Joining New Projects as a Bonus
"I'm a stretch goal" is very much a TTRPG Scene Thing, isn't it?
Well, September got really weird really quick.
Afterwords: The Far Horizons Guide to Death
Currently being Kickstarted by the Far Horizons Co-Op, Afterwords is “an anthology of short tabletop games and essays about death.” Right now it will include:
Poorna M’s Shadow Market is a storytelling game, based on an interpretation of a Romanian myth about capturing the shadow of a person while laying the foundation of a home, to be played in three stages. In the first stage, the person for whom the home is being built approaches the Shadow Mage, as does the person whose shadow is to be buried. They lay out their life stories – like the worst cover letters ever – with the home builder trying to bargain for more luck and the shadow burier trying to bargain for more time until death claims them.
Jess Marcrum’s Farewell, My Heart is a WLW System duet game about caring for someone with a terminal degenerative disease; it's about confessing your true feelings for that person and living – or dying – with the consequences.
Jeremy Borders’s Upon the Digital Sea is a game about a group of online friends who only meet physically once for the funeral of one member. It's played out of chronological order, exploring the things that bring the group together initially, their lives individually, how they relate to the each other, and how the group splits apart after the funeral.
Keith Asada’s Charon Rails puts players in the roles of psychopomps, taking souls to the lands of the dead in a modern bureaucratic framework. They may craft whatever background and take on whatever job they wish. Their expertise is reflected in the game's four stats (body, wits, spirit, and corp) and a collection of special abilities. General Managers (GMs) craft scenarios in a whimsical world full of salespeople trying to get souls to go to their deity's afterlife, rest stops in the most desolate parts of the hereafter, demanding corporate overlords, and more.
Bastien Trotobas-Gibelin’s essay Embracing Empathy and Diversity will compare the perceptions of death among two groups – neurotypicals and intellectually gifted neurodivergents – drawing on structured interviews with participants in each group. The interviews will cover how proximity to someone informs the impact of their death, spirituality and beliefs surrounding death, the mechanisms and rituals of grief and mourning, and connections to climate change and collapse.
I’d be pointing people towards this no matter what, because it seems like a really cool project, but there’s some additional self-interest. See, if the campaign does well enough, there are some stretch goals to add more games and essays - and I’m among them!
When the call went out for Afterwords, I pitched something I’m calling Reload.
In Reload, characters die over and over again, tackling the same scenario in a loop, gradually figuring out shortcuts and learning info that helps them to win in the end. Because in the final loop, death is forever.
It's going to be built on Breathless, a system that lets characters rest to replenish their abilities, but turned on its head, with only death resetting dice values – and restarting the scenario as the player character(s) reload at the start. Taking inspiration from video games and time loop media such as All You Need Is Kill, the game features figuring out how to overcome obstacles and enemies and ultimately how to escape the time loop. LUMEN tech will be spliced in as a way to improve the characters' abilities via clues, shortcuts, and loot that would allow players to bypass challenges "off-screen" on subsequent loops and make them more capable of tackling further challenges. In keeping with the genre, escaping the loop would require one final redo of the scenario, this time with no way to replenish the characters or to recover from death.
You can cheat death as many times as you'd like, but sooner or later it's going to come calling. In the end, you only have one life to accomplish what you want and need to.
Reload will probably get made no matter what, now that I’ve had the idea, but I know for a fact that it will get made a lot faster and I’m quite sure it’ll be made exponentially better if it’s part of Afterwords. So, throw some support its way to get a bunch of cool-as-the-grave content and lock me in a (game design) loop of my very own. Please and many thank yous!
PLANET FIST: West Marshals
At every hour of every day on Sixaura, the soldiers of each empire are killed and reborn in an endless loop. Their dead bodies derezz, the bonds between their nanos dissolving—just in time for them to be reassembled elsewhere, fresh with the memory of death and ready to kill once again. These clone commandos do not die, do not rest, and do not age. They are duplicated forever, frozen in the same unchanging body, save a few occasional gene-edits from the top brass in order to optimize their killing potential. This is the only life they know. It is a meatgrinder without meat—a bloodbath without blood. And it is also, soldier, your life.
