system)! It’s been awesome to see just how much great stuff is already out there for LH, and I hope more and more systems keep getting these kind of sites in the future.

Check out the Liminal Horror Library HERE!

I recently ran the opening hours of Tacticians of Ahm’s starter adventure Early Graduation over on The Weekly Scroll. It was a really fun, tight session with great characters that I’m excited to see more of in the future as we, hopefully, continue the search for Dekkin Von Lopesbane!

If you don’t already have Space Penguin Ink on your radar, I encourage you to check them out (and keep doing so regularly since they have a new release or two at least once a month). Recently, they’ve released Resonant, a Mothership 1e adventure from Amanda P and Tony Tran, as well as At the Mutants of Madness (for MCC) by Forrest Aguirre, Bradley McDevitt, Brandon Yu, Jarrett Crader, and Stella Condrey.

Check out the full Space Penguin Ink catalog HERE!

Kate and I drove about two and a half hours north of St. John’s a few weeks ago to enter the path of totality for the recent solar eclipse, and it was incredible. Despite thick cloud cover, cold temperatures, and biting wind, we were able to catch a break in the clouds at the exact moment totality occurred, and I was able to get a few worthwhile shots (like the one above). Worth it all for those few minutes of astronomical brilliance. Plus, this photo was even shown on the local news!

In 2017, we traveled to Kentucky to the point of longest totality and that was also a breathtaking experience. I took some photos back then too, including one that I used as the cover photo of Tunnels in White, my Liminal Horror adventure.

The next mainline Liminal Horror release, The Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow, is about to hit Backerkit in around a month and from what I’ve seen so far, it looks great! Loosely inspired by the classic DnD adventure N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, Hungry Hollow looks to be really taking a whole new spin on a great core premise, and it has an absolutely awesome team working on it.

You can check out the Backerkit and follow it now HERE!

Robotic Topologist recently released a minimalist but very capable solar system generator, perfect for your sci-fi home game or even your own publications. I imagine I’ll make use of it myself in the future.

Check it out HERE!

I got a fun little play report for another chaotic session of someone bringing THERE IS A GOBLIN ON THE LOOSE IN ICARUS STATION to their table. I’ve read dozens of play reports for this adventure at this point and every single time, they put a huge grin on my face.

You can find the adventure, in all its chaotic horror comedy glore, HERE!

My Play-By-Blog of Luke Gearing’s The Isle recently concluded over on Tumblr after 22 weekly entries! I had a lot of fun bringing this module to life in this way and experimenting with a different form of play than I had experienced before. Using the community votes to guide the character was really interested as it meant even I did not know how it was going to turn out.

You can check out the entire repository of entries HERE.

Thank you so much for reading all this way and for your continued support. - Christian

I am very proud of the accomplishments I have had these last few years as a freelancer, but I’m even more proud of my own creative works, the projects that I take from original idea to finished product (often with the help of many great folks along the way). Recently, I have had to change up my overall life arrangement and figured I would walk you all through my thought process.

Our international move from the United States to Canada was more expensive then we planned and I need to build work experience here to work towards our long-term goal of staying permanently in the country so I got a local gig, similar to my situation back home but much more of an hours-per-week commitment to rebuild some of that expended savings and build more experience.

While freelancing is really rewarding and the indie space has been very generous to me in terms of both opportunities and pay, it is rarely reliable enough to stake your entire subsistence upon it. In the past, my part-time local work was aiding in that as well as some of my more successful MCGW projects. With less and less overall time in my life to do creative work and less freelance work to go around these last few months (some parts of the year are always slower than others, it seems), I decided to make a sizeable change.

On the editing front, I’ll be largely maintaining business as usual, only lowering my overall number of editing slots in a given year (probably just 1-2 per month at most, depending on project size).

On the development front, I’ll be moving forward unchanged. I love this type of work and overall, it is fairly low in terms of overall hour counts. It is also the rarest type of work in my portfolio, and I’d love for that to change.

The big change comes on the adventure writing front. Going forward, I am planning to only offer 1-2 adventure writing slots per year. While I love writing for other systems and settings in an official capacity, I’ve simply found that these projects often take me the longest amount of time and pull me too far away from my own creative projects.

Writing for new or upcoming systems can be considerably time intensive considering the writing I am doing may be working to inform how adventures will be written for a game going forward or may need to undergo revisions and changes to meet the game’s structure for adventures as it takes shape. It’s interesting and rewarding work, and I love every adventure I have written for folks in the past (especially some that have yet to see the light of day), but I found the deadlines, the size of the commitments, and the number of hours required for how I work on them to simply be too much to open myself to them as often as I have. In order to ensure I can create more of my own MeatCastle GameWare projects in a timely fashion, something had to give, and freelance adventure writing was that thing.

While I’m sad to be losing time overall to work on TTRPG projects, I am very excited for this change and it will be bringing my own projects, primarily Tacticians of Ahm and the Mothership adventure GOBLIN PLANET, entirely to the forefront of my creative focus.

In a world where we must work to live and where creative work rarely yields enough fruit to live off of, sacrifices must be made but still time must be rationed to feed our creativity and imaginations. There’s no version of my life going forward where I do not create as I have been these last few years. I may create less, but I’ll never stop. It’s a much a driving part of my self as anything else.

Pre-Orders Ending: FIREDROP

FIREDROP, my micro-wargame of drop pod warfare against the superflea hordes, is now in its final week of pre-orders!

I’ll be updating the PDFs to 1.1 (with some corrections/tweaks received in feedback since the game’s digital release last month) and ordering the print run during the first week of April. As soon as they arrive at Space Penguin Ink’s warehouse, they’ll be going straight out to folks! Copies will be available at my shop after pre-ordering but will be fairly limited overall (likely just 100 total copies for this first run including several retailer orders).

Get yours HERE!

Funding Now: The Lost Bay

Iko of The Lost Bay Studio and Outer Rim: Uprising (and the Wicked Wanderer’s Bundle for Mork Borg) fame has launched The Lost Bay, his suburban gothic TTRPG of weirdos in even weirder situations in 199X America, over on Kickstarter!

