What's brewing at Mottokrosh Machinations? ☕️
Hey there,
You're receiving this email because you've bought something from us at some point, and agreed to us sending you extremely sporadic emails.
We're very, very grateful for this, as it's very hard for a tiny company like us to be heard on social media, so a mailing list of interested folks is the best way for us to share all the cool stuff we've been working on.
Enough preamble, let's look at the goods!
The Eternal Grind Café
Last year at the KRAKEN convention in Germany, a GM named Olga ran a game in the brave morning slot that was so much fun and so hilarious that I asked her there and then to publish it.
This game is now ready and available as a softcover zine (shipping worldwide) and PDF.
DriveThruRPG liked it so much, they posted about it on X!
On the blog: Compelling Arena Fights
Originally published in the awesome KNOCK! magazine (issue 3), this article is now also on our blog.
With the tables from this article you can make every arena-style combat a memorable, quirky, and/or very dangerous set piece.
There are more blog posts in the works, including a full adventure, so do drop by occasionally, or subscribe to our RSS feed with your favorite reader.
Read our books online as art-light web pages
Hypertellurians was one of our first books to get the ebook (read: HTML) treatment, and recently we've added Capes and Cloak and Cowls and a Park, as well as the brand new The Eternal Grind Café.
Why "give away" our books like that?
Well, first of all, all of the texts of our publications have come with a Creative Commons license from the very beginning. With attribution, anyone could do this.
The reason we're doing it is to make our games as widely accessible as possible:
Not everyone can easily (or at all) read small-ish printed text, amid lots of art and graphical elements. On a semantically structured webpage (as all of them should be!), this content can be parsed and presented by assistive technology in a myriad of ways.
And frankly not everyone can afford all of our fancy books. We're eternally grateful to those who can and do buy them, as pretty much all the money goes directly to artists and collaborators, but if you're suffering from hardships (and let's face it, capitalism pretty much makes sure you do to some extent, unless you're born into money), we'd rather you have some means to play our games than none.
Quick bits
Discuss on Mastodon. I'm moving away from Graphcomment to Mastodon for discussion on the website. If you're not familiar with Mastodon, it's part of a network of services, apps, and sites that communicate via a common protocol called ActivityPub. All services using this protocol can communicate with one another, and together it's called the Fediverse (federated universe). It's a form of decentralized social network because anyone can run their own server, with their own rules, but they can all cross-talk. Mastodon is one of the oldest of these, and, as of the time of this writing, even Meta's new Threads has started trialing opening to the Fediverse, starting in the US. You'll see "Discuss on Mastodon" links under all machinations and new blog posts on the site, while the older ones will (for now, at least) continue to show Graphcomment. You can also reach me directly.
Fantastology. I've talked about this upcoming anthology a number of times, and while it's not quite ready, it's getting ever closer. As a recap, it'll feature 50% remastered old adventures and 50% new ones, and it will double the number of powers and drives available in Hypertellurians. I'm super excited about this one.
Wolden. I've been working on and playtesting a new game for some time now. Originally called Woaden, it's now been renamed to Wolden. It incorporates and iterates on some elements of Hypertellurians, but unlike the latter, it comes with much more of its own lore and setting. Furthermore, its core system covers travel, conflict, social, and downtime.
System Crashers. If you haven't seen this "down with the system" free game and its accompanying adventure yet, I'd recommend you take a look. I'm quite proud of it.
And if you made it this far, please enjoy this discount code for 15% off everything at https://shop.mottokrosh.com:
MAMAMAMAAIIILING
That's all folks, thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed it, do feel free to share it, or our website, around; or mention our stuff on your favorite social network, website, forum, actual play, or podcast! (I'm always happy to guest, too.)
#MottokroshMachinations
