Hullo

Fairy
Meta
Comps
Knights
Press
Links
Spoiler Warning For Bye
Bye

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In April Image are celebrating 50 (count ‘em!) issues of I Hate Fairyland, with I hate tie-in covers across the line. We decided to do one for DIE Loaded, with David Lafuente stepping in to have Gert bludgeon DIE. I said you can’t defeat DIE, but no-one tried an enormous spiky mace.

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This is really fun. With only a few weeks to go before The DIE: Metadungeon kickstarter launches, Juan Moore (aka Odd Artworks) drew a Meta-dungeon inspired dungeon. His whole channel is him drawing really fun and charming dungeons from prompts, and is just delightful to see. You can watch it here...

And here’s the finished map…

...and here’s the prompts RRD gave to inspire it.

Now watch the DIE discord race to try and run a game with this instead of the standard Total Party Kill random tables.

Sign up to the MetaDungeon here for immediate notification of launch. I think this is going to be really special.

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DIE: Loaded #5 is out next week. Comps arrived. Coo at the comps. Coo at them.

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Jim and I had our traditional post-campaign THREEDOM chat about Mythic Bastionland, where I go off on several ones, conclude like…

That’s a thing I love about Mythy B. It’s an OSR game with a strong narrative flavour and rejects the “it’s all about the adventures” in favour of “Here’s a book with much more content than you will ever need” while also having rules which are perfectly crafted for the specific material presented. I often read OSR rules and think “This is flour”. I read Mythy B and think “This is fucking cake.”

You can read the rest here. See why I’ve been chaining O Fortuna for the last few months.

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While The Power Fantasy #16 went out into the world (for the second time – see my outro for more details) we were also wrapping up another release. The Power Fantasy’s first trade is going back to press for a second printing. Clearly, good news – also a chance to tweak a few things. Yes, clearly, that includes the Indicia. The Power Fantasy Loves You.

We also went back to press with DIE: Fantasy Heartbreaker for the fourth time, which gave us a chance to change the cover to align with the later trades. This means we’ll have a stylistically matching set – I’ll write a bit more about this another time, as I suspect it’s worth doing a proper look into how cover style develops.

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• Profile of Stanley Plotkin, the 93 year old godfather of vaccines, and his despair at seeing what is being rolled back. The problem with basically solving a problem is that people incapable of understanding with the historical record forget the absolute horror that the problem was. (Needs a free account to read).

• Jay Dragon suggests Adli’s Razor, a test to apply to anyone’s grand theory of games. If it is also true about going for shopping in Aldi, it’s likely that your definition is overbroad. It would be so much easier if folks could not mistake their own aesthetic preferences for grand over-reaching statements of truth. This lead to chatting to Jim, and a reminder that I should read my copy of the Grasshopper which actually nails down a definition which may even hold water. Even if it’s surrounded by a lot of stuff which doesn’t.

• Oh – I’m doing an Incursion in this anthology of Trophy incursions that’s crowdfunding now. It’s my Folk Horror Tom Bombadil adventure, which does sound like the sort of thing I pitch. Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold are excellent games, and well worth your time.

• Is the Power Fantasy already the best series of 2026? BamSmackPow thinks yes. I think it is the best comic called The Power Fantasy of 2026, unless someone else releases a better one, in which case we’ll probably send lawyers them way. Unless they called it The Better Power Fantasy, which would be funny, so we’d let ‘em off.

• The Ugly Monster seems to be very excited about the MetaDungeon, and who can blame ‘em.

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Spoilers for The Power Fantasy #16 follow in my outro.

Not any of the content, but the future of the book’s existence and whether it’s continuing or not.

Turn away now.

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One of the best things about The Power Fantasy #16 was getting messages from folks who really didn’t know until the last page whether or not the book will continue, and how thrilling that was. I had presumed it had been shot – I had seen people decide it was continuing or not, based on their interpretations of things I said.

