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A double-week before our planetary conjunction of releases divulge.

The Power Fantasy #14 is out, as we inch closer to issue #16. I showed the preview last week, if you want. Otherwise rush to your purveyor and grab it. It’s another big one. You may as well assume I’m going to say this on every issue of The Power Fantasy from now on.

(On the off chance you don’t know about the Power Fantasy, here’s our primer.)

And here’s a teaser!

Also, we have DIE: Loaded #2, where we catch up our misadventures as folks explore DIE, we see a new region with a new master, meet some gods and more. Preview pages here too. It’s a packed one – it does remind me as DIE 2, in terms of what it does. There’s also the start of the backmatter, including specific rules and role-play notes for one of the gods. Let them guest-star in your own DIE games at home.

(If you don’t know DIE at all? Well, here’s the primer for DIE: Loaded.)

And here’s a teaser…

Which you’ll note is a tweaked version of the FOC one.

My last comic releases of the year, I believe, unless there’s a Marvel trade I don’t know about, which is entirely possible.

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Here’s some big news. There’s a new DIE RPG thing for you to lust after, with a new big expansion.

DIE RPG: The Metadungeon is a megadungeon where each of its six levels is explicitly about in the style of a period of RPGs. As such, the whole thing should be both as satire, celebration and history lesson of what gaming is. The architect of this is Gareth Hanrahan, who is just the best in the biz at this kind of thing, but I’m heavily involved and couldn’t be more excited. You know the bit where DIE RPG starts playing with RPG history? This is that, and seems that it could actually some cross between RPG Understanding Comics and playing Playing At the World and probably Paranoia.

It’s clearly a berserk idea.

When I announced DIE RPG, Gareth messaged me with the idea for this and I was obviously delighted, and we’ve been looking for an opportunity to do this ever since. With the epic Megadungeon month approaching in April 2026 we thought it’d be the perfect chance to do finally this. There’s really nothing like this that exists, and we think it should. That’s dependent on folks being as charmed by this as we are.

If you want to be alerted when the campaign start Sign up for the Backerkit here and if you want more details of what we’ve got planned, here’s RRD’s delightful Blog post.

Lots more to come in the coming months, but if you want to know even more and ask questions, we’re having a live chat on RRD’s discord at 7pm GMT (2pm EST) on 19th December (This Friday). Come ask questions to Gar, myself and Grant.

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The next Script Club on December 31^st, and I’ve decided what to send out.

Once & Future #13. We’re doing a script from later in the series, which may be interesting for various reasons. You can see how I write for an artist when a project is under way and we’ve worked out a method together – and also how we reintroduce a whole new status quo in an issue. How I work with Dan is quite different from the other ones I’ve sent out – a little closer to what my Work For Hire scripts look like, but with a lot more real world reference.

It’s also set around the New Year, which is why I picked it.

Details on Script Club here (TL;DR: $5 a month, I sent you a script/other bit of writing, to support the list)

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It says a lot about how busy November was that neither Jim nor me posted on Old Men Running The World, but I squeezed in another few entries in my fave 101 TTRPG entries ever. 100, 99 and 98. At a rate of three a month, this may take a while, but maybe days will magically become longer. You never know.

Anyway, I say things like this about In Nomine…

I can’t run this. I suck. It sucks. Burn it down.

I decide the next session will the the final one, and try for a climax. I have a demon start try to kickstart the end of the world by acting out events from the book of Revelations. This demon went to Bristol Zoo, and performed a rampage in the aquatic mammal area, vivisecting the poor beasts, spilling guts everywhere.

Yes, they had broke open seven seals.

...and inevitably a whole lot more, which doesn’t prove how my pun game was already active back when I was 21.

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I did an AMA at the League of Comic Geeks a while back now. I was promising to cherry-pick some answers to include here. I did, and there was way too many for a single news letter. Instead, I included half of them last time, and half of them this time.

What's your perspective on current spaces for cultural criticism? In particular, what role do online forums play (such as LoCG, Reddit, etc)?Personally, I really appreciate the opportunities to engage, however briefly, with creators I follow and support, as well as being able to read non-professional reviews from a wide variety of backgrounds.

I need to wrap and come back tomorrow, and this is a heavyweight one to come to with a tired brain. I'll do a basic take, and then perhaps when I come back I'll say more. (I didn’t - Ed)

Cultural Criticism is a big word. You can choose to hold it lightly or heavily. At which point does you talking about why you liked what you watched on Netflix to your mate while grabbing coffees become criticism?

