It’s been a year of big growth for RV Games, and I had largely resisted formalizing the RV Games ttrpg development process. Not because I’m opposed to process, but because I want to be sure to develop the right publishing process.

This is part 1 of a two part newsletter, part 2 will be published in two weeks. In this one, I get pretentious and talk about the conceptual underpinnings of the RV Games development process, and in part two, I will lay out what this looks like in reality, using Orgy of the Blood Leeches as an example.

Development Processes

I’ve talked here about how my day job involves teaching people to write. However, I am also a coordinator and consultant and my area of teaching and research is in design processes and structures. I apply this work towards educational systems in my academic and professional work, so I wide array of experience of designing human systems, structures, and processes at all sorts of scale. I’ve notice two problems whenever organizations tackle adding process to a previously unmanaged task, and they both stem from wanting to approach process in a top-down fashion:

1. They try to to wholesale import a process from someone or somewhere else

2. They over-design their processes before implementing anything, and then implementation is brittle and clunky.

However, if you aren’t importing a process or conducting a bunch of design ahead of time, you have to be willing to exist in a messy, unorganized realm until the areas that need process emerge and reveal themselves. The processes developed are grounded in the task at hand and developed in a bottom-up fashion.

As you work on projects with teams, you see where you have miscommunications or delays or things that led to poor outcomes, and you develop process around this pain points while allowing as much as possible to stay free and organic and unconstrained by development processes. You want the lightest touch for the results you want, otherwise, your processes end up turning into needless bureaucracy, especially in the case of RV Games which has one full-time owner and their partner who work with small ad-hoc product development teams.

Once you’ve made some mistakes, which include hurt feelings and miscommunications, you can then start to do some research into processes that may be adaptable to your situation. Determining what is adaptable is a process in and of itself that requires focus. After working on Advanced Rules and Hecate Cassette Archive as larger scale projects, I built a theory of action for RV Games, a guiding principle for larger ttrpg projects.

After a lot of sleeping and shower thinking, this theory of action led me to three questions that I would need to answer to develop a rigorous process for ttrpg development:

1. What does it mean to rigorously develop a ttrpg product?

2. Why is it important to bring rigor to ttrpg development?

3. What processes are necessary to generate rigor and ship ttrpg products?

What does it mean to rigorously develop a ttrpg product?

A rigorously developed ttrpg product is hardened and defensible. There is a design sensibility that is conceptually entwined in all aspects of the text. There is an idiosyncratic view of the world that is logically coherent within itself that is apparent through the text. A rigorously developed ttrpg has something to say, but does it in a way that is woven through the text, it is not heavy-handed or didactic, but it is defiantly obvious.

Current films by David Cronenberg, Coralie Fargeat, and Robert Eggers are examples of the type of rigor that RV Games would like to bring to ttrpgs: The Substance, Nosferatu, and Crimes of the Future expertly wielded rigorous craft to make the exact movies the directors wanted to make. They are all heightened realities with extremely obvious subtext. They are High Camp, taking Body Horror and the vampire film very seriously, escalating to something sublime and ridiculous and meaningful.

Camp is thought of as shoddy art by many people, but High Camp is the most rigorous genre to work in. It takes such an understanding of a medium to use high levels of craft within genres that have often been degraded. They are not deconstructions or satires of genres, but they understand their roots and play with them.

Within ttrpgs, this means understanding the tropes and history of the genre and of a particular system to play with and break expectations while still acting as a superb example of work in that genre or for that system. Orgy of the Blood Leeches definitely hopes to play with expectations while at the same time being the most Mothership-y module possible.

Why is it important to bring rigor to ttrpg development?

There has been much ink spilled to talk about coherence between gameplay and fiction within ttrpgs, but when I discuss coherence I mean more than that. I’m thinking about how ttrpgs are a unique product because you are giving people the pieces for a game, but they will play it out however they see fit. This means that coherence between social theory, message, gameplay theory, writing, and art needs to be strong and obvious. I’m including social theory here because I am an auteurist, and every auteur is sharing their idiosyncratic view of how the world and society and psychology all fit together, which is different from the broad picture message you would like to send.

This is what I meant by defiantly obvious earlier, you want to develop something that is on the nose and blatant because that’s what it takes to get something across within the genre of ttrpgs, you need to work in broad strokes in a heightened reality. It can become really easy to moralize or to lose subtlety when taking this approach, especially when coming from a particular social stance, so it takes a rigorous process to strike the balance. People will always misinterpret your work, but much like a screenwriter, there are ways you can build your manuscript to be sure that the Warden will approach it in a certain way without eliminating their creativity and moment to moment decisions at the table.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a very Queer piece of work, so it takes a lot of thought and care to develop something that makes an impact for Queer and straight people alike. You can get torn apart by either audience, and you probably will when making any Queer art, you have to have thick skin, but you can make sure that you do your homework before putting something out in the world. As a publicly Queer individual, I know that my work can be interpreted as something larger than just my own views, and that is in the back of my mind as I write even if it isn’t necessarily the best way to stay creative.

What processes are necessary to generate rigor and ship ttrpg products?

Rigor comes from the editorial process, I do not believe that there is such a thing as over edited text. Rigor especially comes from doing multiple rounds of developmental editing until a manuscript is ready to go. There also needs to be a process for getting outside eyes and input on a manuscript before entering into copy and line editing and production. This where the academic process of working with a committee with a chair guiding the writer seems perfectly suited for generating rigor within ttrpg products. By the time the manuscript is through the process, it is rather painless for layout to happen since text adjustments should be minimal by that point. This committee type process also gives an opportunity for everyone to look at the fully laid out work before moving into printing and distribution. In part 2 of this essay, I’ll discuss what this looks like in a lot more detail for RV Games specifically.

Mothership Month

Mothership Month 25 launches tomorrow! I’m sitting this one out as a writer because I am still working to complete Orgy of the Blood Leeches. However, there are four different projects that I’d like to highlight.

We’re providing development and production support for The Conduit and Flatline on the Blocks, All on Red is a writing project for A. Jordan Dewitt, the writer of A Secret Chord for RV Games, Burnt Flesh & Borrowed Gloves is from Hammer City Games for whom we distribute, and Sunlit Path is from Joshua Justice who wrote Hecate Cassette archive with RV Games.

These are all fabulous pieces of work that I am excited to see fund!

The Conduit

Pressed into service by LinneTech, your Crew hunts the source of defective black-market clones. The trail drags you through The Dream’s underbelly: Doptown, the Sink, and beyond. It pulls you into a web tying a rising clinic, a “charity” that feeds the machine, and a clandestine lab. At the center is The Conduit, clones intent on founding a new civilization. Choose your allies, crack the prison, and decide who gets free and who gets burned before the AI wakes and someone arms the bomb.

Flatline on the Blocks

Flatline on the Blocks is a new setting module of crammed city blocks, scheming factions, and ticking doom set aboard the megacity X-class space station Prospero’s Dream, for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. This zine contains cascading criminal conspiracies building up from small events to massive, district-wide catastrophes that affect the entire playground of the Spinal Crux District. Inspired by squalid city life in Final Fantasy VII’sMidgar and Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One with the colorful madness of Joel Schumacher’s Gotham City and a dystopian F-Zero, this district has the heart and hooks to keep pulling your crew back in.

All on Red

All On Red is a tense sandbox investigation module set on the perilous mega-station Prospero’s Dream. Speeding trains, a vicious gang, a clinic on the brink of failure, and a rebel plot all collide in this pressure cooker adventure!

Burnt Flesh & Borrowed Gloves

Step into your new flesh like borrowed gloves, and burn your fingers once again! Introducing new transhuman mechanics for Mothership RPG as part of Mothership Month 2025! Swap bodies, go insane, and see just how far from human you can become.

Sunlit Path

Explore the mysteries of a sect of Solarians with a powerful understanding of Solar Astrology, 2 unique classes, new items for innovative problem solving, and both ties to Prospero’s Dream, and a mandate to explore abroad.

In this issue I am going to trace the development of the investigation system for my upcoming campaign adventure module for Mothership 1e that is launching as part of Mothership Month 2024: Orgy of the Blood Leeches. I will also have some brief coverage of the five (😅) other projects that we are distributing for Mothership Month, in addition to our other crowdfunding projects that we are currently closing out. This is a long issue, so if you’re reading via email instead of the Substack app, you may need to click to continue to read everything in your email client.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches Launch Party

What is Orgy of the Blood Leeches?

At its heart, Orgy of the Blood Leeches, is an investigation adventure; however, the scenario is much less an investigation procedural and much more Twin Peaks.

The set up is a murder mystery stacked on top of a political powder keg.

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?

However, it’s not just a straightforward murder mystery. In gameplay, it strives to be much closer to an immersive sim than any other genre. Ordinarily, immersive sims only provide simulations of environments and the locations of NPCs and other systems, but this adventure also wants to apply this to social situations. Much like how Ursula K. LeGuinn referred to her work as a social science fiction, Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a social immersive simulation. I view this as being different from your typical ttrpg or crpg sandbox since there is still a singular mission to accomplish, so it is a limited sandbox. Another key component of this sandbox is that I design everything to be playable either solo or Wardenless from the ground up.

As part of developing this mystery I had to develop the cast of ten murder suspects who include:

1. Brianna Pilgrim (she/they) - Murder Victim

2. Sheriff Woodrow Wilson (he/they) - Sheriff of Trellick Station

3. Dr. Johannes Lethian (he/him) - The Creator of the Blood Leeches

4. Nick Henry (he/him) - Brianna’s Regular Client and Second Murder Victim

5. Addie Flynn (they/them) - Representative for the Interstellar Sex Workers’ Union

6. Dr. Rogelio Luca (he/him) - The Medical Officer Onboard Trellick Station

7. Amanda Davis (she/her) - Corporate Administrator for Trellick Station

8. Pamela Posier (she/her) - Activist for the Radical Feminist Liberation Front

9. Benjamin Dryden (he/him) - Fascist Corporate Spy

10. Victoria Valentine (they/them) - Brianna’s On-Again/Off-Again Partner

Investigation System Attempt #1 - Static Murderer, Static Clues, Gumshoe Inspired

I had a scenario and a set of suspects, and I decided to play out in my head who I thought the murderer could be from the most obvious to the most obtuse. I did research into traditionally designed investigation design, at this point in time I read Gumshoe and the guidelines for designing mysteries that were published in Hull Breach. I appreciated how these eliminate the roll for clues aspects of static mysteries as approached in other systems, but there is still a clear critical path even if you place multiple clues lots of places. It really didn’t accomplish my goal of building a social immersive sim that can be playable solo or Wardenless.

This is when I came back to Twin Peaks. David Lynch and Mark Frost have said that they never wanted to reveal the killer in Twin Peaks because then it turns it into a run-of-the-mill secret, it’s revealed, and it’s done. The mystery doesn’t keep going, and the real charm of Twin Peaks is the town and the characters, Laura Palmer’s murder is just a way to get you there. I actually believe that they did not even know who the killer was until Bob Iger (yes, that Bob Iger) forced them to do the reveal. Twin Peaks is a descent into weirdness, not a procedural whodunit, and having a static murderer with static clues doesn’t support this kind of vibe.

At the same time I was grappling with this, I hung out at a party with a bunch of lawyers, and I realized that it doesn’t matter if an investigator knows who committed a crime, without a solid case file and evidence, no prosecutor is going to touch the case to bring it in front of a judge. That brought me to my next attempt at an investigation system.

Investigation System Attempt #2 - Chosen Murderer, Procedural Clues

My next version involved the Warden either rolling for or choosing one of the ten suspects at the start of the adventure. The clues are then picked up procedurally as the players explore Isolation Zones that have been blocked off from the rest of Trellick Station due to leech infestation. Players would need to get three clues from every single Isolation Zone, they would need to speak with all living suspects, and examine both victims dead bodies before they could pitch their case file to the Warden who would tell them if they were correct or if they need to fix something in their case file. The case file is a simple tracker for players where they can place clues into three columns: “Means, Motive, and Methods.” This is influenced by Sean McCoy’s Investigation Sheet.

The rolled for murderer and procedural clues gave things more of an immersive sim vibe that in my first attempt, but it still left too much up to Warden fiat when trying to develop a simulation. This also makes solo or Wardenless play involve more creation of material than I prefer, my design style for solo and Wardenless play tries to minimize the use of oracles and journaling through the use of procedures.

Investigation System Attempt #3 - Doing the Columbo, Revealed Murderer, Procedural Clues

For my next attempt, I came back to Twin Peaks. When I first experienced Twin Peaks it was for a college class on the works of David Lynch, and my professor decided to introduce us to the show in chronological order, so my first introduction to Twin Peaks was Fire Walk With Me. I then watched the entire show already knowing who the killer was. I didn’t experience the show as a whodunnit but as a how/whydunnit, and I feel as though this actually accomplished the goals that David Lynch and Mark Frost set out with Twin Peaks. I was focused on the characters and their relationships and the mysteries of the Red Room, the Black Lodge, and the White Lodge more than I was trying to solve “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

It was at this same time that serendipitously, I started watching Poker Face, and then Columbo. Both of these shows start by showing you the murder, and the main characters are very intuitive, so they also immediately know, so their task is about finding the evidence to build a case, and this is the vibe that I wanted for my investigation system.

This led to rolling for the murderer out of the suspects and then revealing the killer to the players at the start of the adventure. It’s about weaving together the random clues into a case file and narrative that give context and allow you to seek justice for Brianna. However, the decision for whether the case file is correct or incorrect was still determined by Warden fiat, and that is an issue when designing towards solo or Wardenless play that is more about player emulation than GM emulation.

Investigation System Attempt #4 - Revealed Murderer, Procedural Clues, In-Fiction Confirmation Procedure

As my brain stewed on a way to confirm a case file procedurally, I came back to Brindlewood Bay even though I had scoffed at case solving procedure like the Theorize move in that game. However, an in-fiction solution to this came to me, I realized that the module needed to have “The Twist” about 75% of the way through the adventure. I needed to come back to the Asian story structure of Kishōtenketsu, the four act story structure (and to remind myself of The Tilt Table in Fiasco!)

1. Introduction (ki): an introduction to the characters, era, and other information required to understand the plot.

2. Development (shō): follows leads towards the twist in the story. No major changes so far.

3. Twist (ten): the story turns toward an unexpected development. This is the crux of the story, the yama (ヤマ) or climax. If the narrative takes several turns, this is the biggest one.

4. Conclusion (ketsu), also called ochi (落ち) or ending, wraps up the story.

Adding The Twist to go the game adds an in-fiction reason for why the party would know who the murderer would be ahead of time and established major moral decision for players to make. Part of this moral decision is whether they interact with a system that can procedurally tell them with utmost certainty whether their case file is correct or not, cribbing from the system in Brindlewood Bay. They can choose not to interact with this system based on their decision, but that may lead to a false conviction or a case file with errors that allows the murderer to not be prosecuted or convicted.

Working with my editor, we realized that this confirmation system also needed some guidance for failure. At first we just used a d10 table split into “Means, Motive, and Methods” without more detail than that. My editor then suggested adding more detail to this table since the simple error table still leaves a lot to Warden fiat, still making it difficult to play solo or Wardenless without extensive use of an oracle or a journaling style approach.

Investigation System Attempt #5 - Player-Driven Murderer, Procedural Clues, In-Fiction Confirmation Procedure

The final piece in developing an investigation system that can provide support Wardened, solo, or Wardenless play was developed after quite a bit of back and forth with my editor. Giving players the murderer could diminish the buy-in to the module or give away The Twist early because players have their own ideas. They could also not trust the culprit given to them, so I finally relented and moved to a player-driven system. Players choose who they think the murderer is with no predetermined outcome, they collect the clues procedurally to build their case file, and then they choose whether or not to interact with the in-fiction case file confirmation procedure based on their decision resulting from The Twist. A solo player or a Wardenless player are able to interact with these systems without using an oracle or free form journaling (unless they’d like too), and it creates a simulation that runs independently of Warden fiat, giving the social immersive sim flavor for parties of all types. It took five revisions, discussions with a close colleague, and four rounds of developmental editing with two different editors to get the system to where it is now. I have included the procedure below, stripped of the in-fiction information that would reveal The Twist.

• To check their case file against the memories of the suspects, players make an Intellect Check @ [+], including an applicable skill. Use the highest Intellect in the party and the most useful skill from the party.

  • Players gain 1 percentile bonus for each Clue collected and used in the party’s explanation.

  • Players gain 3 percentile bonus for each living suspect who they interview.

  • Players gain 3 percentile bonus for each dead suspect’s body they examine.

  • Remember that no matter how high these bonuses raise the target for the check, a roll of 90-99 is always considered a failure.

• On Success, their Case File is correct and ready to prosecute.

  • On a Critical Success, players receive Investigation, a Master Tier Skill.

• On Failure, their Case File is incorrect. Use the following Case File Error table to determine what portion of the Case File is wrong.

• On a Critical Failure, the party has chosen the wrong suspect. Roll 2d10 to choose two different suspects. The real murderer is one of those two suspects, and players must choose one and alter their case file accordingly. If players roll a Critical Failure a second time, do not roll to choose a suspect, players now know that the murderer was their second choice from the initial roll. If players are highly unlucky and roll three more more Critical Failures when trying to corroborate their Case File, treat each subsequent Critical Failure as a Failure for the purpose of this procedure. You should still call for a Panic Check as part rolling a Critical Failure, but it should not trigger a cascade of guessing new suspects.

We took some time to give players a strong chance of being correct because we don’t want to recreate the Perception Check issue that can come with finding clues.

Discussion

I now feel really solid about the investigation systems within Orgy of the Blood Leeches. Things will probably change more with play testing, but it has gone through enough cycles of writing and revision that I feel like it is a really solid system that can support solo and Wardenless play from the ground up while still supporting traditional play with a Warden. Designing solo-first means that my systems are much more solid and unequivocal since you can’t hand wave things and pass them onto the Warden. There is some authority to give to Wardens, but I want it to be in the context of rulings during play not in defining the structure of the module itself. Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a designed adventure, an immersive sim, not an open sandbox.

Mothership Month Campaigns Distributed by RV Games

Not Enough Scoundrels by Chris Airiau of 5 Million Worlds Press

Not Enough Scoundrels is a new smuggling module for Mothership RPG. The zine is an adventure generator, NPC compendium, and ship type supplement, and includes procedures involving shady NPCs for players to get mixed up with between the horrors.

Death Pays All Debts by Octopus Ink Games

Death Pays All Debts adds a new tower in the depths of Prospero’s Dream loaded with loot and danger. Enterprising crews robbing the tower can walk away made for life. Unlucky ones will perish in the attempt… or worse.

Operation Golden Cut by Krakenhund Studio

Operation Golden Cut is a sci-fi horror adventure for Mothership RPG. Navigate a war-torn mining moon, steal valuable cache of gold amidst brutal corporate conflict, and survive the horrors of human greed and warfare.

Starships & Soldiers by Brenden Carlson of Hammer City Games

A Toolkit for warfare, military tactics, and planetary annihilation! See new worlds, meet new people, try and kill them all and make a buck doing it!

Devil’s Due

Devil’s Due is a hardcover compendium of space pirate supplements and adventures, with around 100 big ol’ A4 pages of raiding, hijacking, and backstabbing for the Mothership sci-fi horror RPG, crafted by a worldwide team of 20 contributors.

