Rationing Time
FREEBIE: A Very Normal, Boring Dungeon
As you can tell by when this is going out, I’m running a week or so behind schedule right now! I apologize for the slight delay! I started a full-time local gig here in town after our semi-recent move and that’s been occupying a full-time amount of my time so I’m working out a new routine for how and when my creative work gets completed! Plus, both my wife and I were down-and-out sick for about a week and a half in the middle of all that. It was a tough March! Here’s to a better April though! - Christian
I am very proud of the accomplishments I have had these last few years as a freelancer, but I’m even more proud of my own creative works, the projects that I take from original idea to finished product (often with the help of many great folks along the way). Recently, I have had to change up my overall life arrangement and figured I would walk you all through my thought process.
Our international move from the United States to Canada was more expensive then we planned and I need to build work experience here to work towards our long-term goal of staying permanently in the country so I got a local gig, similar to my situation back home but much more of an hours-per-week commitment to rebuild some of that expended savings and build more experience.
While freelancing is really rewarding and the indie space has been very generous to me in terms of both opportunities and pay, it is rarely reliable enough to stake your entire subsistence upon it. In the past, my part-time local work was aiding in that as well as some of my more successful MCGW projects. With less and less overall time in my life to do creative work and less freelance work to go around these last few months (some parts of the year are always slower than others, it seems), I decided to make a sizeable change.
On the editing front, I’ll be largely maintaining business as usual, only lowering my overall number of editing slots in a given year (probably just 1-2 per month at most, depending on project size).
On the development front, I’ll be moving forward unchanged. I love this type of work and overall, it is fairly low in terms of overall hour counts. It is also the rarest type of work in my portfolio, and I’d love for that to change.
The big change comes on the adventure writing front. Going forward, I am planning to only offer 1-2 adventure writing slots per year. While I love writing for other systems and settings in an official capacity, I’ve simply found that these projects often take me the longest amount of time and pull me too far away from my own creative projects.
Writing for new or upcoming systems can be considerably time intensive considering the writing I am doing may be working to inform how adventures will be written for a game going forward or may need to undergo revisions and changes to meet the game’s structure for adventures as it takes shape. It’s interesting and rewarding work, and I love every adventure I have written for folks in the past (especially some that have yet to see the light of day), but I found the deadlines, the size of the commitments, and the number of hours required for how I work on them to simply be too much to open myself to them as often as I have. In order to ensure I can create more of my own MeatCastle GameWare projects in a timely fashion, something had to give, and freelance adventure writing was that thing.
While I’m sad to be losing time overall to work on TTRPG projects, I am very excited for this change and it will be bringing my own projects, primarily Tacticians of Ahm and the Mothership adventure GOBLIN PLANET, entirely to the forefront of my creative focus.
In a world where we must work to live and where creative work rarely yields enough fruit to live off of, sacrifices must be made but still time must be rationed to feed our creativity and imaginations. There’s no version of my life going forward where I do not create as I have been these last few years. I may create less, but I’ll never stop. It’s a much a driving part of my self as anything else.
Pre-Orders Ending: FIREDROP
FIREDROP, my micro-wargame of drop pod warfare against the superflea hordes, is now in its final week of pre-orders!
I’ll be updating the PDFs to 1.1 (with some corrections/tweaks received in feedback since the game’s digital release last month) and ordering the print run during the first week of April. As soon as they arrive at Space Penguin Ink’s warehouse, they’ll be going straight out to folks! Copies will be available at my shop after pre-ordering but will be fairly limited overall (likely just 100 total copies for this first run including several retailer orders).
Get yours HERE!
Funding Now: The Lost Bay
Iko of The Lost Bay Studio and Outer Rim: Uprising (and the Wicked Wanderer’s Bundle for Mork Borg) fame has launched The Lost Bay, his suburban gothic TTRPG of weirdos in even weirder situations in 199X America, over on Kickstarter!
As part of the already reached stretch goals, I’ll be writing a choose-your-own-adventure style alternate character creation path for the core book! This is going to be fairly lean on words and heavy on moods and vibes, and I think it’ll make for a really cool secondary way to create a character in The Lost Bay. I’m hoping that for most players it feels like THE way to create a character, if I play my cards right.
You can check out the campaign and back it yourself HERE.
