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It’s only when deciding to write a newsletter today that I realised there’s no pressing need for one. I have nothing to plug, bar the usual. It’s just a chance to write.

So there’s content, but it’s mainly game stuff – so if that’s not your bag, daddio, either skip or skim down to a random micro-essay where I riff on a quote from Musorgsky. There’s an outro where I update you on lung friend too, lung friend watcher.

Actually, that said, if I am here, I probably should plug THE POWER FANTASY and DIE: LOADED, right? They’re still for sale. We will still accept your money, or retailers will, and eventually give it to us.

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I’ve said I was going to write about The Scions, the main TTRPG I’m developing, a few times. I’ve said what it is, broadly (“We have the Horus Heresy At Home”) but not really dug into it. After the last playtest, I had an idea – basically, we were keeping a campaign journal for it, as a fictional history of the world. Let’s publish that on the site, plus a bit where I write about what I learned from the playtest. So it’s both an intro to the game, an example of the sort of things that happen in a given game of Scions and also notes on the development process.

You can go read it here.

Here’s an entry from the journey, where you can likely spot the edit war…

The War is fought against the orcs, with the Scions unable to prevent the orcs from boarding the fleets across the galaxy. They of course would of definitely succeeded if Nyxar was there. However, Ikarion is able to lead the resistance, and Aurix efficiently cuts off their retreat, setting up for a final battle. Aurix and (having smuggled herself aboard a wax seal out of the Parliament System) Livia try to take down Threenose in his huge space hulk battleground, but set the stage for Ikarion to arrive, with antimatter/matter weaponry, climaxing in a battle in the psychic realm where with a well-placed anti-orkishness railgun he annihilates the concept of “Orc” from reality.

...which you can probably also guess that one of the players is Jim, and the ludocrats influence was very much to the fore. It’s always epic, but not as silly.

And here’s me chewing over what I learned from setting up slightly wrong, and leading to a cascading set of awful stuff for the Scions…

Part of this is great - it's big drama, big moves, big thematic stuff. However, things getting rough early meant that none of the Scions had imprinted on the fiction sufficiently. What The Scions is trying to do is present a Commander-eye view of an Empire. Yes, you do all your big Caeser and Pompey meetings and have your Cleopatra moments, but it is a game which models the political situation, and builds hard consequences from it. As such, it has more boardgame DNA than most, because that awful alienation from slaughter is what it's in some ways about.

The game gets interesting when what you see is perfect play has a narrative push against it. The right tactical thing to do is this - but that would involve abandoning the person you like to an awful fate. However, due to dropping them in the deep end, they hadn't had enough time to generate those emotional attachments. I think folks had fun, but it often felt like an elaborate fictional wrapper on top of a boardgame. This is always a bit of that there with Paragon games, but more so with Scions, for obvious it-looks-like-a-boardgame reasons. While the amount of information on the board is what's on a classic character sheet, it's more present, and can led at least one player to staring at the board rather than the game, if you see what I mean.

...which is hopefully fun process stuff for those who like seeing game design. Iterate, darling, iterate.

My current goals is to get it to a state where I can release a basic print-at-home ashcan version for people to play around with, which isn’t actually impossibly far off from where I am now. Actually, my current real goal is working out whether I can find time, space and players to run it physically for the first time at UKGE this weekend. We’ll see.

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There’s a quote which I’ve been paraphrasing for a long time, but a moment in the a recent 500 Songs podcast had me thinking about it again. I bought a digital copy of  Natasha’s Dance, so I could actually search and find who it was by. It was this beauty.

"Symphonic development, technically understood, is developed by the German, just as his philosophy is. The German when he thinks first theorises at length and then proves; our Russian brother proves first and then amuses himself with theory."

- Musorgsky, writing to Rimsky-Korsakov

Natasha’s Dance is a fascinating book – a cultural history of Russia, which posits its history as a push and pull between whether St Petersburg or Moscow is the cultural heart of what Russia is. I loved it so much that when I was asked to pitch Black Widow early in my career, I used it as the blueprint for the mystical shadow war between Assassin schools, and their specific goals. They said no, which was expected and fine. I didn’t really have time to do another book then, so was pitching something from the same place This One Is For Me that led to Journey into Mystery a few years later. If they said yes, I’d have found a way to do it – but I didn’t need to do it.

It was also a terrible idea for Natasha, but that’s by the by.

Anyway – the quote above hit me when I read it, as it’s an approach that I recognised. I also suspected that it may not be something to see on the outside. After all, if theory is spouted about when you talk about a project, you assume the project came from the theory, rather than being generated post hoc. When I end perfectly reasonable sentences with random bits of latin, you kinda see why.

The reason I dug it out was this bit, where Hickey describes the Who’s Pete Townsends’ working method...

Indeed, one thing we’ll see with Townshend a lot over the course of these episodes is that Townshend was at his peak someone who was able to almost split into multiple people when working on a track. He talks a lot about how he would write songs “as a writer”, not thinking of the band at all, but thinking of pure songs, but then as soon as he walked into the room with the other members of the Who he became just an equal member of the band, with no more say about the arrangement and performance than the other three (this is probably not strictly true, because a lot of his demos show sketches of arrangements that are very similar to the final record, but it’s what he told himself and others). When performing with the band he would look on the song as the work of someone else altogether — Pete the writer, not Pete the band member.