Featured Mothership Month Campaign

What Was Left To Rot by Terry Herc Games

Sentenced to hard labour on Crater 146B, your transport crashes and you awaken to a living nightmare. A mysterious fungal infection ravages the penal mining colony, transforming inmates, guards, and colonists into grotesque abominations. Factions clash for control over dwindling resources, and the only way off-world is blocked by orbital defenses.

As a convict armed with nothing but your wits and the will to survive, you face impossible choices. Will you forge uneasy alliances? Will you uncover the dark secrets behind the infection? Will you live long enough to escape?

Other Crowdfunding

Hecate Cassette Archive - Late Pledges Open

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying. A one-shot for Mothership 1e. Distributed by RV Games.

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays. Community made, distributed by RV Games.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

Nuts and Bolts, Practical Learning

At this point, RV Games now has a roster of four different writers who we are guiding along the writing development process from pamphlets or rules supplements to Zines to hardcover campaign sized books. I love writing my own work, but I’ve realized that I love publishing and supporting people in this better even better. For me, writing entails a necessary level of pain and introspection, that isn’t necessarily a joyful creative process for me, so supporting others through this is something that fills my bucket.

We’ll have a bunch of exciting projects to announce throughout the rest of this year and 2025. It’s taken two years, but we now have the infrastructure and pipeline to be a true multi-project company. We tend to follow the Roger Corman model: releasing many smaller budget projects instead of focusing on singular blockbuster products. The lower your budget, the fewer copies that you need to be profitable, and it spreads the risk out better than sinking everything into a single large project. However, it also means that you need to be constantly publishing and crowdfunding and selling your back catalog as add-ons during the next campaign. You also need to have a deep enough pipeline that you can deprecate older modules for newer ones and hopefully develop some evergreen products that get multiple print runs.

Just like I’ve learned to always have multiple suppliers, fulfillment partners, and distributors and back-up artists, writers, and editors for projects, I’ve also learned from my own misfires (Mitosis was not as highly received as we had hoped), working with other folks, and observing the industry that you don’t want to have a single point-of-failure in the form of one large project on which your entire company depends. This is why even though we’re moving much more firmly into the realm of hardcover and boxed modules and games through 2025, we still keep ourselves firmly planted in the ecosystem of zines and pamphlets.

Zines and pamphlets are a great way to develop new writers since the budgets are lower and the timelines shorter, and new writers need practice to develop their craft before they can put together a book-length commercial level manuscript. We will continue to leave a spot open in February for a new writer who we will support through ZineQuest and beyond. We’ll publish anyone with good ideas and writing skills and who takes well to editorial feedback, but we also strongly lean towards bringing forward voices of folks traditionally marginalized in the ttrpg community with an especially strong focus on Queer designers and writers.

Loving Kindness

I practice mindfulness and meditation regularly, and the type of meditation that has the most impact on me is “Loving Kindness” meditation where you grant yourself permission to give yourself love and kindness and then you put these wishes out into the world for others. This meditation always leaves me as a sobbing mess, being so full of love.

There’s two different events that have happened in 2024 that made me evaluate how I incorporate love and care into my business. Working with doctoral students is my day job, and I lead with love and care and humanity when working with my students. However, my work with RV Games was still rather transactional even when working with folks who are my friends.

Return to Perinthos

In January, the legendary game designer Jennell Jaquays passed away. As part of processing this as a community, we helped to spearhead a game jam and book, Return to Perinthos, benefiting her family. We were able to immediately give her family $4,300, which covered their ambulance bills, and we will have more money for her family once everything is complete and fulfilled.

What was most evident to me when I watched Jennell’s funeral was that Jennell was such a kind influence and mentor for so many people. I realized that I want nothing more than to be remembered as positively as her. It’s great to make influential games, but building love and care and community is what’s most important.

The Hecate Cassette Archive Curse

The need to focus on building community over building games came into full view as we have worked on Hecate Cassette Archive. The team working on this module has encountered the following things:

• Multiple cross country moves

• Major breakups/divorces

• Ill parents

• Family hospitalizations

• Death of a family dog upon returning home from hospitalizations

• Housing issues

With all of this life stacked on top of each other, we decided that the module had been cursed!

People started disappearing from contact, and I could see resentment start to build as folks went MIA. At this point, it’s when I started sharing vulnerable things about myself with the rest of the team. My relationship with Joshua Justice became especially close as we have worked through this. I started holding more whole team meetings and explicitly checking in with people to see how they are doing. We now start our meetings seeing how everyone is doing, and we know about what’s going on in each other’s lives.

At this point, this same team could make absolutely anything together. We’ve managed to support each other through this curse and have turned into a small community that is full of love. Queer joy is real!

Writer’s Group

As I saw the team cohere around the HCA curse, I realized that I was also missing out on opportunities to bring together the writers who work with RV Games. I created a writer’s group for five of us (myself, Joshua Justice, Chris Airiau, DiscoDan, and Shea Perry), and it has turned into a community space full of connection and collaboration. The next year of RV Games is going to a big one with all of us putting out medium to large scale projects, and they’re all going to be stronger through this community space.

Memory

Not everyone is lucky enough to make it through crowdfunding and the business aspects of the indie ttrpg world unscathed. In a recent post, Crab Dominion, dissected the failure of their own Mothership Kickstarter, Memory. RV Games is the publisher mentioned in the post who reached out to try and fulfill the back catalog for Crab Dominion while taking on Memory as a long-term project to get it completed to the extent promised during the Kickstarter. Even though this publishing deal was unable to come through, we’ve still been working with D.N. Wilkie to put together a print & play/digital version of Memory based on the CC-licensed manuscript shared by Crab Dominion at the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign and by recovering art from Zach Hazard Vaupen. This module is being released for free in this newsletter, on Itch, and on DTRPG. This is not my module, so it will always be free, releasing it is a gift for the backers of Memory and for the Mothership community. It falls short of the 32-pages promised by the Kickstarter, but this module is really great work, and it would be a shame if it’s not shared with world in some form.

• Memory on DriveThruRPG

• Memory on Itch

Memory PDF

1.91MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Crashed on an alien planet with no memory of how you got there, your only option is to try to escape.

Download

Crowdfunding

Berserkr - Currently Live for Slightly Reckless Games

Norse Mythology + Mork Borg

Hecate Cassette Archive - Late Pledges Open

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying. A one-shot for Mothership 1e. Distributed by RV Games.

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays. Community made, distributed by RV Games.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

Traditional Production Process

In Issue #10, I dove into the traditional writing process, and here I extend it to the traditional production process going from rough draft to a fully laid out book.

1. Drafting

2. Developmental Editing

3. Copy and Line Editing

4. Layout

5. Art

I end up being much more fluid with where art enters into the process and the role of layout in the editing process. In this issue, I’m going to focus on talking about working with artists just like I discussed working with editors in Issue #10.

In a future issue, I’ll talk about how I prefer to work with a graphic designer who is also a game designer who helps to polish the manuscript further while laying out the text.

My Production Process

My production process ends up looking more like this.

1. Drafting

2. Art

3. Developmental Editing

4. Art

5. Copy and Line Editing

6. Art

7. Layout

8. Art

I’ve often discussed my neurodivergence and aphantasia in the context of maps, but this bleeds over into how I write and collaborate with artists. I don’t have any mental imagery, so I need to work with illustrators much sooner than most people. As a publisher, I always set aside money from prior projects, so I can fund art for new projects during the development process and before seeking crowdfunding.

I start with a general pitch for a project and a super rough draft, and then I commission art to help me visualize the writing. These can be creature illustrations, NPC illustrations, a cover mockup, a map, a render, a cover markup, a patch, or a poster. I just need something that I can write to, rather than conjuring up the mood from scratch. Working with artists is a collaboration for me, not just a commission, they drive how the work takes shape just as much the editor and myself drive the text.

From the first pitch and art, I’m able to work out my first whole draft, after which I usually have some more ideas for art that I’d like and want to bring in during the developmental editing process. I work with the editor to write to and incorporate new art and to figure out what other spot art we may need as the work emerges and takes shape.

As we focus on line editing, things tend to take a sharper focus, and we have a more focused idea for the art we need. This art tends to follow the format of a commission, we’re looking for something specific.

If something is a big project, it goes to crowdfunding, and this pays for layout and any art that has not been paid for during the development process. This is quite often larger, much more expensive, full spread pieces, covers, any spot art that we realize we need during the layout phase, and art for stretch goals.

I’m next going to talk through how I used this process in two different ways for two different projects: Return to STAR Station and Orgy of the Blood Leeches.

Return to STAR Station - Live in the 2024 Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam

Return to STAR Station is a module that had been eating me from the inside out. For Advanced Rules the final stretch goal of the campaign was a solo/wardenless adventure that used as many of the tools from Advanced Rules as possible as an example for designers and wardens. I was absolutely stuck on the premise for this module 😱

I knew that I wanted to pull a Roger Corman and re-use the map from Mitosis: Escape From STAR Station. I knew that the module would be about a new tenant at STAR Station after the events of Escape From STAR Station, so I knew the title would be Return to STAR Station. However, I had absolutely no clue what the module would actually be about, it was just a map, a title, and a collection of game mechanics!

I was originally planning on this being a text-only module like the rest of Advanced Rules, but this wasn’t working for me, I didn’t have art to plug into my writing process, and I didn’t have an art budget factored into this stretch goal because I originally thought it would be text-only. This is when I turned to my friend Evlyn Moreau’s Patreon. I had originally joined her Patreon to use some Mothership crew illustrations she had made in an unannounced project, and I had seen so much great horror and sci-fi artwork in her Patreon. I scoured through all of her Google folder of Patreon archives, and I found the cover image for the module.

Once I found that image, I searched for images that could help me create an ecosystem and life cycle for this creature. This led me to finding images like the one below.

Suddenly, I had a location and a set of encounters. From there, I still needed a reason for folks to be there, and that’s when I discovered the image that would define the pre-gen PCs for this module. These aren’t typical Mothership type characters, but they spoke to the spoopy vibe that I had landed on for this module. At the same time, Evlyn posted an image of a robotic hand, which she did redraw for me for the module, and I knew that this sentient robotic hand would be the McGuffin for the module. There was also an image of a pair of “evil” investigators accompanying the illustration of the PCs.

I now had a faction for the PCs, an opposing faction, a McGuffin that both factions are trying to get, and an entire life cycle of encounters. From there, the idea of STAR Station now being inhabited by a cult came to life. The final piece that put all of this together came from the call for entries for this year’s Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam with a theme of natural phenomena. It helped me to land on the classic B-Movie sci-fi trope of an encounter with a comet causing a confrontation with an alien creature.

I went from nothing but a super loose idea to a completed zine in about a week. It also helped that this lined up with a WIP week hosted on The Lost Bay Discord. I had a place to post things as I went along for accountability and encouragement. Without Evlyn’s Patreon, I would have continued to be stuck. It is a major lesson for me that if I’m trying to make something small but still want to have art to guide my process that I should remember to turn to Patreon (or other service) of illustrators who I’d like to work with. It’s affordable, and it’s not the end of the world that your illustrations are not exclusive to your work. Using the limitations of using existing illustrations helped me to put together the whole picture, a lot like using small details from a random table to help you build out your world.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches - Launching for Mothership Crime Month - October/November

I’ve been working on Orgy of the Blood Leeches for two years now! I’m almost ready to put together an ashcan zine of the first area of the module, and it’s taken working with five different artists and an editor to get it to this point. I now feel comfortable launching it this October/November as part of Mothership Crime Month, a cross-collaboration BackerKit campaign aligned with Tuesday Knight Games next Mothership release, Wages of Sin.

For this module, I started with a general premise, Shivers on a large space station with the population of Oakland, California. I knew that there were leeches that infected people and turned them into merged erotic beings like if the movie Society were hot and gay. I had a mood board, and I had a cover mockup from David Wilkie.

I had no clue what the life cycle of these creatures looked like. This when I reached out to three different artists to do a sample piece of art, and Amanda Lee Franck was the clear winner. I met with Amanda to go over the idea, and I gave her free rein to develop the creatures. She came back with sketches of three different nine-stage life cycles with three different versions of the leeches.

We were able to narrow this down to there being three different leeches (a tripledemic) and ten images overall. From there, I was able to write the encounters and develop the general ideas for NPCs, and I was able to have something that could then go through two rounds of developmental editing with Christian Sorrell. From there I was able to create rough descriptions of named NPCS, which I was then able to work with Amanda to develop the characters and to further develop the 70s retrofuture vibe that now defines this module and the RV Games universe as a whole.

With encounters written, I was then able to approach Sam Wildman to develop a rough render of Trellick Station, and he has recently created a new version that has shifted the writing for the first area again (it is now in zero-g, which means a lot has to change)

Alongside this art, I also worked with Lone Archivist to develop a corporate logo and patch for crowdfunding when I was stuck on writing. This logo really pushed forward the 1970s vibes.

Finally, to help put together the ashcan demo of the first area, I worked with Zach Hazard to develop a cover that will also become a movie poster for the crowdfunded full version of the module. This has given me a lot of oomph to continue writing with my new editor Greenspore.

Discussion

Working with editors and artists early in the writing process is a fantastic way to engage in a more rigorous writing process, honing the text and building around the art. However, there is one big issue with this: it’s a really slow and expensive way to write 😅

However, I have learned some ways to hack this system by leaning on Patreon and peer/community feedback for smaller projects. There’s nothing that beats a fully crowdfunded module with custom art and a dedicated editor, but that shouldn’t stop you from adopting an art forward writing style even if you are not an illustrator yourself. Visual artists give a different perspective that is complementary to more literary minded folks, and the intersection of the two is where the real magic happens. Let the tail wag the dog, let the art guide your writing instead of letting your writing dictate the art.

Crowdfunding

Hecate Cassette Archive - Late Pledges Open

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying. A one-shot for Mothership 1e. Distributed by RV Games.

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays. Community made, distributed by RV Games.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

Paid Subscriber Materials

Paid subscribers get permanent DrivethruRPG access to Return to STAR Station as part of their subscription. It is currently free on Itch during the length of the Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam, but it will only be available as a paid module afterwards.

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Earth: After Death - Launching on Kickstarter May 7

Post-Apocalyptic Survival Roleplaying, A Spiritual Successor to Gamma World 1e

Welcome everyone! This issue of The AGP is an interview with Brenden Carlson about his next game, Earth: After Death.

Tell me about Earth: After Death. What is your elevator pitch?

Earth: After Death is a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler, heavily inspired by AD&D and the old TSR-style of games, and is billed as the spiritual successor to Gamma World. Just like how Fallout succeeded Wasteland, Earth: After Death is designed to be approachable yet advanced and have mechanical depth, and have its own stylistic identity while retaining the general vibe of what Gamma World offered: a world that was once familiar becoming incredibly alien and dangerous.

Describe the system used in Earth: After Death. What was your design philosophy?

Everyone and their mother uses a d20, and while I tried using the criminally underrated d12, it just made sense to use the d20 as the base dice, both as a callback to its roots, and because that made the math work the best. It's a roll-under style system, meaning that rolling the target number or under is a success, making it easy for players and GMs to know if they succeeded or failed without having to look up a “Difficulty Challenge” or a, *shudder*, THAC0 chart. The number needed to succeed (Success Threshold) is often modified by the player's listed Skills, which are increased in whatever order the player wishes as they level up and gain Skill Points. This allows the player to feel as if they are directing the evolution of their character as they progress, instead of being stuck on a prescribed path as most modern RPGs (or the one prevalent RPG) are notorious for.

How did you develop the idea that turned into Earth: After Death?

Truth be told, the original idea came in 2014 when I was first introduced to the hobby, and wanted a Fallout-style post-apocalyptic game, but unfortunately I was too naive and unfamiliar with the space to look into the classic games. When I did, I found absolutely wonderful and creative projects, but none of them really tickled the fantasy I had in my head for a game that catered to what I wanted and got out of my favourite CRPGs. However, delving headfirst into classic TSR products and watching plenty of Adventure Time coalesced the idea which would eventually become Earth: After Death as it is now.

What role has sensitivity reading played in the development of Earth: After Death? What benefit have you found from this type of reading? Are there any challenges you encountered from this type of reading?

As an avid horror TTRPG player and horror media fan, I understand both pushing the envelope in order to create evocative stories, as well as knowing when something is a bit too much. My main concern with Earth: After Death in a sensitivity context is the inclusion of slaves that can be both played as and interacted with. While it can be a useful tool to explore history and humanity, I specifically wanted to represent slavery in a respectful way that avoided falling into stereotypes. In fact, my sensitivity reader - Anah Tiller - brought up a wonderful point on the struggles between slaves and serfs given the clash of those forced to serve versus willingly serving or giving up their freedom. Such a concept couldn't ever have come up had I not had her as someone to read my work and make sure it was representative as well as respectful. I wholeheartedly think that sensitivity reading can be a powerful creative tool, especially for sensitive topics where a creator isn't as knowledgeable or wants a second opinion.

What is the product that you are about to launch on Kickstarter? Tell me about what will be included.

Previously, I have printed and distributed a pre-release of the game, with the intent of getting blind playtests of it before the full production stage. Thanks to the supporters of this project, the Kickstart is launching with an edited and smoothened Wastelander's Handbook (player's guide), alongside a separate Overseer’s Manual (GM’s guide), the Apocalyptic Dreams adventure booklet, and a cardstock Overseer's Terminal (GM screen). I want whoever invests in the Kickstarter to get their money's worth and to see my company as one that produces quality products within reliable timelines.

How do you manage personal responsibilities and your creative work?

I'm a nuclear chemist in my day job, and so while I can't sit down and smash out pages and pages of content, I've been able to find snippets of time here and there to jot down notes, ideas, build stat blocks, or edit my work during breaks or during slow days. Oftentimes I'm running three parallel documents with a project: the notes on my phone, the raw whitepaper in my computer, and the actual file everything gets refined and positioned inside. I feel like I'm a unique case not because I'm a workaholic (I love having downtime and not doing anything), but because I know how to best utilize whatever free moments I have. If I can't directly build the project in its final form, I can always edit, brainstorm, or refine what I've saved and exported in between deadlines and my “real job.”

Discussion

In this interview, the question about sensitivity readers is most interesting to me. I’m of two minds on using sensitivity readers: I don’t think folks should preemptively censor work that could be controversial, and I think it’s good to get other folks to read your work who have different backgrounds and can illuminate blind spots. It’s hard for me to be an absolutist about anything. All of my work is openly Queer and controversial since Queer is a political stance, and I can’t let fear of being misunderstood get in the way of putting out work that I feel is personal and important in the climate Queer folks are facing right now, being turned into a wedge in the ongoing culture wars. However, if I I am including characters who have experienced a different life than I have as a college educated White professor and former teacher and administrator, I want to make sure that I am not causing harm due to something I have included in my work. My work all seeks to illuminate liberation in some way, and liberation has to happen in solidarity.

Hecate Cassette Archive - Late Pledges Open

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

• Written by Joshua Justice

• Art by Amanda Lee Franck

• Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Justin Vandermeer

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

• The highest pledge tiers also include a tape of audio and a solo prequel adventure in the liner notes.

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying. A one-shot for Mothership 1e. Distributed by RV Games.

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays. Community made, distributed by RV Games.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

• Written and Compiled by Violet Ballard

• Edited by Roz Leahy

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

Trigger Warning: Nudity, Illness, Dissociation, Abuse, Surgery, Body Horror, Psychedelic Drug Use, Stillbirth, Coming Out, Trauma Bonding, Torture

My personal life is a hot mess, and I needed to leave home for six days for a conference in Philadelphia. I put on my strong face, so I could be there to see my students present. They’re so brilliant.