Funding Now: CE - Life & Death
I'm doing more developmental work on Cloud Empress's new Land of Life and Death setting books! The project goes live TODAY. In addition to the new setting books, it’s also bringing the core game to hardback, along with a cool collector's box to put it all in one pretty place.
You can check out the campaign and back it yourself HERE.
FREEBIE: Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale - Part I
This month’s Missive Freebie is Part 1 of Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale, my weird and wild take on a very standard, boring, traditional five-room dungeon. While it may look like a dime a dozen little fantasy dungeon, I promise it goes to some weird places pretty much right off the bat. Overall, it’s focused on creating an environment that welcomes the GM (and players) to bring stacks of their other TTRPG books, adventures, and even novels to the table in order to pull in items, locations, and enemies.
Once I got a bit into working on this, I realized I really wanted it to be more than just a few quick, fun room descriptions so, similar to the Lophin setting pamphlet I did in the past, this one is going to be released in stages with Part 1 in this issue and Part 2 completing the 16 page or so zine of the overall dungeon.
For now, enjoy the first 3 chambers!
Download the first part of the full dungeon zine HERE!
MORE COOL STUFF
I got a collection of wonderful play reports following last month’s release of FIREDROP, including one from Violet Ballard of RV Games, a very experienced microgame player and creator, who said:
I had an amazing time playing this with my 10-year-old son. It was his first wargame, he'd mostly played HeroQuest, Azul, and kids games up until this point. FIREDROP scratches that entry level Microgame wargame itch, a wonderful little dudes on a map game.
I got a chance to play some Call of Cthulhu for the first time in years and have been having a lot of fun. We are playing one of the two adventures from Chaosiums’s recent Dead Light and Other Dark Turns, and our finale is coming up this week! Will my Bolshevik-sympathizing turned exile Russian smuggler Ignat Papanov live to see tomorrow? There’s so much I still really love about this system, but also a lot more that I would tweak, remove, or replace entirely. Maybe one day I’ll get to make my own historical horror heartbreaker.
FIREDROP brought a huge influx of subscribers last month, and it was awesome to see. I wasn’t sure what kind of response to expect for my first non-TTRPG thing, and it’s exciting to see a lot of folks willing to check out my work in new (if not similar) arenas. I’ll be keeping that in mind in the future, for sure! If you are new here, thank you so much for joining the gang!
I recently re-organized my TTRPG shelves and notes and discovered these early test prints from The Mole on PIRAD ONE, my very first TTRPG creation. It was fun to see all these iterations and how unsure/paranoid I was about every little change and how it would actually turn out on the page itself. Also, I really liked that ASCII Mothership header I had on the original version, but it didn’t fit with Tuesday Knight Game’s licensing guidelines so it got the axe. Ah well!
Helena Santana has been hard at work on a few more pieces for Tactician of Ahm’s next update! Here’s Dekkin Von Lopesbane, a legendary Tactician and your professor at the Academy during the game’s starter adventure Early Graduation!
Aaron King created a short n’ sweet TTRPG where you only roll saves and your table decides all 5 saves when you gather to play so it’s all saves and totally built for your world, players, etc. It’s elegant and simple (and I’ve already thought of a dozen fun ways to play it). Check it out HERE!
Several of the 2023 Meaties winners posted some photos of their Winner’s Edition copies of the zine, along with the MCGW stickers I sent along! I’m so happy they got all the way to them safely.
2023 Meatie winner Charlotte Laskowski recently released DAISY CHAINSAW, a bloody and beautiful game of magical girls and cosmic threats. The art and design on this one looks tremendous. Check it out HERE!
Roque Romero, artist of both my adventures The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station and Tunnels in White, recently unveiled his cover art for the Spanish language version of the Liminal Horror Investigators book and it’s just killer. I want a copy, and I can only barely put any of my high school and college spanish skills to use at this point. You can find more info (in Spanish) HERE.
Zach Hazard Vaupen, The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station’s hexmap artist and all around awesome creator in his own right, recently released the Metaphysical Squatter, an optional character class for CY_BORG that looks great. Check it out HERE!
Thanks so much for your continued time, attention, and support! It means the world to me (and genuinely helps fuel me to keep creating)! If you’ve got any thoughts or questions about anything at all, drop them below. See you next month!
- Christian
My Mothership group has asked about Goblin Planet multiple times since I mentioned it, so this is great news on that front!