384: I hope I kiss a Balrog
Hullo
9
Relax, Hyperbrains.
Get Git Gud Soon
MERPS
Links
Bye
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DIE: Loaded #9 drops! As I said last time, this is a real collision of different flavours. Peak Goth Jumanji! Stephanie continues to really work it, on every page. Includes a couple of rare examples of actual Splash Pages In DIE too.
Our guest cover is by Will Kirkby, who is just great. You may know him as the visual powerhouse behind TTRPG Eat the Reich. So, we absolutely got him to do a vampire, and a different look at Zamorna.
We did the preview last week, if you want a tease and is available in shops and online.
Oh – and an urgent call out. I’m pulling together the letters page for issue 11, and hit a problem.
Remember in the first arc we printed the wrong e-mail address for the letters page for an issue or two before fixing it? It slipped back in for the second arc, so we’ve been sending people to an e-mail address that doesn’t exist. So while we have some letters, we don’t have as many as normal.
I’ll be pulling this together on Friday, so if you want to write, and have a spare minute before then, you can drop us a line to…
Thanks!
We actually have another alt cover, which is a Witchblade celebration, drawn by Caspar Wijngaard.
That Caspar guy. I wonder what he’s been up to?
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Oh, Caspar put this online last week.
THE POWER FANTASY LOVES YOU – @kierongillen on Tumblr
💬 0 🔁 22 ❤️ 48 · THE POWER FANTASY LOVES YOU
See you soon.
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DIE: Loaded’s second trade is out in February, and this is the cover. Collects issue 7-12, and has us still very much on my magpie bullshit.
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Cripes. I actually stayed on target and did another big chunk of my list of favourite TTRPGs I played before I was 50. Here’s 59-41, which includes my first ever RPG…
It’s a few weeks before Christmas. My parents are standing in a game shop, looking at the row of RPG sets, without a clue. They decide to buy the Games Workshop edition of Middle Earth Roleplaying, as I like Lord of the Rings. I am ten years old. Come Christmas morning, my younger brother and I open the box, look at it all with gleeful confusion and play it by cutting out the cardboard figures, pushing them around the map and occasionally looking at a table, rolling some dice and guessing.
It is not a good first role-playing game, except in the way that any role-playing game is a good first role-playing game. It is a cut down Rolemaster, in exactly the same a small pile of cocaine is a cut-down version of a large pile of cocaine.
...and a whole lot more, obv, as I am full of words and they leak out on the floor, pooling horrifically.
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I was on the Rascal Reading Group podcast this week, as the guest talking about Blades In the Dark in the talk back episode. This was really fun, in a shooting from the hip way.
I finally listened to all of the Leigh Alexander hosted U R Next, a true crime cyberharasser series. It was really good, as in, horrific. Go listen.
Sam “Coldest City” Hart’s kickstarter for 10 Lost Days has ended – but has pre-order backing opening, so you can still jump aboard. It’s about what happened in the missing days in the georgian calendar and the death of magic, which sounds like your sort of thing, right?
Pixelated Geek writes on the first three The Power Fantasy trades, and dwelling on the awful heart of the Eliza story. I also find it unbearable to think about.
Sarah Jaffe looks back on the 10 years from her first book, Necessary Trouble, on populism and a bunch more. That Phonogram and Necessary Trouble had similar big birthdays at the same time does make me smile.
My old comrade Matt Sheret has started doing indie games! Ballad of the Lilyipond is a “is a poetic tabletop role-playing game — think Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but everyone's a frog and it's set on the riverbank” and about each of your composing a song or ballad about a noble frog. This is really fun and has great art from Sar Cousins.
The “Re-enlist and get time off to play GTA 6” story has stuck in my brain like a foetid splinter.
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Upgrade nowA short day – Comrade Sarah Gordon is popping down to Bath for a bimble, and then I’m taking Iris from school until bed (time to be ascertained according to the movement of the stars). Chrissy is off in London until late, as her Perverse journal are having a reading at the Betsey Trotwood. 7:30 tonight, go along, poetry lovers.
So I want to get this out to you, and fight a few fires. Stephanie and I are chewing over whether we should do something in issue 11 of DIE – we (er) made a mistake on the map in issue 8, putting two of the regions in the wrong place (7 and 9, dice fans) and would like to re-print the map to make sure folks have it, but we need to work out a few specifics.
Work wise, I haven’t done a huge amount of generative new scripting – I’m half way through the last issue of the last issue in the Power Fantasy’s fourth arc, but I’ve left it hang to fight other things. I’ve also maybe said probably-yes to another larger-but-contained comics thing – I wasn’t sure about it, but sitting and watching the latest Paw Patrol movie in the cinema gave me a chance to chew it over, and I think maybe I can make it work. I’m going to turn everyone into dogs.
On a more fun thing, I was briefly in the three-actual-games a week thing – my regular tuesday game (playing Orbital Blues), my Friday The Scions playtest and a quick Thirsty Sword Lesbian Game set in Lord of the Rings. Sadly, the next session of that won’t be until December, so I won’t get back to my Phoebe-from-Friends-as-an-Entwife character and all the other misadventures. I hope I kiss a Balrog.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
16.9.2026