The trip is good, the food is great, the negativity to come is portended by the strap on my work bag breaking as I walked back to my hotel one afternoon for a nap.

That evening I go to a lame reception at a fancy hotel, but then I make it to a barcade to play some pinball: Godzilla and Vector. 2:30 in the morning is when it hits, the fever. I’m now alone in a hotel room across the country from home going through twelve hours of unpleasant illness.

I’m able to wake up to Doordash some pho and Ibuprofen for breakfast, and then sleep the rest of the day until I’m awoken by sweat. My fever had broken.

I draw myself a bath to rinse off and to ground myself back into my body, not ready to rejoin the world at large. I stumble back through my hotel room, naked and slightly dissociated, trying to figure out what to do next.

I realized that I had been dragging around my copy of Horse Girl in my bag, I’d been meaning to show it to my friend. If you don’t already know Horse Girl is a solo journaling ttrpg with the following premise.

In that liminal space away from home in between sickness and health, I realized that it was now the time to play Horse Girl. I’d been saving the game for a time when I was in a good headspace, much like taking psychedelic drugs, but I was drawn to it in this moment of strange loneliness.

I gather the cards and the zine, I get together a pen and a journal that I’d received as swag out of my purse, and I look to see what else I need. I didn’t travel with any dice or a Jenga tower, but thankfully there are plenty of dice roller web sites, and there is an alternate method for simulating the Jenga tower using a counter and some dice rolls. Finally, I need some tokens, so I pull ten pennies out of the change pocket in purse. It is important to note that I’m still nude while doing all of this, as indicated by the game.

I was not able to be in nature, and I was not able to write on my body, but I was able to situate myself on my hotel bed as I started to play.

The game is a reflective experience. It’s emotional. It’s one of the most powerful experiences in my life, only trailing behind the traumatic birth of my first child, holding my second stillborn daughter in my arms, and coming out as trans. I’m a weepy, snotty mess as I finish the game. I lose, I give into my life as a horse.

Horse Girl uses the randomness of cards and dice to capture the inconsistent reinforcement of a trauma bond. There are moments of beauty and love and memory punctuated by moments of anger, torture, and emotional silencing. The feeling of someone being the only person who sees a lovable person inside of you, but only when you serve their emotional needs. I finished the game identifying my own moment of when I gave into my own “life as a horse.”

My trip to Philadelphia and my play through of Horse Girl mirrored my life in ways I had never predicted. Heightened moments of joy interrupted by misery and sadness, but at least in the case of my trip, I came out the other side of my fever feeling clear and understanding that things will be better when I make it through the other side of this mess. Unlike the protagonist of Horse Girl my story isn’t over, and my “life as a horse” is not permanent.

I can’t recommend Horse Girl to anyone as a fun game, but if you are ready to give in to a full body emotional experience, it can change you. It’s not a popcorn movie, it is the tabletop gaming experience of watching a film like Possession. It’s not for everyone, but it is breathtaking in its beauty, sadness, and ugliness all nested inside of each other.

Crowdfunding

Earth: After Death - Launching on Kickstarter May 7

Post-Apocalyptic Survival Roleplaying, A Spiritual Successor to Gamma World 1e

• From the creator of Graveyard of the Gods, Brenden Carlson

• Published by Hammer City Games

• Distributed by RV Games

Hecate Cassette Archive - Late Pledges Open

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

• Written by Joshua Justice

• Art by Amanda Lee Franck

• Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Justin Vandermeer

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

• The highest pledge tiers also include a tape of audio and a solo prequel adventure in the liner notes.

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying. A one-shot for Mothership 1e.

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

• Written and Compiled by Violet Ballard

• Edited by Roz Leahy

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

When we started the project, we knew that we wanted to include a solo adventure in the liner notes for a cassette.

However, I didn’t know what form of solo adventure this would take. I’m a big fan of programmed adventures like Death Test for The Fantasy Trip and all of the games from Dark City Games. I’ve even developed a Mothership version of these in the form of my Microgame The Progeny. I thought about creating a miniaturized version of this type of game, but as I thought through the fiction for this prequel module, something with a map and combat was not the experience needed for Cassette X.

I then thought about a straight choose-your-own-adventure format. This helped me sort out some of the fiction in my mind, but it wasn’t feeling enough like Mothership to really make it stand out.

Enter the Adventure Gamebook

This is when I turned myself towards a genre I knew of but didn’t have much experience with: the adventure gamebook, a genre that most notably includes the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series of books. I am an academic, so whenever I’m writing a game, I’m also reading a ton of reference material in the form of vintage and modern games, books, movies, and music, so I went to the Internet Archive to dive into examples.

Both Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf showed me what I was looking for even though their systems didn’t exactly fit what I was going for. They still have some necessary math for combat and include more combat than what I wanted to write for Cassette X. However, they gave me the correct framework.

In about an hour of writing time, I was able to assemble a Panic Engine Pocket Mod for Mothership derived adventure gamebooks. I’m really proud of how I captured the feel of Mothership with its Stress and Panic systems while still letting the fiction guide the way more than the game. This gamebook system is now part of our funded and upcoming book Advanced Rules as well, and you can see an early draft here.

Workflow

I knew that I could write an adventure gamebook manually, but from prior experience with other projects I knew that I should use Twine to help me write branching interactive fiction.

Within Twine, I chose the Story Format named AdventureTome because it is designed specifically for playing in a browser with rules and a character sheet. It has built in dice widgets as well. This makes it really easy for me to develop and play through my draft since it makes for an interactive test bed. AdventureTome does not provide good support for making print versions of the text, though, so I am planning on using Gordian Book for exporting for copy and line editing. We’re going to provide the following versions for Cassette X, and this workflow will enable this.

1. Interactive HTML

2. Screen and print friendly PDF

3. Cassette tape physical edition for Kickstarter backers

Physical Edition

Once I figured out my game structure and workflow, the scenes needed for the module became easy to figure out. When I figured out this format, I was then able to develop the physical format for Cassette X. I was able to settle on using a 7-Panel J-Card for the adventure.

This 7-Panel J-Card allows for the tape to have a traditional liner, but we will have lines indicating that you should cut out the extra roll over panels. You cut out two panels for a mini booklet with the character sheet, rules, and Panic table. You cut out another two panels for a mini booklet with a title and intro to the scenario on the cover, and then a scene on each of the other four pages. You can then tuck these two mini booklets into the cassette case for storage later. It will be a super slick little Pocket Mod.

Moving Forward

Now that I have a system and a workflow figured out, I would like to write and publish more Panic Engine gamebooks. The system is part of Advanced Rules, which is Creative Commons licensed, so I welcome other creators to make gamebooks in this system as well. Just like RV Games Microgames, this gamebook system is a different sort of OSR than the ttrpg version.

Crowdfunding

Hecate Cassette Archive - 1 Week Left on Kickstarter

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

• Written by Joshua Justice

• Art by Amanda Lee Franck

• Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Justin Vandermeer

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

• The highest pledge tiers also include a tape of audio and a solo prequel adventure in the liner notes.

Quality Assurance (QA) - Late Pledges Open

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying.

• Written by SL Perry

• Editing and Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Sam Wildman

• Art by Conner Fawcett

• Distributed by RV Games

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays

Proceeds from this Crowdfundr go to Jennell Jaquays family and Trans Lifeline. The official campaign is closed, but you can still donate by purchasing a book until we order the print run.

We are still looking for community volunteers to help us complete editing and layout of this book. You can get more information at the Return to Perinthos Volunteer Site.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

• Written and Compiled by Violet Ballard

• Edited by Roz Leahy

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

Editorial Process

When I wrote my first Mothership modules, I did everything myself: writing, editing, art, layout, and all of the publishing work. I consider myself a strong writer, and a large part of my day job is coaching students with writing, so I looked at an external editor as a luxury. However, over the last two years, I have learned that an editor is actually a necessity because I need a coach just like my students. Feedback is important and getting it in productive ways is doubly critical.

Missives from the MeatCastle

Thinking About Feedback

This month’s main article is a bit more off-the-cuff than usual since I’m a bit behind the ball due to continued life wildness. I’m starting a new local gig here to help better support my wife and I that’s been a whole process in itself! I hope you enjoy the freebie this month though. It’s not a TTRPG but a dice-rolling wargame I made while waiting in t…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · MeatCastle GameWare

Below, you’ll find a simplified graphic of the editorial process. It’s important to note how the bubbles overlap because the process isn’t nearly as linear as it makes it out to be. Every stage of editing can point to more drafting and revision, so there would be crazy arrows everywhere if you tried to show how cyclical the process is when it confronts the reality of writing and product development.

First Draft

This what I call the “bulk draft.” You’re going from your mess of notes and getting something on paper that you can work with. I use a movie analogy for this, you shoot hours and hours and hours of footage that get worked into an actual movie through editing. This is also the stage where you have your informal collaboration where you have your friends and collaborators who you bounce ideas off of and just let things grow and stew organically.

Second Draft

This draft is where you make your first draft make sense to you. You clean things up, you re-arrange, and you integrate new thoughts. You’re trying to get to the point where you can share a draft with an editor. This is where you can have friends and collaborators look at drafts as well, but you’re not receiving formal notes.

Developmental Edit

This is where you finally share a draft with an editor, and they give you notes on the work about structure, overall tone, and just how the piece works all together. You nail down themes and find the real core of the work with this way. This can be a one-time thing, but the best way to work with a dev editor is to get notes, make new revisions, and then cycle back to the dev editor for rounds of editing until the work is super solid. This isn’t always possible, though, depending on your budget and your relationship with your editor. During this phase, your editor can really push you to expand things or to “kill your darlings.”

Playtesting

If you are going to conduct play testing, I would do it during this phase of writing where you have something solid, but you’re trying to figure out if it works. An exception to this is if I’m working on a boardgame, wargame, or full ttrpg system, I get a prototype made and on the table super early during the drafting phases.

However, with ttrpg module development, I find play testing to be overrated since so much is adapted and changed from table to table, you really should just be building cool stuff for people to play with. It is also doesn’t help that personally, I am really good with play testing my own work when it’s about systems, but once it’s more fiction forward like a module, I get really self-conscious, so I hate running my own work.

It is difficult to find someone else to playtest a module, but this is more useful anyway since your market for a ttrpg module are really the folks running the game, not the players. If you know another creator, trading playtests with each other can be a cost effective way to have other folks run playlists for you.

Copyedit

Copy and line editing is when someone goes through your work line-by-line. This is to give it clarity and to hone your voice. There will generally be correction of grammar, spelling, and punctuation during this phase, but that is not the main focus of going through line-by-line. During this phase, you will find things that are unclear, and you will probably have to draft more revisions even though you thought that development was complete when you moved out of dev editing. I’m good at it, but I personally hate doing copyediting for myself or other folks, and I outsource it as much as possible.

Layout

After copyediting is when you move to layout, but I actually conceive of layout as another round of copyediting. As things get put into actual pages and spreads, wording needs to change, so that things fit and make sense in a graphical context. I specifically work with the graphic designer David Wilkie because he is also a very strong editor whose opinions I value highly, so I know that it will move through another round of editing when we move to layout.

Proofread

Proofing is the most straightforward form of editing, this is where an editor is looking through solely for errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. This isn’t important in the big scheme of things, but these kinds of errors are what make your work look less professional, which impacts sales and reach of your product. This is also the opportunity to check for page references, PDF bookmarks, table of contents, and index to make sure everything is accurate and accounted for.

Accessibility

Proofing is also the stage for final accessibility checking. However, all of the stages above need to have accessibility built-in. Making sure language is clear and that layout is usable is all part of accessibility. As a publisher, I do not like to work with folks who use Affinity over InDesign because of accessibility. If you design in InDesign using styles with tags attached, write alt text as it is placed, set reading order, and enter the correct metadata, you can export a PDF that is accessible and ready to go. PDFs that come from Affinity need to go through the extraordinarily clunky accessibility tools inside of Adobe Acrobat, which is something I hate doing more than I dislike copy and line editing.

Where does art fit in?

If you have the money, art and illustrations can also be a part of the drafting and editing process. You can commission (or create art) before you write your first draft to help you put your ideas together, you can source art during dev editing if you are stuck, and then you of course add more art for the layout phase, which can impact your writing and what you need to include or explain as discussed in the earlier section about layout.

Editorial Process in Action

In this next section, I will briefly discuss what the editorial process looks like and has looked liked for RV Games current projects. It’s useful to see examples of something in process, especially if you are considering working with an editor or editors on a project of your own.

Hecate Cassette Archive (HCA)

This is a project where I am taking on the role of a dev editor; however, it is a in a much different capacity than if I were a freelance editor. This project actually belongs to Joshua Justice, he is the lead writer and designer. We have a publishing partnership together where we evenly share net profits on the project. Joshua owns all of the rights to the project, and RV Games has a contract giving them the ability to publish the work and to receive their half of the profit. I personally act as the producer on this project, so my job is to shepherd Joshua’s work through the publishing process: development, production, fulfillment, and distribution. RV Games is owned my by wife and myself, but I am the only who does this work on behalf of the business entity. Either Joshua or RV Games can exit this contract at any time, and the rights for the work would revert to Joshua, and we would develop a plan for what to do with any physical inventory of the module.

This business partnership is very different than if we were a publisher commissioning a piece of work of if Joshua had come to me to publish or distribute a completed work. I am not on the clock as an editor, my hourly rate for this work is probably super low unless the work becomes a hit. It is in the best interest of Joshua and myself to develop the module as much as possible and to keep it moving forward since we don’t benefit financially unless the work sells.

The first drafts on this were done working David Wilkie who edited and laid out Joshua’s prior pamphlet adventure Radio Free Hekate. David was absolutely essential in working through notes and ideas, so Joshua could even get to a first and second draft.

Now that his drafts are ready for formal editing. I give Joshua notes and deadlines for new drafts, and we meet every other week. This goes both ways, thought, because when Joshua gives me a draft, I then owe him feedback. It is a mutually beneficial cycle. It’s not as Roz Leahy put it to me “going all J. Jonah Jameson.” It’s about mutual accountability. This is an equal partnership no unlike a marriage, we drive each other forward.

I have been able to support and push Joshua towards expanding the scale of the module without moving into scope creep territory because I am also the publisher responsible for product development. Joshua has also been able to help me and RV Games develop the prototype for what it means for something to be an RV Games module. We have published work before, but this is this first module that really stakes a claim on our identity, an RV Games module or game needs to mean something to people, just like an A24 film means something to people.

When we think the work is where it needs to be, Joshua and I will call a meeting with David, and we will all discuss the work and make further plans for revision. Getting everyone together in one room like this is where magic happens and work gets pushed further.

This module will go through a lot more revision as Joshua develops maps in partnership with Justin Vandermeer, copy and line editing with Greenspore, and layout with David. I love being a part of this team and getting to be a coach and dev editor for the whole process. It is a very rewarding process for me personally.

Return to Perinthos

Return to Perinthos has a very different editorial process. It is a community created book in memorial to Jennell Jaquays, so it has about 90 contributors. This is not something that I can manage on my own as a volunteer work without community editorial support. Thankfully, I have been able to consult with Jarrett Crader (Space Penguin Ink) about how to approach a decentralized, volunteer editing project because he was very involved with putting out the zine Dissident Whispers. We are making great progress on this book, and the community is volunteering time for copy and line editing. This book needs to get finished, so people are not conducting dev editing, just copyediting and proofing. We want to have clarity, but we also want the individual work of the community to stand out in all of its idiosyncratic glory.

Advanced Rules

Advanced Rules is an RV Games book, but it is also a book that I am writing and compiling myself. I don’t have a publishing partner on this book like Joshua Justice gets working on HCA. I paid hourly for early dev editing to shape the project with Roz Leahy, and the crowdfunding for this project is paying for Roz to help finish the book with copyediting, proofing, and indexing. Working with an editor top to bottom this way has been really useful and rewarding in a different way than working with a publishing partner. I was charged hourly for dev editing, and we settled on our copyediting and indexing contract amount using per word rates. It’s really powerful to own your own work, but it’s also really isolating to be all on your own and having to budget in this way for editing. This work wouldn’t happen without Roz, but I do someday hope to find someone who I could work with on a partnership basis as my personal editor.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches

Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a Mothership module that I have been working on for over two years. I’ve worked with artists to get inspiration and to drive writing, and I’ve been working with Christian Sorrell (MeatCastle GameWare) on an ongoing basis as editor. I’ve worked through a draft of the setup for the module and through a draft of the first area of the game with Christian. I have been self-funding all of this work with the proceeds from everything else RV Games publishes. These early dev editing sessions are the reason that Advanced Rules became its own book and crowdfunding project, and we’ll soon be diving in more to edit and put together an ashcan zine of the first chapter of what will eventually be a hardbound setting and adventure book and box set. It’s also been highly rewarding to start early with editing and art on this project, but once again, it is still a different vibe working with someone who you are commissioning versus working with a partner with skin in the game. Christian, Amanda Lee Franck (the artist), and David Wilkie (the graphic designer) will be receiving equity in this project, and I want to do this with more projects moving forward, so that collaborators all have the success of the project in their best interest. This is highly inspired by the model being used by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for their new production company.

Discussion

There’s no better way to give your work the polish and care it deserves than to work with an editor in a formal capacity. However, editing costs money, and it’s something that you can be tempted to leave out of your budget for a game or module. Working with an editor early and often is what takes your work from good to great!

Dev editing is the most important and most overlooked form of editing in my opinion. It is worth the $100-$200 ($50/hr) to have a dev editor look at your second draft for just a single round. You find so many issues and avoid going down rabbit holes and dead ends when you can get notes early in the development process.

The ideal way to work with a dev editor is if they are part of your publishing agreement, or they are a partner in the work being paid in equity. This requires giving up some control to a publishing company (a double-edged sword) or trusting someone enough to be a business partner. This way, you can meet together regularly and go through rounds of developmental editing until the manuscript is honed and as great as it can be. If you’re paying for an editor hourly, this can be difficult to do. If you are working with an editor at this intimate of a level, I would also highly suggest making sure that you work with someone else for copyediting and proofing, either paid for by your publisher, crowdfunding, or out of pocket. A dev editor who is an insider on the project is too close to the text to notice things that an outside set of eyes will find.

If you’re looking to crowdfund something and publish it yourself, you will still want to pay for as many rounds of dev editing as you can upfront. You want to come into a campaign with a really solid manuscript that has gone through a few rounds of revision. You can make copyediting and proofing part of the production budget for your crowdfund.

If you’re self-funding and publishing something, it is still worth the money to pay for a dev editor. If you have a tight budget, I would forgo copyediting and proofing (in that order), but I would not skimp on dev editing. And, it is really important to target your time if you are paying for limited dev editing. You will want to come in with questions and areas where you want the editor to focus, it’s best if you can put this in writing ahead of time. You will want to insist on having a synchronous meeting to discuss this and to go over the feedback once you receive it. You will want to get notes in your document and to receive a written summary and another meeting with a chance to ask questions about the feedback. These times to speak with our editor and the opportunities to hone what you are asking for will make your money go further and support your work more than handing off a piece of work without intention.

Crowdfunding

Hecate Cassette Archive - Now Live on Kickstarter

A supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio

• Written by Joshua Justice

• Art by Amanda Lee Franck

• Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Justin Vandermeer

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

• The highest pledge tiers also include a tape of audio and a solo prequel adventure in the liner notes.

Quality Assurance (QA) - Kickstarter Campaign Ends in 48 Hours

An orbital disaster, a race against time, and one very special robot. Escape with the target, save some lives, or die trying.

