Looking Back and Pushing Forward
FREEBIE: Lophin - system-free rural sci-fi town pamphlet!
As the first Missive of the year, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to look back at the last year for MeatCastle GameWare and look forward at what 2023 holds!
Looking Back
2022 was MCGW’s biggest year yet! It was a whirlwind of hard work and preparation for my first Kickstarter, that project doing FAR better than I ever would have imagined, several really encouraging talks at GenCon with other industry folks, continuing to grow my work, playing more TTRPGs than ever before, and making the jump from full-time coffee shop manager to part-time barista and full-time TTRPG writer/editor!
It was really a transformative year for me. It certainly wasn’t an easy year, especially when it came to stuff outside of TTRPGs in the wider world and my life personally, but it was easily one of the most eventful years ever (in a very good way)!
2022 Highlights:
The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station campaign was a huge success and it’s now finished and out in the world!
Orbital Debris saw similar success and is out now digitally (and coming soon to print)!
Released 10 personal projects of varying sizes from The Bloodfields (a 40 pg. zine) to A Sunless Space (a double-sided postcard game)!
Released the “shareware” demo version of Tacticians of Ahm, my first standalone system and a project I’m going to grow into something much bigger this year!
Made the jump to TTRPG work full-time and have been consistently booked up on freelance work!
Edited projects for Mothership 1e, Old School Essentials, and Fallen!
Wrote adventures/supplements for Mothership 1e, Guild: Sword and Magick for Hire, Running Out of Time, Primal Quest, and Through the Void!
Pushing Forward
I have a lot I’m hoping to achieve in 2023, centered around two large projects: Tacticians of Ahm and A Home in the Dark. I have two smaller projects on the roadmap as well and imagine I’ll try to do an additional project or two for game jams that I don’t even know about yet! Beyond that, you can check out the MORE COOL STUFF section below for a handful of my upcoming freelance projects as well!
2023 Roadmap:
Tacticians of Ahm: This is a really special system for my home group and I. We’ve played almost a dozen playtest session already, developed the core rules a lot, and added a lot of equipment, enemies, and more to the mix. Now that my schedule is opening up, it’s going to the front of my project development time and is something I hope to bring to either crowdfunding or pre-orders later this year. Plans are still early, but I’m hoping to make it a 3-4 zines box set (similar to something like Chris Bisette’s Dungeon Drop) with a load of VTT goodies as well.
A Home in the Dark: This is the next big Mothership project! It will be a larger book focused around a strange, uncharted star system accidentally discovered the PCs when their ship drops unexpectedly out of warp. In the first half of the book, it will feature 3-4 planets each with their own strange anomalies and old facilities, strange ruins, and more for you to explore and even claim for yourself. The second half will be a facility building and management system allowing your players to reclaim old facilities for themselves, create a base of operations for the campaign, and develop it over time. The Mothership universe is a harsh one though so running your own station also opens you up to pirate attacks, bringing alien infestations home, betrayal among the hired help and more! I am a big fan of stronghold/city builder type subsystems in games and I think Mothership is ripe for one considering the high lethality and how a company or ship can often be the central focus of a campaign (rather than a single player). This will be full of ways to PCs to build a place for themselves in a harsh universe with all the opporunity and danger that provides.
I Cannot See the Stars: A Mothership pamphlet inspired by the horror film Skinimarink. This is kind of an experimental concept (much like the movie that inspired it) where everyone - the Warden and players - all know there is no way out for their characters. Everyone will die here, sooner or later, but we play to see how and why and to see what the players can do with the time they have left. It’s removing the SURVIVE option from Mothership’s SURVIVE, SOLVE, SAVE and turning the focusing to SOLVE and SAVE. Why is this happening and what is the entity that taunts you from the dark? How can you keep this from happening to others? How can you stop it from spreading?
Remnants of the Lord of Order: I’ve been wanting to do a proper Mork Borg dungeon for almost two years now and this will be my slightly unusual approach to that where I bring a temple of the Lord of Order to the distinctly chaotic world of Mork Borg. It will take a much different visual style than the usual MB adventure and will be full of puzzles and odd enemy interactions structured around terrifyingly absolute Order.
