Mothership Backers Join the Fray!
Plus, new monthly exclusives for you to take to the table!
This missive is an exciting one for me because it’s the first to include all of the Orbital Debris and Bloodfields at Blackstar Station backers that subscribed to the newsletter via those campaign surveys! Welcome to the club!
In honor of the big jump in subscribers here, I wanted to similarly increase the value of the newsletter itself so going forward each new missive will have a free, exclusive something for you to take to your table.
Today, this is a new weapon for use in your Mothership game (since I know we have a lot of Mothership fans here), but in the future, it may be a system-agnostic dungeon, a fantasy adventure for a different system, and/or more!
One of my favorite aspects of the indie RPG space is playing a number of games, creating for a number of games, and just building our experiences and flexing my creativity across genres and game type.
Since my last missive, I received a slew of playtest feedback for ULTIMATE BADASS, made adjustments and finalized the digital and proof copies. This effectively brings all the physical rewards work for The Bloodfields campaign to a state of completion!
While I wait to hear back from more backers via the Backerkit Survey (92% had responded so far), I am working to get all of the Digital Assets in line as well. This means making standalone versions of ALL the sector, character, contestant, and station art Roque did for the project. It’s a bit tedious but well worth the work considering how many of us primarily play TTRPGs virtually these days.
All told, I’m about 3 weeks away from ordering the print runs for The Bloodfields, doing digital fulfillment, and then waiting for the runs to come in and for my fulfillment partner to get them out to people. Logistics and waiting, but not much creating (which is the part I truly love doing) so I looking forward to the next few projects.
After some inspiring chats with folks at GenCon last weekend, I am working on seeing how realistically I could shift my current day job to part-time and my games writing and design work to full-time (rather than the other way around, like it is now). My next few projects are going to be me testing the waters on writing for other folks’ projects, acting as an editor for hire, and more. I want to get experience in the short term with the other ways to make money (and to contrdibute to projects) in this space beyond doing it all myself (in terms of writing, layout, project management, etc.). This will help give me a better idea of the kind of work I want to dig into on a regular basis going forward, if going full-time is truly possible.
I imagine 2 large, self-directed projects a year surrounded by smaller/freelance contributions to the work of others will be the mix of work I find most sustainable and enjoyable, but I have to try it all to find out first! I learn best by doing so it’s time to get out and do some more cool stuff.
Once announcements are made, I’ll be working my way through the process of doing that kind of work here with you all in the coming months!
MISSIVE EXCLUSIVE!
Intended for use with the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG 1e
My intent with this weapon was creating something that would create unique moments not seen in the standard list of Mothership weapons. While visually similar to the rigging gun, my intent is that with decreased damage and increased range the TPTC3 will stick to its original, in-fiction use case: collecting tissue/environmental samples from a safe distance. There are load of modules where a scientist with a tissue sample could learn much and having a weapon that works towards the “Solve” aspect of an adventure rather than purely the “Survive” angle is interesting to me.
More knowledge may build towards an exciting, more prepared climax for the players. Plus, trying to use this weapon to collect a sample of an alien creature and then failing also brings about a whole slew of fun twists and turns. It’s a risk with big rewards given the right situation. Plus, it’s just cool (to me, anyway).
What kind of exclusives would you like to see in a future Missive?
MORE COOL STUFF
I joined Ryan from The Weekly Scroll for an interview with Diogo Nogueira and a read-through/review of Primal Quest. This was a lot of fun and it was exciting to discuss more of a system that’s one of my favorite to read and play in a long while. PQ is focused on weird stone and sorcery stories in an unreal prehistoric world.
The Mothership Discord is holding a lo-fi, in-universe zine jam where the challenge is to make a cheap bit of ephemera that would exist within the Mothership universe (like a pamphlet the PCs may find in a doctor’s office or a dusty old magazine in a space station bar). I am going old-school in my approach and doing a classic cut-n-paste punk zine titled Corpo Culture Killed My Dog. It’s been a ton of fun doing something more fiction-focused, zero mechanics and just focused more on creation and less on explicit polish. I think it’s going to be a really fun artifact for people’s games.
It will (eventually) be available via the Tuesday Knight Games shop in wonderful physical print form! I’ll post a reminder here in the future when it’s available.
Alan from Tuesday Knight Games featured both of my Mothership pamphlets (along with a huge pile of other killer stuff) on his most recent episode of the Mothershow!
I recently did another read-through thread over on Twitter for Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives’ The Bureau for Liminal Horror. Spoiler alert: It’s cool as heck.
Thanks for reading! Missives change a lot from month-to-month depending on the work I’m doing, how much free time I have and more! So expect deeper dives in the future, more things about and for more systems than just Mothership, and bigger exclusives to bring to your table (I’m dying to get to some fantasy soon)! - Christian