So to discover, at least for a chunk of people, it genuinely was a surprise was nice, and a reminder of how small a part of the conversation any individual conversation is. A gap after issue 16 to leave the question open was always the plan. If we were the new Saga and the schedule was easy, we’d have still had a gap after issue 16, so the next issue wouldn’t appear in preview until 16 was out, and really leave people wondering whether the world continues. Use the weirdness of the direct market as a positive rather than a negative. As folks have said to me, in a world where everything is leaked and pre-chewed, to have a genuine question about whether or not the book was continuing until the very last page was really fun.

Of course, if we weren’t continuing, it would be mean. But we were continuing. The slight tension is actually part of the game. Santa is not going to give you coal. You know we wouldn’t let you have hope to only let you down. The Power Fantasy loves you.

The Power Fantasy is also very tired, and it nearly changed its mind after the book had gone to print.

It was the Thursday 5^th Feburary, 20 days before the issue was out. It was already a hard day, the first day Caspar was back at work, and various other things around the book cascaded frustratingly. There was the sense of “Oh, this plan to do it in a less painful way for everyone may just not be working.” So that was already the mood. It’s not just Eliza who’s trapped in hell.

Around 5pm I’m walking up to pick up Iris from Nursery. I glance at my phone. It’s raining apocalyptically, which turns out to be the pathetic fallacy working overtime. I get a message from a reader who tells me they’ve just been sent a digital copy of Issue 16 from Google Play. It’s available to buy.

I screenshot it, and send it to Image and ask them to move on it, as I continue to stomp towards my pick-up. Clearly, this is not good. They get on it. By the time I’ve got Iris home and am serving her pasta, it’s been pulled from the site. However, the link had already been picked by the fan communities, and people have bought it, and someone was writing essay-length-posts spoiling the whole thing.

We reached out to the mods in the communities, saying the release was a mistake, and we’d appreciate if they’d limit conversation over the leak. Bless the mods and the community – they did.

Caspar and I were not pleased about any of this. Really, we were distraught. It was literally the worst issue that this could have happened to. To be working on something for 2 years, to all lead to a single moment, and this big reveal – and for it all to be wasted because somewhere a “25” was entered as a “3”.

Now, I told Caspar that you have to remember that the fan communities are a tiny part of any book, even an indie book. Most people won’t know this happened. It’s not like it happened on Amazon – a much bigger digital site. And it’s not on the piracy sites.

I’m not sure if I said “yet” or not, but it is subtextual.

But as I’m saying this, I’m aware that I’m also telling myself this. Because, really, after the day, I was thinking “Let’s change our mind and stop.” There is a point where the cost of doing business is a cost you don’t want to pay.

This is where my head was when I went to see Garth Marenghi live.

If you don’t know Garth Marenghi, you do know Garth Marenghi.

He’s that guy. He’s a comedy character created by Matthew Holness in the cult 00s comedy show Dark Place. He’s a 1980s mode horror writer, a delightful parody of every egocentric hack. In other words, the idiot god of what I do. As I had Chuck say in DIE, we are all one bad day away from being Garth Marenghi.

I had a bad day. I was with him.

He’s touring to promote his new book This Bursted Earth – like the previous two, three short satirical horror novellas. The live experience takes the structure of an author’s book reading – so excerpts from the book, and then goes to a Q&A, riffing in character. It’s exactly what you expect. The only music played before, after and during the break was Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, on repeat.

The Q&A is wrapping up, and throughout the gig, I’ve been thinking about all the above and what am I going to do. Is it actually worth it, or would I be smarter just saving everyone the pain?

I’ve realised something. Specifically, I am a pretentious pulp writer who is having an audience with a god of what I do.

I should just ask him.

I raise my hand. He points me out.

“You’ve created so many seminal works – have you ever been tempted to abandon one?”

He strokes his chin, thoughtfully.

“Good question.”

(Which was a relief, as he had tore several new orifices from the last questioner.)

He walks the stage, considering this, while the future of the Power Fantasy hangs in the balance.

Eventually he says...

“Yes, I have been tempted… but that would be denying all of you my genius. That would be cruel. I couldn’t do that.”

And the Power Fantasy continued.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
4.3.2026