The LoCG is a good example of that. Look at the reader reviews. Some are long enough that you could run them as a review in a magazine or other magazine-like website. Some are a single word or sentence. Where's the line? Is there no line - in which case, yes, that one word review is cultural criticism.

I can see that argument, but I think an argument which actually renders the word meaningless - or at least useless.

If you're using it that broadly, what you're really talking about is Cultural Conversation - as in, Conversation around Culture.

Conversation around Culture is what I think all what even the strictest definition of criticism grows from. It's the soil of it. It's the audience for it. It's why people really go for it.

As such, I think the real impact for Reddit and LoCG and the Discords and the Forums and all the other place is really about cultural conversation - and I think honest, good faith talking about what you like or hate about art is just good.

Capitalism tries to make us consumers - as in, something which is consumed (Edit: I think I’m being rhetorical here. It’s not just that, of course – I think I meant “someone who is reduced to just one who consumes”) . When you actually have active conversation around culture, you are in a space outside that - something key about art, and enjoying art.

(A lot of my work is about this kind of thing - how we use art, and how it helps us or not,etc)

This may not have answered the question, but I think it's a good starting place.

How do creators come into this? That depends on the creators. For me, I try to encourage fan conversation, but also think a little church/state division is important. Readers need to be able to have their own spaces to talk about what they care about and have their own responses. Me being present explicitly can step on that, right?

It seems I don't really do short answers.

If Power Fantasy was adapted into a show or movie, would you want it to be animated or live action, and why do you think it's the best choice to represent that story?

That's a good question. When I have meetings about anything I've written with Hollywood folks, I'm always intrigued by how folks see it. It's not just live action vs animation, but format; I'm aware with - say - DIE, if it was made as a TV show, the model would be LOST. If it was made as a movie, the model would probably be more SAW.

I don't really think about it much though - I do my work as comics, and figure adaption is something someone else (or possibly future me) will deal with eventually.

There are certainly times I wonder whether TPF would work best adapted to a stage play.

Why did you decide to include America on your Young Avengers team (given that her only previous appearance was in Vengeance) and what was the process of expanding upon her backstory, powers and personality within the book?

Some of it is really simple - when we were told who was available or not, I realised I wanted a patriotic visual character on the team, and just read Nick and Joe's Vengeance and thought "She's great."

(With retrospect, I wish I'd dropped a line to them to say I was going to. That's bad form.)

Developing her was many faceted, but at least part of what we were doing on YA is doing stories which were inspired by classic Avengers stories, but written as if all we knew about them was the title and the vibe. So when we do west side story in space at the start of the second arc, we're doing a Kree/Skrull war. Mother herself was us doing Ultron.

America was us doing Young Avengers v1. As in, a character who you assume is a riff on one superhero and is in fact connected to another - specifically, Billy. We also leaned into the Wonder Woman of her - she ran away from paradise to save us all, except she did it as a 5 year old. There was an idea of the power-glass-ceiling too - that if you get past a certain level of power, you start speaking like the Silver Surfer. A street level attitude with a cosmic-level powerset, etc.

The big thing was trying to leave a fruitful gap. We explicitly leave a 10 year gap in her life, in hope that other creators (ideally not two white guys from Britain) would fill with her Earth family. We wanted to make her interesting enough to make people want to do more with her, but didn't want to tie down folks with Earth-specifics.

What inspired your take on Exodus? Your take on the character made him one of my favorites of the entire Krakoan era of X-Books and it's rather disappointing that they have shelved him for the time being.

Thank you. He was the one who I felt I did the best work on, in terms of giving him a spin. I can see why they've shelved him for a bit - he's a Krakoan true-believer, right? That's a hard thing to write around. (As in, if they don’t want to centre Krakoa in the stories a character who wants to do that is tricky without reseting him entirely - Ed)

Basically, I did what I do when it's a character who isn't as known - I just do the research and look with clear eyes at him, and see what's interesting, and see how I can make that more so. I just looked, and saw that he was a total weirdo.

He's a 13th century Crusader. He has slept for 1000 years, and now is active in the modern day. He's basically Captain America. There was a take that would be great to have done to lean into the time difference stuff... but he's been active in the world long enough the culture shock wouldn't have quite landed .

But he's also a clearly deeply religious man AND a mutant supremacist. That's WEIRD. How does he square that?

Which led to all the mutant-catholicism stuff, etc.

In reality, my basic approach with renewing characters in WFH is to look for what makes them weird and make it more so. Folks go the other way, making them more likeable or whatever else... but there's plenty of likeable characters who you could know in the real world. Those spaces are filled. But there's also space for a new freak.

