Hullo

Mother
15-1
Island
Lemon
Links
Bye

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DIE: Loaded #3 drops this week. I included the preview last time, if you want a taste.

Stephanie’s main cover above, and here’s the alternate by the always-great Marguerite Sauvage.

By this point, we’re well into DIE, and after the heavy concept-selling of the second one, we can fall into its natural rhythm. The theme of No-one Is An NPC is very much in play. What I like about DIE: Loaded is how this first arc builds, and explores different bits of DIE. We do a lot of modes – some grimmer, some more emotional, some more playful, some all at once, to different degrees. This one leans grimmer.

There’s also quite a lot of fun stuff in the back – I realised that if I keep on writing, I’ll just recapitulate the essay in the back. There’s also two of DIE’s gods in here, both of which are quite fun. Stephanie didn’t actually read the rules for the Barnacle Witch until after it had gone to print, and I’m relieved that she laughed until she cried when she finally did, as otherwise it could have been really awkward and possibly have led to DIE ending.

You can get it from your local shop or your retailer.

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Also the comps for The Power Fantasy #15 turned up, which is handy, as it’s out next week.

Here’s the preview.

And you can read the rest next week.

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I’m still deciding what this month’s script will be, but as a FYI: Lemon Ink is the company that will be charging you for payments, if you’re wondering what these mysterious $5 monthly payments are.

Script Club details are here, but you can sign up if you want to support this list.

Upgrade now

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We finished off our short campaign of Deathmatch Island, so Jim and I wrote up some experiences over at Old Men Running The World. As you lot are mainly comics folks, I suspect quite a few of you would like DMI. It’s very much informed by the Prisoner as much as anything, and our game had a lot of Grant Morrison’s vertigo-y energy too it, especially with the game’s Rian Hughes Does The Filth ironic corporate logos.

Here’s what Jim said about that stuff…

Denee is someone who really knows how to make things look polished and professional on the page, and I am not sure I own many books where the competency of things like page-design and making tables really fucking work good is quite as clear cut. It’s very Orange and White. It feels like something created with an incredibly specific vision in mind. The book, particularly as a physical object, captures the vibe so completely that it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. Triangle Agency does some similar stuff, but what’s here is more austere, sober, and disturbing, even while it is playful. To be sure, there are lot of incredibly pretty, high production value books right now, and this is not a book that is based on how good the illustrations are (they’re abstracted, and again, designed: a simple depiction of a grenade, a can of beans and so forth) all of which sells the corporatised, labelled, produced nature of the game as a fiction. This is a TTRPG where the GM (and by extension the forces that are causing the Deathmatch Island event to happen, whatever they might truly be) are literally called Production. It has the faceless, mysterious, moderately threatening banal alienness of big corporation stuff that occasionally appears in modern fiction. And to convey that in the visual design is masterful. It also evokes The Prisoner and 1960s weirdness, and it also spoofs modernity and the logic of corporate signage.

Read the rest of our chat here.

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• House to Astonish had their end of year podcast, where Al and Paul talk about their picks for the year, and their listeners have a big shout out too. It was really touching to hear how many people said they loved The Power Fantasy. The Power Fantasy loves you.

• The Open Hearth is an online community I play with when I can – it’s just a great place with great players. They have a variety of community podcasts, by I was invited onto Around The Hearth with Cat Rambo to talk about our recent gaming. If you want to hear me really ramble about Mythic Bastionland, this is the podcast for you.

• Tom Francis writes his four bits of advice for game developers born of his 15 years in development since leaving PC Gamer. I suspect some of this transfers to many other creatives. I was freelancing for PCG when Tom was there, and it’s been really good to watch him be as successful has he has been while remaining true to his own goals. I mean, Tactical Breach Wizards? What a name.

• I’ve heard Joe Quesada tell this anecdote about storytelling in person, and it’s a good one. I’m glad to see him drop it here, and looking forward to him promising more nuts-and-bolts storytelling columns.

• Infinite Realities shop had me on to talk on their podcast, which you can listen to here.

• Spanish site Zona Negativa interviews me. I remember this one being fun, and google translate reveals that seems to be true.

• Clayton passes the mic to Hector Negrete when asked about how relettering translations of comics works.

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Let’s have a quick anecdote from yesterday.

I do a walk in the morning – up to the canal, down to the shops, and loop back. Getting some steps in before I get sucked into my head.

When I reach the canal, sitting in the middle of the path is a cat carrier. It has a cat in it. The cat seems non-plussed, and happier inside there than out in the ongoing rain.

I pause, and look around and do the obvious. Your obvious may vary, but for me is shouting “DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS CAT?”

A lady sticks her head out of the nearest canal boat. She said someone left it there a little back, but they were carrying a lot of things. They thought perhaps they were over-burdened and were coming back for it. As we had a time on how long it was there, I figured we should leave it a little longer, in case they returned.

I head up to the shops, and decide to head back the longer way to check. Yes, it’s still there. At this point, I decide that it really has just been abandoned, and need to do something about it. I head home, and talk to C, and try to contact the local cat home. It’s not picking up, so I leave a message and then we’re at an impasse. We can’t take the cat into our house, as we have petrified cats. We perhaps could take it to our front door and wait to see if the home gets back to us?

In the end, we realise this is just wasting time. What is likely going to happen is them to tell us to bring it to them, so we should just get to it.

C drives the car near as we can to the cat, and I walk up. Another woman is there, clearly thinking what we’re thinking. She was going to bring it to her house. We talk, and we decide it’s best to just take it to the cat home. I knock on the house boat and tell the lady what I’m thinking – and that if someone does come back, to tell them where the cat’s been taken. After all, it’s been there for two hours by now.

I’m about to pick it up when a woman comes running up the towpath, clearly in significant distress. She’s relieved to see it there. It’s her cat. The person who was carrying it had left it here when carting the rest of the stuff. She’s distressed enough that I don’t want to ask questions except making sure she’s okay right now. Clearly, she’s none too happy with him.

Obviously, it’s got a lot to leave you thinking of, without even touching on the How The Hell Did He Think Leaving The Cat Was The Best Idea? If she had come five minutes later, would she have worked out where the cat had gone? Did she actually know where the cat actually was specifically? Did the person who left it actually give her good enough instructions? Would the woman on the boat have realised she was looking for it? If I didn’t come back, would that other woman have taken it back to her house? Plus how many people walked or ran past it, without getting involved? Because this is not a quiet towpath.

Yeah, in these situations, one natural instinct is to think of how many people just walked by. That’s not useful. What I dislike about telling this story is that I come out of it well. That’s not really the point – god knows there’s enough times I’ve walked past something. But when I look at this story, I see a few someones did get involved. You only need one person to actually help to help, and sometimes that happens to be you. Doing it more is better, but doing it ever is not nothing.

I’m happy I did. I’ll try to do it more.

In terms of work, this was the real kick off. Last time was mainly tying off a personal project (which sounds like a really unsavoury euphemism), various bits of TPF 16 backmatter prep plus sending a proposal for a thing which I’m sure will almost certainly not work out (but was so little work to write up that I figured worth sending on the off chance a company is feeling a little bit tipsy.)

I have been attacking a new script – it’s for the work-for-hire project, and I’ve told the editor I’m going to shoot for a couple of issues of this in January. That is do-able, but also perhaps not wise. While I’m writing this at an impressive velocity, I’m aware I’m hitting the material really hard, and suspect I should get the second approved before going on the third, in case I really am going too.

It’s a fight comic. Which is not a mode I work in often, to the point where folks almost certainly think I don’t like fight comics. They would be mistaken. It’s just that it’s the first thing gets squeezed out when my plotting reaches a certain point, like the way sex does. But this one is structured around the spectacular and That-guy-did-that-what? of it all. It has the fighting.

Which is fun, in a completely different way to usual. After DIE and TPF, I could do with a completely different way.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
14.1.2026