• Written by SL Perry

• Editing and Layout by D.N. Wilkie

• Maps by Sam Wildman

• Art by Conner Fawcett

• Distributed by RV Games

Return to Perinthos - Still Able to Donate

A 200-page memorial book of megadungeon tiles in the memory of Jennell Jaquays

Proceeds from this Crowdfundr go to Jennell Jaquays family and Trans Lifeline. The official campaign is closed, but you can still donate by purchasing a book until we order the print run.

We are still looking for community volunteers to help us complete editing and layout of this book. You can get more information at the Return to Perinthos Volunteer Site.

Advanced Rules - Late Pledges Open

A 100-page community compendium of house rules for Wardens and Mothership creators

• Written and Compiled by Violet Ballard

• Edited by Roz Leahy

• Published and Distributed by RV Games

The Adventure Gaming Periodical is a back after a holiday and life hiatus. I’ll be back to posting regular content, and this will still be the location for our Micro Subs Microgame subscription. We’ll be moving to publishing at least once a month and at most once per week. A weekly deadline proved too much for me this Fall.

Luke Gearing Joins Return to Perinthos!

I am currently organizing a Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam and Fundraiser to help raise funds for Jennell Jaquays’s family medical and funeral expenses and for Trans Lifeline. As part of this process, I have spoken with specific individuals about contributing to this project, and I’m super excited to announce that the fabulous Luke Gearing has graciously taken on some writing on this project, with special thanks to his employer Tuesday Knight Games.

Luke will be writing a short setting for Return to Perinthos. He will help us to establish how and why disparate maps running the gamut from Ancient Greece to a traditional dungeon to a spaceship to a Quake level are all found together in a megadungeon in ancient Thracia. We’re so excited that Luke is able to volunteer his time for this project to help us make something beautiful.

Call for Volunteers for Return to Perinthos

We are looking for people to help move Return to Perinthos from a game jam to a book. We will need writers, editors, illustrators, and graphic designers to help us assemble the book. If you’d like to contribute spot art for the book, you may provide it this way rather than as part of the jam. You can volunteer at the following link:

• Return to Perinthos Volunteer Site

As we are assembling the book after the jam, we will hold a Crowdfundr for this book where all profits (donations - printing costs) will be donated to Jennell Jaquays’s family. We are working with retailers and distributors to sell copies with profits donated to Trans Lifeline as part of this print run. More details about this will follow in the coming couple of weeks.

Press Coverage for the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam

We appreciate the support we have gotten in sharing the word about the game jam! These are articles that have been published about the jam. We appreciate everyone spreading the word to gain support!

• PC Gamer

• Dicebreaker

Advanced Rules Live on BackerKit Crowdfunding

Before starting this memorial for Jennell Jaquays, I had been preparing for this crowdfunding launch for Advanced Rules on BackerKit Crowdfunding for a few months, and my release date was set. I feel strange promoting my crowdfunding campaign is this time of grief, but I do still have a business I need to run at the same time I am volunteering my time. However, I will be donating 5% of the profits from the Advanced Rules crowdfunding to Jennell Jaquays’s family as my monetary contribution to the game jam and memorial.

With that out of the way, after our first day of crowdfunding, we have raised $2,683 from 100 backers in our first 24 hours. This is 77% of our total funding needed to pay for editing and a small print run, so this is a really solid first day. This is a more niche book made for experienced Wardens and module designers, so the level of support we have seen for a print run has been refreshing. Not everyone wants or needs 100 pages of alternate rules. If this book is for you, it’s REALLY for you.

I’m back after an unexpected week off from The Adventure Gaming Periodical. A combination of busy work days with my day job, sheer exhaustion, time change, and the mental health issues that go with all of those things meant that I needed some time to recharge. I have been working with my editors on Advanced Rules and Orgy of the Blood Leeches and have been working with Lone Archivist to develop an in-universe corporate logo for Orgy of the Blood Leeches, so I haven’t been holding still, just keeping a low profile.

Interview With Adam Good and Jess Levine

This is a tremendous interview that I held with Adam Good and Jess Levine, members of the team making An Infinity of Ships. We discuss the fact that An Infinity of Ships will contain ships with genders and sexualities including lesbian spaceships. This leads to a discussion of what it means to be an ally, the history of intelligent spaceships in speculative fiction, and the cultural implications of the existence of a lesbian spaceship. This mix of game design and Queer cultural critique is my vision for The AGP, so I’m very happy to be sharing this interview with our readers!

Tell me about An Infinity of Ships. What is your elevator pitch?

Adam: An Infinity of Ships is an expansive toolkit for creating truly unique spaceships for your sci-fi tabletop roleplaying games. Featuring evocative ship illustrations by Rob Turpin (aka thisnorthernboy) and over 100 pages of tables, generators and adventures, this gorgeous hardcover book and accompanying card deck is the perfect resource for spacefaring GMs and players alike.

How did you develop and conceive the idea for this book?

Adam: It actually started out as a playlist I made, of song titles that sounded like they’d be cool spaceship names. Around the same time, I also made a d100 table of spaceship names inspired by the Culture books. I just got really into spaceship names, honestly, as these amazingly compact little bursts of flavor and worldbuilding. I added some classes and ship-types to little generators I was making, and had these instant ship combos that really opened up new hyperspace lanes in my mind.

Then I read Thriftomancer’s excellent d6666 list of miens and thought, yeah, this could totally be a zine, just a BIG ASS LIST of cool spaceship names. While I was starting to think of it as a proper book, I got introduced to Rob Turpin’s amazing spaceship illustrations and writing, and we connected about the possibility of him doing a cover for the book. We really hit it off and I realized we could do much more than just a list of ship names.

So from there, we’ve really expanded the toolkit in a couple of key ways:

• We added in LOTS of tables, so GMs and players could really jam a lot of flavor into their ships, really leaning into bits of worldbuilding that aren’t necessarily standard spaceship building fare, things like far-future music genres, AI personalities, bumperstickers, stuff like that. 

• Ship profiles. With Rob’s illustrations and all our tables, we’ve created instant ship profiles that have just enough flavor and detail to make them compelling for folks to pick up and drop into their games, or build out their own worlds from.

• Adventures. We’ve brought on some of our favorite writers (like Evlyn Moreau, Chris Airiau, and Alfred Valley) to create playable material (one-shots, encounter tables, deck crawls, etc) that are as unique, diverse and unexpected as the rest of the book. 

One of our guidestars has been to make the book a simple, instant shot of inspiration, as well as a deep resource for more nuanced ship crafting and storytelling. Just need a quick ship name? Check. Want to create a unique ship with experimental tech, a detailed backstory and crew, piloted by a rogue AI with its own agenda? Go for it.

What made you decide to make this book system neutral instead of focusing on a specific system like Mothership, Traveller, or Stars Without Number?

Adam: Pretty simply, we wanted to make a resource that provided a really, really wide range of possibilities for space sci-fi, without tying us down to any particular universe or series of mechanics and expectations for what ships are and can be. The systems you mention, and most others, have highly detailed spaceship mechanics and worldbuilding assumptions, as well as plentiful resources for creating and utilizing ships. They also tend to dial in more on specific styles, tones, genres, universes. 

The universes of sci-fi are vast, multiple, diverse, contradictory, terrifying, hilarious and beautiful. We wanted to provide a source of inspiration that reflects that range, and that people could use to inject unexpected elements into their games.

I became very interested in this project when I heard about how it contains ships that have gender identities and sexualities. Hearing about the idea of lesbian ships made my trans lesbian heart flutter a little. How have you approached presenting this idea since you are not Queer yourself? What is your approach to being a strong, inclusive ally?

Adam: A big goal of the book is to radically expand the design space for what spaceships can be, and to provide GMs and players with tools, frameworks and material to make ships as diverse and interesting as the far far future(s) will (always, hopefully) be. As a fan of sci-fi that explores gender and sexuality, and as a sexual educator myself, I knew I wanted to explore the idea of ships having “gender” and “sexuality” as an aspect of their identities, and what that would imply for relationships between ships, and also between Ship AIs and their crews. So I started, as I normally do, with tables, just to start getting ideas down. So a table for genders, expressions and orientations. Another table for types of relationships between ships. The tables started as a mix of known/common human terms for gender and orientation, and I started working in more technical / abstract / science-y terms. I was also reading Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star and was really taken by her nomenclature of sexual preference in a far future in which everyone is engineered to have both sets of sexual organs (to assist in the propagation of humanity in the face of massive environmental pressures and de-population). So, I was kind of exploring ideas.

Then, Jess Levine expressed interest in An Infinity of Ships, somewhere on social media or Discord or somewhere; something along the lines of “this project looks cool!” And I thought, yes, Jess should really do this part. As a straight cis male, I realize that a lot of these ideas are abstractions to me, not really lived experience, and that the only way I could responsibly include them in the book was to give the controls to someone for whom these considerations are not abstract, but real and lived. 

So I’d say my approach to being an ally is two-fold. First, I have the intent, interest and desire to proclaim, very clearly, that gender and sexuality have a place in explorations of what spaceships can be. And more importantly, that I give that space to others to explore from their experience, perspective and expertise.

How are you approaching writing these gendered ships? Are there ways that you are hoping to shape things to be more inclusive and informed by Queer perspectives?

Jess: When Adam approached me about writing gender and orientation for spaceships, I was simultaneously delighted, and as confused as many of the people we tell about it. How can a ship have a gender? How can a ship be a lesbian? At the same time, as someone with a lifelong love of spaceships who describes her writing speciality as “scifi & lesbians,” I was delighted by the idea of puzzling out answers those questions. After sitting with it, I realized it wasn’t without precedent: from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series (and the exploration of whether “ships can love other ships” in Ancillary Mercy) to Arkady Martine’s short story “When the Fall Is All That’s Left,” queer readings of and even explicitly gay relationships told through intelligent spaceships is very much tread ground. The questions for me, then, were:

1. What would a new and interesting take on gay spaceships look like?

2. How do I concisely convey the meaning and implications of gay spaceships to an audience of TTRPG players who may or may not be LGBTQ, and who will be taking these stories into their own hands?

Discussing these questions with Adam, I laid down some basic expectations. First, for spaceships to have gender and orientation, they must have enough intelligence to communicate—this might be through an AI (even if that AI and their communication looks totally different than human intelligence), or a human mind uploaded to the ship, like Martine’s story. Second, these ships must have some opinionated relationship to human culture.

Using lesbianism specifically as an example, there is a common misunderstanding of homosexuality as an essential, almost biological property of human beings—that if you find any example of two women loving each other throughout history, that is lesbianism. While there is a cultural and emotional value to painting history and ancestry in that way, the truth is that lesbianism is culturally specific. The concept of a lesbian as we know it now is just over a century old, evolving out of women’s “romantic friendships” and sexologists early attempts to categorize human sexualities—rarely did women or non-binary people self-identify as lesbians until the 1950s. Other cultures with different languages use different terms to describe love between women, which may be related to lesbianism, but have their own distinct cultures and way of conceptualizing themselves and their orientation. To be a lesbian is to say that you are in a cultural and communal lineage of people who have called themselves lesbians.

All speculative fiction parallels and comments on reality—whether the author recognizes this fact or not—and to say that a ship is a lesbian (something I am very interested in doing in this project) is to say that lesbianism as we conceptualize it in reality exists in this fictional universe, and that the ship has some relationship to this concept of lesbianism. In adding the fictional elements, we could say that lesbian culture originated with ships, but for my take, I am interested in asking what it means for intelligent ships to say: “I see humans practicing lesbianism, I like and identify with that cultural phenomenon, and I would like to be a part of it too.” As a non-binary trans women & lesbian—who finds her gender more accurately described as lesbian than woman—I actually identify very personally with that relationship to lesbianism. From there, it’s easy to explore other in-fiction implications of this idea: some ships may decide they too want genders and orientations, but “woman” or “lesbian” doesn’t work for them, or they may find that human genders and orientations in general don’t suit them. They might invent all sorts of gender expressions and orientation labels that better fit the sort of expressions and relationships available to and between ships.

Adam commissioned me to write tables of ship genders, expressions, and orientations, and to explain their meanings. I plan to fill these tables with both human genders and orientations these ships might want to adopt, and those which other ships decide to create for themselves. Gender and orientation are evolving and inter-linked to the society they exist within—I can’t wait to explore what sort of gender a ship might desire (or even feel trapped in) in the society implied by the tables and example ships of An Infinity of Ships.

I am still nervous about handing all of this over to players who may not have the knowledge or lived experience to treat these ideas with respect. In the end, I can’t control that. Instead, I see it as my task to communicate what I have here: that to say that a ship has a gender and orientation is to say that the ship exists within a society somewhat like our’s, and the ship’s intelligence is struggling to find its own place and identity within that society. This is a subject that any good story of artificial intelligence explores. I am excited to make this exploration gay as hell—and to give it hyperspace engines.

Commentary

There is one line from Jess that highlights a reoccurring theme as I talk to Queer creators, including in our earlier interview with Noora Rose.

I had a recent discussion about my own work with my editor on Advanced Rules, Roz Leahy. In my initial manuscript, I spend a lot of time making arguments for why the rules I am writing are “correct,” by arguing against ways people might critique them. This great in my academic writing where this argument and conversation is the point of the writing; however, it gets in the way of the book being a useful book for referencing rules. Roz told me “they’ve already bought your book, you don’t need to convince them.” And, like editors do, this unlocked something in me, so I needed to process this emotionally. This is where this story links with what Jess said above along with comments from Noora. Personally, I’m so worried about being critiqued or misunderstood that I’m over explaining, and well, this is my default trauma response as someone who is Queer and neurodivergent. I’ve felt so misunderstood and punished for being misunderstood so many times in my life that I try to seal off all areas of misunderstanding. However, this ends up diluting and convoluting the work, addressing every possible misunderstanding and angle. Instead of spending time crafting what I want to say and letting it stand on its own, I spend time theory crafting against myself, which is a quick road to an “I’m not writing” shame spiral.

I think this general urge to over explain and to focus on design intent comes from this nervousness and fear of giving up agency of the work. Words need to be able to have their impact without foot notes and asterisks and subclauses attached to every little detail. Even friends and family who have known each other for decades have misunderstandings and misplaced words, so it’s foolish to think that you can proof your work against all possible interpretations through the printed word alone. And that’s why we need more people who are willing to make things gay as hell with hyperspace engines, who put that kind of pure thought and madness into the world and let folks respond how they’re going to respond.

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Upcoming in The AGP

• 11/15 - Issue #9 - A Design Essay Featuring Warped Beyond Recognition and Turbulence for Mothership 1e

• 11/22 - Thanksgiving Week - No Issue

• 11/29 - Issue #10 - An Interview With Brenden Carlson of Hammer City Games About Earth: After Death

• 12/6 - Issue #11 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

Pyroclastic Flow - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

November 14-December 12

• A Microgame inspired by the classic Metagaming Microgame Hot Spot. It is the Floor Meets Lava turned into a Combined Arms Hex and Counters wargame.

• Free rules are available.

• Print and Play available via DTRPG or for paid subscribers.

• A set of print-on-demand counters is also available.

Advanced Rules - BackerKit Crowdfunding

January 16-February 13

• This is our community compendium of house rules for Mothership 1eincluding a full solo and wardenless methodology inspired by the Cloud Empress Solo Protocol.

• The print book and pdf is a work in progress, but you can access the draft rules for free online. I recently went through a round of dev editing with Roz Leahy, and I am now working on a more streamlined, complete draft.

Crowdfunding Links

An Infinity of Ships by STATIONS

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. It also features Lesbean Ships! This has a stacked roster also including Holly Jencka, Luka Rejec, Evlyn Moreau, Jess Levine, Chris Airiau, and Alfred Valley.

Goblin Mail by Evlyn Moreau, Sofia Ramos, and Luna P.

• A Troika! compatible adventure about a chaotic post office run by goblins full of whimsy that's infested with gremlins and all sorts of freaky lil' creatures.

I’m excited to be posting our seventh issue this week since our change in format and publishing schedule. I’m learning and growing, and The AGP now has almost 1,000 subscribers, which will be a huge benchmark to hit!

For this week, our publishing schedule has shifted a little bit, so I am here this week with a discussion with watt, the creator of Cloud Empress, and our interview about An Infinity of Ships will be releasing next week instead. watt and I discuss, family, Queerness, community, and the Cloud Empress Solo Protocol. I then follow up with a short commentary about Queer community within tabletop gaming. So, without further ado, we start our interview with watt.

Interview With watt

I’ve heard you discuss being a parent before, and I like to ask other indie creators about parenting while doing this work . How do you balance making and coordinating a project like Cloud Empress along with having a family and any other responsibilities that you may have?

I’ve prioritized making art and creative projects for at least ten years now. For a great portion of that time I was seeking to create a legacy for myself through my art. Since the pandemic and having a child, I’m much more skeptical of being remembered by the things I create. Very few artistic expressions stay culturally relevant beyond the decade they were created in, and even less are embraced across one or two generations. We can die unexpectedly. All this is to say, spending time with my family and child is extremely important to me. I’m trying to look at creative projects through the lens of enjoyment, expression, and connection (as opposed to legacy, relevance, and unsustainable financial growth for example). 

In practical terms I work on Cloud Empress, my ecological science fantasy RPG Mothership hack, 2-3 hours each day, seven days a week. I work early and late hours around family time. Keeping a consistent sleep and creative work schedule is vital to moving my ideas into tangible, shareable products. Having a schedule means I can focus my attention on the work at hand, rather than when I’ll have time to work. I’ve been overworking myself for the last ten years though. I think an hour and a half a day feels like the sweet spot for me. I hate working at night. I’m trying to schedule so I don’t need to push myself to complete projects. The longer I live, the more I value my relationships (including the relationship to myself) and my experiences. Overworking is a great way to burden both relationships and the enjoyment of the present moment with stress and fatigue.

You put out Hot Stuff on Shore Leave and recently put out an addition to Cloud Empress about gender. How much does your Queer identity impact your work? How much of yourself to explicitly include? Why do you make the choices that you have? I’m a trans mother of a trans child, so I understand that it is a balancing act with what you put out in public because of the discourse surrounding Queer identities happening out in the world right now. It’s scary and getting myself or my family targeted is my worst nightmare even though I know that Queer art is more important than ever.

Being online is a double-edged sword. Any popularity seems to come with a lot of misery online. I’m most connected to queer people online too. My ttrpg writing and community developed during the second year of the pandemic when I was feeling particularly isolated, in part because I lost two important trans friendships (one due to their mental health struggles, another, our interests going in different directions). Finding queer spaces online has come much more easily to me than engaging in a queer spaces where I live. I think online spaces afford trans and queer people access to social lives that can be much less demanding than the social challenges of embodied friendship. This feels like a blessing and a curse. I write and create in online spaces.  In my writing and game design I’m able to express a free-er version of myself not bound by the physical and social constraints I live in. Putting work out into the vast internet that is specifically queer-coded is still scary. I try to be upfront and make my experience of gender obvious and integral to what I create. I hope being upfront about my identity acts as a lighthouse calling queer folks towards me and letting transphobic people know that what I create will likely upset them. My best work also explores my existential questions rather than my political answers. I’m a lot less confident I know how to solve the world’s problems. Not leading with a singular political message allows for greater connection and community building. I’d like the Cloud Empress community to come together around doing good for the planet and each other, with the understanding that ‘doing good’ is very context dependent.

Why do you think that Mothership has such a strong base of Queer creators and players?

