When to Say When
Plus: ENNIE Nominations, New Releases, and More Cool Stuff
Over the last year, my wife and I upended our entire life, moved out of the United States, immigrated to Canada, and have been building our new life here. In that time, I became the primary source of income for our household, originally just focusing on TTRPG work for that until I was able to get things like my work permit to start working locally. Over those months, everything was more expensive than we expected, took longer than expected, and, honestly, was just simply more difficult, more tiring, and more work than we expected. Even now nearly a year in, we are still making slow progress on certain steps, planning next steps, and more (we move into a considerably better apartment later this month, for example). Rebuilding your life in a new place is exciting, fulfilling, and beautiful, but it is also utterly exhausting.
I’d wager that probably less than 50 people in the English-speaking world make enough income as full-time, indie creators in the TTRPG space to entirely support themselves and their family. For myself, I was able to spend almost two years doing games work full-time because I worked part-time in my previous day job and had a partner bringing in an equivalent income to mine (and did not have any big additional expenses like children). Even then, I felt extremely lucky to be in the position I was in and loved each and every day of that work. I was able to work on dozens of projects, put out substantial monthly pieces, and make sure and steady progress on my larger personal projects.
It was, in many way, the writer’s dream, but it was only really sustainable in that precise configuration. Now, that has shifted and I’ve spent the last several months mentally and emotionally floundering as I try to balance the scales on full-time day job work, full-time writing work, and more than full-time immigrating work (learning how new government systems work here, how taxes work here, how insurance works here, how sick time and vacation pay work here, what kind and when to apply for updated permits, etc.).
This is all to say: I am going to be taking a ninety-day-or-so hiatus from all freelance work and will be heavily limiting my personal project work as well.
Of course, I will be sticking to my existing obligations, and I am happy to be a part of them as I’ve already been a bit more selective in recent months about what projects I knew I could or couldn’t do. As such, I’m working on some great stuff, but I won’t be adding new freelance work to my plate in any capacity during this hiatus.
Tacticians of Ahm development will continue, albeit it on a slower-than-month update schedule so I’ll be updating the Itch page to reflect that fact. Other project work continues as well when I am ready and able to do so. I’ve been making progress in recent weeks and even have a smaller side project approaching a playable state which I’m excited about.
This Missive will continue as well, although it may not be hitting your inbox on a monthly basis. Freebies will come as inspiration strikes for now, but I won’t be forcing any extra work in this area. Still, I hope to provide more than enough free and inexpensive entertainment in the “More Cool Stuff” section to help soothe that temporary change to the format.
Obviously, creative work can happen during times of stress and hardship. Some of the best work often does, but there’s a huge difference between passion and inspiration-driven work that pulls you out of those hard times and aiming to make a day job of creative work. Too often, I think we see the two conflated (or rather all creative work being treated as entirely passion/inspiration-driven) when in my experience, they are two very different modes of creation: one is workmanlike, reasoned, structured, and the other is breakneck, happening around the fringes of the chaos or in notebooks just before you fall asleep. Even then, most projects will need that steady, even-handed approach to cross the finish line from manuscript to Actual Product. When I’m finding myself too burdened by a slew of mostly self-set or imaginary deadlines to actually be in the mindset to creative, something is clearly wrong.
My aim with this hiatus is to get the other aspects of my life, in a world that requires I constantly toil to survive, on track to better embrace those moments of true inspiration and build the structure around me back into one where I can (hopefully) return to the kind of creative output I had over the last few years.
In short, I’m taking a break from many things, but I love games and creating stuff for them too much to ever really stop, but I’m stopping where I can, focusing myself elsewhere, and aiming to come back stronger than ever when fate allows.
ENNIE Awards - 2024 Nominees
This year’s ENNIE Award nominations were recently released, and I while I maintain my overall standing on awards (see last year’s MEATIES), I was happy to see several great indie books (and folks) on the list, including two projects I had a very small hand in: The Bloom and Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas!
The Bloom is an awesome sandbox adventure for Liminal Horror. I proofread this one. Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives continue to do incredible work with Liminal Horror’s modules. It’s great to see that work getting the spotlight. Check it out HERE!
Land of Cicadas is Cloud Empress’s hexcrawl zine released as part of its initial crowdfund. I did development work on this one. I have felt for a while now that watt is doing some of the most interesting and heartfelt writing in the TTRPG space so seeing that recognized here (alongside Roz Leahy’s always tremendous editing) is awesome. You can check the zine out yourself HERE!
In addition to these two titles, I was also pleased to see Koriko: A Magical Year by Mousehole Press and Jack Harrison (one of my favorite creators in the space) getting a nomination for Best Product and Best Writing, VR Dead from Daniel Hallinan and Space Penguin Ink getting a nod for Best Monster/Adversary, and Exeunt Press’s Skeleton Code Machine newsletter getting a nomination for Best Online Content. '
Overall, it was a great showing for indie and small creators, and I think it led to an overall list of nominations much more in tune with the industry/community than we’ve seen in previous years.
