339: it’s also never been away
Hullo
Cast
TPF11-1
Library
Alice
Links
Bye
****
A newsletter late on Friday? That’s unusual. There must be a reason for it.
We’ve just announced this.
The first feature is live over at Rascal, which lays out what we’re up to. Let’s just grab a quote…
Fantasy is infinite. There's no end of things to say.
Yes, that's me throwing my usual gnomic hyperbole around, but that was really what Stephanie and I were trying for. We wanted to make a device to do stories about fantasy (primarily through the medium of games) for as long as we wanted to do it. I sort of pair DIE with Phonogram (Jamie McKelvie and my book on Music) which had a similar remit. As in, let's make a device robust enough to return to as often as we need to.
That's really true in DIE — the main reason I wrote DIE RPG was I wanted to invite as many people inside this concept as we could. That we're doing the DIE quickstart in comic format speaks to that as well. We wanted to have something relatively inexpensive out there when the first issue of DIE: Loaded drops which they can see on the shelves next to the comic, grab, and try out.
There's no end of stories in DIE. And, to lead back to the question, that includes for us. We're not finished with DIE, and DIE isn't finished with us.
Lots more to come in the months to come.
And as the quote explains, you’ll also note that it’s not the only DIE entering your comic shop on November 11th. There’s also this beauty…
It’s a DIE RPG Quickstart. This is the same as the larger one, but reformatted to be comic size. It’s basically the most accessible way you can get a taste of the DIE RPG, and take it out for a spin, and should be on the shelves the same week as the first issue.
After the first issue, I’m also planning to include more beta rules in the back of the comic too. I suspect most will be custom rules to bring the actual DIE gods into the game, as the gods have a key role in the story this time, but as the article says, I also have some other ideas.
Oh, and making this a REALLY big week for DIE RPG rules, the community licence has gone live. This means people can release, write and even sell their own DIE RPG contents. It’s based on the normal Rook Rowan & Decard one, with a few DIE-specific tweaks. You can read it here. Basically, want to do your own DIE supplement? Follow the rules, and you’re sorted.
In short: DIE’s coming back, but being an amoral god that exists outside time and space, it’s also never been away.
Spread the word.
****
The Power Fantasy also drops next week, with the end of our second arc. It’s a big one.
Here’s the preview…
...and get to your shop sharpish to read it. Or wait for the trade. Or just come to it years later, nestling in a library shelf. Who am I to tell you what to do? Nobody, that’s who.
****
****
Tomorrow (August 9th) is a mini con at the Bath Library.
I’ll be there from 11am-1pm. Come say hi. It's a children's event, primarily, so bring the kids. I'm going to give away as many of my old Star Wars comps as I can, as I am very generous and definitely not trying to clear space in the house.
****
New post on Old Men Running The World, When I Roll a 1. Long term newsletter readers will recognise this, but this is an improved version of what I wrote about the end of the first DIE campaign here. As in, I explain stuff I should have first time, and also removed a lot of the usual typos and crappy writing, and inevitably added some more crappy writing.
Anyway, it starts like this…
I often think of this bit of Red Dwarf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qPSUr3AyzIIt’s where Rimmer is describing his great victories in Risk, much to Lister’s annoyance. An endless string of “And then I rolled a 6!” The joke being, that no-one is interested in hearing about people’s gaming adventures.
I spent fifteen years of my life trying to prove that wrong, and get people excited about that time I rolled a 6.
Or a 1.
...and continues in a similar vein.
****
Eisner for Clayton Cowles campaign complete! We are now in the Clayton Has An Eisner Era.
The Eisner results were fun with a bunch of great stuff getting the nod – was relieved to see that Absolute Wonder Woman won our category, as we said it was going to win in the indicia for the trade, and if we were wrong, we’d have been panicking and trying to stop the printer to change it.
The 40th anniversary of John Constantine’s debut, and David Barnett writes about him as the most important British character in American comics. This is a fun overview. To beat my usual drum, people who try and paint Moore’s complaints about his work beings stolen ignore the fact that he also co-created Constantine, and never complains about that. That may imply there was something different about what he understood about Watchmen. It also says a lot about Moore. For most writers, “co-created John Constantine” would be the first line of their bio. For Moore, it’s a foonote.
Graham Smith eaves Rock Paper Shotgun after twelve years, and does a piece which is a clipped and precise manifesto for writing about games – and a lot works in many forms. This is the Sunday Papers, the column I started when I was on RPS, trying to highlight good writing (not always about games) elsewhere. In many ways, it’s the earliest version of this bit of the newsletter. After I left RPS, various other folks have taken on, including Graham. Graham tells me it’s still compiled in the googledoc I started all those years ago, which is touching, in a “this is the single bolt in the hull which prevents RPS from being a true ship of Theseus” way.