Three things come to mind. First, Mothership (and Alien by Ridley Scott) are most potent when the horror of violence is paired with economic horror. Players generally take the roles of PCs who are economically marginalized. 

Second, TKG’s support for Dissident Whispers, a collection of Mothership (and OSR) supplements to raise money to post bail for community justice protestors is an unparalleled political action (that I’m aware of) by a larger indie publisher. The huge effort undertaken to put the book together also seemed to build strong community ties with like minded Mothership creators. 

Third, TKG takes a very positive role in community moderation. The Mothership Discord is very actively and thoughtfully monitored. I believe the moderators feel empowered by a publisher that knows their game isn’t for everyone, and consequently don’t need to tolerate abusive, hostile, bigoted behavior in order to make an extra sale. Cultivating an inclusive, boundaried audience does wonders for the folks creating 3rd party content for that audience. TKG also approves all Mothership content in order to prohibit sexist, homophobic, racist, transphobic, etc. stuff from being released. I’m sure TKG doesn’t get everything right when it comes to moderating their community, but it’s refreshing and wonderfully supportive as a third party Mothership creator to know that the Mothership community won’t be embroiled in a hostile conversation (e.g. are games political?) every 6 months like on Reddit and other forums.

Describe your approach to the Solo Protocol for Cloud Empress. I’m a big fan and have been following that project since you first started talking about it. What makes it different from other methods of solo play for ttrpgs? Where did you get your inspiration?

My interest in solo roleplaying started with the discovery of Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings. It’s a journaling game where the player creates memories in a journal of their centuries old vampire. It explores guilt, memory loss, and the passage of time. My first solo game Hot Stuff on Shore Leave was designed to explore isolation and joy between work shifts in a dehumanizing corporate environment in a journaling format. Solo journaling games are quite common in the genre. The other most prominent solo roleplaying approach is through the use of an oracle. The oracle acts like a magic eight ball and/or tarot deck for the player who asks and interprets the Oracle’s answer related to their character and the world. Both journaling and oracle systems almost exclusively take the perspective of a single character, object or location. 

Cloud Empress: Solo Protocol instead models the actions and interactions of an entire adventuring party. In this way, (which you actually first pointed out), the game acts like the experience of wardening a game. I think group narrative interactions have become the hallmark of the tabletop roleplaying genre. I’m excited that the Solo Protocol system creates situations where party members are solving problems differently, arguing with one another, and coming and going. My solo system centers the fun around the observation of simulation rather than writing. The Sims is a big inspiration, where the fun comes from simulation, emergent storytelling and an omniscient view of the action. The other through line was taking inspiration from some 1980’s wargames I’ve heard about. In some of these games, there is very little player agency, but the experience is story-rich and thrilling. I keep thinking about Geoff Englestein, on the Ludology podcast, describing a game where the only action the player takes is to roll dice to see how a plane is damaged during its mission. Solo Protocol asks for creativity and imagination around the edges of play, during character creation, and visualizing a vast and evolving world your tiny adventuring party is tasked with moving through.

Finding Community

When watt talks about being a lighthouse for Queer people by being open with your identity and creating powerful work, I instantly draw parallels with the news of the illness of Jennell Jaquays. Jennell is an absolutely legendary designer working in tabletop and video games, she is a late transitioning trans woman, and participates in trans activism. I don’t have anyone else in this field who is a role model for me in the same way, so when I heard she was ill, I made the mistake of publicly mourning the illness of a trans elder. I was “All Lives Mattered" in bad faith, like I can’t mourn a member of my own community without it meaning I’m denigrating cis people. Thankfully, the broader community put these folks into their place and the discussion was shutdown, but it was disheartening to have my own grief about someone important get turned into a wedge. In the weeks since making this publication explicitly Queer, I’ve also been told that my work is “unnecessary.” I’ve been told that things are too political just for saying the word Queer when I’ve shared articles that are entirely about game design without Queer commentary. I’ve been called “attention-seeking.”

It’s tough. It is what I have signed up for being publicly Queer. It doesn’t make it any less tough, and it steels my resolve and lets me know that the work I am doing with the intersectionality of Queerness and gaming is important. I’d rather have my art create emotions than a “meh.” Too much is at stake to shrink back into my shell and continue to publish my little newsletter about my little games. However, I can’t do this alone. I have people I can talk to individually about these things in my personal life, but it’s not the same as having a space where you can grieve in community and where you can build and celebrate Queer joy.

Thankfully, I do have some spaces online where I can feel safely myself, much like what watt described. I got my start in writing and publishing in the Mothership Discord that watt also discusses. It is a fabulous focused place. It is very inclusive, and I also give Sean McCoy and the rest of the team there major kudos for what they have created. There are lots of Queer people who feel safe there. Almost two years ago, someone created a rainbow flag server logo for Pride, and it has just never been changed back. However, the success of the space is the fact that is always highly focused and brought back to the topic of Mothership. This is perfect for a space that supports a game and its players and creators, but it is not a place for and by Queer folks. I also spend time in The Lost Bay Discord, which is also a fabulously welcoming community full of Queer folks and allies, but it is once again not somewhere for and by Queer people. It’s why my heart jumps with Joy over the fact that Evlyn Moreau has created a server for trans people where we are able to be ourselves, where we provide support for our work as well as providing Queer community. It’s scary meeting new people and being in community, and it is early days, but I have high hopes and great vibes.

In the end, I’m here, to quote watt “to do good for each other.” Expressing a Queer viewpoint helps me to do this. Cis people need to hear trans voices, straight people need to hear Queer voices, men need to hear women’s voices, and White people need to hear BIPOC’s voices. There is no way to operate in good faith without an understanding of perspectives. I’m not out here trying to change minds or to be combative, I’m just here to share my own idiosyncratic views to hopefully build more understanding. I can show how Queer folks live like anyone else and create things important to them like anyone else. There’s fighting to be done, but I’m not personally going to do it by picking fights, I’m going to do it by living my best life and by putting out kindness and love into the world.

Upcoming in The AGP

• 11/1 - Issue #8 - An Interview with the Creators of An Infinity of Ships

• 11/8 - Issue #9 - A Design Essay Featuring Warped Beyond Recognition and Turbulence for Mothership 1e

• 11/15 - Issue #10 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• 11/22 - Thanksgiving Week - No Issue

• 11/29 - Issue #11 - An Interview With Brenden Carlson of Hammer City Games About Earth: After Death

Pyroclastic Flow - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

November 14-December 12

• A Microgame inspired by the classic Metagaming Microgame Hot Spot. It is the Floor Meets Lava turned into a Combined Arms Hex and Counters wargame.

• Free rules are available.

• Print and Play available via DTRPG or for paid subscribers.

• A set of print-on-demand counters is also available.

Advanced Rules - BackerKit Crowdfunding

January 16-February 13

• This is our community compendium of house rules for Mothership 1e including a full solo and wardenless methodology inspired by the Cloud Empress Solo Protocol.

• The print book and pdf is a work in progress, but you can access the draft rules for free online.

Currently Crowdfunding

Morticians RPG Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking by Coxon Media

• GURPS inspired Zombie Apocalypse TTRPG created in Fresno, California

Outer Rim: Uprising by The Lost Bay

• A massive bundle of Mothership 1e modules and a campaign structure that features 12 veteran designers

An Infinity of Ships by Adam Station

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. Also features Lesbean Ships!

Subscribe now

In a little over a year, RV Games has grown from making a single digital release to having a pipeline of games developed in-house and published for others. We’re excited to finish out our series of six Microgames (print and play available for paid subscribers and via DTRPG), publish games in new genres and from new places, to finally release Orgy of the Blood Leeches, and to work with some very talented new collaborators.

Pyroclastic Flow - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

November 14-December 12

• A Microgame inspired by the classic Metagaming Microgame Hot Spot. It is the Floor Meets Lava turned into a Combined Arms Hex and Counters wargame.

• Free rules are available.

• Print and Play available via DTRPG or for paid subscribers.

• A set of print-on-demand counters is also available.

2024 Crowdfunding Schedule

January 16-February 13

Advanced Rules - BackerKit Crowdfunding

• We finally have a date for the launch for Advanced Rules on BackerKit Crowdfunding. This is our community compendium of house rules for Mothership 1e including a full solo and wardenless methodology.

• The entire book is a work in progress, but you can access the draft rules for free online. These rules will always be available free in addition to the fully laid out book available physically and via DTRPG.

• Dev editing with Roz Leahy has just started dev editing on this project!

• curiousfriend will now be providing illustrations to update the cover and for the crowdfunding campaign.

February 13-March 12

Hecate Sector - Part 2 - Kickstarter

• We’re so excited to be publishing a larger zine taking place in the Hecate Sector with Joshua Justice for this year’s ZineQuest.

• The first adventure in this sector is Radio Free Hekate, which is available physically, via Itch, DTRPG, and for paid subscribers.

• This will be with the same team who made Radio Free Hekate with D.N. Wilkie providing layout and editing and Amanda Franck providing illustrations.

April 9-May 7

Microgame #4 - Baseball - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

• Baseball reimagined as a hex and counters wargame. This is not your typical baseball simulation, it has a focus on the nitty gritty decisions made by players instead of on the managerial and statistics focus of most baseball boardgames.

June 4-July 2

Microgame #5 - Left at Home - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

• Evil Dead meets Home Alone in this ttrpg and wargame inspired boardgame of hidden movement.

August

Hit the Road Jack - BackerKit Crowdfunding

• We’re partnering with Urania Games out of the Phillipines to publish a physical edition of their solo journaling or duet biker duel game, Hit the Road, Jack!.

• This will take the form of a tarot deck and will be further edited to fit this format by me!

September

Orgy of the Blood Leeches - Kickstarter

• We will finally be launching Orgy of the Blood Leeches for crowdfunding next Fall. This boxed Mothership 1e campaign has already been in development for over a year, and we’re going to continue the work through the next year.

• We hope to put out a free demo featuring a vertical slice consisting of the first area of Trellick Station. This will be released sometime during the first half of 2024.

October

Microgame #6 - North African Escape - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

• A hex and counter wargame inspired by the GDW classic Beda Fomm. This is the one historic game within our first season of Microgames. However, it is not a simulation of a specific battle, it is instead about capturing the vibes of Beda Fomm while using my Panic Engine inspired WIP wargame system, Disrupter.

November

Other Suns - Kickstarter

• This project is still unannounced, and I’m not going into too much detail. However, I am very enthusiastic about the concept art that has been generated by Sam Wildman and Holly Jenka for this project.

December

Mitosis 2nd Edition - The Game Crafter Crowd Sale

• We will be publishing a 2nd edition of our abstract strategy board game Mitosis. River Schenkat is developing new pieces and rules to expand on the deluxe edition of the game.

• These versions will only be for the board game, they will not include the Mothership adventure, Mitosis: Escape From STAR Station. This pamphlet adventure is available in a physical edition, digitally via DTRPG, and for paid subscribers to this magazine.

Distribution

In addition to the games that we are publishing as RV Games, we are also set to distribute the game Earth A.D. for Hammer City Games. There is a free PDF starter zine for this game available now, and Hammer City Games will be running a Kickstarter for a box set with a hardbound player’s guide, a gm handbook zine, an adventure zine with many fabulous collaborators, and a gm screen.

After our very successful collaboration with Hammer City Games on their Mothership module Graveyard of the Gods, we are very excited to continue to support them with product development, physical production, distribution, and fulfillment of this much larger project. We will be featuring an interview with Brenden Carlson about this project later in November.

Upcoming in The AGP

• 10/24 - Issue #7 - An Interview with the Creators of An Infinity of Ships

• 10/31 - Issue #8 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• 11/7 - Issue #9 - An Interview With watt, creator of Cloud Empress

• 11/14 - Issue #10 - A Review of Turbulence for Mothership by Green Moon Games

• 11/21 - Thanksgiving Week - No Issue

• 11/28 - Issue #11 - An Interview With Brenden Carlson of Hammer City Games About Earth A.D.

Currently Crowdfunding

Morticians RPG Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking by Coxon Media

• GURPS inspired Zombie Apocalypse TTRPG created in Fresno, California

Outer Rim: Uprising by The Lost Bay

• A massive bundle of Mothership 1e modules and a campaign structure that features 12 veteran designers

An Infinity of Ships by Adam Station

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. Also features Lesbean Ships!

Subscribe now

There is still one day left to pre-order our solo/Wardenless Mothership Micrograme inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Brood. You can get the free rules here. The more people who order, the lower the price gets!

An Interview With Iko

For this week, I have an interview with Iko from the Lost Bay about his current Mothership Kickstarter campaign for Outer Rim: Uprising and his work-in-progress game, The Lost Bay. We discuss some of the business and workflow aspects of assembling a large bundle like Outer Rim: Uprising, and we talk about solo play in The Lost Bay.

Outer Rim: Uprising looks to be a rather hefty bundle. What aspect are you most excited about?

I love its mind-blowing art, its fantastic layout, but I find even more exciting about ORU is the way it allows you to jump right in a rich setting. All the items of the bundle can be used independently: some are adventures, others are adventure-building tools. There are several player-facing accessories, one of them is the NPC card deck which I’m really excited about. They are all designed for Mothership, but a few of them are actually system agnostic, like BLINK, a guide to faster than light travel, or SAP, a Voight-Kampff-like test to determine if a subject is an android or not. But together, all the items build a setting with a strong theme: at the fringes of the galaxy, mega evil corps experiment with terrifying technos, xeno horrors dwell, and rebel alliances organize and revolt. The bundle items share NPCs, factions, events, outlining a common universe, and on top of those we’ve designed the Campaign Handbook that contains a series of frameworks, classes, resources to run a medium/long campaign set in the Outer Rim. So, to recap, the ORU is highly modular, and comes with a formidable tool to ease and speed its use. There is an incredible gaming potential in the bundle, associated with the fun factor of getting a collection of items.

There are a lot of contributors to Outer Rim: Uprising. Are there any tools or workflows that you’re using to help you wrangle the project?

We have a private channel in The Lost Bay Discord server. I opened it simply because most of the contributors were already members of the server. This channel is where most of the talk happens. I usually send big recap emails when we reach milestones. Discord is cool, but maybe I would have preferred a (free) tool that allows for better file management. The workflow is pretty simple. We talk a lot! Every time there is an important decision to make, I ping the crew. As a publisher, I have the responsibility of a lot of decisions, but I want those decisions to be informed by the feedback of the designers and other contributors. And it happened a few times that the feedback received pushed things in an expected way.

Can you share anything about the financial structure of a project with a large number of collaborators like this? Are there opportunities for contributors to receive equity?

Sure, I believe that transparency is important to keep the scene healthy. The bundle designers, myself included, are all paid an equal percentage on the bundle profit (the money that’s left after all expenses, production, marketing, transaction fees, taxes). The company itself takes a 10% fee on the net income to finance overhead. Designers fund development expenses for their own projects, like art or layout, and they remain sole owners of their zines. Lost Bay Studio gets a license to publish them within the bundle. In a sense, we are functioning like a temporary cooperative of publishers.

Tell me about The Lost Bay ttrpg, it appears to be a real passion project for you.

The Lost Bay is fueled with memories of the place where I grew up and that I had to leave abruptly as a young adult, and it’s heavily influenced by late 80s and 90s media.

It’s a horror game set in a gigantic coastal suburb of a mysterious and faraway town, urban and rural, beautiful and derelict, filled with contrasts and contradictions. Modern, at least in a 90s way (with skateboards, metal music, and console games), but also archaic. Magic prayers, curses, wicked monsters and immortals are part of daily life alongside scooters, arcade games, and strip malls. In it you play as young and powerful characters, who have been touched by the Weird, an ancient force that grants them incredible powers but consumes them as well. 

The playing characters are inspired by cinema and fiction of the 80s/90s (the Firestarter, the Splinter, the Scanner, the Screamer, and many more) but they also carry with them something ancient and untamable, something dark and mysterious.

How are you approaching solo play tools in The Lost Bay?

At first The Lost Bay rpg was built as a group game. After its release, roughly a month ago, I received positive feedback from solo players, who found it easy to run solo, but needed more resources. So I started discussing with them on twitter, via email, DMs, collecting more feedback on tools and procedures. I exchanged with as many people as possible. It’s been an extraordinary experience, that shows how the scene works at its best. The subsequent development has been very much influenced by this. TLB remains a group game, but mechanics and support/generation tables and procedures are designed in a solo first way. I believe that if the game works well solo, it’ll make a better group game.

Business Structure and Personal Reflection

What excites me most about this discussion with Iko are the inventive ways that he acts as a publisher. The way that Outer Rim: Rising is structured is fascinating to me. Spinning up a temporary publisher collaborative is a very innovative approach to a large project like this. However, Iko has positioned himself as the main publisher, which definitely helps for guiding the product as a whole, I’ve seen many collaborative projects fall apart due to design by committee. Iko is very community-minded, though, so this structure makes sense. He runs a super friendly and welcoming Discord server that gives people a place to build community and connect over life, not just about games. He shares early drafts and lets community feedback guide his design for The Lost Bay. It’s something I admire even though it is very different from how I operate RV Games even though we both have similar goals.

With RV Games, instead of a more collaborative model, I have a model more similar to Artists Equity, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s new production company. As I wrote in my interview with Noora Rose, I take an auteurist perspective on games, so I’m looking to publish and distribute independent games with strong authorial voices. To put out these kinds of games, I have two different methods that I use: publishing and distribution.

Publishing

When I am publishing a game, it usually starts at the manuscript or pitch phase, but it needs art and product development. I have to really believe in a game that I am publishing because I then take on all the risk of paying for development, editing running campaigns, advertising, printing, distribution and fulfillment. I take on a very strong editorial role when I am publishing; however, the rights for the game still ultimately belong to the lead designer for the project. We establish a publishing agreement where net profits are split 50/50. I am still working in partnership with independent artists, not taking ownership of games. When I publish the work of others or myself, so I am paying for it, I do make sure that I am creating contracts and paying out equity to major contributors (artist, editor, layout) in addition to paying the lead writer/designer their royalties.

Distribution

When I act as distributor, I fill more of the role that Iko has been filling with Outer Rim: Uprising. A game that I distribute is mostly complete with art and layout. The publisher of the game is responsible for funding, running campaigns, and marketing. I just focus on physical product development, printing, distribution, and fulfillment when I am distributor. In this case, it is a 70/30 net profit split with the publisher receiving the larger amount. Just like with my publishing contracts, the creator ultimately owns the game, I’m just receiving royalties for getting the game out there. I use this model to get games out that I would not ever design myself but that are so unique that they need to get out into the world; however, I don’t have to take on the full risk and time investment of acting as publisher. This model also make distributor and publisher partners, I only make money as distributor if copies are sold, so we both have the incentive to do the leg work. If I were just operating as a fulfillment house, I would get paid per copy, and generating long tail sales is not something that would necessarily be in my interest in the same way that it does as a distributor who takes a percentage of net profit.

Project Management

I think it is very telling that both Iko and Sean McCoy have both said that Discord can only get you so far as a collaborating tool for a project. It works at a certain scale, but it becomes hard to manage. I’ve considered learning Base Camp for this reason, but I’m still not sure if my projects escalate to this level. I operate with small teams on purpose because I want to keep things focused, and I want to keep individual vision in tact for every collaborator. I have one project idea that will definitely take a larger team than I have been working with, and that is something that will take me some time to process. I need to finish this series of Microgames and Blood Leeches before I can think about my own next projects (I have a few publishing and distribution deals on the books for 2024, but I’m very slow with my own work).