As part of the already reached stretch goals, I’ll be writing a choose-your-own-adventure style alternate character creation path for the core book! This is going to be fairly lean on words and heavy on moods and vibes, and I think it’ll make for a really cool secondary way to create a character in The Lost Bay. I’m hoping that for most players it feels like THE way to create a character, if I play my cards right.

You can check out the campaign and back it yourself HERE.

Funding Now: CE - Life & Death

I'm doing more developmental work on Cloud Empress's new Land of Life and Death setting books! The project goes live TODAY. In addition to the new setting books, it’s also bringing the core game to hardback, along with a cool collector's box to put it all in one pretty place.

You can check out the campaign and back it yourself HERE.

FREEBIE: Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale - Part I

This month’s Missive Freebie is Part 1 of Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale, my weird and wild take on a very standard, boring, traditional five-room dungeon. While it may look like a dime a dozen little fantasy dungeon, I promise it goes to some weird places pretty much right off the bat. Overall, it’s focused on creating an environment that welcomes the GM (and players) to bring stacks of their other TTRPG books, adventures, and even novels to the table in order to pull in items, locations, and enemies.

Once I got a bit into working on this, I realized I really wanted it to be more than just a few quick, fun room descriptions so, similar to the Lophin setting pamphlet I did in the past, this one is going to be released in stages with Part 1 in this issue and Part 2 completing the 16 page or so zine of the overall dungeon.

For now, enjoy the first 3 chambers!

Download the first part of the full dungeon zine HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

I got a collection of wonderful play reports following last month’s release of FIREDROP, including one from Violet Ballard of RV Games, a very experienced microgame player and creator, who said:

I had an amazing time playing this with my 10-year-old son. It was his first wargame, he'd mostly played HeroQuest, Azul, and kids games up until this point. FIREDROP scratches that entry level Microgame wargame itch, a wonderful little dudes on a map game.

I got a chance to play some Call of Cthulhu for the first time in years and have been having a lot of fun. We are playing one of the two adventures from Chaosiums’s recent Dead Light and Other Dark Turns, and our finale is coming up this week! Will my Bolshevik-sympathizing turned exile Russian smuggler Ignat Papanov live to see tomorrow? There’s so much I still really love about this system, but also a lot more that I would tweak, remove, or replace entirely. Maybe one day I’ll get to make my own historical horror heartbreaker.

FIREDROP brought a huge influx of subscribers last month, and it was awesome to see. I wasn’t sure what kind of response to expect for my first non-TTRPG thing, and it’s exciting to see a lot of folks willing to check out my work in new (if not similar) arenas. I’ll be keeping that in mind in the future, for sure! If you are new here, thank you so much for joining the gang!

I recently re-organized my TTRPG shelves and notes and discovered these early test prints from The Mole on PIRAD ONE, my very first TTRPG creation. It was fun to see all these iterations and how unsure/paranoid I was about every little change and how it would actually turn out on the page itself. Also, I really liked that ASCII Mothership header I had on the original version, but it didn’t fit with Tuesday Knight Game’s licensing guidelines so it got the axe. Ah well!

Helena Santana has been hard at work on a few more pieces for Tactician of Ahm’s next update! Here’s Dekkin Von Lopesbane, a legendary Tactician and your professor at the Academy during the game’s starter adventure Early Graduation!

Aaron King created a short n’ sweet TTRPG where you only roll saves and your table decides all 5 saves when you gather to play so it’s all saves and totally built for your world, players, etc. It’s elegant and simple (and I’ve already thought of a dozen fun ways to play it). Check it out HERE!

Several of the 2023 Meaties winners posted some photos of their Winner’s Edition copies of the zine, along with the MCGW stickers I sent along! I’m so happy they got all the way to them safely.

2023 Meatie winner Charlotte Laskowski recently released DAISY CHAINSAW, a bloody and beautiful game of magical girls and cosmic threats. The art and design on this one looks tremendous. Check it out HERE!

Roque Romero, artist of both my adventures The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station and Tunnels in White, recently unveiled his cover art for the Spanish language version of the Liminal Horror Investigators book and it’s just killer. I want a copy, and I can only barely put any of my high school and college spanish skills to use at this point. You can find more info (in Spanish) HERE.

Zach Hazard Vaupen, The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station’s hexmap artist and all around awesome creator in his own right, recently released the Metaphysical Squatter, an optional character class for CY_BORG that looks great. Check it out HERE!

Thanks so much for your continued time, attention, and support! It means the world to me (and genuinely helps fuel me to keep creating)! If you’ve got any thoughts or questions about anything at all, drop them below. See you next month!

- Christian

The last few folks have been a bit of a trying mental time for me when it comes to Tacticians of Ahm. I put in a massive amount of work for the game’s first monthly update, released it, and then watched as a portion of the game’s small discord server spiraled from bits of feedback into an, at times, downright mean-spirited critique. I went from putting in the work, being happy with the update, to then being totally mentally downtrodden, all because of a small handful of people (truly just 1 to 3 folks, all told) harping on the small elements I’d missed or bits that are, as it says in the document, still work in progress and haven’t had their entire design perfected yet. I went from hyped about the project to just wanting to abandon it.

It’s well known that its the negative comments that always get to us. You can see sizeable sales and lots of positive or neutral interactions with a project but then one or two negative comments can totally blindside you, mentally and emotionally.

For me, it led to speaking with several other creators and with my wife and trying to find a path forward. I had created a discord for Tacticians of Ahm as a means of starting to build a community for the game, one where folks could discuss characters, post homebrew options, and find more players to play virtually, but in a short time, it had turned into a weird haven for a few rules-lawyer-like players to cyclically and harshly critique a few pieces of the still work-in-progress game.

At first, I thought what I needed was to give these folks a guideline for what helpful feedback looks like (since giving feedback is a skill not many players have, typically only being cultivated in creative workshop-type settings). What I cooked up was, I think, a good guide to feedback, at least for what helps me the most as a creator:

Useful Feedback comes from at-the-table (virtual play included) play experiences focused on what you enjoyed or did not enjoy, what made sense right away or what was confusing, and what you'd like to see more of broadly in the future. Providing alternate solutions, mechanics, etc. is almost never helpful. Doubling down on a piece of feedback is also never helpful.