And then he would become Pete the critic — in interviews he would look back at his work and analyse it using the theoretical structures he’d learned as an art student. And while he was a fan and admirer of his own group, he would be relatively dispassionate about the work when talking about it.

As a result, we have the odd situation where most of Townshend’s work has been publicly overanalysed by its composer, even as he says himself that that analysis is not necessarily any more correct than anyone else’s.

That was a Oh God, Yes, That. 

I’m a writer, I’m a collaborator and a critic, in that order. Not of importance, but of process. Folks occasionally bounce off me as I do analyse the work – but it’s me analysing the work. Death of the author means that my opinion is just another opinion… but it’s an educated opinion of someone who is doing an unusually close reading of a work. Of course, me seeing what a work does in the process of working on it does loop back, but it all is built on the gut of something that moves me, and then reverse analysing what the hell is actually going on.

I write this, mainly for the fun of it, but also to shine a light on a bit of my method which (perhaps ironically) concealed by how much light I do shine on the work. I’m someone who clearly likes theory, has personal respect for academia and absolutely reads and utilises ideas… but to view me as Germanic in the Musorgsky model is a fundamental mistake.

As a creative, I love academic theory, in exactly the same way that the Vandals loved Rome. I arrive, take what I want, and ride off, likely leaving it on fire. 

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The Script club will be going out on the 31st, or there abouts. It’s The Wicked + the Divine #2. Sign up if you want it!

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Let’s bump this one out of the links section, as Comic Philosophy really is doing the work and needs a little spotlight. Here’s his essay on The End of History, digging really hard into the philosophical underpinings of what’s going on. Here’s a quote…

Despite being very much responsible for those visions, Etienne professes ignorance. Note that lying is very much allowed by Etienne’s act utilitarianism, so long as it is in service of the greater good (Eliza not destroying the world, in this case). But lying is morally wrong in Kantian ethics (no exceptions), and clearly not a feasible rule in rule utilitarianism. And virtue ethics? Well, if honesty is one of your core values, then truthfulness would be the corresponding virtue. You practice routinely telling the truth (when it is easy to do so) so that it becomes habitual. Then, when it is hard to tell the truth, that practice hopefully translates into truth-telling. But Valentina – despite her repeatedly stated virtue ethics goal of being better in this issue – clearly lacks practice.

...but a whole lot more.

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Let’s make this really game heavy. I just lobbed up a playtest of the scenario I’m writing for RUIN, the Trophy Dark anthology that Kickstartered.

I had another playtest of it last night, which also went well. The three ring structure let me get through the whole thing in two hours each time, which works, and the core definitely lands.

It’s Folk Horror Tom Bombadil with doomed hobbits. 

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• Good to see Weird City newsletter launch – a pop cultural newsletter. I’m in this one, talking about DIE: Loaded and why Comics is such a jealous medium.

• Antony Johnston republishes his article from the writer’s yearbook where he gives tips for breaking into comics. Antony is actually part of my own journey, in a weird way – he was the person I mailed my first 5-page script to ask his opinion on it, and whether it was worth getting drawn. 

• Tegan O’Neil’s latest The Hurting Gazette includes a big article chewing over Cheers, what it did and why it’s fell out of discussion of the canon, and why it’s interesting to revisit it. This is good stuff. C and I also went back to early Cheers, when Iris was born, and seeing it through our adult eyes was fascinating and really human.

• We’ve reached the stage. Sam Kriss’s makes the argument If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.

• Comics Bulletin reviews DIE: Loaded Zero Sessions and say it’s good, which we agree with.

• I was interested in this article into the research into who are the actual footsoldiers of fascism and oppression in a system. Broadly speaking, it’s people who are lagging in their careers and ability, and are willing to do a dirty job to get ahead. Almost by definition, the best don’t have to do it.

• I’ve linked to Joe Quesada’s newsletter so much, you’d think that one of my unannounced projects was over there, but it’s not. It’s really his newsletter is on fire – this time telling anecdotes about breaking with the Comic Book Code and sliding into talking about perspective in comic storytelling.

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Lung friend is mostly gone. Lung friend mostly comes at night. Mostly.

(I lie. Lung friend mostly comes when I laugh too much, which means that Taskmaster is dangerous.)

There is a new foe, of course. The eternal enemy of my people: the white circle that looms above our blighted, sinful isle. I spend my waking (and sleeping) hours trying to work out what we have done to anger it, and how it can be appeased. Human sacrifice seems to be the logical next step, so if anyone wants to volunteer, that would be great.

This has not helped productivity. The script I'm writing is being approached like it's a hot stove, and I have to touch it quickly, do what I need to do and then run away. It’s perhaps for the best this is an edited week. The bank holiday cut it to 4 days, and I’m travelling up to UKGE on the Friday. I suspect I will wrap this script by then – it’s basically done, while also being a long way from being done. Ideally, I’ll hand in the Trophy Dark scenario, and actually finish the taxes. I’m not sure of that, but it needs to be done, right? Somehow?

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
27.5.2026