Upcoming in The AGP

• 10/17 - Issue #6 - RV Games Microgame #3: Pyroclastic Flow Pre-Launch

• 10/24 - Issue #7 - An Interview with the Creators of An Infinity of Ships

• 10/31 - Issue #8 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• 11/7 - Issue #9 - An Interview With watt, creator of Cloud Empress

• 11/14 - Issue #10 - A Review of Turbulence for Mothership by Green Moon Games

Crowdfunding

Morticians RPG Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking

• GURPS inspired Zombie Apocalypse TTRPG created in Fresno, California

Outer Rim: Uprising by The Lost Bay

• A massive bundle of Mothership 1e modules and a campaign structure that features 12 veteran designers

An Infinity of Ships by Adam Station

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. Also features Lesbean Ships!

Subscribe now

Why The AGP?!

Earlier this weekend, I had a discussion with the wonderful Evlyn Moreau about what I chose the name The Adventure Gaming Periodical, or The AGP for this magazine. Trans women and other Queer folks may be familiar with the term Autogynophilia or AGP. AGP is part of a controversial typology of transfeminine folks developed by the sexologist Ray Blanchard. Blanchard categorized trans women into two categories: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body. These categorizations have been very harmful to trans women, and especially trans women who do not identify as straight.

I am a late transitioning trans woman, as I’ve written about before, I didn’t start my transition until I was 34 years old. I lived a miserable life, and I didn’t even think being transgender was something for me because of AGP Theory (even though I didn’t know what it was called). When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I learned about gender confirmation surgery, and I was absolutely fascinated. I had always thought about what it would be like to experience life as a woman, and thought this was just a normal thought experiment that everyone did as part of being an aware human being. It was at that same time that I heard of the idea of non-straight and non-operative trans women, and the remarks I heard were “what’s the point of transitioning if you’re just going to be with women,” and “they must just be crossdressing perverts.” I shut myself out of even considering anything else about my gender identity because gender and sexuality were linked in my mind. All of these ideas in the zeitgeist about gay trans women came from AGP theory even though I had no clue it even existed.

It wasn’t until my transition that I dove head first into Queer Theory and discovered discussions of AGP by the trans woman scholar Julia Serrano. However, I still had reservations about proudly being a lesbian leaning pansexual trans woman. The ideas of AGP had seeped into Queer communities as well, and in some spaces, trans lesbians are looked at as men who are predators for Queer women. It further finds purchase in modern TERF/Gender Critical discourse, assuming that trans women are men who want to assault cis women. I now have wonderful women as partners who accept me for who I am despite the fact that the repercussions of AGP Theory led to me hiding my gender away inside of me and made me feel like I needed to be with men for my identity to be valid. This is why I have reclaimed AGP as a play on words for the title of this magazine. I closeted myself and hurt people around me because of the insinuations of Blanchard’s typology, so I reclaim the term now as a proud trans woman who loves women.

Maps as Accessibility Tools

The second half of this week’s issue is much more Mothership focused and much less Queer focused. Within the Mothership community, theater of the mind combat seems to be most commonly used. There are maps for locations included, but quite often they aren’t directly used with player counters, or they are just simple flow charts. This works for quite a few people, but it doesn’t work at all for my neurodivergent brain: I have aphantasia, so I do not form mental images. I have a terrible sense of direction, so unless I see something directly on a map, it may as well not be there. I get lost and want to stop playing when it is entirely theater of the mind. Accessibility is about more than alt text and screen readers. However, Mothership is also not about tactical grid combat, so traditional style battle maps don’t really fit the system either. This is how I developed the map for The Progeny alongside my editor and designer David Wilkie.

The criteria I had for developing this map were:

1. It needed to work just as well in-person as in a VTT

2. It needed to have a coordinate system for easy reference

3. It needed to indicate range as well as the general structure of the facility

4. It needed to have all of the information necessary to run the map on the map

As you can see, this final map meets all of these criteria. It originally started as a hex map because I hate how diagonal movement either makes things difficult or requires fudging when using a square grid. However, it felt really clunky as a hex map, so David turned into a grid. However, if you notice, the locations are face in one direction or are a single square, there is no diagonal movement. Also, the squares do not represent an actual real distance, they represent range bands.

• Adjacent = Same Square

• Close Range = 1 Square Away

• Far Range = 2 Squares Away

• Out of Range >= 3 Squares Away

What this does is essentially turn the map into a flow chart of zone maps. You know the general size and range and configuration of rooms, but you do not get bogged down in measuring on the grid and figuring out movement distances since in Mothership you can basically move one square per turn. You aren’t worried about where individual pieces of furniture are, but there is a visual of where everything is for folks who have a difficult or impossible time with visualization.

I’m also very proud of how playable this map is. There’s a key directly on the map for interpreting the symbols, and the tracker for room lighting is brilliant. If you get the boxed version of The Progeny from our current Crowd Sale, you are able to use a dry erase marker to track the status of lights and door locks, which is wonderful for hacker and mechanical repair type player characters.

When you combine this with the dynamic table set up and dice AI, you have a programmed adventure game for Mothership, you are able to run something within a single location as a non-authoring solo game or as a Wardenless game.

Zone Maps

Not all modules and locations fit into rooms like with the grid map above. A module like Desert Moon of Karth or a game like Cloud Empress both include outdoor travel rules with random encounters. You aren’t able to build a flow chart map with ranges on the fly this way, so bringing maps to these kinds of encounters requires using a generic zone map.

For Advanced Rules, I propose a simple zone system inspired by Traveller 1e. To represent distances between characters and encounters, you can use a four row by one column grid that you've drawn out on a sheet of paper. You can then use tokens or counters or just draw the distances you find characters and encounters from each other. Each cell of this grid represents a range band, just like with Grid maps. This means that markers on the same square are Adjacent, markers one square away are in Close Range, markers two squares away are within Long Range, and markers three squares away are Out of Range. This allows you to move the relative distances to allow people to see where there distance is in relation to the scene. You narrate and play through the scene as usual, but there is more visual indication for the general shape of the encounter.

Upcoming in The AGP

• 10/10 - Issue #5 - An Interview With Iko From The Lost Bay

• 10/17 - Issue #6 - RV Games Microgame #3: Pyroclastic Flow Pre-Launch

• 10/24 - Issue #7 - An Interview with the Creators of An Infinity of Ships

• 10/31 - Issue #8 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• 11/7 - Issue #9 - An Interview With watt, creator of Cloud Empress

• 11/14 - Issue #10 - A Review of Turbulence for Mothership by Green Moon Games

The Progeny Crowd Sale

There is still one week left to pre-order our solo/Wardenless Mothership Micrograme inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Brood. You can get the free rules here. The more people who order, the lower the price gets!

Crowdfunding

Morticians RPG Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking

• GURPS inspired Zombie Apocalypse TTRPG created in Fresno, California

Outer Rim: Uprising by The Lost Bay

• A massive bundle of Mothership 1e modules and a campaign structure that features 12 veteran designers

An Infinity of Ships by Adam Station

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. Also features Lesbean Ships!

Interview

Tell me about Beecher’s Bibles. What is your elevator pitch?

Have you seen what a .52 caliber round from a Sharp’s rifle will do to the chest of a Border Ruffian? Would you like to?

Beecher’s Bibles is a gritty, pulpy action-adventure role-playing game about deadly close-quarters guerilla battles in the Kansas Territories against the forces of slavery. Players in Beecher’s Bibles are Jayhawkers, Red Legs, Free-Staters; proud abolitionist militant guerilla bands in 1850s Kansas, clashing with the pro-slavery forces of border ruffians and bushwhackers. A "Beecher's Bible" was the name given to the breech-loading Sharps rifle that was supplied to and used by anti-slavery forces during the Bleeding Kansas period (1854–1860). The name was inspired by the words and deeds of abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher of the New England Emigrant Aid Society.

Why did you decide to write this game? How did this idea develop?

Like many things in my life, spite: I initially wrote Beecher’s Bibles in response to a Daniel Fox hostile engagement-bait post about “as a Publisher, I would never publish a game that hadn’t been playtested.” So I ran a game jam about games you weren’t allowed to playtest and wrote the first edition of BB, which actually used the modified ITO-meets-AD&D framework I’ve called Pink Hack. I think the genesis of the content was re-watching The Outlaw Josey Wales and feeling suspicious about Clint Eastwood’s character fighting against Union soldiers. That led me to researching who, exactly, the Red Legs in the story were and what they were about. I became enamored with the apocryphal epithet of a “Beecher’s Bible” being a firearm smuggled into contested territory for the express purposes of violent and radical abolition, and started reading more about not just John Brown (whom I was already very familiar with) but other figures during the Bleeding Kansas period and the events that helped instigate the American Civil War.

One of the things I wanted to really hammer home with this work was that the oft-heard excuse of “[they’re] just a product of their times” is total bullshit. Total bullshit. People called John Brown mad, but I think John Brown was one of the most rational and moralistic human beings to have ever lived. He saw a widespread system of injustice that was utterly abhorrent to his very core values. He quickly discovered that that system of injustice was so embedded into the geopolitical landscape of his country that it would only be dislodged by force. He gathered like-minded people to his cause, and he sought to confront that injustice openly, fearlessly, and when necessary violently.

What made you decide to go with Panic Engine on this project? I love working with the Panic Engine, and I’m always interested in connecting with other folks using it for more than Mothership.

As a writer who grudgingly will call herself a game designer I am somewhat of a heretic and don’t subscribe to the notion that a game’s mechanisms or rules have as much impact on play as people who explicitly call themselves game designers would like to imagine, particularly with regards to TTRPG systems being bespoke instances of curated experience. Everyone knows MoSh is a fine engine for survival/horror; I wanted to showcase how the elements that let it excel at that aren’t limited to Alien franchise knockoffs and could be used for different kinds of play. In this case, the hectic and harrowing guerilla battlefields of pre-Civil War Kansas Territories. Musket fire is terrifying, cannonry apocalyptic, people are still for some reason using swords to fight, and the height of medical care seems to be “amputate, and then do a lot of narcotics.”

As I’d mentioned above, the first version of BB wasn’t Panic Engine at all, but a hideous melange of Into the Odd and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which is further horrifying to System Purists, I’d imagine). I switched over to the Panic Engine having played more MoSh recently and wanted to play around with the engine and what I could write with it. I don’t think the play experience is much different from system to system however from a writer’s perspective there are more and different buttons and levers to push when writing the framework for play.

You’re Queer, visible online, and have a family, including a new baby. Are there any things you do to help shield them from possible attention online? How do you deal with the extra attention that comes from having a public persona? I’m a trans mother of a trans child, so I feel a need to be an advocate and to make Queer art, but that’s balanced with a desire to protect my family, so this is a topic that I like to ask people about.

The best thing I’ve probably done in that regards is delete my personal Twitter. I think it’s important whenever possible to stand tall and make weird and Queer art to show other queer, trans, racialized, and marginalized people that they can, too, but there does come a time where the best thing to do for your own mental health and your family is to pull back from the constant fight of being visible online and let someone else (hopefully) take up the sword for a little bit. The unfortunate reality is that it is often not even the most explicitly right-wing fascist types that are the most dangerous to you and your family - in my case, for instance, I was more or less driven out of online spaces by White Queers for whom uncomfortable or unsanitized art is problematic. It’s very easy to tune out or laugh in the face of the right-wing chud brigade hurling slurs, but its far more difficult to see people around you that you previously had respectful interactions with - or even people you’d never before interacted with - spreading vile untruths about you because as a racialized trans person, your sense of belonging is even more precarious and you are that much easier to brand as unperson.

That being said, it is through the making of transgressive art that I feel like I am doing the most, not merely being a visible online racialized and radical trans woman; its fairly cliche but sometimes the most effective thing you can do (and the thing that annoys people the most) is just to be successful in the thing that brings you joy, despite the people that hate you for being you. And at the end of the day you’re far more likely to have that same questioning or uncertain or closeted trans, queer, racialized or marginalized person come across your work, find it resonates with them, and have them say “Oh! She’s just like me!” than is likely they will have that experience with a tweet. Twitter is shit, anyways. The uwus can have it.

How do you balance your family and professional responsibilities since being an independent publisher can be all consuming?

When I figure that one out you’ll be the first one to know!

The trick there is that it’s a constant balancing act and requires a lot of active triage. I worked as a cook and a chef for 17 years pre-COVID and “retired” to pursue parenthood and writing full-time post-lockdown. That long being a chef has given me (I think) very good time management skills; I’m used to not sleeping much and juggling the demands of multiple attention-seekers. I’m also fortunate enough to have a spouse who works full time and so share the emotional, physical, mental and financial load. Writing is my passion but also my business; I treat it as such, I (try to) keep strict Office Hours, I keep track of when and for how long I am working, I keep Work and Home separate. And like any job, family has to come first. Too many people think they can make it at TTRPGs as a career but continue to treat it like a hobby, spend thousands of unpaid hours on projects, and then make claims about the unsustainability of the industry. There is in fact a great deal of money to be made in TTRPGs. This is a niche publishing industry where collectors spend tens of thousands of dollars on collectibles. You just have to actually treat it like a job and not your hobby anymore.

How do you go about constructing progressively aligned ttrpgs? You’ve spoken online about how designer intent means much less than how a game is played at the table. This means that more political games could easily be misinterpreted, so it is a fine line balancing a message and what makes a fun or interesting game, and this is an interesting tension to discuss.

The first thing you have to acknowledge and be okay with is that you are utterly powerless to people ‘misusing’ (however you define that) your work. I put words on paper, and what people do with those words is entirely up to them. Anybody trying to sell you on the moral purity of their work and the notion of ‘safety’ derived from it might as well be trying to sell you a bridge in New York - you can put “fascists aren’t allowed to read this book” all you want but you have no recourse for aforementioned fascist ripping that page out or simply ignoring it altogether. I think the indie scene’s obsession with ideological purity and a highly inaccurate and misapplied notion of “ideological reproduction” draws too near to assigning objective morality to not only the consumption of certain art but the art (and artist) itself, straight through “violent video games make kids violent” and right into fascist notions of “degenerate art” territory. I also think that in a weird way the focus on ideological purity of Design Intent entirely offloads the responsibility of writers’ words onto the reader: after all, if you’re going against Design Intent it doesn’t matter how poorly that intent is conveyed, that’s YOUR (the reader) fault, not theirs.

Ultimately TTRPGs are a melange of two things: writing, and play. Writing influences play but does not dictate it. You can’t judge play based entirely on the writing, just like you can’t judge the writing based entirely on play. People have a difficult time with this and I can’t really imagine why: we can judge separately a screenplay and an actor’s ability to convey emotion, we can judge separately a piece of sheet music and a musician’s ability to adapt it. We can even judge separately a page of prose and one’s ability to read it out loud! You have to accept that the written part of the game and the part of the game that plays out at the table are so different that they cannot be judged by the same metric. As a writer, you will only ever have agency over one of those parts.

Once you’ve accepted those truths, you just have to be intentional and careful with your words, because that’s all you’ve got. You can’t rely on safety consultants or editors to curate your words or double-check your research to ensure you’ve written something insightful and respectful - I think the over-reliance on safety/sensitivity/cultural consultants to “clean up” works is actually a very bad thing for the industry - you have to put time and energy and research and care and love (and often frustration and hate and spite!) into the words you choose, to make sure they’re the right ones. Just because you can’t control how people will react or interpret your words doesn’t mean you have no ability to affect their impact, and words always have an impact. People have to take their job as a writer - not a game designer or a tastemaker or a narrative designer or a storyteller but as a writer - more seriously, and commit to mastering the craft of writing. It isn’t technical writing, it isn’t “narrative writing,” games writing isn’t this magical and special sub-genre that elides the need to develop a writer’s voice and a writer’s discipline and a writer’s skill. You are a writer. Be a writer. You have the same responsibility in the way you convey your thoughts and emotions as any other writer of any other sort of medium.

I sound like an old crank - I am an old crank - but indie writer/designers do not read nearly enough and do not write nearly enough, either. People have a microscopic, myopic focus on the part of the genre that interests them the most - which is fine for a hobby - but then turn on an authoritative voice when they speak on the areas of the genre they aren’t interested in and thus have done no reading on. Do you know how many critics of D&D 5th edition haven’t read any of the books? How can you tell me it’s a “poorly-designed” game when you’ve never read it? And the embarrassing part about all of it is that you can so easily find out what people have written themselves when they make such claims. Spend more time and care on your craft!

Auteurism in TTRPGs

It may not be a super popular stance anymore, but the lens through which I view art is auteurism. I do think that auteurism is misunderstood, though, because it became viewed as something that should only be applied to men who are film directors. However, an auteur is not limited to that field, a piece of auteur art shows an individual’s idiosyncratic view of reality for the rest of world to behold, it is art that lays its creator bare. Now, most commercial art is entirely a collaborative endeavor, but the best part is guided by this idiosyncratic vision, not something designed by committee and smoothed into product or content for mass consumption.

When I read Noora’s response here, and when I look at Nora’s last newsletter, I see a description of an auteur view of ttrpgs. The words a writer uses are important and articulate their worldview. Sensitivity readers and an over-reliance on play testing smooth out this worldview, so that the goal becomes not to make a piece of art but to incentivize the players to interact with the game in the way that the writer wants. This may look at an auteur view of games from one angle: the writer is expressing their worldview through the systems of the game. However, what a dismal worldview, folks won’t want to interact with each other and have fun unless they are told what to do. This really feels like a copout and a distrust in people’s own writing craft. The system guides the players (including GM), not the author’s words. Writing a ttrpg is like writing a screenplay that you will not direct: you have to be confident enough in your words and structure that a director and actors can put their spin on the work as somewhat intended. Placing so many things into the system feels like putting storyboards, music suggestions, and shot lists into the script. This works if you are writer/director like James Gunn or Quentin Tarantino (they both write scripts like this), but as Noora said in her newsletter, unless you, the writer, are running the game at the table, you lose this ability to be a writer/director.

Making personal art is really scary this way, though, because you have to be confident in your words. I like to write rules within systems that support the particular piece of art that I am making, but creating systems from scratch isn’t even something I do when I write board and wargames in addition to ttrpgs. My large in-development boxed Mothership campaign, Orgy of the Blood Leeches is very Queer, very personal, and very idiosyncratic. It does include procedures for a designer intended method of play (including an entire optional book of Advanced Rules), but I write this understanding that, at best, they will be used as written, generally, they will be used as suggestions and messages sent to the Warden to indirectly guide them, and at worst, they will be completely ignored. I like writing in Mothership because the base system gets out of the way and lets me focus on what makes something a great piece of art. I’m very different than Noora, in that I consider myself a publisher who writes because no one else can write what I want to make (this is the same perspective David Cronenberg has about screenwriting). My auteur vision isn’t just shaped by the words of the text but by art and product design. My Quaker view of the world is expressed even in my crowdfunding campaigns by the fact that I price things fairly (which means a little higher than most), don’t do early bird discounts or many stretch goals (other than simple upgrades), include a breakdown of finances for campaigns, and offer equity to major contributors as standard operating procedure. I may be making transgressive art featuring violence and nudity, but it’s still all about love and understanding and treating people with care.

I live to be the example of what I would want to see in the world. I’m just a trans woman, raising a family, sharing my life with my partners, and making the art that is stuck in my guts and my heart, and that’s my auteur view of the world that I want, no NEED, to create and share. I show the grotesque to make people think and feel and want people to love, I want to be Crimes of the Future Cronenberg, not Videodrome Cronenberg.