Looking back on my first 3 months of full-time TTRPG work, I’ve found that I’ve nearly broken even financially with my situation before (including my part-time work as well, of course). This is really promising as I was expecting to have to eat into savings, need 6-9 months to really spin up and get a packed schedule, etc. I’m hoping that 2023 is the year I can take it even further and eventually grow beyond my part-time work, but I’m not going to rush it. I know consistent and good work is more important than anything else and that’s what I’m aiming to bring you all this year.
Without you all none of last year and none of these plans for 2023 would be possible so thank you all, once again!
MISSIVE EXCLUSIVE
LOPHIN is a system-free sci-fi/sci-fantasy town and planet setting pamphlet that we’ve been working on section by section over the last few months and it is finally here in all its completed gatefold fashion!
You can download it HERE in both standard and printer-friendly versions!
GET MY STUFF
The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station physical bundle is now available at the Tuesday Knight Games store, Exalted Funeral, Indie Press Revolution, and more!
Tunnels in White, my new Liminal Horror mystery, is available digitally NOW with print copies dropping (hopefully) next month as part of #ZiMo2023! I got my start GMing in the horror mystery space with games like Call of Cthulhu so it was fun to go back into that mindset while writing this adventure. It’s also a bit of an origin story for Dextro-Singleton, the megacorp mentioned in several of my Mothership projects. Check it out HERE!
My lo-fi, in-universe Mothership zine Corpo Culture Killed My Dog should also be dropping next month on both the Tuesday Knight Games shop and my new direct store (coming soon)!
MORE COOL STUFF
Cloud Empress, World by Watt’s latest project, is live now on Kickstarter and it’s one of my most anticipated projects of 2023. Check it out HERE!
I also got to take part in a really fun Cloud Empress actual play wardened by Watt over on Plus One Exp! We played The Last Voyage of the Bean Barge (available HERE), and I am still thinking about it.
Sean McCoy also recently chatted with Watt about the project, supporting your systems with a long-tail of great adventures, and more in his newsletter, Win Conditions.
Tim Obermueller and Logan Dean are co-writing Hoss, an upcoming Mothership zine about a powerful working class hero that is savior to some, enemy to others, and is definitely more than meets the eye. I’ll be editing this project and with those two at the helm for writing, I’m really excited to get my hands on the manuscript! You can find the KS pre-launch HERE.
I recently did some developmental editing on Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones which is coming to Kickstarter as part of #ZiMo2023. It’s a really interesting, complex Metroid-vania and Bioshock-like adventure that I enjoyed getting to work on! It’s got a lot of meat to it and some really unique aspects I’m interested to see players experience at the table (cus there are some WILD ways it can go). Check out the KS pre-launch page HERE.
Orbital Debris, a massive Mothership hexcrawl/setting book on a garbage-covered moon that I wrote and edited for, released digitally last month! You can still pre-order it now to get the PDF (as well as an at-cost code for print-on-demand when it goes live here soon). Get it HERE!
SpicyTunaRPG has a Primal Quest zine, A Butterfly Dies, inspired by Mexican Myth and the Mexican Muralist Movement coming as part of #Zimo2023! Marco is having me on to edit the project, which I’m really stoked about (both as a fan of Marco and of Primal Quest)! I think Primal Quest has a great potential for BIPOC creators the world over to create wonderful adventures inspired by their ancestral myths and legends and I hope this is just the first of many we see for the game. You can find the KS pre-launch page HERE!
A really massive remastered and expanded edition of Magnum Galaxy’s Nirvana on Fire for Mothership 1e is live now on Kickstarter and everything I’ve seen of it looks pretty incredible. Check it out HERE!
#Dungeon23 continues! I recently finished Floor 1 - The Temple of Kardox of my megadungeon, The Deep Hot Heart of the World. You can follow my daily progress over at THIS Twitter thread.
Just before the new year, I dropped a short thread on some of my favorite games I actually got to play in 2022!
The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station is part of a great Zines of 2022 bundle right now over at Itch.io! For $25, you can get 18 zines! Check it out HERE!
Thanks for reading! This may be the LONGEST missive yet but a lot happened over the last month and there’s even more to come going into #ZiMo2023! Next month, I’m going to dig into the design of Tacticians of Ahm and the importance of playtesting! - Christian
Really looking forward to digging into the Tacticians of Ahm this year and I'm excited for what's to come! Thanks for the Cloud Empress shout out too!
Hell yeah Christian! So excited to see what you do in the next 12 months! And I can’t wait to work with you again! This year is gonna rule for you!