Phoebe Bridges and Lizzie Styles are kickstarting the excellently named Total Recall of the Heart. They gave me the copy early, and I liked it enough to give a quote. This quote. "After decades of folks attaching the "-punk" suffix to their sci-fi genres like journalists adding "-gate" to the political scandals, it's a delight to read a cyberpunk story that understands that "punk" is a word which means something. Political, seedy, born of the underground... but no fear of going overground, getting invited to the fancy parties and then pissing in the sink. It's a snotty, obnoxious, salacious book for bruised romantics everywhere.”. Go back!
A History of Rock Music In 500 Songs reaches the MC5, which is always as good as the form gets, but this episode is especially of relevance to The Power Fantasy readers. The Detroit MC5-y scene is exactly where Heavy emerged from, and his name is explicitly structured as if he could be a member of the MC5. If you want to know a bit of what this form of hippy radicalism may look like, this may be your crash course. Levitate the pentagon, indeed.
Comrade Meer continues writing about Transformers, and specifically going through Target: 2006, the torture-porn-for-pre-teens, which is basically the seminal British Transformer story. Frankly, the bit where Shrapnel gets shot through the head as a harpoon was my everything when I was a tiny human.
Aditya writes about many things, including their digital declutter. That I actually started tidying the office this week may imply that doing it digitally may not be an impossible dream.
A nice review of We Called Them Giants as part of the Hugos round-up. It’s been an interesting book, Giants, in that it’s a book which is very certain of what it does, and then either people get it or not. Which is, of course, the nature of story, but is particularly sharply felt when you’re choosing an angle against what culture mostly does right now.
This was interesting to see – Paul Cornell and Lee Harris setting up Cosmic Lighthouse, a comic devoted to letting prose sci-fi and fantasy authors write comics rather than having other people convert them. First up is Adrian Tchaikovsky writing for Mike Collins, in a story set in his The Final Architecture universe.
****
It’s been a few weeks, so many things of happened, many of which I don’t remember. Also, when this one is as packed as it is, I don’t really want to make it extra-long.
The last week and change was basically shaped by realising we need to announce DIE: Loaded, and pulling together everything for that – talking to Rascal and seeing if they wanted to do it, working out a teaser and so on. A lot of DIE things are moving around elsewhere – the Quickstart, the open licence, alt covers and the rest. Stephanie is actually on issue 6 right now, which is a level of organisation I’ve never dreamed to have before. We’ve basically nailed down the schedule, including a couple of months she wants to travel, so we basically will do twelve issues with only the first trade as a skip month.
This also means that if I get around to doing a bigger trailer, we have so much art for it.
As well as this, I’ve been writing The Power Fantasy #13. It’s another big one. Caspar should be wrapping #12 over the weekend – the pages I’ve seen so far have been startling, and if you check out his instagram, you’ll see him teasing bits and pieces - so by the time you read this I should have finished the script, got it to Katie, done any tweaks and got it over to him. He keeps on asking me what the ending is, as I’ve been chewing over whether I can fit it all in the space available. If I can’t, I end one beat earlier, and we start #14 with the second beat. If I can, I fit them both in. Either way, it should work – it’s really about deciding where to splice the material, and what space everything else demands.
(I’ve just come back to this essay after just finishing the script – I got it in. It actually was all relatively reasonable in the end.)
I’m mostly writing this bit earlier in the week, despite the fact the newsletter will be going out late Friday. I’m off at a Balloon Fiesta that day, so if I don’t do now, I won’t do ever. Hmm. Other stuff – well, finished the second full playtest of The Scions, which went great – I got so much stuff from it, that I basically gained the confidence to tear up bits of the Paragon system it’s based on and move them into places. The playlist of the four videos are here, if you want to see the game in active development. I think the third and fourth are where the machine really starts doing what I want it to. I’ll write a bit more about the process in a quieter week, I suspect.
I’ve been doing fairly random reading – I’m working through a bunch of comic trades I bought, plus following my obsession with the DC Compact Classics. Also, some prose stuff – let’s plug It’s Behind You, by Bob Pape as it’s a memoir of a coder working in the mines in the 1980s videogame industry. A lot of these sort of things are written by the folks who ended up founding companies, not the people at the sharp end. Pape coded the Spectrum version of R-Type, which will either mean nothing to you, or get about as respectful a nod as one can get. I remember being astounded at what he managed to make the Spectrum do, and the story behind its making is as messy as the game is beautiful. Oh – it’s also free. You can download the e-book here.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
8.8.2025