• "This aspect of the game appeals to me. I'd love to see more of it!"

• "I really didn't understand how this worked. I found the wording confusing."

• "We stuck to the rules as written for this part of the adventure, and it was super difficult. We thought maybe we were doing something wrong."

Not Useful Feedback is focused on things that are corrected or re-written later in the development process (like small editing suggestions, proofreading, etc.), offers unsolicited "solutions" to perceived problems within the game, and digs back into a topic already discussed and noted previously (especially when there has been no development time to even correct or change the game since that feedback was given).

• "It says 'two pip' here when it should say 'two pips.'"

• "This mechanic is a mess. Here is a list of specific examples of how it's used inconsistently in the rulebook."

• "This is the same feedback I gave hours/days ago, but I am going to give it again."

• "You say this, and yet you did this. You should do this instead."

• "I want the game to be like this instead of what it is now."

Ultimately, the most important feedback you can give is exactly the type I requested initially in the ⁠feedback form which is:

"While post-reading impressions can be helpful at times, the highest quality feedback for game designers comes after you bring the game to your table. Post-play feedback will always be prioritized as it best showcases how the text translated to a final game experience.

"How you felt and what aspect made you feel that way is some of the most important feedback I can receive and helps me tweak my design as development continues. There is no need to provide alternate solutions, new mechanics, etc."

I posted this, notified everyone on the server, and hoped it would be the tonal change the server needed. But it wasn’t, and it became clear that while some folks simply weren’t interested in giving better feedback and weren’t used to being in a space with the actual creator of the media they are engaging with. It also just wasn’t something I needed at all in the way it was being given. Initial feedback, even if helpful, was buried in big discussions in an ephermal text chat. There was not a good way for me to track and use that feedback going forward unless I engage with it on a daily, consistent basis (which often made wading through the murky waters of bad, demoralizing feedback along with it).

In the end, I really had to look at what I was looking for out of both player feedback but the Tacticians of Ahm discord server. For feedback, I wanted to know how people were feeling after reading or much better yet playing the game (in both the good and bad ways), but I didn’t need much more than that (and certainly didn’t need those points to be something focused on as part of a group discussion, which just tended to demoralize me without adding anything useful to the actual feedback). For the discord, I wanted a place that players can come and organize play sessions for the game and share content they’ve made for their own tables.

After making changes to feedback (pushing it entirely to Google Forms) and re-focusing the discord on organizing play and sharing homebrew, things have already been much better, both in terms of my stress/morale around the project and around the actual uses of the server. We’ve gotten cool new enemies, some wonderful pixel art battlemaps (see the image above), and more, all while increasing the use of the feedback forms that I can actually work through as I build towards the next update.

So when it comes to feedback, discords, and any kind of player outreach, my recommendation (harshly learned through my own mistakes) is to have a focused purpose for each thing you do in those arenas and whenever something is not serving that purpose, remove it or rework it. You don’t need to take player feedback. You don’t need to have a discord server. You don’t need to read the comments. But if you do, be sure to do so with a clear intent because if you don’t, the harm may outweight the help.

NOW FUNDING

Tacticians of Ahm’s first monthly update is out now! With it comes the early access version of the new starter adventure, Early Graduation, which puts your Tacticians in their final weeks of their time at the Academy when chaos erupts during a field day of final exams! Plus, the game includes a new one-page quick reference guide for players to bring to the table to help with any rules questions that may arise during play. The digital tools (both the downloadable and link-accessible versions) have been updated to include the new battlemaps and region map from the starter adventure as well!

You can get the digital early access rulebook and starter adventure PLUS all future monthly updates for just $20 USD! Check it out HERE!

HOME - A Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking TTRPG still has a little over a week left in its successful Kickstarter campaign! I am editing this one, and it’s very much in my personal wheelhouse despite being pretty unlike a lot of projects I’ve worked on in the past. Collaborative mapmaking, narrative focus, and fast/sharp play. Fans of games like Beak, Feather and Bone will love this one.

The Shrike by Leo Hunt and Silverarm Press has over two weeks left on its really successful Kickstart campaign as well! I edited this book and at 70,000+ words, it’s my biggest editing project by far! I really enjoyed working on this book, and it’s only getting better with all the art and layout.

FREEBIE: FIREDROP

In FIREDROP, you play as a Soldier dropped from low orbit to fight the hordes of superflea’s infesting the planet. Each mission will be unique, with its own objectives, Siphonapterian nests, and extraction point. Your job is to complete the objective and, if you can, extract with your life intact. To aid you in battle, you will have a number of clone reinforcements available upon your death as well as high impact firepower like sentries, orbital bombardments, and more.

You can download the full digital version for free HERE!

FIREDROP is a 28-page, half-letter, black and white zine hex and dice wargame. It’s something fairly new for me, but it’s been a lot of fun to make and really fun to playtest over the last week. And yes, it is heavily inspired by Helldivers 2! I started making it while I was waiting to get into the game’s overloaded servers to play!

If you’d like a PRINT copy of FIREDROP, pre-orders are up now!

Additionally, the game is also available digitally (as a paid purchase) on Itch.io HERE.

Share

MORE COOL STUFF

If you are a voting SFWA member, I submitted Corpo Culture Killed My Dog for the 2023 Games category and I’d love your vote! If you’d like to check it out and grab a complimentary copy, you can head over to the SFWA member forums and find it HERE!

The TTRPG space has very little in the way of proper journalists and several of those folks were recently laid off as part of the continued media landscape enshittification. In the wake of that news, Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter have launched a new, worker-owned TTRPG site: Rascal. Check it out HERE!

The Panic Table just launched their new Mission Control series, interviewing creators in the Mothership/TTRPG indie design space. The first episode with Joel Hines is up now, and it’s great! I am also featured in a future episode that I’m very excited for y’all to see. Check it out!

Marco of Spicy Tuna RPG interviewed me about Tacticians of Ahm and some of the design ideas behind it for one of the latest editions of his newsletter. Check it out!

Ever since I watched the latest People Make Games video about a massive trend of murder-mystery-like games coming out of China, I’ve been dying to play one.

Quinns, from People Make Games and Shut up and Sit Down fame, also just launched a new TTRPG review channel that I’m excited about! I’ve gotten to play a few sessions of DCC with Quinns in the past, and he’s a fun dude, plus his channel actually has opinions and isn’t just another flip-through-the-book type channel which has me more excited than anything else.

Waco made a new Mothership animation, and this one even has its own new class!

The Winner’s Edition of the 2023 Meaties, my annual TTRPG stuff I liked zine, finally went out to the winners this week! I printed 10 copies of a full-color variant of the original zine, meant to act as the “trophy” for winners, signed and numbered them, and mailed them out! If you missed the zine and would like to check it out, it’s available for free HERE (and its easy to print your own at home)!

The Isle Play-By-Blog continues over on Tumblr! Medon survived a deadly cave eel attack and is now descending even deeper into the caverns beneath the Isle! Check it out HERE!

HOME, a Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking TTRPG from new Canadian designer Nick Gralewicz, is live now on Kickstarter!

One year ago the Rift opened and the Kaiju attacked. It tore our cities apart, rampaging for days until we finally dropped the bomb. We killed the terrifying beast, but lost so much in the process.

We knew more would come so we built the Mechs: giant war machines, the pinnacle of human engineering, and our only hope for survival.

The Rift is reopening. It won't be long before the Kaiju emerge, but this time will be different.

Your home depends on you. Are you ready, Pilot?

I'm editing this one! With HOME, Nick has created a game with real heart, a strong visual style, and an easy to play structure on top of a killer premise! Beyond that, Nick is very structured in his project planning, the game is already text complete, and the visual design and layout is looking extremely sharp. Check it out HERE!

The Shrike, a huge (by my standards anyway) setting and adventure book for Old School Essentials, by Leo Hunt is live on Kickstarter now! This was my largest editing project so far, and it really is an awesome book! You may know Leo’s other work from the phenomenal Vaults of Vaarn.

The Shrike, is a heaven-harrowing thorn, a black iron mountain with serrated spires of rock and rust, that pierces the heart of the God, causing divine blood to flow and nourish life within the corroded iron and stone megastructure.

The Shrike is a world of decay - rusted iron, crumbling stone, saltwater, blood, and fog - surrounded by a roiling ocean, a lifeless archipelago, pewter-hued clouds, seabirds, and pitiless stars. In this infernal Galapagos, players will encounter masked Devils, blood which gives life to things which should not have it, stones which give life to people who do not want it, terrible and stranded monsters, perilous locations, and wonderous treasures from across the planes.

There’s so much weird, wild, dark, strange, and evocative stuff in this book, and the wonderful thing is it’s already written and edited in its entirety! Plus, it’s being published by Joel Hines’ Silverarm Press so you can expect the same level of quality as Silverarm’s other projects (like Desert Moon of Karth and Secret of the Black Crag). Check it out HERE!

Monthly Update #1 for Tacticians of Ahm is coming later this week! To celebrate, here's a new piece of full-page art from Helena Santana! Leukon of the Flaming Sword and his companions look out from the shore of the Forgotten North towards D4RKW3LL, the source of the Corrupt1on.

Helena’s art, the new adventure, and more was created entirely thanks to the support Tacticians of Ahm has already seen, and I've still got loads more planned! You can still pick the game up now for it’s lowest price of just $15 USD and get all future updates! After Monthly Update #1 drops on February 16th, the price is going up to $20 USD! Check it out HERE!

Greenhorns, Spicy Tuna RPG’s weird space RPG, is nearing the final 48 hours of its successful campaign on Kickstarter! I am writing the starting Bounty Hunt adventure for the main book, and I’m so excited for it. This system is rules-lite, fast, and (most importantly) weird. Plus, the art is absolutely gorgeous.

Greenhorns is a roleplaying game where you play as powerful Kruxians bringing new life into the cosmos and protecting your home planet from rogue vengeful anomalies. Beware! It's a pretty dangerous job. After all, there's a reason you're all greenhorns.

Planet creation missions feel like dungeon diving. Bounty hunting missions challenge the crew to topple enemy schemes and eliminate lethal adversaries. And Kruxor, the crew's home planet, is an everchanging sandbox location that provides prominent factions and opportunities for developing your characters.

If you haven’t backed of any of Marco’s projects over at Spicy Tuna RPG, I really recommend it. The fit and finish of the physical products are always top notch. Check it out HERE!

See you later this month for your regularly scheduled Missive! - Christian

Subscribe now

If you’ve been subscribed to the Missives for more than a week or so, you know that I just recently launched my first standalong TTRPG system, Tacticians of Ahm, in an early access capacity via itchfunding. Itchfunding is a mostly-unofficial term for selling a game on Itch in a crowdfunding-like manner. There’s very little the platform itself does to support this and it’s mostly a matter of communicating your plans and intentions well via the product page along with creating a Sale promotion with a set dollar amount goal which then displays a funding bar at the top of the product page.

Historically, itchfunding has been fairly hit or miss. Compared to Kickstarter, the sales numbers are very low, often a fraction of what a similar Kickstarter would expect to bring in, but there are times when something in the TTRPG space will catch fire, whether that is because it’s an adventure for a popular system from established creators or it hits the perfect storm of interesting mechanics, cool style, and a really engaged fanbase in its genre catching wind of it. For all thesae reasons when going into planning an itchfund, it can be difficult to know what kind of support you may see and why.

Not long after launching the game and getting an honestly quite surprising amount of support, I had a few folks reach out my way asking about how I was able to get so much traffic to my game on Itch, since typically it is difficult for folks to hit larger numbers of sales, especially in a short amount of time. While I do not think I can adequately analyze everything that goes into the who and why backs or buys a game when they do, I do think that my experience can help shed some light on a way to help give yourself the best chance for success on the platform.

In the first 12 hours or so after launch, I posted here (~1700 subscribers), on Twitter (~1,500 followers), Bluesky (~250 followers), Tumbler (~250 followers) and TikTok (~1,800 followers) about the game. Additionally, I created an introductory video for the game on Youtube (~50 followers). When the game goes live on Itch, an alert was also sent to all of my Itch followers (~600 folks).

Looking at my analytics at that time (sadly, I did not think to take a screenshot), the vast majority (around 70% of my traffic to the itchfund page) was traffic I had directed there from these other various avenues. The only traffic coming in from Itch itself was coming from a fraction of those 600 Itch followers who clicked through on an email or checked their Feed on the site itself. Of that traffic, this newsletter and Twitter were roughly similiar in bringing the most folks to the page (which is a bit surprising since Twitter is typically extremely bad at generated clickthroughs and sales, but a lot of other creators graciously boosted my launch posts so it did get much more reach than a typical post of mine would). Next were Itch followers, followed by Tumblr and Bluesky. Tiktok traffic, due to the nature of the platform, is not tracked via the platform itself (since you can’t embed links) so I imagine a good chunk of the google traffic was likely folks coming from either TikTok or Youtube and searching to find the page.

All of this traffic allowed the page to break its initial goal of $1,000 and generated around 60 total supporters. So let’s fast forward a bit and see what changed.

The image above is from just after 3 Full Days since going live. For about 2 of those days, Tacticians of Ahm was sitting at the top of the Physical Games - Popular and Physical Games - New & Popular charts (due to all of the previous support generated in that first day). At this point, you can see the Itch.io-driven traffic really shifts into the top spot. The Popular chart page specifically fed more traffic may way than any other single avenue over the next two days.

My main takeaway from all of this: When it comes to TTRPGs on Itch, you cannot rely on the site to promote and generate traffic for you, especially not at first. It is really key to build an audience across other platforms (especially newsletters) and use those avenues to direct folks into the Itch ecosystem. Within Itch, followers is easily the most important metric when launching a new game (since your game is dropped into their Feeds on the site and they are often alerted of the release via email). In my experience, Itch followers are difficult and slow to gain. Only from several years on the platform, actively following other creators I enjoy, and having lots of previous releases was I able to build the ~600 followers or so I had at launch.

Having directed all of your various audiences at your game, if you are able to rise up those charts than (and only than, it seems) the site itself will begin to generate traffic for you (helping you rise even higher on them even faster). Essentially, you want to be able to kickstart the few sources of traffic generation available to you on Itch whenever possible. There’s no silver bullet for engagement across platforms, but the surest advice I can give, regardless of the platform, is to 1.) Be Consistent, 2.) Be Passionate, 3.) Be Engaged and 4.) Be Kind. From there, it’s all about time. Beyond that, it just takes time to build an audience (unless you’ve got the cash to bring on a marketing firm and push ads, but even then, an artifical audience is a fickle audience).

Additionally, someone who had checked out the game posted about it on Reddit’s r/rpg. I had heard in the past that Reddit was a big driver of traffic within the TTRPG space, and the numbers here definitely agree with that. For a relatively small post (40 upvotes, 15 comments), it generated over 200 visits alone! That’s a pretty massive clickthrough rate. It helps, I imagine, that this post came organically from the community rather than being an explicit promo post from myself which seem to rarely do well (for this reason, I did not post to Reddit at all about the launch as I’m just not active enough on that platform to be seen as a member of most communities).

Share

NOW FUNDING

The Tacticians of Ahm itchfund launch continues! We smashed Goal #1 on the first day and are well on our way to completing Goal #2 and beyond (just a few days in). The game hit #1 on both Itch’s Physical Games Popular and New & Popular pages, beating out games like Honey Heist and Lancer! I’m blown away by the support the game has already seen, especially not knowing what to expect from itchfunding and from the early access-type structure of the campaign.

Get the early access rulebook NOW and get all future updates for FREE!

In case you missed it previously, Tacticians of Ahm is a tactical combat-focused tabletop roleplaying game in the corrupt3d fantasy world of Ahm. A bit-rotten blight has appeared in the Northern Sea and from it flows the Corrupt1on, fractured light and shattered shapes sowing chaos across the realm. As Tacticians, you alone are prepared to face the darkness spreading across the lands and reunite the scattered peoples of Ahm.

Unique Elements of Tacticians of Ahm:

• Always-hit, set-damage grid-based combat!

• Class-specific attack patterns, abilities, and more!

• Easy-to-use weapon and ability diagrams!

• Rules light out-of-combat play using a single d20!

• A digital fantasy world corrupting with age!

  • You know it's a video game, but your characters don't!

The game will be at this lowest ever price of $15 for the next month (after which it’ll raise by $5 per month with each content update)!

Greenhorns, Spicy Tuna RPG’s new weird space RPG, is live on Kickstarter now, and I am writing the book’s introductory bounty hunting adventure! I have gotten to play Greenhorns, and I can’t really say I’ve ever experienced anything quite like it. It’s one-part Destiny, another part cosmic-level Marvel, and another part weirdo-archangels. I’m excited to be a part of what it shaping up to be a really unique book. It’s based on Down We Go so all the core rules and character sheet fit on a single spread but the book is full of flavorful varieties of planets to explore, added class details, bounty board, and setting lore. This is my 3rd or so time doing adventure writing for Spicy Tuna RPG, and they continue to be one of my favorite folks to work with in the scene!

Check it out HERE!

FREEBIE: 12 Damned Coins!

After reading the combo of someone talking about how horror roleplaying games are rarely, if ever, scary to play (as opposed to just being about scary things) and PrismaticWasteland’s New (Year’s) Resolution Mechanics post, I was inspired to make something silly and stupid that attempted to handle both things. The result is 12 Damned Coins: Do Not Play This Game!, a one-page roleplaying game of old world greed and risk versus reward coin flipping and face slapping that is never meant to be played.

Download the full-quality PDFs (including extra printer-friendly) HERE!

MORE COOL STUFF

The folks over at The Weekly Scroll were generous enough to let me come and rant about Tacticians of Ahm on it’s itchfund launch day. We dig into the reasons I started designing the game, how extensive playtesting has gone, plans for the future and more. I think you can really tell how many bottled up thoughts and emotions I had about this after working on it in the background for the last year or so!

