3 Weeks
Hello friends,
The plan is to send out a newsletter roughly every other week, but it looks like I’m currently on a 3-week scheduled. Since the last couple of delays have been because I’m working on stuff and not because I hate my life, I’ll take it.
Castaways & Conspiracies is now available at all the usual places. The print version is coming soon, but was delayed due to some issues with the cover.
I’m getting close to having a complete draft of QAGS 3E. Right now there are several sections that need more detail and a lot of places with “insert text here” (often for things we’ve written a thousand times, like attribute descriptions), but I’ve at least got at least a general idea of how all the major rules systems work and fit together. I’ll be running the second playtest this weekend when the Hex crew gathers at Land Between the Lakes for our second retreat of the year.
I’m also still writing about the history of Hex Games over at The Death Cookie (You can read them earlier by joining by Patreon).
I’ve also started working on getting The Red Witch of Chapel d’Angoisse prepared to release as a Million-Colored Sun adventure. I’ve already got the maps and I’m going to try to use Daz3D renders for the rest of the art. I’ve already got the cover and one interior piece finished.
Red Witch of Chapel d’Angoisse cover mock-up. Speaking of Million-Colored Sun, check out this review on Youtube (the MCS part starts about 12 minutes in).
Recent Reading
I’m just about finished with Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs. I read The Place of Dead Roads several years ago and it didn’t make much sense. Later I found out it was part of a trilogy and picked up the other two books. Cities of the Red Night is the first book, and this time around it makes slightly more sense but still isn’t what you’d call straightforward.
The Illustrated Al is a bunch of comics of Weird Al songs collected into a massive slipcase hardcovers (I bought the deluxe edition). Whether it’s for you depends on how much you like Weird Al (I’ve already bought my ticket for the 2025 tour, so I’m definitely in the target audience).
Assassin Nation by Kyle Starks and Erica Henderson is a graphic novel about the former World’s Greatest Hitman hiring a bunch of the world’s top hitmen to protect him from being assassinated. It’s a quick, fun read.
The Ronin’s Guide to the Sprawl Vol. 1: Street Cred by Gun Metal Games is a book about just what it sounds like for the Savage Worlds Interface Zero setting. You can read my review at the Death Cookie.
The Power Words Engine by Dom Liotti is a zine I got from Kickstarter a few years ago. It’s a vocabulary-based magic system that’s supposed to work with any game. It has some decent ideas and makes some really strange choices for a game that’s supposed to be system and setting agnostic.
One of Us by Stary Wisdom Press is another game from my Kickstarter zine pile. It’s for DCC, but it seems like MCC would be a better call since it’s a post-apocalyptic dustbowl circus game. Except for the fact that what backstory is there is seems to be based on a muddled understanding of early 20th Century history, the stuff in the zine is pretty good. The biggest problem is that there’s just not much in the zine.
Recently Watched
Only Murders in the Building season four started a while ago and is just as much fun as the first 3 seasons.
I watched a few episodes (maybe even a whole season) of Vikings when it first came out, but lost track of it. I just started it again since I enjoyed the “guys on boats killing people” genre when I watched Black Sails.
I also watched Kevin Can F**k Himself when it originally aired, but it was so good I decided I’d watch it again when I saw it on Netflix. The plan was to just watch an episode at a time in between other shows, but I ended up binging the whole damned thing.
Boy Kills World is about a Skarsgard who kills a lot of people in the dystopian future. It’s a very stylized and splattery action movie that’s probably not for everyone. The thing that really made it work for me is that the main character is a deaf-mute so all of his internal thoughts are voiced by the guy from Bob’s Burgers doing his best Street Fighter imitation.
Still Waiting is a sequel to Waiting that I didn’t even know existed. It has it’s moments, but the best of the cast from the first movie is either missing (Ryan Reynolds, Anna Farris) or basically doing cameos (Luis Guzman, Chi McBride). In their place you get John Michael Higgins and Steve Howey, two funny guys who are in way over their heads with a script that’s mainly only funny when it’s doing callbacks to the first movie.
That’s all I’ve got for this time. I’ll give you another update in 2-3 weeks.
TYTYVM,
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson