Hullo

It’s too late
Foxy
Club
Star
Links
Bye

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The Power Fantasy #16 is out.

We released a preview last week, which is here (all one page of it).

Here’s Morgan Beem’s cover.

If you dig it, do grab The Author Immortal, which is an absolute showcase for her work.

Get to the shops quickly if you don’t want this one spoiled. Spoilers: you don’t want to get this one spoiled.

I have other stuff to say, but I’ll save it to next time. Let this one breathe.

I’ll be releasing a teaser later today elsewhere. But you’re special. You get it now.

You can set this playing if you want the full effect.

I cannot resist a Pixies needle drop.

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We wrapped our Mythic Bastionland campaign last night. Jim and I will be doing a piece on Old Men Running The World soon enough, I’m sure, I was on the Smiling Fox, the premier* Mythic Bastionland podcast, last week talking about the game generally and my game specifically. It’s basically me and age jumps, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g mortality in a sexy way.

You can listen here – the Smiling Fox was a big part of my process for running Mythic Bastionland, so was really lovely to come in and guest as I was wrapping our game.

Also, in a real way, if you want to hear me be a fucking nerd about shit I really care about and you likely don’t, this is the place to go.

*Only

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As said last time, the next Script Club will be The Wicked + the Divine: 1831.

This will be going out on February 28th. Not January 31^st, as I said last time. Time is shat circle, and we are poop.

Details about Script Club above. In short, you give me coins, I give you script.

Upgrade now

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Me and my mouth, saying things about comics. Anyway, I’ve been following Folarin Akinmade and Bimpe Alliu’s development of this, and think it’s neat. The kickstarter is live now, so you can back here.

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• When I was researching the Dears last week, trying to find the exact date of when I saw the Dears, I saw that a lovely someone had uploaded a bunch of footage from the Moles club in the period. If you want a portal into Early Phonogram, this is basically it.

• A quieter week for links, so I’m going through some things I’ve had saved and been looking for a place to run. Here’s Julie Philips’ on the quiet power of Ursula Le Guin’s activism. Lots in here, but I’ll quote this as it’s a The Power Fantasy Week. “In 1982, an interviewer for a science fiction magazine asked Le Guin what she would do to save the world. She answered impatiently: “The syntax implies a further clause beginning with if…What would I do to save the world if I were omnipotent? But I am not, so the question is trivial. What would I do to save the world if I were a middle-aged middle-class woman? Write novels and worry.” If “worry” can be translated as “care,” then she combined her vision for the future with tending to what is worthy of care in the here and now.

• Sam Sorenson’s Three Question Taxonomy of Games, where he tries to (and quite successful) break down TTRPGs across Problem-Solving vs Telling A Good Story, Authorial vs non-authorial and rules-favouring vs world-favouring. I’d quibble some examples, but it’s strong stuff. Though when we reach the conclusions, the “it’s easier to turn a minimalist OSR game into a complicated and prescriptive storygame” than vice-versa” does make me think, yes, that’s true in exactly the way that it’s easier to turn flour into cake than vice versa. You have to do something with the flour to be of any use - which is why the adventure and the culture-of-play are so key in OSR.

• I have been 500 Songs About Rock Music pilled so hard that I went onto the oft-recommended Cocaine & Rhinestones despite only having a marginal interest in Country Music. It’s really good – big, smart, literary, detailed, full of love and way to think about the music. The whole George Jones/Tammy Wynette second season is masterful stuff. The last episode had me looping to the first, entirely as intended, and a really smart example of how sequencing can shape how one reads a biography.

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This week’s main work is mainly working on plotting something new. It’s not going fantastically. I’m still in gathering information and character together, but I think is probably the way I have to do it. It’s me writing something I haven’t done before, so I need to know what I really believe about any of this. I wrote a one liner about how a character views the world yesterday, which I can already feel resonating outwards.

I suspect tomorrow I’ll start actually putting things in sequence, and I’ll see how it cascades.

This has me thinking about doing a playlist for it, which was prompted by me selecting my old Generation Hope playlist. Here it is on Tidal, and it’s still on my old Spotify Account over here. It’s a good playlist, which had me thinking about it being a fine example of one thing the playlists are used for, and how imperfectly it worked.

There’s a mistaken idea that people get – which I get, as I link to them – that the Playlists somehow for the reader as a soundtrack. Oh, no. They’re for me, as part of the process. They’re mostly my equivalent of a mood-board for a project, a bunch of things that resonate with what I want to do with the book, or its approach. Not all the playlists are just this – but it’s rare which one doesn’t include at least some of “I wanna feel like this”.

There’s also the aspect that I’ll be likely as not listening to the playlist every single day when I’m writing the book. If I don’t want to listen to a song literally hundreds of times, it doesn’t get on the playlist.

So, with sixteen years distance, I’m looking at this playlist, and it’s mostly appropriate bangers, but I’m looking at the gap between conception and execution. Generation Hope was a fun book, but it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It never quite worked. I learned from it, and you can see Generation Hope But More Than Just Okay all over Young Avengers, The Wicked + the Divine and even a few residual bits in The Power Fantasy.

Some choices and mood are great – Hitten by These Dancing Days as opening track, to get this slight melancholic teen movie vibe. Adventure by Be Your Own Pet just being brattily insouciant. Then the darker stuff - McLusky’s The Hope That House Built with the name drop and just a whole lot of cynicism. X-Ray Spex’s Identity just being this howl about the book’s awful core – a group of kids being dragged along with one kid’s grief, which she never talks about, and how it warps them all. The specific character choices are really speaking to what we tried to do. Cold War as the Idie song. Firework, to choose another. I suspect Idie, for all the problems I have with her, was where we came closer to putting on the page what was setting myself on fire.

I also see bits where my subconscious is working in, my write-history-for-the-losers aesthetic moves in. I wanted this book to sell – why on earth was I having Dweeb’s No Hit Wonder on there? Well, we are a doomed gang against the world, right? But also not just that. I think I knew the score.

It’s a good playlist though. I suspect I’d say that you should rather listen to it than read the comic.

Of course, that’s also nonsense. I’m also aware that the point of these playlists as mood board is to give yourself an impossible goal. You always fail. It’s just a question of how much you fail by.

For example, the first track on this new playlist is Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt.

I’m never going to get there.

But also you have to remember all art is failure. And you must also remember that the people you who you’re using as inspiration felt the same way about the art inspired them too.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
25.2.2026