May 14, 2021

Star Wars but with Cowboy Bebop problems

All right, luvvies? I sat in a friend's garden, ate Lebanese food and held a baby last weekend. Tomorrow I'm going to sit in a different garden and play Dungeons & Dragons with friends who aren't behind a screen. The things that make life good are coming back. Now I just need to shut up the bit of my brain that's all "does this mean I'll start making things more slowly?" Slow is fine! Give me that slow life!

Coming right up

1. New Merely Roleplayers mystery and lore supplement on sale
2. Work in progress: galactic 2nd edition game jam
3. Live theatre from Blackshaw
4. Rebel scumbadges

Sherrydown Enquirer issue 2

is now available from my itch.io shop. If you head there before Monday, you can get issues 1 and 2 together for 20% off.

The Sherrydown Enquirer is a series of ready-to-play mystery scenarios for the roleplaying game Monster of Week, which ties into Vigil, our ongoing Monster of the Week series on Merely Roleplayers. After each Vigil production, I take all the prep I did for the session - stats for the monster, notes on supporting characters and locations, details of what happens if the players don't succeed in stopping the monster - and write it up so that any Monster of the Week group can play the same story.

That's the bulk of each issue, but I also include a few pages of lore for our setting. In issue 1, I think I erred on the side of vagueness - hinting at concepts and secrets but probably leaving a bit too much unsaid. Issue 2 has a lot more concrete detail, especially about the Department of Omissions, why they're doing such a bad job these days that our main characters have to fight monsters for them, and why no one seems to remember that things like figment sharks and ghouls and the Winter King exist.

Also:

https://twitter.com/MerelyMJ/status/1385336977164210179

In the end, I think it turned out more romantic and yearning than sexy, but you'll just have to pick up the issue to judge for yourself.

I'm trying some pricing experiments with these. Now that issue 2 is out, I've dropped the price of issue 1 by a third, to see if it can act as a loss leader. And like I said up top, I'm running a launch sale where you can get both issues together for a discount. Grab them before midnight (UTC+1) on Sunday if you want to take advantage of that. Quick!

I'm also keeping an eye on views and sales to see what's my most effective channel for promoting stuff like this. Common sense says the podcast itself should be the best bet; people arriving from there are presumably already interested in Vigil and Sherrydown, and I expect a fair few play roleplaying games. But I didn't see that coming true so much with issue 1. I'll report back in the next one of these if I see any interesting patterns.

In the meantime: go grab one or both issues of the Sherrydown Enquirer if a) you play Monster of the Week and want some new mysteries for your group, and/or b) you're interested in the story we're telling on Merely Roleplayers and you'd like a closer look at some of the lore powering that story.

The Starchaeologist

is the working title of a playbook I'm working on for the galactic 2nd edition game jam.

galactic is a roleplaying game by riley rethal, building on the Belonging Outside Belonging/No Dice No Masters system developed by Avery Alder to tell relationship-focused stories of wars in the stars, many aeons ago in a stellar region a long, long way away, if you know what I mean. galactic rocks and you should play it. We're playing it for the next Merely Roleplayers Studio production, scheduled to air in August.

The galactic 2nd edition game jam is an invitation for game designers to hack galactic and create new playbooks, sub-systems and other content for it. The Starchaeologist (which, I stress again, is a working title) is a playbook that lets you play a Doctor Aphra type, who barrels around the galaxy looking for secrets of lost civilisations and forgotten truths about galactic culture. I'm aiming for it to be a playbook that causes lots of trouble by dragging the party into dangerous places and situations, and that will threaten the false or incomplete histories and narratives peddled by the mandate (the evil space fascists who rule the galaxy).

I'm also considering submitting a new pillar for the game: the Ship. Belonging Outside Belonging games don't have a game master; instead the external forces that act on the main characters are divided into setting elements (called pillars in galactic) that the players divide up between them. The pillars provided with the base game are big forces like the mandate and the liberation - the two sides in this war among the stars. I'm interested in adding one that creates more everyday challenges, so that while the mandate is committing atrocities and the space between is offering the secrets of the galaxy, the characters also have to contend with running out of fuel and making enough credits to keep up with maintenance.

Bascially, I want to add some Cowboy Bebop problems to the game's base set of Star Wars problems.

Regular readers of this letter will know I already have multiple other game design projects on the boil ... but a game jam is a time-limited thing, and I had ideas for this one immediately, and I'm pretty sure I can design and polish at least the playbook fairly speedily. Then it'll be back to Project Bigbird being my main game design priority. Check in next time to see if this optimism pays off!

Trouble at Sea: a Miss McSkimming Mystery

is an upcoming production by my friends at Blackshaw Theatre Company. Merely Roleplayers regulars will recognise some names: Ellie Pitkin directing, Strat writing. It's a follow-up to Some Treachery: a Miss McSkimming Mystery, the 2017 production by the same team.

Expecting a pleasant transatlantic cruise, Miss McSkimming must instead deal with a missing companion and a series of mysterious thefts, all whilst trying to avoid panic amongst her fellow passengers.

The Miss McSkimming shows are live productions - a novelty, as we emerge blinking from months of no going out or gathering in places! But they're also specifically designed to have a longer shelf life as audio dramas. The appeal of going to see the show live is that you see all the foley being created on stage: watermelons getting squished and celery getting snapped and unexpected things happening to balloons. The audio drama version is more polished - stumbles edited out, volume balanced, and so on - but you only get the finished sound effects, without the visuals of how they were made.

Trouble at Sea is happening on Saturday 3 July in a big top in south London, as part of Wandsworth Arts Fringe 2021. Keep an eye on Blackshaw or WAF to snag tickets when they go on sale, or follow the Blackshaw Arts Hour podcast to pick up the audio drama version after the live performance.

The garbage will do

Which is to say: okay, I'll enjoy the corporation-approved stories, but I will be adding my own modifications and repairs to make them more habitable. Left: Pride of the Resistance from diesel sweeties. Right: given to me by a colleague, origin unknown.

That's the thing with stories - they can't really own them, because they can't stop you deciding which characters really want to kiss. Until next time,

Matt x