(I also was very conscious that I didn't want to redeem him - he's a villain who just happens to be on “our” side. )

So my question would be: for someone who doesn't know anything about D&D, has no experience with any tabletop game, and doesn't have a local D&D scene to learn from, how could someone learn about D&D?

If they have an internet connection, search for basically an actual play and watch (or listen) to a bit of it. If you get a big budget one, it won't be what on your table, but the basic syntax will be there. "Oh, this person is describing stuff, this person is saying they're doing stuff, sometimes they roll, etc". The biggest part of the boom in RPGs is from this very demystification - actual plays and episodes of sitcoms where they do very basic RPG stuff.

If you're online, you can also find games online to play - you can get paid-for games, even. Get in a one off and play it and see how it feels.

If you aren't online, you can travel to a gaming con and just soak it in and see what you think.

If you mean specifically D&D... well, the D&D starter set is relatively inexpensive and they are trying to teach the game. I haven't seen the current one, but extended examples of play can do a lot that Actual Plays do.

If you mean more broadly ABOUT D&D and its worlds and culture and monsters, there's a great series of illustrated D&D guide books for kids, which actually work great as a primer.

If you mean learning about the HISTORY of D&D, the book GAME WIZARDS and SLAYING THE DRAGON make up a history of TSR, the company that made D&D. If you want a wider look at where it came from, PLAYING AT THE WORLD will do the job

You can read the rest of them on the original AMA thread.

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• Jim also posted on Old Men Running The World, specifically with his friendly encouragement to people who want to get better at improvising in games, giving some simple exercises that ease you in.

• The Mindless Ones newsletter has excellent stuff, but musing on Santa Claus vs Father Christmas as cutural items is very much my jam.

• Katie Pryde is interviewed at TCJ talks the problems and joys of running Portland’s much loved Books With Pictures, and their recent crowdfunder to help the shop keep running.

• Harrowing article about ChatGPT Divorces, in another example of how the tech really isn’t fit for purpose.

• Christmas Off Panel is good, and lots to chew over with the three hot takes presented. One I agree with almost entirely, one I think is entirely wrong and one is nice to hear, but a little too optimistic for me. That’s all part of the fun of it, right?

• Oh - late arrival. Jim Teeth and Marsh Teeth with their fave things of the year.

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I’m writing this on a train up to London. I suspect I’ll be sending this on the way back. Perhaps I’ll have sorted out a TPF release teaser by then? My teaser game has been knocked out of whack because due to the holidays, all the deadlines have been moved around – which means that our orders for issue 15 were set before issue 14 hits the shelves (And same for DIE: Loaded). None of this is good for retailers, so I was touched that the orders for both were really solid – TPF’s orders 15 were especially solid.

(In fact, they were among the best we’ve ever had, which makes me think I should just give up doing FOC teasers, as maybe they actually hurt orders? Maybe it reminds retailers about the book, but it reminds them in a “oh yeah - I meant to lower our orders on that one.”)

This is the sort of brain melting that happens to you in Creator Owned comics. You really don’t know what, if anything, is having an impact, and you can’t really repeat experiments unless you’re doing a lot of books. This is why it’s important to talk to your fellow creators and see what they learn and what lessons you can take from that.

I don’t think it’s “Don’t do FOC teasers.”

The week’s work has took a hard turn in a different direction – I was planning to wrap the next DIE script before the break, but as Stephanie is back and she already has a whole script to work on, I instead turned back to The Power Fantasy, where I basically am plotting the rest of the story. I’m still not sure what we’re doing with it, but I also realise that I need to see it all before we decide either way. I also know if we decide not to continue it, if I don’t write it all down now, if we ever chose to come back, I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of working out what I was doing.

But it’s interesting to see things coming together in a big, real document again, and what that even looks like. I’m having fun with foolish subtitles, which is usually a good sign.

I’ve also been reading a bunch of comics (catching up with Absolute – my god, Absolute Batman is an admirably feral creature) and actually doing a surprising amount of actual roleplaying stuff. Fridays were down at the weekend, so we had a quick session of Yazebas Bed & Breakfast. I ran a pretty bleak yet funny one-off game of DIE RPG for a podcast, which may come out next year. I also just ran an in-the-flesh game of Deathmatch Island last night, where I used The Hustle as the theme tune for the violence and recycled my Bluey’s Dad and Captain Barnacles’ voices into the games antagonists (“Aw, mate. Don’t be a dobber. I don’t wanna cut you from crotch to neck, mate”). All went pretty well, I think.

It was also Iris’ nativity, where she was a shepherd. Traditionally, we gave her a dressing gown to wear, a look which made her look less ancient field worker and more Arthur Dent.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Near Swindon, apparently
17.12.2025