Based on FIST by CLAYMORE, PLANET FIST is a tongue-in-cheek-and-missile-through-face game from Jess Levine, whose games I’ve thoroughly enjoyed looking at before as a reviewer. I’ll be doing the same for this one - it’s a great showcase for how hackable FIST is - but I have some more immediate involvement. See, first of all, I got to hop into one of the last playtests.
As I’ve said elsewhere out there on the socials, seldom have I had so much fun getting vaporized multiple times in a row.
Over the course of seven or so rounds I snuck into an enemy facility, frightened a bunch of allied recruits into charging back at a mech that had already shredded several of them, seized a control point, gazed longingly at an ex before picking off someone attacking them, scared the mech into vanishing in a cloud of nanites, planted a signal beacon, was splattered across a wall by machine gun fire, landed next to the signal beacon in an orbital drop pod having been reconfigured into an anti-vehicle trooper, blasted a hole through a second mech, and was splattered across the opposite wall by said second mech.
I starting missing Setback and the rest of Wolverine Squad almost before the session ended.
Lucky devil that I am, though, I’ll at least get a chance to travel to Sixaura again as a cast member of the West Marches-style actual play series, PLANET FIST: WEST MARSHALS!
PLANET FIST is currently itchfunding with WEST MARSHALS being the second goal, and the cast announcement graphic above is already out of date as the goal has been reached! So, keep an eye out, and consider getting the game to both enjoy and help fund expansions to the game (the next goal is more ready-to-play missions and another battlemap).
The Extras
Tales from the Cockpit is, theoretically, rules and content complete! Since it was first released as part of PocketQuest ‘23, I’ve added 6 more Pilots, 6 more Pilots Table events, 4 more Time Table events, and a new question prompt for the end of each of the three acts.
It’s also managed to cross the line to Copper Best Seller at DriveThruRPG!
It’s also gotten a no-explanation two star rating, which is less thrilling. So, here’s an ask. If you have gotten or do get the game with this special substack-only discount, leave a rating and a review! If it’s five stars, let me know what you liked! If it’s one star, let me know what was terrible! Either way, your help will be greatly appreciated, because I have Some Actual Plans for this game and I want to refine it as much as I can.
Something Cool To Check Out
The Mistborn Adventure Game holds an odd and special place in my heart. The review and Meet the Party for the core game were both the last articles I did for the Mad Adventurers Guild and the first I did for Cannibal Halfling Gaming, cross-posting in the former’s final days and the latter’s first. I’ve only ever run it, and only then ever as one shots using the Alloy of Law era… but it was played twice at the online group’s annual realspace meeting to good acclaim and even tied in our Genesys!Stormlight Archive campaign, and the one time with the usual realspace group got at least person into the books. So, all in all a success.
Well, it looks like Crafty Games are going to be parting ways with the license, but not without a few last hurrahs. They just released a new Nobles-focused supplement for it, and they’ve got a Bundle of Holding going for the rest of the line. Those digital versions will vanish forever come the end of the year, so if you ever wanted to test your metals against the Final Empire or the perils of the Roughs, now is the time!
The last third of the year is looking to be a doozy. There’s WEST MARSHALS, and there’s Afterwords if it funds. There’s Tales from the Cockpit to refine and A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase to get back into. National Game Design Month is coming up fast, and I’m already back into the swing of things moderating and trying to come up with ideas (I played myself a little bit, by making Tales over the summer). I’m probably going to be helping to organize the Ind of the Year Bundle on itch.io again. And then there’s the normal course of Cannibal Halfling Gaming - I’m a little behind my goal for the year, but it’s still within striking distance (oh, by the way, we didn’t win that ENnie, but we lost to the best folk possible).
It’s going to be weird. But interesting!
Until you catch the next Dispatch,
Seamus