Public voting opens on Friday, July 12th so go and show your support!
NEW RELEASE: The Thinking Fist
A Saboteur's Guide to Cidus II is a collection of system-free, in-universe artifacts that come together to create a player-driven adventure of an evil megacorp, a cutting-edge facility, and the rebellious faction that fights back against them.
Welcome to Cidus II, the first pamphlet, is the official LifeLabor BioSciences corporate welcome literature given to visitors upon arrival at their Cidus II facility. The Thinking Fist: A Saboteur's Guide to Cidus II, the second pamphlet, is a handout created by The Thinking Fist, a group fighting back against LLBS's gene drone program, outlining a number of vulnerabilities, high-value targets, and more across the Cidus II facility.
I co-created this pamphlet duo with Nyhur (Whispers in the Darkness, Alien Armory) as part of Outer Rim: Uprising and collaborating on the entire thing from concept to final form was really fun (and not something I had done in this way before).
Check out both CIDUS II pamphlets HERE or you can find the full ORU bundle HERE!
NEW RELEASE: The Vault
Haunted Table Game’s Triangle Agency recently launched digitally and that launch included The Vault, the game’s mission book collecting 12 different missions from 12 writers and 12 artists, one of which was me! My adventure is ROM Dump (featuring tremendous art from Sajan Rai): A missing couple, chiptunes echoing inside an old barn, glowing eyes in the cornfield. It’s a rural midwest tale of childhood loves and the dangers of holding on too long to old things.
There’s a lot of where I’ve been mentally in the last year hiding in this adventure: Pondering nostalgia and the digital death of early video game worlds (see Tacticians of Ahm for a different take on this aspect), watching both sets of grandparents fall ill and pass away, moving far away from the cornfields and barns of my youth, and more. In the end, this adventure ended up being about change, transformation, and what parts of yourself you give up to continue living (and who, if anyone, allows you to make those sacrifices). It’s a very special one for me.
You can check out Triangle Agency itself HERE and The Vault, the game’s massive (and awesome) mission book that includes my adventure ROM Dump, HERE.
NEW RELEASE: Outsourced
Spicy Tuna RPG’s latest Mothership 1e release, Outsourced: The Luko Fin Corp Deception, is here, and I wrote a bunker escape adventure for it! It’s a very weird, fun, and scary escape where you start locked in the dungeon and have to fight your way down before you can fight your way up and off world. It can be played all at once, piecemeal between other missions, or even on your own thanks to solo rules by Alfred Valley!
You can find the digital version HERE (physical copies are coming soon)!
MORE COOL STUFF
I’ve been creating modules for it for literal years now, but Mothership is finally out and publicly available in its proper first edition form! If you missed the Kickstarter, you can find both the core set, deluxe set, and digital versions HERE.
The folks behind The Panic Table are launching their first crowdfund, and it’s for a big batch of well-produced found footage audio and video files for use in your Mothership games. Plus, there’s a tie-in adventure by DNGN CLUB. It’s live NOW!
Sam Sorenson recently released a free “secret rainy dream-realm characters find by a following a map soaked in water.” I just think that’s an awesome premise and I imagine you do too! You can find it HERE.
They Won’t Cage Us, a new Mothership 1e module from Tim Obermueller and Josh Domanski, is out now as part of the Outer Rim: Uprising digital release! I edited it, and it was a blast to work on! You can find prison heist adventure HERE.
Aaron King recently dropped a free one-page RPG inspired by Jenny Nicholson’s recent video essay on the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. You can find it HERE.
Brandon Yu (known online as Chaoclypse) recently downloaded and added metadata to every single public domain image on Getty.edu. He then, in all his continued awesomeness, dropped them all in a well organized and easily accessible Dropbox folder which you can find HERE. This is tremendously helpful work for us indie folks who want to make great looking stuff but rarely have large budgets to spend on new art (from great artists like Brandon).
My Cloud Empress play-by-blog is ongoing, slowly but surely, over on Tumblr. Check out our full party (created using the game’s really cool solo rules) and first steps into the Land of Cicadas!
Chris Airiau has been dropping some BIG freebies at his newsletter, The Rokaner Report. Fans of my TTRPG freebies here should definitely go and check them out!
Lastly, I recently went and got to see some humpback whales just off shore on one of Newfoundland’s most unique beaches. It was incredible. I encourage you to touch grass whenever you are able.
Thanks for reading and your continued support! - Christian
Workmanlike and breakneck, at the same time all the time is rough, I feel that in the marrow. Good luck with the break, I hope it works out the best for ya.