Moreau Vazh over at Tasklander wrote a great, in-depth review of Tunnels in White that also examined the ways Liminal Horror has evolved since its initial release and how experienced GMs often look for different types of adventures than newcomers. I really enjoyed reading it (plus, there are some great and valid criticisms too).

“Sorrell does not provide a ‘preferred path’ through Tunnels in White: There is no obviously most sympathetic faction and there is no obviously preferred outcome, there is only the details of a situation that your group are welcome to explore and resolve to their own collective satisfaction and that is precisely what I want in a scenario as it a) empowers the players to make their own decisions and b) empowers me as a GM to think creatively about how I fit the adventure into my campaign and how I explore the consequences of the players’ actions.”

My contribution to The Discourse over this last month was speaking to TTRPG writers average pay rates and how we need to raise our expectations of what we will pay, what we will expect to be paid, and when it can be a good idea to not take low-paying work when you could create something of your own. If I want to be known for anything in the space, it’s as an advocate of better lives and livelihoods for creators.

To save you from having to journey into the hellscape of modern Twitter, here’s the thread:

Watching a TTRPG budgeting video. They are talking about how writers are paid on average $0.05-0.06 per word and to build your budget around that. Folks, do not write for that low of pay! Honestly, there's no reason not to make your own book at that level of pay. Dreadful!

The only things I've written at a rate in that range was something very small for a project by friends where I just wanted to take part in it, mostly for fun. Otherwise, it's just better to put something out yourself, own it in perpetuity, and make more $$$ in the long term.

Additionally, they mentioned that the only folks making $0.20-0.25 per word are "industry luminaries" who've been writing in the space for 20+ years, and folks, that's just not true as well. I charge what my time and work is worth, and I'm no luminary!

I typically write for low word count style projects but even for wordier styles and systems, these rates just don't make sense. Imagine writing a 100+ page setting book (50,000 words, let's say) and only making $2,500. Less than $11k for the entire 5e PHB!

For example, I would have received just $66 for Goblin on Icarus Station if paid at $0.06/word. Doing basic layout, hand-drawing a map, and using Patreon stock art to make the rest myself: 650+ copies sold! At $5, you'd need to sell ONLY 14 copies to get paid more than that rate!

Additional thoughts: If you have done work for less than this, I do not think you are a sucker. I think you deserve pay closer to your work's actual worth. Also self-pub isn't a golden ticket for everything (but if small indie pubs can pay $0.20 or more, I know bigger ones can!)

Cloud Empress is continuing to grow with its new Lands of Life & Death expansion coming to Backerkit this April. I’m a (small) part of the team, just like for the base game, and I’m so stoked to be back in the Hereafter.

Luke Gearing and David Hoskins have teamed up for a new game of grimy, city-dwelling bastards called Swyvers that looks killer. Check out the Quickstart HERE.

DEAD HORSE finally made it out to pre-orderers and retailers! It was a longer road than we expected, but it should be in everyone’s hands now (after a generous and helpful save from Amalara Game Studio)! I’m still really proud with the look and feel and overall quality of this production, especially considering it was our first swing at a literary magazine-like thing! It’s available in limited quantities via Exeunt Press, Spear Witch, and a few other retailers.

I recently added “Comfort Colors” tees to the MeatCastle GameWear shirt and hoodie store. Additionally, I added this extremely stupid “Sea Doo What Nintendon’t” tee, mostly just for fun after the idea came to me.

Chris Airiau named Corpo Culture Killed My Dog his “Fave Diegetic Print-at-Home” of 2023 in his handmade Weirdo Faves of 2023 zine. There’s loads more fun stuff in here too than just TTRPG goodies like Corpo Culture. Check it out!

A few days after last month’s Missive went out I put together the MeatCastle GameWare Year in Review: 2023. Overall, I had 3 personal releases, I edited 16 releases, I wrote for 3 releases, and I did game development work on 3 releases! It was productive year and my first doing freelance TTRPG work full-time.

My Play-By-Blog of Luke Gearing’s The Isle continues over on Tumblr. We are in the heart of the dungeon now and so far, Medon - our cutpurse magician - has managed to stay alive. Click here to check out the Repository of all the entries so far!

NOTE: I’m aware of Substack’s recent depressingly bad take on allowing fascist, reactionary, and other harmful folks to operate on their platform (as well as their lackluster response to folk’s valid criticism about that initial decision). Right now, I am just not in a situation where I can justify a new monthly expense (due to the size of the Missive’s audience, I’ve yet to find a solid service that’s free at the tier I’d need) so I am remaining here. Now, that could certainly change, depending on how things pan out. Additionally, I enjoyed Chris Bisette’s recent thoughts on the topic and how we shouldn’t have to cede every corner of the internet over the shittiest of folks.

Thanks again for reading! This last month has been a time of high highs and low lows for me. From being really sick for most of the month and having a rather dreadful holiday season because of it to having Tacticians of Ahm hit #1 for over 2 days on Itch’s Popular Physical Games chart! I’m ready to keep the good news and good work going into the next few months though. Thanks for sticking with me! Your support is, as always, the only reason I get to keep doing any of this. - Christian

Share

Tacticians of Ahm, my game of tactical roleplaying in a digital fantasy world, is now itchfunding! I’ve been writing about the design and playtesting of this game here on the Missives for months, and the basic layout version of the core rulebook is finally here! Buying in now ensures you get access to all future updates to the core set (including art and layout complete versions of the core rulebook, a starter campaign zine bringing characters from Level 1 to Level 4, and a setting zine with loads of new enemies, magic items, classes and more) at its lowest price ($15). With each update, the price will go up towards its final retail digital price of $45 so get in now if you are interested!

Get the Tacticians of Ahm core rulebook NOW!

Tacticians of Ahm is a tactical combat-focused tabletop roleplaying game in the corrupt3d fantasy world of Ahm. A bit-rotten blight has appeared in the Northern Sea and from it flows the Corrupt1on, fractured light and shattered shapes sowing chaos across the realm. As Tacticians, you alone are prepared to face the darkness spreading across the lands and reunite the scattered peoples of Ahm.

Unique Elements of Tacticians of Ahm:

• Always-hit, set-damage grid-based combat!

• Class-specific attack patterns, abilities, and more!

