Cover Stories are a new line of gamemaster screen-shaped adventures designed to be played in a single session but ripe with plot hooks and possibilities that can be expanded upon by creative judges. Each is complete with the adventure information, background, keyed encounters, map, creature stats, and illustration to make reference fast. Laid out on sturdy card stock and printed in full-color with a laminate coat, these 6-panel adventures are as beautiful as they are fun to play!

Hi Lou! So you've currently got a Kickstarter campaign going for Cover Stories. It looks like you essentially took the physical format of a judge's screen, but put an adventure on it. I've seen plenty of pamphlet adventures before but never quite this. Where'd you get the idea?

Well, Stefan, let me start with some lies…

Pamphlets are great, right? The whole idea of a short form adventure that takes almost ZERO prep is just like­-well, it’s true artistry, you know? To get an adventure down to that kinda’ of space and still have it be engaging and unique, that takes some serious skills. -Of course you would know something about that, wouldn’t you! BUT…what’s bad about pamphlet adventures? They get lost inside your bookshelf of other gaming books, they get damaged easy, and there’s just no space for the sort of art and detailed maps that really “make” an adventure in my mind. By producing this product in the size and thickness of a judge’s screen-most these problems are solved! Imagine some of your favorite adventures boiled down to the tri-fold cover they come in -voilà! Now, you have “Cover Stories” my first go at short form adventures.

And now the truth…

Although all those things are coincidently true of this product line, I’m just a really divergent thinker. So, I tried to come up with some very basic adventure premises that still seemed interesting and could fit on a pamphlet. But then, for example, I had such fun coming up with 4 cool NPC sky pirate concepts in the “Floating Spoils of Czar BeeZare” next thing I knew I had 20 pirate crew members statted up. And then there’s the chance to add random encounter tables, and new magical/techno items. Next thing you know, there is no way the adventure can fit on a pamphlet! So, I went in with my editor’s eye and found the most exciting and necessary parts of the adventures. Add that to the art I had commissioned and the best format seemed to be the old “6-panel screen.”

So you've got 3 Cover Stories: The Floating Spoils of Czar BeeZare (MCC), The Ratcatcher's Son (DCC), and In The Employ of the King's Foresters (DCC), plus a stretch goal for a Weird Frontiers adventure. What made the ideas behind these adventure perfect to release as Cover Stories? I imagine that you had some specific design goals when creating these adventures.

I keep a couple journal books that I’m always jotting ideas down in. In preparation for these products, I tried to ask myself what are the best parts of adventures from the players’ perspective. Certain things kept coming up in the list: an interesting “task”, enemies that engage in surprising ways, and locations that have a visceralness that breeds creativity and mood.

For the MCC adventure I really was looking for some exotic locale, but the trip is that almost everything in MCC is exotic; so where do you go? Well, why not go adventuring in the sky? For the DCC adventures I wanted to take a crack at the two basic fantasy RPG themes: the dank dungeon and the forbidden forest. I wanted to take these things and do something that would stand out.

There was an AD&D module called “The Needle” that has this great premise of sending the players off with a team of workers to take down this ancient obelisk from a foreign land and ship it back to the king. Now, I know culturally, that sucks, but there’s this whole romance in my mind about the kind of colonial era engineering that it would take and troubles you might have with the workers and the natives… Anyhow the module itself never really achieves that sort of feel -there aren’t really any rules in it that pay off in that respect. So, for the “On the Employ of the King’s Foresters” adventure there’s this whole interplay of keeping the foresters’ morale up, getting them fed and rested, and defending them from all the monsters and cursed happenings of the forest in that one.

For “The Ratcatcher’s Son” I wanted to present the most realistic-feeling dungeon from like an archaeological dig perspective. That is, the site presented is a mortuary temple and the rooms have a feeling of being made by ancient hands, they’re purposeful and have details that serve no direct game effects but set the room up as an artifact of a darker time left by inhuman worshipers. You’re not wandering about, thinking about pit traps and secret doors. Instead, you’re looking at all these bizarre rooms and not wanting to touch anything or unseal any doors because you have a real sense that there’s evil present that shouldn’t be stirred up.

