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The second part of Alien vx X-men drops today, where we show how we got into this mess, and get further into the mess we’re in. I think by the end of this, we’re well into the “stuff you likely weren’t expecting” part of this endeavour.

Here’s the preview.

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It seems that we’re entering the live TTRPG era. We mentioned the Hollows game I’m part of on November 7^th a couple of weeks back. Now Dragonmeet has announced they’re doing a live DIE RPG event on November 28th.

Here’s the listing…

DIE: FAN FRICTION

Show Starts: 13:00
Tickets: £5

You are a real game super fan, and you’ve been invited to the ultimate fan meet and greet. The invite just appeared… mysteriously… as if by magic.

Let Kieron Gillen take you to the other side of the con table and far away into the most meta live show of your life! Catch this madcap DIE:RPG adventure where the writers get sucked into their own story and have only the magic provided by their real audience to help them…or harm them. Your call. Let the fans decide!

I need to sort out my guests for the table for this one, actually. It should be fun. More details when I finalise them. You can get your tickets here.

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Currently crowdfunding is Feel Your Warmth, a tragic two-player roleplaying card game. It’s the sort of sequel to The Time We Have (which was two people, one of whom is turning into a zombie, sitting either side of a closed door). This time it’s two people, one of whom is a vampire, sitting either side of an open door. I see what they’ve done there.

I’ve played The Time We Have, and it’s a prompt driven, really smart and a great one shot game, and can’t wait to see how this turns out.

I’m a stretch goal writer for it too – both games have a bunch of one-card settings to give a spin on what specific kind of vampirism (or zombie-iness) is happening, which are lovely weird fiction prompts. My stretch goal has actually been already hit, so I need to nail that down.

You can go back here!

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As a reminder, the next Script Club will be Once & Future #1 and sent be sent out on October 31^st.

Script Club is the premium subscription for this newsletter, which is used to keep this all ticking over. It’s $5 for every mail I send out, which includes a Script (or a similar amount of writing).

I don’t send one out every month, and I tell folks what I’m sending in advance, in case it’s of no interest. Anyway – you can upgrade here, if you wanna, which is appreciated.

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Like Jamiroquai, Orbital Blues is the Space Cowboy. Unlike Jamiroquai, it doesn't make me wish music itself could be scoured from all existence, just to make sure I never have to hear him again. Jim and I do TTRPG review-o-chat over at Old Men, saying things like…

Honestly, if it had been like “Deeply-Conflicted Space Cowboys”, I would probably have been into it without Chris’ prompting. 

It is interesting what specific kind of space cowboys it is. When playing it, I boiled it down to “Dieselpunk Cowboys, but specifically the 1970s cowboys movies cowboys”. It’s got that The New Hollywood approach to it – which doesn’t always mean sad, but certainly means deliberate. That sort of cowboy material is the most interesting stuff, for me  – especially when it’s pure New Hollywood. I mean, at its best, you can imagine it being less cowboy and more specifically New Hollywood – EASY RIDER IN SPACE. Not that our accents would ever allow us to pull that off.

My American accent is amazing!

Amazing is certainly a word which came to mind.

...and more, more, more.

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I poured one out for Bioware this morning, and thought about their rise and fall across such a long period. It's oddly close to home, for someone who never worked there, and only in an adjoining industry.

But I did get to see behind the curtain once, and it stuck with me.

I joined PC Gamer in 1998, in the month when Baldur's Gate was being reviewed. I didn't do it - Ross A did, while I worked on Thief: The Dark Project. He gave it 89%, I believe, and I gave Thief 90%. A good month, basically. That new writers got two games of that quality says exactly how much stuff was flying around.

Bioware were never my core beat, but were certainly adjacent to it.

And as an aside - you should not doubt how fucking uncool D&D was in 1998 as a game and a source for videogames, and how poisoned that particular well had been for a while. Baldur's Gate turned that around, and if you do want a road from D&D then to D&D now, it does strike me that Bioware's needs more credit than they usually get. They’re part of this story.