• Easy-to-use weapon and ability diagrams!

• Rules light out-of-combat play using a single d20!

• A digital fantasy world corrupting with age!

  • You know it's a video game, but your characters don't!

Inspired by video games like Into the Breach, Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem, Tacticians of Ahm was created out of a desire to maintain the rewarding tactical choices and big dramatic moments of traditional grid-n-minis TTRPG combat without slowing the pace of play by removing as many of the frustrating aspects of play as possible and streamlining the rest. Combat is fast and furious! You can always easily read your abilities, know the damage you will do (and when you can do it), and more.

Check out the full game page and pick up your copy HERE!

WHY ITCHFUNDING? 

Financially, Itchfunding helps offset a portion of the risk inherent to a project like this by allowing me to raise funds up front for more art (by Helena Satana), expert editing (by Jarret Crader), and professional layout (TBD) while also letting you experience the core game now and come along for the ride as it grows in the future (all for a lower-than-final retail price)! For more information on my plans for the continued growth of Ahm, see the full Development Roadmap on the Itch page (I’ve got lots planned for the next several months).

Support the project, get the core rulebook now, and secure loads of free updates!

I’ll be back later this month with your regularly scheduled Missive! Thanks for reading (and checking out the new game)! - Christian

Share

With the end of the year just around the corner, folks have been talking once again about #Dungeon23, the megadungeon challenge of writing one room a day for a full calendar year. Most folks are bringing it up facetiously, knowing that they (and likely most of their followers) fell off not all that long after they started. This reminded me that I hadn’t dug out my own #Dungeon23 notebook since the move. After a short search through our overstuffed living room closet, I managed to find it and spent a half hour or so reading back through my partial megadungeon.

I fell off long before the move. Between my part-time job and my full-time writing and design work, I was already writing every day so the added daily checkmark of #Dungeon23 inevitably fell off my to-do list, and the notebook started gathering dust on the back corner of my desk during my last several months back in Indianapolis. Still, I did manage 50 days in a row which feels like an accomplishment (a much smaller one, but an accomplishment none the less).

You can actually see my daily progress from back then via this Twitter thread.

Looking back over it, I was pretty pleased with what I’d created: A surface-level region with 7 points of interest, a first floor (see below) with 25 rooms, a second floor with about 16 rooms, several factions, 7 or so d6 encounter/loot roll tables, and some basic lore around the edges. Obviously, this falls far short of the #Dungeon23 ideal (365 rooms across 12 floors). This dungeon was far from mega, and yet, it was still the largest dungeon I’d ever created across all my years of homebrew GMing and writing TTRPG stuff. Walking through the space in my mind as my more detached modern day self, I was reminded of the cyclic dungeon generation (from Sersa Victory) I used to help give build 4 smaller areas and sub-objectives into each floor, and it really struck me as an interesting space to navigate as a party (albeit in need of a bit more connective tissue here and there).

It was then, after reading and enjoying the contents of the notebook, that I had to decide what to do with it, if anything. Should I pick back up where I left off? Could I convince myself the dream of #Dungeon23 wasn’t dead? Should I set it aside as a fun novelty? Or should I make something out of that work? I did enjoy what I’d read after all, and it was a considerable amount of writing I’d already done. I thought on it for a day or two, ran a poll with folks to see if they’d want something like that system-free or statted for a specific dungeoncrawl system (which would be more work), and considering turning it into a proper adventure. In the end, I decided it was worth the elbow grease to polish it up and bring it out into the world. It will not be a complete megadungeon, but it can be The Deep Hot Heart of the World - Part 1, a 2-floor, 50-room dungeon that could occupy a table for months and months. During the next slow chunk of time in my schedule, I’d pick up at Floor 3 and build slowly towards a Part 2 sometime down the line.

For now, I’m whittling away at it (it’s third in my current project priority rank). I have transcribed all of it over from my notebook, and I’ve recreated the original maps in Dungeon Scrawl for ease of future use. From here, it’s all about finishing up the 2nd floor (this is the largest amount of writing work to do on it) and then going through the entire manuscript as it was written in the notebook, expanding where I originally trimmed things down in the moment just to fit on the physical page, and then making sure that my system-free language is consistent (and useful) throughout.

For me, #Dungeon23 and this recent reconnection I made with it was a great example of how even a failed project can be useful. I learned more about dungeon design in those 50 days than I had in my whole life prior to that point. I drew my own maps (and actually kind of liked them)! Now, I am going back and seeing I still enjoy a lot of what’s here and want to pretty it up and polish it into a proper release, not the release I may have originally envisioned, but the beginning of something bigger long term and my first foray into super classic-style dungeon delving.

So even if you will probably fail, just go out and do the thing. There’s value in the attempt alone.

FREEBIE: The Meaties Award Zine

For a while, I’ve been joking about doing my own Official and Exclusive TTRPG Awards, and this is exactly what that is! Inside, you’ll see exactly what I chose to have it take on this easily home-printable fanzine form and what games I selected from the last year (or so).

The winners will be getting (if they are up for giving me their mailing addresses) a special color print variant of the zine, limited to 7 or so copies, as well as some MCGW/Meaties stickers.

Download the full fanzine HERE!

Also, you can find the zine and grab it for free (or pay-what-you-want) over on Itch if you’d like to have it in your library over there.

This was a really fun project to put together over the last few days, and I hope you enjoy reading it. It’s definitely something a bit less formal and more personal than a lot of my other freebie work.

More Cool Stuff

If you missed the campaign or want to pick up any of the individual modules (plus more from several of the bundle creators), Outer Rim: Uprising preorders are live now on Backerkit!

Marco Serrano at SpicyTunaRPG just dropped a free quickstart for his new game Greenhorns. I got to play it a few weeks ago, and it’s got a ton of cool stuff going on. You are chosen by a machine god to take part in the creation of new planets across the universe. Thematically, it reminds me of Destiny or anything with super-powered characters and divine warriors. My character, Lamplight, was basically a Destiny warlock wielding a laser-firing prism blade who died in heroic combat against a demon terrorizing a shifting plane of a forming planet. My allies took up my sword to cut them down and win the day.

