Who's driving this thing?
All right, luvvies? I'm now semi-vaccinated! I'm hoping that by the time I get the second dose, they've invented another drug to go with it, that takes care of the fatigue and mood plummet that hits me the day after I go anywhere and see anyone. No wait; they have that already, it's called coffee.
Coming right up
- New Merely Roleplayers production
- New game release: the Researcher playbook for galactic 2e
- Tickets on sale for Trouble at Sea: A Miss McSkimming Mystery
- Pin Pride
Vigil: Tourist Trap
is now playing in the Main House, performed by Merely Roleplayers.
This is our third outing to Sherrydown, and introduces the last four main characters we created back when we first launched the story.
Cold Snap, the previous Vigil story, was very woodsy and folk horror and The Dark Is Rising-ish; this one's a much more modern urban fantasy. We all worked together to create this small English town, and I wanted to make sure this adventure took us to some more of the places we'd created - and that there'd be plenty of civilians around to need saving.
Here's a bit of backstage trivia (spoilers for the second half of Act 1, if you haven't played it all the way through yet): Ellen just decided in the moment that her character, Jess, would get got by the identity-eating monster. I was as surprised as anyone when she narrated finding her accounts and profiles wiped. I cut out my reaction and the subsequent check-in and negotiation ("you don't have to, I'm not making you, are you sure you want to?"), but it was such a lovely silly-serious moment; I remember saying something like "Oh no! Jess got got!" and Ellen and I looking at each other through the webcam like two rabbits in the headlights, frozen because something was happening that neither of us had exactly intended. It seemed to have happened independently, like the story was suddenly driving itself.
I say a thing at the start of each episode about "keeping the story going places even we can't see coming", and that genuinely is the joy of creating stories in this medium. That decision took us places we would never have gone otherwise, and gave Ellen's character incentives to do some pretty damn dramatic things later in the production.
Stay tuned to find out what those things are! Merely Roleplayers is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, pretty much all the podcast places - find all the relevant links at MerelyRoleplayers.com.
The Researcher
is what I called that playbook I was working on instead of the Starchaeologist. To recap from last newsletter, this is my entry to the galactic 2e game jam, which is celebrating the 2nd edition of riley rethal's roleplaying game galactic by inviting people to create new playbooks and other supplements for it.
https://twitter.com/MerelyMJ/status/1393116388726804484
Doctor Aphra was my starting point for the playbook, but I ended up leaning away from what's probably her defining characteristic: her tendency to throw other people under the bus to save her own skin. I just found it wasn't something I wanted to play with in a Belonging Outside Belonging game.
What survived from that tendency into the Researcher playbook is a tension between solitary obsession and the need for community. If you play the Researcher, you have niche pursuits and you'll tend to get blinkered when they're in your sights, overlooking other people's priorities and making bad deals. But like your object of study, you don't exist in a vacuum: you need the context of other people to give yourself and your work meaning.
Beyond that, the key idea behind the Researcher is that it gives the player power to propose alternative, forgotten or erased histories. galactic is a Star Wars game; it's about resisting space fascists, and one way space fascists win is by rewriting space history. Star Wars is also about traditions and dynasties and religions, which also rest on stories told a certain way, and the Researcher is welcome to challenge that as well. You could absolutely play Luke from The Last Jedi as a Researcher, building an alternative narrative of the Jedi's place in the galaxy.
You can get the Researcher from merelymatt.itch.io - there are still community copies available as I write this, and money sales keep that pot topped up - and galactic 2e from metagame.itch.io.
Trouble at Sea: A Miss McSkimming Mystery
is at 1pm on Saturday 3 July in the Wandsworth Arts Festival Big Top in London SW18. You can get tickets now, and there's a discount code that expires tomorrow: use the code EARLYBIRD for 20% off.
Other than helping set up on the day, I'm not involved in the production itself, but I will be part of an associated writing workshop that's happening the Monday before, 28 June. It's free to attend, and open to Wandsworth residents. We did something similar for the last Miss McSkimming production a few years ago and everyone seemed to get a lot out of it!
Generally, the workshop is covering the discipline of writing (aka how make words go out of head and on to page) and crafting narrative, but the sign-up form asks what you hope to get out of the session, and we'll tailor the exact plan with those answers in mind. If you're a Wandsworth resident and you're looking to get started writing, or you have some work in progress you'd like help developing, here's the application form for the workshop.
Wear with Pride
Happy Pride!
I got myself all confused the other day trying to work out whether June is Pride in both the US and the UK, and whether it's different this year - the Pride in London parade has been delayed until September, but does that mean Pride is September instead of June, or is it just the parade that's moved...
...and then I decided it doesn't matter, borders aren't real, time is a flat circle, Pride is an attitude rather than an event, etc. I don't care if it's the 'right' month; Happy Pride!
I've posted some of these before, but what was I going to do, not post Pride pins for Pride? Clockwise from top left:
- Bi Pride heart from Tab Kimpton
- Mutant Pride from Diesel Sweeties
- Bi Pride planet and Queer Rainbow from Zealo
Corporations and political parties have started their usual campaign of rainbow-washing everything in sight for Pride. I'm seeing a lot of good work from people on twitter calling out the hypocrisy on display - organisations wanting points for celebrating Pride while donating to anti-LGBTQ+ movements or harming their own trans employees, for example.
https://twitter.com/AnarchoBreadism/status/1399902179536822279
So don't give any points to corporations in rainbow facepaint this June; funnel money to actual LGBTQ+ people instead. That could mean buying things or donating to causes that help improve our lives!
The UK and US governments are both attacking trans rights specifically and concertedly at the moment, trying to carve one letter off the acronym as a precursor to breaking up the rest. Stonewall has become the lightning rod, but trans-specific, trans-led organisations like Gendered Intelligence need support as well.
LGBTQ+ isn't a series of neat boxes or separable groups. Plenty of us partake of multiple letters in the acronym. So I have hope that this isolate, divide and conquer strategy won't work. They think they're facing an isolated, vulnerable group ... but they're actually facing the whole Pride.
(booing from offstage)
Until next time, Matt x