Upcoming in The AGP

• 10/3 - Issue #4 - Grid and Zone Maps in Mothership 1e

• 10/10 - Issue #5 - An Interview With Iko From The Lost Bay

• 10/17 - Issue #6 - RV Games Microgame #3: Pyroclastic Flow Pre-Launch

• 10/24 - Issue #7 - An Interview with the Creators of An Infinity of Ships

• 10/31 - Issue #8 - A Review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• 11/7 - Issue #9 - An Interview With watt, creator of Cloud Empress

The Progeny Crowd Sale

There are still two weeks left to pre-order our solo/Wardenless Mothership Micrograme inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Brood. You can get the free rules here. The more people who order, the lower the price gets!

Crowdfunding

Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception by Spicy Tuna RPG

• A setting, toolkit, escape adventure, and solo rules (by Alfred Valley) for Mothership 1e

Morticians RPG Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking

• GURPS inspired Zombie Apocalypse TTRPG created in Fresno, California

Outer Rim: Uprising by The Lost Bay

• A massive bundle of Mothership 1e modules and a campaign structure that features 12 veteran designers

An Infinity of Ships by Adam Station

• A toolkit and selection of space ships with art by Rob Turpin. Also features Lesbean Ships!

Follow Morticians RPG

Tell me about Morticians. What is your elevator pitch?

Morticians is a new tabletop role-playing game where you adventure through the zombie apocalypse. Using the new Morticians percentile system, you and your friends explore the ruins of the modern world while encountering other survivors, Bikers, and lots of Zombies! Morticians don’t just survive, they thrive through cooperation and exploring the world around them looking for new resources, helping other survivors, and protecting the innocent from the undead.

Our first crowdfunding campaign is to manufacture Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking, a starter set that includes everything to begin playing Morticians right out of the box.

Describe the system used in Morticians. What was your design philosophy?

Morticians, from inception, has been designed to support combat and cooperative role-playing in the zombie apocalypse. We wanted a system that engages all players at the table and encourages cooperation. Using point buy mechanics, players develop the attributes they wish their character to possess. Character attributes influence their stats and skill base values. Skill checks use percentile dice and are structured in a way that everyone at the table knows what the threshold for success is. There’s nothing better than watching the dice settle and everyone knowing immediately if the effort was successful or not! Taking inspiration from systems like SPECIAL and GURPs, development has been focused on creating a system that is quick and easy to learn but supports complex, story-driven gameplay.

How did you develop the idea that turned into Morticians?

Back in 2012, I wanted to introduce TTRPGs to my three nephews, but they were not interested in high fantasy. I’ve always been a fan of zombie movies and created a homebrew campaign that was based around a bus load of teenagers on their way to a sleep away camp when the zombie apocalypse hits. It was at that point that I thought a percentile system would be accessible for my nephews to easily conceptualize odds of success when rolling the dice. 

At the time, there was a show called Life After Humans that used CGI to illustrate how the world would crumble if humanity disappeared. After initial game play with my nephews, I started to wonder what the world would be like seven years after a zombie outbreak. The world of Morticians sprang from that wondering. I have since drafted a novel manuscript that extends the Morticians’ world. The novel is planned to be released within the next year, in addition to the game. 

As a writer, much of my writing is based in and around my hometown. Although the valley Morticians inhabit and protect was inspired by the Central Valley of California, Sanctuary Valley could be dropped into any location. In fact, we want to encourage players to use familiar surroundings as a backdrop to their gameplay as much as they can to personalize their experience.

What is the product that you are about to launch on Kickstarter? Tell me about what will be included.

Crossroads: The Introductory Undertaking is an encounter box designed to introduce gamers, new and experienced, to the Morticians world and system. We created it to provide an immediate playable one-shot or short campaign to grow the Morticians community before the full core rulebook planned for 2024. 

Crossroads will include everything needed to get started playing. Six pre-generated character folios provide backstory, stats, and equipment lists and introduces half of the Morticians player character archetypes from the full core rule book. These pre-gens can be played in any combination, allowing the game to be played with one Funeral Director and anywhere from 1 to 6 players, although 4 is recommended. 

The Starter Players Rule Book includes game play information for all of the players and the Funeral Director. This is a shortened version of the full core rule book, focused on introducing game play and includes information needed for the Crossroads story and possibilities. 

The Funeral Director’s guide includes an original, engaging story, presented in two parts. The first half of the story is highly structured and designed to introduce game mechanics, providing opportunity for a variety of skill checks and combat against an array of different baddies. The first part runs approximately 2-4 hours, depending on play style. The second half of the game opens the world up, expanding game mechanics and providing the Funeral Director information for multiple locations, more baddies, new obstacles, and many choices for the players. The second part can be completed in an additional 4-6 hours, depending on play style. This guide also includes scaling information to adapt challenges to party size. 

In the spirit of supporting gameplay out of the box, Crossroads will also include a full-sized, color hexagonal play map to be used during the first part of the Crossroads encounter. Also included will be black and white chipboard tokens representing each of the 6 pre-gens and non-player characters (NPCs). Finally, a polyhedral dice set will be provided because there’s no such thing as too many dice! 

All of the artwork are original works created for Crossroads and 100% human created. The rule books and tokens are black and white and intentionally evoke the style of classic RPG line drawings to both pay homage to the great art that was created during the 1980’s for ttrpgs as well as leaving room for the players’ imagination to fill in the gore. Allowing players to be as gory or as goofy as they want while playing Morticians. We’ve also secured a manufacturer. Crossroads will be 100% human created content made in the U.S.A.

You work on this game and publishing with your partner. How do you balance your personal and professional relationship?

We don’t. There is no conflict between our personal and professional relationship. I get to work with my best friend, who also happens to be my wife. Our friendship was formed as teenagers doing theater productions and engaging in work-as-play. We each bring different skill sets into this work. I write and work through mechanics and play experience, while she creates art and is a hell of a continuity editor and project manager. It all relies upon communication. We never stop talking to each other and development sessions often feel more like hanging out than work. Even though we’re putting in 10 to 12-hour days, that doesn’t stop us from having a nice dinner together or carving out time for family and friends. Life still flows even when you have a job. The important thing is to be present and enjoy the process.

You also have a family and a busy life, how do you manage personal responsibilities and your creative work?

My responsibility is to bring my creative works into reality. That takes work and dedication, and I am fully dedicated to my writing. Once I decided this is what I wanted to do for a living I structured writing like a job. Because I treat it like a job, I am my own boss, and my boss is a real hard-ass. Start time is 5am before anyone else is awake. That nets me two hours of uninterrupted time. I make sure everyone is up and ready for school. Once the kids are at school, I work nonstop until it’s time to pick them up. During which time, I may be writing, brainstorming, and collaborating with my partner, or any other of those un-ending tasks that come with running a business. After school and into the evening, a few more hours are worked in, as needed, because I really never stop thinking about Morticians.

Being dedicated to my schedule during the week allows me to continually make progress on my creative work and still have time to regularly play at my local game shop, support my kids in their endeavors, and spend quality time with my family. But most importantly I’ve created a schedule that allows me to be accessible to my family’s needs. My wife has her own schedule for focused work that is off set from but compliments my schedule. Life is going to happen, whether you want it to or not. We’ve structured things so when something inevitably does come up, there is the flexibility to handle it.

The Crossroads Kickstarter campaign will be launching September 26 at 9am EST. To learn more about the game and sign up to stay up to date on the latest Morticians news, visit to http://play.morticiansrpg.com/1.

Reflections

I’m excited for Morticians to release. It might not be a popular opinion, but I really like GURPS, and I am in love with its predecessor The Fantasy Trip, so when I see someone developing an OSR style game based on that lineage instead of D&D, it makes me very excited. I think that it’s a shame that we don’t see more work inspired by other older ttrpgs and Microgames outside of the D&D hegemony.

Steve continues the theme of folks regimenting their time to make sure that their family life doesn’t suffer. I admire his ability to make games with his partner in a highly collaborative fashion. I tried this with one of my partner’s at the launch of RV Games, and we had to work out a different workflow for ourselves. We can bullshit and brainstorm game design deep into the night, but then we need to each work on our own stuff. River now only brings me stuff that she has developed and prototyped, where she then needs an editor and a publisher. Collaborating together caused a lot of undue pressure for us because of differing working styles. She takes awhile to think things through and assemble them while I smash through drafts quickly and start to make production plans. My style is too high pressure for River, so our brainstorm, prototype, edit and publish workflow works to keep us creative together without resenting each other.

The Progeny Crowd Sale

• RV Games Crowd Sale for our second Microgame, The Progeny is live until October 10. We need eight more backers to unlock the next level of discounts for this solo or Wardenless Mothership Microgame inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Brood.

Order The Progeny

Upcoming for The AGP

Unlike the launch last week, I have a more solid schedule for some of our upcoming issues alongside some things to expect at a less definitive date.

• September 26 - An Interview With Noora Rose of Monkey’s Paw Games About Their Current Campaign for her Slave Abolitionist, Panic Engine game, Beecher’s Bibles.

• October 3 - Grid and Zone Maps in The Progeny and Mothership

• October 10 - An Interview With watt, creator of Cloud Empress

• An interview with Iko of The Lost Bay, behind the upcoming Mothership bundle, Outer Rim: Uprising, and The Lost Bay RPG.

• An interview with the team behind An Infinity of Ships. I’m very excited to talk about lesbian space ships!

• A review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism, an Unreal Tournament inspired miniatures skirmish game

Links

• Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception - Live Kickstarter Campaign by Spicy Tuna RPG with an adventure by Christian Sorrell and solo rules by Alfred Valley

Today I’m really excited to announcement an evolution of this newsletter. We are now The Adventure Gaming Periodical or The AGP.

We are expanding the format into a weekly Queer gaming magazine focused on the broad genre of adventure games, which was the late 1970s-1980s term that encompassed ttrpgs and wargames. We chose this vintage name because magazine is still a house organ for RV Games. It is modeled after old magazines like Dragon, Fire & Tactics, or The Space Gamer.

For now, I will still be writing most of the content. We will still feature Mothership house rules, RV Games WIP writing, and small experimental games. A subscription to this magazine still gives you access to our Microsub for our year long experiment publishing six Microgames. We will still talk about RV Games releases, but it will mostly be through links at the bottom of issues, our product launch communications will now be exclusively handled by BackerKit. This means you are able to choose whether you want to subscribe to our mailing list, this magazine, or both.

Our content will feature more interviews, essays, and reviews in addition to the RV Games posts that we have been making. We also hope to feature writers other than myself, and we hope we announce more about that soon. We keep our lens Queer, but all of our content may not be explicitly Queer focused, and we do hope to feature Queer writers over others.

An Interview With Marco Serrano of Spicy Tuna RPG

For this inaugural issue of The AGP, I spoke with Marco Serrano of Spicy Tuna RPG about his currently funding Mothership module Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception, solo gaming, and balancing family and trying to make it as an indie publisher. This book features gorgeous artwork from Evangeline Gallagher, an adventure by Christian Sorrell of MeatCastle Gameware, and solo rules from Alfred Valley. This interview was conducted via text, so it was cooperatively assembled and edited to build the interview below.

Tell me about Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception. What is your elevator pitch? What are you most excited about with this project?

Outsourced is an intrigue filled survival module. The crew was sent to their death, the ship rigged to crash. If they survive, they’ve learned the mission was manufactured to fail. Now, they must navigate who to trust, continue their career under restrictive contracts, or somehow break free.

The hardcover book contains the backstory and motive of the people behind Luko Fin Corp, two horror filled planet settings, each with detailed toolkits to generate stalking horror missions, a ready to play bunker escape adventure playable with an optional solo procedure, and a mercenary appendix to spice up characters and shore leave.

Simply put, Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception is the kind of book we want to keep making. It’s designed for flexible play. Easily ran as several one-shots or an interconnected survival campaign. Toolkits and random tables in the book give extended use after playing the adventures. It’s all the utility we want in a module.

As a solo play developer myself, I’d love to hear more about the solo rules for Outsourced coming from Alfred Valley. What kind of system is it? What makes it unique?

The solo rules for Outsourced use a slightly reformatted version of Alfred’s Combined Systems Semiotic Standard oracle released with Thousand Empty Light. The spin for the Jiri Clovis Bunker Escape was introducing complications in the form of hypnotic suggestions. 

Before you begin, you roll to determine 5 triggers from the list of 50 in the Semiotic Standard. The 5 triggers are placed into the Psychic Conditioning table. Each time these triggers are rolled your character has a compelled reaction. You might feel overwhelmed to present yourself at the Processing Office, or become suddenly disinterested in weapons and become more confident when unarmed. There are hellish illusions and urges to turn in other Resistance Force members too. Each compelled reaction should change the narrative and/or your character in chunks.

Further reactions are triggered as you advance into higher levels of the bunker, and in the case you are detained and “reprocessed” you gain 5 more triggers and all of the sudden you must be doubly clever.

I think it fits particularly well with Chrisian Sorrell’s bunker escape, because advantages in the adventure are awarded through building connections and cleverly bypassing security. That and/or garnering support for a riot…and anything in between those options. The solo rules reinforce this by making combat completely optional and presenting new complications which change the way you interact with NPCs and plot your escape.

What made you want to add solo support for Outsourced? Do you plan to support solo play in more modules moving forward? Do you think that the market for solo modes and games is expanding?

I fell in love with a few solo rpgs recently, and have a growing affinity for them. The two main stand outs for me were Blurred Lines by Gontijo and Thousand Empty Light by Alfred Valley (There’s been many since). These two games welded the gameplay and design in such a beautiful way, solo became a bit of an obsession of mine.

Then I saw Fey Light Studio hired Alfred to do the solo procedures for This Ship is a Tomb right before our campaign for Constant Downpour Remastered launched and it was abundantly obvious to add a solo procedure to the game.

The main goal we had working with Alfred was to provide a unique way to experience the module as a solo player, even if the player was potentially a previous warden of the adventure. I think Alfred knocked it out of the driveway with the Constant Downpour ruleset and we hired them again for Outsourced - with much more time in advance so the solo rules could make it printed inside the book. (Spoiler - Alfred knocked it out of the driveway again for Outsourced!)

We want to support solo as often as possible. I can see times where it doesn’t make sense, especially for smaller projects, but for the most part it’ll be included in the same book.

That’s a great question about the solo mode/solo game market. My guess would be yes! Rune, Reap, Miru I & II, Notorious, Artefact, Fallen, Pilgrimage of the Sun Guard, Thousand Empty Light, Anamnesis, Waffles for Esther, Lay on Hands, Outliers, and more have gathered a ton of positive buzz and have great numbers to show for them. I know Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games and Jason Tagmire from Button Shy Games have talked about solo modes as a necessity for board and card games (an adjacent space), and the recent evolution of these wants more than likely translate to rpg players.

What you’ll see from Spicy Tuna is mostly solo as a unique way to experience multiplayer games and adventures. But we have some solo game releases on the docket (in an undetermined place in the future), one being a reworking of the Soldier Splashing All Alone solo procedure (the solo ruleset for Constant Downpour) into its own module with it’s own hex map, terrain, and areas of interest to interact with. Another is a game of mazes I started to develop. That’s the current plan anyways :)

I’ve heard you discuss being a parent before, and I like to ask other indie creators about parenting while doing this work. How do you balance coordinating a studio along with having a family and any other responsibilities that you may have?

This is a long one. I’ve been self-employed since before I had kids, and my oldest, 7, was born (when I was 25) during a very financial do-or-die time so I’ve sadly been very absent at times, overcorrected during others, and struggled through a lot of it. I’ve had 3 more kids and have adjusted and tried a ton of new things since then. This is what works for me currently:

The most helpful action I’ve found is to define protected time with family. Non-negotiable times generally split between kid time and spouse time if applicable. Ideally this includes large sections of time (ie weekends), but in my case with 2 babies under 18 months old, we’re more flexible with work hours all around and it’s hard to guarantee a weekend or getting off on Fridays when the kids get off of school.

My current protected times for the kids include: >Getting the oldest two ready for school/pre-school and dropping them off. This is always more rushed and less quality time than I want, but it’s great to hug each other goodbye and be present at drop off.

>Lunch or break around 1 PM to spend time with the youngest two. This is just a long and easy break I get to spend with the babes. I also get great conversation with my wife.

>Dinner time with the family slows us all down and we get to talk about our days, school, books, experiments, big brain builds, and anything else. Family dinner is very important to me.

>Bed time routine with the two oldest where we read books, ask nighttime questions, say our gratefuls and our favorite parts of the day.

I’m also with the baby from 9 PM - 1 AM where I’m sometimes just hanging out, soothing, and reading out loud, but it’s not protected time because I’m trying to work as much as I can during that time to keep up with work.

The rest of my day is ideally standard work during the weekdays, but with young kids and sleep deprivation it varies dramatically.

After setting aside specific time for the family, the next step is to take a series of actions that shield these protected times from outside stress, work worry, and the lot. This is the hard part, but a lot of these compound and make doing all of them easier. Here are the actions I take:

Learning how to switch off. I personally love working, building new businesses, and doing creative work and it has been very hard to turn off my mind when it’s time to be with family. Even when it’s pure excitement or in-your-brain-writing, there’s a toll that’s paid if I am not switching off. A few things that helped me is spending the last few minutes of work making a list of things that need done when I’m back at my desk, trying to steal an additional minute after that to decompress without guilt, immediately letting my wife know what’s stuck on my mind when I get off, and big long breaths.

Focus on positive things/practicing gratitude. I think this is one of the most important things to do regardless, but it’s essential to having great time with your family while running anything. A few times  a week, or a few times a day sometimes, it’s more beneficial to take 10 minutes to list out and focus on happy interactions, positive happenings, and other things I’m generally grateful for than it is to spiral out. This is especially helpful when the update is requested on Kickstarter, or the negative review comes in, or the reach isn’t where I wish it were, or I noticed a mistake in print, or a ridiculous comment is made about a project I’m proud of. Being intentionally grateful is the best tool I have for it and it’s necessary to get my brain in the right place which is necessary to get good work in and to get good time in with family. Being grateful for small things works better for me than large things. For example leaf colors being brighter on a cloudy gray day, or smiles, or a comfy-ish chair, or that I’m doing something for myself, or a good laugh, or my mouse pad has a wrist rest, or I can switch the Pandora station, or my friend texted me, or someone complimented something I made - instead of focusing on the greatest things like having healthy kids or dinner time is coming up.

Communicate and negotiate expectations before starting. This is mostly with a partner or spouse. It’s important to understand limits, how far you can go, how alone can the other person feel, what duration can you push through, what are non-negotiables. Everything generally takes four times longer than I think, so I try to communicate in that way. Being realistic is the most important thing here, although it’s the part I’m still the worst at. Idealizing short hours with massive results isn’t usually how it works. I’ve found it’s often more important to discuss possible time allotted than amount of work completed. Check in to make sure these expectations are being met and make sure everybody is comfortable speaking up when they feel the expectations aren’t being respected. Redefine and renegotiate when a new kid is born or something substantial happens.

I really enjoyed putting together this conversation with Marco. As a mother, full time professional, and a publisher, it’s really important to me that as a creator community that we talk about and acknowledge family and wellness and balance, and I appreciate his insight into how he manages it all. I’ve previously spoken with Sean McCoy about this, and I will continue to ask other designers about how they take care while pursuing their passions.