Roque Romero (who did all of the art for The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station) just released an art pack of his reimaginings of classic fantasy TTRPG monsters and characters. Check it out HERE!

Mint over at There’s An RPG for That on Tumblr recently put up a Google Sheets playkit for A Sunless Space, my Andor-inspired microgame of rebellious flashpoints against an endless empire! It’s a great resource for anyone playing virtually (or just wanting to keep their notes and info all in a relatively safe, online space).

I was recently on The Weekly Scroll playing Lilliputian, a game of tiny sailors on the open sea, by Matthew Morris aka ManaDawnTTG (the full game is only $5 btw). We got to play Matt’s newest adventure for the game “Isle at the Edge of the Horizon” (just $1). My character was, like all good TTRPG characters, a weird little freak with a penchant for drink and a variety of voices. It was a really fun time!

The Panic Table recently debuted their big, in-studio Mothership actual play series, and there’s even a violent cameo from the Swords of Sinclair (from The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station)! It’s really interesting to see the modern AP style combined with Mothership, and I think they’ve already done some really cool stuff with their world setup, the set (that table is especially cool), and some tweaks to the system (shifting Sanity to Composure, for example). I’m intrigued to follow along and see how Mothership’s lethality and ongoing conditions may come to shape a longer-form campaign in this style. For Mothership fans, there’s also loads of little easter egg references in there too, for both first and third-party modules.

Ryan from The Weekly Scroll commissioned this really cool zine box from Loz the Eye Wizard to hold MCGW releases! I’m honored, and it looks killer!

Read the Fucking Manual (RTFM) continues to be my favorite TTRPG podcast! A recent highlight for me was their examination of the classic DnD module The Keep on the Borderlands (which I’ve been running for about a year as part of a long, ongoing Tacticians of Ahm playtest). I found some aspects of it surprising given its age and my assumptions, but I also agreed with a lot of the RTFM crew’s takeaways too. Check it out HERE!

The Missives from the MeatCastle recently passed 1,700 subscribers which is INCREDIBLE! Thank you all for the continued time, attention, and support. It means the world (and makes these so much more fun to write)!

Leeches cling to 5 [2d6 roll: 5] skeletons, their bones a strange blackish blue are stained in swirling patterns and writhing with leeches that glisten in the little light. Beards still hang from their skulls. Several spears and swords rest among them. They writhe slowly in place.

At their center, you see another skeleton. A shock of white, nearly glowing hair hanging from its head. Leeches crawl inside its rib cage. A slew of golden rings hang from its bony fingers, rattling as its slowly moves. As its mouth opens, the squealing of the leeches—all of them—form a single voice.

"Well, now... I was not expecting you, but I am not one to turn away guests of any kind, be they invited or not. Come, rest here after your descent."

My Play-By-Blog of Luke Gearing’s The Isle continues over on Tumblr! We are up to Entry #12 now and (as you can see from the excerpt from #11 above) things are really starting to get interesting/exciting/deadly. You can find the full repository HERE if you’d like to start at the beginning and get caught up or you can find the most recent entry HERE and vote in the active poll to help decide what happens next!

I have teased a few small pieces of the work-in-progress draft for Goblin Planet, my next big Mothership project, over on social media. A few of the loadouts from the new Goblin player class as well as a few entries in the “Teleportation Gone Wrong” table.

I’m still fairly early on, but I’ve been reading Up in the Old Hotel, a book collecting a ton of Joseph Mitchell’s old stories for the New Yorker. It’s a vivid, intriguing look at a selection of weird, unique folks from old New York City. For TTRPG creators and GMs, I think it’s also a fascinating look at just how varied the life of a single person can be and great inspiration for NPCs of all types. I can only hope to create characters with 10% of the depth of any of the folks described in these stories.

Lastly, I’ve been trying to get more exercise, take time to clear my head, and just explore more of my new home here in Newfoundland. As part of that, I’ve been publishing some quiet hike videos and drone footage.

Thanks again for reading! See you next year! - Christian

Share

My entire catalog is now available at the MCGW Store! After months of frankly terrible interactions with my last fulfillment partner (more on that later, perhaps in a future Missive), I have finally gotten my inventory back, set up my own store, and have a much better setup overall. To celebrate, EVERYTHING (print AND digital) is 30% off (applied at checkout)!

VISIT THE SHOP HERE!

The entire catalog of MCGW-published supplements are here:

• The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station (Mothership 1e)

• Corpo Culture Killed My Dog (Mothership 1e/System-Free)

• Tunnels in White (Liminal Horror)

• MeatCastle GameWare Annual #1 (Mothership 1e, Mork Borg, and System-Free)

• The Mole on PIRAD ONE (Mothership 1e)

• There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station (Mothership 1e)

• ULTIMATE BADASS: Optional Action Movie Rules (Mothership 1e)

You can grab EVERYTHING I’ve ever made in print for around $50 USD or get it all digitally for just $26! The sale will run from now until the evening of 12/10 (so two full weeks)!

Again, you can hit up the store at shop.meatcastlegameware.com!

Having my own store has already been very empowering and has enabled me to do business differently (like the recent pre-order campaign for MCGW Annual #1) and in ways that directly support me (something that is important to me when I’m buying from other indie creators). Simply put, it rules.

The shop itself is built on Shopify (like many other indie creator stores out there) so you likely already know how to navigate it, have an account, etc. so even though it’s a standalone shop it likely won’t require a ton of new sign-ups and information on your part which is always a plus.

I am hoping to use the store in the future, outside of more standard releases, to allow me to do more fun and creative releases like a possible Tacticians of Ahm - Alpha Access print run (around the time it comes to itchfunding in the next month or so).

This is likely the biggest sale I will be doing until my next physical release (which is still several months away) so definitely take advantage if you are interested! It’s a larger discount than I typically do, but every purchase here ensures that the VAST majority of your money spent actually comes directly to me, which supports me to keep doing what I’m doing and make more cool stuff in the future. I’m just really excited to finally have direct control over all of this again so I wanted to share the love!

Check out the new MCGW shop (and 30% Off Storewide sale) HERE!

I truly appreciate any and all support. Each and every dollar goes a long way for indie creators like me! - Christian