Does your MCC adventure have any connection to your past MCC publications: Seekers of the Un-K'Nown and The Time-Lost Citadel? Or do your DCC adventures have a connection to other DCC properties? For example, the Ratcatcher's Son seems easy to set in Punjar/Lankhmar.

I did not really make any connections to any of those, but by the design, itself, any of these could be dovetailed into any other series of adventures. I tried to make these with very little setting specific events. As a side note, I have sections for how to convert the DCC ones to MCC and vice-versa, but they had to be cut for space purposes. I’m hoping if we hit the stretch goal where I get to add an insert sheet to the modules, I can restore that content because I love cross-genre play when it is well thought out.

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I believe this is the first time you've published your own DCC (aka not MCC) content, plus there's that possibility of Weird Frontiers content. Are there any plans to create more content for that space? Or are you still planning to more focus on MCC?

There are so many fantastic writers handling DCC right now, to be honest I’m a bit scared of that space-plus I’ve really sort of gotten burnt out on fantasy over the last decade. I might still dabble, but there is just something about the open canvas of MCC that sings to me. I just really dig that mix of primitive imagery within a sci-fi backdrop. Like the old package art form those Masters of the Universe toys-that stuff was killer! I do love westerns and western books, so I’m very intrigued by the idea of writing for Weird Frontiers. I had a game I wrote from a prior company called “Century’s Edge.” It was a Victorian era game and I got to play around in the West a lot with it. There were some ideas I had for it that just might make for a good WF adventure, but I’m so many projects deep right now, it would be 2025 before I could probably get something into the playtest circuit.

Any plans to do Cover Stories for Dare Luck Club? Actually, can you also tell us about Dare Luck Club for the "uninitiated"?

The Dare-Luck Club is a system I wrote (starting back in 2015) that uses simple mechanics to play games that have the feel of 70s and 80s adolescent adventure movies. Stuff like “The Goonies,” “Escape from Witch Mountain,” “Stand by Me,” “Monster Squad” -you get it. It’s a game that is designed for old folks like me to recapture a mythical bit of our childhood.

The current format for its adventures are these anthologies called “Tripple-Dog-Dares.” You get 3 adventures themed around a particular location (so far: Haunted House, Museum, and Amusement Park-with a summer camp one in the writing/design phase right now). I totally feel that something like these Cover Stories would be a good addition to that game series. Maybe even a book of quick, one-to-two-page adventures that are really varied in their themes and locations. …Just need a clever name for that product… …And a bunch of writer friends I can hire for content…

Thanks so much for taking the time to share with everyone! Any last words that you'd like to share?

There are so many good products on Kickstart this month. Please, if you check mine out and it doesn’t scratch your itch, do a search for MCC, DCC, or OSR and you will find something that will knock your socks off. In small publishing, every project is dependent on the last so throwing your support in where you can give us all the chance to try new things out within the gaming space and keep content out there that departs from the stuff churned out by big companies who aren’t always thinking about what will make their fans happy. Thanks for having me, Stefan!

In other news…

Prisoners of the Secret Overlords

This adventure is pretty much guaranteed to take a level 2 party all the way up to level 3. With so many places to explore, new monsters to fight, and NPCs to meet, I can’t see how it would take any less than 4 sessions. Check it out so you can get on the Day-1 deal when we launch!

Dirty Thievin’, Nerdz

I wrote a little pamphlet adventure for Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland! It also has some quick rules for playing video games and even having video game competitions. A bunch of nerds stole arcade cabinets out of a game van. Go beat up those nerds!

It “Pay-What-You-Want” on itch.io and DriveThruRPG so pick it up for free or throw a couple bucks at me if you’re feeling it.

Want to game with me?

I’ve running 4 games next week on the DungeonCrawlers Discord server. Come join!