Back Outsourced on Kickstarter

Coming Soon to The AGP

• An interview with watt, the creator of Cloud Empress

• An interview with Steve Cochrane, creator of the upcoming Morticians RPG

• An interview with Iko of The Lost Bay, publisher of the upcoming Outer Rim: Uprising bundle for Mothership

• A review of Altar Shock by Disaster Tourism

• More WIP house rules and essays from Advanced Rules

The Progeny Crowd Sale

• Purchase a boxed copy of our new The Brood inspired solo or Wardenless Mothership Microgame, The Progeny. The Crowd Sale runs until October 10.

• You can check out the free rules hosted by The AGP.

Purchase a copy of The Progeny

If you have missed my prior articles defining my solo/Wardenless methodology for Mothership, I have included the prior links below.

• Narrative Dice Pools for Mothership

• Dynamic Tables

• Encounter Dice AI

This article is focused on defining personalities and simple AI for contractors and then laying out a solo/Wardenless exploration procedure to put all of this together. I will talk about some ways that you can build and modify maps to support this methodology in a future article, but you could start playing using this methodology using the three articles above in combination with this article.

Contractor Personalities

A solo or Wardenless party is ideally made up of four controllable characters. In the case of solo and partner play, this is handled through the use of Contractors. A solo party consists of one PC and three contractors with generated personalities. If you are playing with a partner, each person controls a PC and a contractor, and if you are playing with three or four people, you each just control a PC (contractors are optional).

For solo and Wardenless play, contractors are controlled indirectly. A personality consisting of traits and behaviors is generated for each contractor, making their behavior unpredictable. Contractors are another aspect of problem-solving, you need to react to their behavior the same way that you need to react to the behavior of encounters. This approach is heavily influenced by the solo protocol included with Cloud Empress by watt. This is the contractor equivalent of the Dice AI for encounters. This makes the gameplay experience somewhere in between a traditional player-driven solo experience and an experience that solely uses player emulation since you directly control yourself and then indirectly control your crew of contractors.

Personality Design Sequence

This is a modification of the solo character generation from Cloud Empress.

You are creating a d10 personality table to represent the personality for a contractor, this is part of the included contractor sheet. You follow the following sequence to generate the personality of the contractor at the time of character creation.

1. Roll a d5. This is the likelihood that a certain trait will be expressed by a contractor each turn. You will fill in the number of rows rolled with a trait and its corresponding behavior.

2. Roll a d10 to select a trait and its related behavior from the Trait Table.

3. Repeat the process until you’ve filled the entire personality table.

For example, you roll the d5 and get a 5 and then roll the d10 and get a 4. You surround the box for sections 1-4 of the Contractor Trait Table with a heavy line and then you fill in the Trait "Helpful," and its corresponding behavior. Next you roll the d5 and get a 3 and then roll the d10 and get a 7. You surround the next three boxes on the Trait Table with a heavy line and fill in the Trait "Charismatic," and its corresponding behavior. Finally, you roll the d5 and get a 5, and you roll a d10 and get a 10. You surround the final two boxes on the Trait Table with a heavy line since there are only two boxes left (even though you rolled a 5). You then write the Trait "Wildcard" in this set of boxes along with its corresponding behavior. Ultimately, you are then able to read the Contractor Trait Table on their Contractor Sheet, and you see that this generated Contractor is Helpful 50% of the time, Charismatic 30% of the time, and a Wildcard 20% of the time.

As you run the Solo or Wardenless Procedure, you will be able to see what behavior a Contractor will engage in according to the Dice AI Roll if you do not ask them to take a different action (which requires a successful Loyalty Save from the contractor as well).

Trait Table

1 - Aggressive - Approaches the nearest encounter and attacks

2 - Stubborn - Refuses to do anything

3 - Scared - Runs away from encounters, attempts to get Out of Range

4 - Helpful - Gives [+] on all rolls to crewmembers within Close Range

5 - Jittery - Panic!

6 - Talkative - Chats with fellow crew members even in the worst situations, gives [-] to all crew members within Close Range, automatically reveals their location to encounters

7 - Charismatic - All crewmembers who failed re-roll their Loyalty Saves

8 - Argumentative - Attacks the closest crewmember with their bare hands

9 - Distrustful - Gives [-] on their next Loyalty Save

10 - Wildcard - Roll for a random behavior off this table whenever this trait is triggered

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Solo/Wardenless Procedure

This is a procedure designed for using modules even if they are modules created or adapted by someone who is playing the game. If you make up your own original content, you are still playing through it in a non-authoring way. There are suggestions for converting existing modules in the sections of the book about Dynamic Tables and Dice AI. You can run this as a crawl procedure in traditional game with a Warden, but this can end up a little too mechanical if you’re not careful.

One key difference with this method of play is that everyone gets to see what’s in the module, it’s very helpful if everyone has access to a copy. It may be useful for the facilitator to make packets of material for the upcoming session.

You can play out social encounters and isolated enemy encounters using theater of the mind, and there are some mapping techniques and ways for handling social encounters that will be discussed in future articles. However, if you enter into a more confined location with rooms and encounters you use the following broad procedure to proceed. The turn counter for the area’s Dynamic Table is set to zero when you enter the location.

1. Roll a Speed or Fear Check for each PC to determine initiative. If a PC is successful, they will act before the encounters, and if they fail, they will act after the encounters.

   • If there are no spawned creatures, you do not need to roll for initiative.

2. Roll a d10 and a d5 to determine the Behavior and Attack AI for the turn.

3. Roll Loyalty Saves for all contractors. Contractors who succeed will allow you to give them instructions for the current turn, and contractors who fail will only follow the behavior defined by their Trait Table and Behavior as selected using the Behavior AI roll.

4. Construct, roll, and play out a cooperative narrative dice pool as necessary for each action group determined by initiative. As always with Mothership only add a roll to the pool for actions taken under stressful situations. Use the AI rolled on the turn to help construct the dice pool as necessary for Contractors and Creatures. There are rules for stacking encounters and contractors that can simplify this and will be discussed in another future article. You also need to remember to roll on the Dynamic Table for the current area as necessary as characters enter rooms unoccupied by PCs or contractors.

5. Increment the turn counter.

6. Start the next turn by starting this procedure from the beginning and continue until you leave the area, everyone dies, or you decide to end the session.

Links

• The Progeny Crowd Sale goes live in a week on September 12. Support our solo/Wardenless programmed adventure for Mothership.

• Outsourced: The The Luko Fin Corp Deception for Mothership 1E is live today! Support this module with a great team. I will be publishing an interview with Marco Serrano about this module, solo RPGs, and parenting as an indie creator in next weeks issue.

• Outer Rim: Uprising is another great campaign packed to the brim with content. It will be launching in early October, and we will be publishing an interview with Iko from The Lost Bay about this bundle and his WIP game The Lost Bay.

Freebie for Paid Subscribers

I’m super excited to announce Joshua Justice’s first adventure module, Radio Free Hekate. It’s a gorgeous pamphlet with art by Amanda Lee Franck and layout and editing by D.N. Wilkie. For paid subscribers, I am attaching a free copy of the pamphlet itself. If you want any of the additional VTT materials and player handouts, you will need to purchase a copy from Itch. We will also be distributing a limited physical run of these via Tuesday Knight Games, World of Game Design, Indie Press Revolution, and the RV Games Shop.

Read more

Along with creating Dynamic Table you also need to create Dice AI to power your encounters if you are looking to create or convert modules for solo or Wardenless play. The Dice AI to power encounters is very simple and is inspired by the Dice AI table used for the Alpha Gaunt in Tuesday Knight Games module Dead Planet. For each creature, you need to create two tables:

1. A d10 Behavior Table

2. A d5 Attack Table

The Behavior Table guides how a creature will behave outside of Combat. Will it approach players, run away from them, follow a more complex pattern? With ten entries you have a lot to work with to translate from the narrative description of an encounter's behaviors. However, quite often, you don't need a full ten entries. If you only need two options, I would suggest using even and odd versus 1-5 and 6-10 because it is easier.

The Attack Table guides how a creature will behave once they are in Combat range. If a creature has multiple attacks with different ranges, they will attack with their longest range attack once they are in range. However, if they can use multiple attacks this attack table determines what attack they will use.

The positioning of behaviors and attacks on these tables is important since you only roll a single d10 and a single d5 during each turn of the procedure (detailed in a future post) to determine the AI behavior of all of the creatures and contractors that are in play. If you put everything in escalating order or place all of the same behaviors in the same numerical bands, it leads to a really boring predictable AI because every single creature will be approaching or attacking with the same general strength of attack in any given turn. If you randomize and alternate how the behaviors and attacks show up in the Dice AI tables, you end up with something very dynamic and unpredictable. Rather than rolling an AI roll for every creature and every Contractor every time, you roll once and randomize the Dice AI tables instead. This small tweak is what makes these Dice AI not become onerous to run, you aren’t making an AI roll for every encounter and encounter for every single turn.

Even if you don’t decide to run a creature using a Dice AI, thinking it through as a Warden or as a module writer gives you a much clearer picture of how to run a creature. I will be including Dice AI like this for any creatures I develop moving forward because the table gives a very concise mechanical definition of what you mean by a narrative description without becoming something too onerous to use. I think of these Dice AI and Dynamic Tables as messages about intent that writers can send to Wardens through their text. Every table interprets and runs a module differently, but these methods make clearer the type of experience intended by the designer even if you decide to steer drastically away from these tables.

Example

To help make this text make sense, I am also providing an example. This example is for a creature from my WIP module Orgy of the Blood Leeches that has been built using these Dice AI from the ground up. It is my first full-sized module to take a solo or Wardenless approach first rather than adding it as an additional protocol. Advanced Rules is being made to serve as the second book to accompany this module.

Hopper

C: 40, I: 40, 3(20)

Description

Heavily mutated host that has lost the ability to see beyond rough shapes. Hunts in packs using echolocation. Weak to bright lights and drawn to loud sounds. Bright lights stun a hopper for 1d5 turns. Highly intelligent and will seek to avoid humans unless provoked or hungry. Can merge with other hoppers to make a centipede-like creature. Merged hoppers combine their health and increase Combat by 10 for each additional Hopper; however, every Wound of damage causes a merged Hopper to lose 10 Combat. Can move from Out of Range to Adjacent in a single turn.

Attacks

Impale - 2 Wounds, Gore, Adjacent

• Can leap across a room, knocking someone over, impaling them with their keratin infused legs

• Requires a successful Body or Speed Save to avoid

Spit - 2d10 for 1d5 turns unless chemically neutralized with a base, Fire, Long Range

• Corrosive spit that melts flesh, highly flammable

• Will eat through anything but heavy steel or titanium

• If collected in a proper vessel, it is well-suited to making a molotov cocktail.

Claw - 1d10x2, Bleeding, Adjacent

• Can use it’s rudimentary claws to slice flesh

Behavior Table

d10 - Behavior

1-3 - Attempt to surround the nearest sound

4-6 - Move directly towards the nearest sound

7-8 - Regroup

9 - Attempt Escape

10 - Merge

Attack Table

d5 - Attack

1 - Claw

2 - Spit

3 - Impale

4 - Impale + Claw

5 - Impale + Spit

The Progeny Crowd Sale

This is a reminder of our upcoming crowd sale for the boxed version of The Progeny that starts on September 12. It features a simplified version of this Dice AI (three entries in an Attack Table and behaviors so simple they do not require a Behavior Table) system. The Progeny is a proof-of-concept for this methodology and for a portion of Orgy of the Blood Leeches.

• Info Page With Free Rules

Links

• RV Games Shop - This is the best place if you want physical copies from us, we are able to keep all of the funds from this (minus overhead).

  • 10% Off Discount Code for Newsletter Subscribers

• I’m now on Bluesky. It seems like this is where Twitter folks are going, so I’m trying it out.

  • https://bsky.app/profile/rvgames.company

• Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception is a Kickstarter Campaign for an upcoming Mothership 1e module by Spicy Tuna RPG. It includes an adventure by Christian Sorrell (MeatCastle Gameware) and solo rules by Alfred Valley. Check it out!

• Outer Rim: Uprising is an upcoming Kickstarter Campaign for a bundle of 25 zines, pamphlets, maps, cards, audio tape, and playing facing accessories by a roster of 12 veteran RPG designers. This is put together by Iko of The Lost Bay. This will be one hell of a package.

Subscribe now

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to remind everyone that the Crowd Sale for The Progeny (free rules available at the link and paid subscribers get print & play access to all of our Microgames) starts on September 12. Follow the project on The Game Crafter to be notified when it goes live.

Origins of The Progeny

The Progeny started as a game jam entry as a design experiment for the ideas I’ve had around solo and Wardenless play in addition to working out larger design ideas for Orgy of the Blood Leeches. These larger design ideas and ways to play solo and Wardenless have also expanded beyond just Orgy of the Blood Leeches as I discussed in my announcement for Advanced Rules. I’ve been working on Orgy of the Blood Leeches for over a year now, and it’s required me to start the second large project Advanced Rules and to design and put out The Progeny as a Microgame, so I can work out workflow and ideas in a smaller, lower stakes space than Orgy of the Blood Leeches, which is the module that I have wanted to make since I started playing Mothership.

The Beginning of a Series of Design Notes

This newsletter entry marks the start of a series of design notes. I discuss how something appears in the The Progeny, and then I will share a larger discussion of adapting this to Mothership 1e to Advanced Rules after playing with the ideas in The Progeny. It’s a transparent view of my workflow and design process. These notes will include the following topics in upcoming newsletters:

• Dynamic Tables

• Dice AI

• Generating Contractor Personalities

• Grid Maps in Mothership

• Zones in Mothership

• Contractor and Encounter Stacking in Mothership

• Solo and Wardenless Play Procedures for Mothership

Dynamic Tables

This entry is close to my heart because it's something that I've been processing for a while. This topic is what I've decided to call Dynamic Tables. If you're playing a game solo or wardenless all of the information is available to you from a module. Hidden information is going to produce surprise or unforeseen situations, and this can be boring. You can procedurally generate areas as you play, but that doesn't really cut it for me either because I vastly prefer to have a well made map that represents a situation. Traditionally, there are monster tables and treasure tables and sometimes you can see an interesting combination of them in the form of the overloaded encounter die. Dynamic tables are a variant of this.

When I first started playing and designing for Mothership, Emmy's Derelictcrawl Procedure was highly recommended and seemed to be used a lot. It uses an overloaded encounter die in the form of the d20 Panic die used in Motherships. It allows a party to explore an area with rooms using dungeon turns, and the Warden rolls the Panic die whenever there is an exploration turn. It breaks the d20 table down into broad effects: Panic, Encounter, Horror, Setback, Locality, Clue, Free, and Regroup. These are the general types of actions a Warden would take, but it takes a little bit of the burden off of the Warden. However, it still involves the Warden making up quite a bit on the fly and isn't specific to any module. It also supposes secret information for whatever is in a room. This is a tremendously powerful procedure, and I've included a variant in my published module, Slasher. However, my mind was blown when I published The Great Crossing Heresies for Chris Airiau. That pamphlet adds a counter to a table with events called the "Haunting Table." It's specific to the module and what is interesting about it is that as the counter goes up, it takes away options since you add the counter to the d5 that you roll to select an entry to the table. This builds pacing into the table, the longer you play, the more likely you are to encounter something more horrific.

Dynamic Tables combine the Derelictcrawl approach with Chris's module specific counter based approach. You can see an example of a Dynamic Table in action in the free rules for The Progeny. For a Mothership Dynamic Table, I base everything around the dice that are already used in Mothership, so a d10 and a d20. A Dynamic Table takes the form of a d30 table. You use a d10 as the turn counter, and you always roll the d20 whenever you enter a room unoccupied by another friendly. This is why a Dynamic Table has 30 entries. When you start and the counter is at 0, your only choices on the table will be entries 1-20. When you max out the turn counter at 10, your only choices are for entries 11-30. This is important because it lets you set the pacing. You can use the same idea from the Derelictcrawl procedure, but make it more specific to a module. specify the horror, require a Panic check and increase the counter, find an item when you search the room, have places to rest and recover stress, and find clues. By ordering these types of things in the table, you can control when they happen. If you don't place any encounters early in the table, you are ensuring that there will not be any encounters early in a session. If you place encounters entirely at the higher end of the table, you can build in escalation to violence. If you intersperse encounters throughout the table, you can make something with a more even chance of violence. By adjusting the frequency and order of what's in the table, you can build a picture of how to play through a session. Since you're rolling only when entering unccoupied rooms, it also makes players venturing away from the party a risk since then you're rolling on the table, possibly causing Panic or causing an encounter to spawn multiple times instead of just once if they players are moving together. This works really well in combination with the way to use Grid Maps that I will discuss in a later newsletter. Each time you enter an unoccupied space, it triggers a roll. This allows for it to operate almost like a video game where you trigger events by entering spaces.

You now have a method that gives randomness and structure, so you can play through solo or wardenless and can still be surprised. Even though you can see the table, it just gives you knowledge of the likelihood that something will happen, but you don't when or if something will actually occur because it is a roll. You are kept on your toes, and you can play through a session with pacing that approximates a Warden. The game ends up Wardening itself, letting you focus on problem-solving and gameplay without a position of authority at the table, the table is the authority.

If you're designing a module that’s not even designed to be solo or Wardenless, this is still a great way to build a table for an area, because the table gives Wardens a really clear picture of how you envision the scenario playing out without being too prescriptive. Even if they don't use the procedure as written, they have a very clear picture of the pacing and the types of things they will encounter. It can let them know where creatures spawn, if they should spawn in the same room as the players, or if they are spawned randomly as a more wandering monster. You're able to make your intent clear without being heavy handed. Even if running a module as a traditional Warden, I appreciate the kind of guidance that a procedure like this gives me. I'm a teacher, and I always develop a really rough outline for facilitating a lesson, and then I bounce back and forth and adjust on the fly. A Dynamic Table gives the Warden this kind of a plan, not a railroad with text boxes to read.

However, if you want to convert an already existing module that does not use a Dynamic Table, there is some work to do. This is part of the work of the facilitator role that I will talk about in further detail in another newsletter. In short, the facilitator will need to work through the module, gather maps, and construct the table with the right items, spookiness, downtime, and encounters. The facilitator has to think about how they would run the module as a Warden and then codify it in the form of the table. However, this is all front loaded, so when it comes to actually playing at the table, the facilitator is able to actually play and assist others with rules without having to be an arbiter of rulings. This is why they are a facilitator and not a Warden.

Solo and Wardenless First

The suggestions for building stock Mothership modules using solo and Wardenless tools fits with how I have started thinking solo and Wardenless first when designing a module. A Warden can paper over a lot of holes in a module, but if you’re designing it to be played without that kind of assistance, I feel like you end up with a module that is stronger in its fundamentals and legibility. You have to think through exactly how something would play out more, and it makes it easier to playtest by yourself before something is ready for a more public appearance. Solo and Wardenless first will also continue to be discussed throughout these newsletters leading up to and going through The Progeny Crowd Sale.

Links

I also have a couple links to some other fabulous crowdfunding events that are happening over the next couple of months.

• Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception for Mothership 1E

  • This is a corporate escape module by Spicy Tuna RPG with art from Evangeline Gallagher, an adventure by Christian Sorrell, and solo rules by Alfred Valley.

  • This has a great team and some wonderful art, and I will be featuring a mini-interview with Marco Serrano from Spicy Tuna RPG in an upcoming newsletter.

• Outer Rim: Uprising

  • This is a massive bundle with a lot of content and a huge roster of Mothership Designers including Ike, Chris Airiau, and Christian Sorrell.

• The Lost Bay RPG - This is more of an early look, slow funding project that is also from Iko and is fantastics.