I visited them once, on a press trip to Edmonton - it must have been for Neverwinter Nights, as I know it was in 2001, due to me having a conversation with a Barista about Al Qaeda, and both of us being surprised the other person knew about them, because it was a few months before everyone did. It was a good trip - and with the distance, I remember very little of the game, but a whole lot about the company culture. It was youthful, energetic, and really engaged. I can't think of another dev I ended up in an actual dance club with, for example.

But that isn't behind the curtain.

The thing I think of is a year or two later, in a press trip to Bath. It's near closing time in the now closed O'Neills, and I'm talking shit with Dr Greg about games, and he just tells me what Bioware is going to do next. No details - but the broad philosophy of the games they wanted to make. The belief they can take what they do, and make it reach even more people.

He is clearly on fire, and - with distance - I recognise the fire of a creator who really just wanted to say everything, but knows they can't.

The key think I remember - the one line - is Dr Greg leaning over and grinning "We have to have the EYE OF THE TIGER". He repeats it a couple of time. The Rocky-quoting hunger to DO IT.

I grinned back. It was great to see. He was clearly very excited to be alive and doing what Bioware was doing.

So, when Bioware did what they did next, I think to the moment - the image of someone who really had confidence in the skills they were all bringing and what they could achieve. And they did achieve it.

And then this.

So you look across time, and it feels like a rise and fall. It's 30 years. A lifetime. But at the same time, you look at - say - what Larian has achieved with Baldur's Gate 3, and you can't help be aware how badly Electronic Arts fucked up with the stewardship of Bioware.

I look back at those early years, and I see a company who understood they were doing really geeky things, but loved them, and wanted people to love them and realised that they needn't submit to the idea they were destined to be unpopular. They made great pop games.

We come back to the idea of Execs who really don't understand why people like art or why people make art, in any way, finding ways to absolutely annihilate those that do, in a death of a thousand cuts and then one big 400-person cut.

It's heartbreaking. The western games industry kills a Nintendo every year.

Anyway - it's my long way to give a salute to Bioware - anyone who worked there in good years, or bad. It's fucking awful, and you deserved better.

This is a remix of what I dropped in a little thread on the socials.

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• British comics legend Al Davison is crownfunding for a electrical attachment for his manual wheelchair. Go help if you can.

• I suspect the Orbital Blues review will have just inched into this newsletter, depending on what time Jim posts it, but I want to plug Soulmuppet’s currently crowdfunding game-face Atrapos: A Doomed Mythic Fantasy which at the time of writing is about to enter its last day. I’ve been a little surprised that it hasn’t done better with the crowdfunding, as it’s clearly an absolute labour of love for all things Oddessey-y. Go have a nose.

• There’s many good ways to play TTRPGs. No, there isn’t, argues Seraphina. Pawn stance or NOTHING.

• A friend forwarded me this long review of classic german WW1 book Storm of Steel, and it’s a striking meditation on duty and regret, in all its forms. Content warming for premature birth.

• I forget if I’ve linked to the article of folks trying to actually play through the Campaign For North Africa. I will do so now, anyway.

• Mark Diaz Truman interviewed over at Rascal, talking about Magpie’s journey across the last decade. Interesting perspectgives throughout.

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Iris’ first half-term, so everything is up in the air. I’m presently visiting my brother’s, so the kids are all running around and being adorable. I handed in the third script for a thing last week, which leaves this week for smaller work, and often contemplative work. The main thing is actually trying to do the work on plotting a thing – I want to move from a short term six issue plan to a big, integrated 13 issue thing. This involves a little research, and a lot of just musing about what I think is interesting and worth pursuing. I think I’m getting somewhere.

The other main thread is the backmatter for DIE: Loaded 12, which is wrapping up. The last of the 12 gods has been written, and I”m trying to get a new scenario-frame into the 2000 words I have left. It’ll be a first note, and very playtest-y, but that’s fine. I’m looking at what we did, in terms of material, and it’s going to end up at at around 11k of RPG expansion – which seems nice, right? That’s basically a 30 page supplement in normal DIE lay out, just given away. Well, given away in a a slightly-better-than-draft form.

It was a good exercise for me too – sitting and writing a public-facing essay on each of the gods, and expressly trying to nail down their philosophy in a way that someone other than me can understand? That’s fun.

And now, a shower.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
28.10.2026