"I have the need to rescue myself, because I’m much too afraid to ask somebody else"

There's actual substance here but I'm trialing song lyrics stuck in my head as newsletter titles, like this an MSN status

• Store Launch

• Ritual Magic for Besties (Updates and Reflections)

• Busy Busy Busy

• Coming Soon: Godslingers

Welcome back to the Rat Wave Newsletter. We're out of February, a month that felt very up and down at times for me at least. I've been busy. I'm always saying I've been busy. In some senses this newsletter is trying to slice the busyness that's just gone into a shape that feels less amorphous. Anyway.

Grand Opening

I opened a webstore. Go to ratwave.square.site and you can buy physical copies of Rat Wave books direct from me. There are six titles on offer in this soft-launch:

• Follow Me in the Night: a Cursed Radio

• The Infinite Dancefloor

• The Story of a Story

• An Illustrator’s Guide to the Dreamtlands

• Transgender Deathmatch Legend

• To Embrace a Swamp Creature

It's an interesting slice of my ouvre. Half the titles are solo games, which isn't really reflected in my wider work. TDL and Swamp Creature are some of my most personal work, next to Terminal which will come to the store down the line I'm sure. At launch there's none of the Old Gods and Young Guns titles which feels like an omission. The guest form for This is Your Lifepath asks people to select three titles of theirs they'd like me to read as research. It's got me thinking about curation, especially when you're curating something that feels representative of you, or or your work at least. Anyway.

Ritual Magic for Besties, the latest

The Ritual Magic for Besties Crowdfundr finished and me and Molomoot are at work finishing the game. It's in close to final layout now so the PDF release should come sometime this month so if you missed out during the campaign you won't have to wait long to fix that.

(I think the campaign didn't go as well as I'd have liked and there's some lessons to draw from that. I think the page could have included (or at least linked to) more details of how the game played as even though that stuff was out there it maybe wasn't front loaded enough? If I'd worked on an actual okay of the game that might also have helped, as well as getting more word out. I imagine some of it is to do with the choice of platform (and as such not having access to Kickstarters built in audience) and there's probably something to say about the decline of Twitter. Still, some lessons, and the game itself is still coming and something I'm proud of. We go again.)

These are previews of the work-in-progress layout. Whereas the samples on the campaign pages used CC resources here I scanned in all the scrapbook elements specifically. I think it gives it a "earthy" quality, whatever that means. Anyway.

Bits and Pieces, Busy, Busy

I've been up to lots of bits and pieces. This weekend I was a panelist at the Areas of Effect TTRPG Symposium at Arebyte Gallery. I talked about worldbuilding and lore with Timothy Linwood and Chris McDowell. My contributions included comparisons to shooting film in black and white, staging Shakespeare, and the rules of wrestling, as well as a tangent about Brian de Palma and Star Wars. It's been recorded for prosterity so I believe will be available in another form soon enough.

Speaking of podcasts I'm in motion on the second season of This is Your Lifepath. I've already recorded multiple interviews I'm excited about and have been doing lots of reading and organising for future recordings. I enjoy making this and think the conversations that come out of it are really interesting. More details to come as I want to record a whole 12-episode run before releasing.

For some book keeping reasons I'm seeking artists for a far away project (Transgender Deathmatch Legend II, which I've talked about a bit before in these here newsletter). Here's the tweet I made asking around. If you know any who should get in touch with me or I should get in touch with do shout out about it.

Also I've been working on my arena for Death Game. I've figured out some interesting archetypes, and how some stuff will look in play and I like what I'm working up. I'll be finishing a first draft this month.

Like I said. Busy. Each of these things could have been their own massive section and instead I'm rushing through them a little, partly in the mindset of "another month will be their time to shine". Exercises in curation. Anyway.

Coming Soon: Godslingers

Next month I'll be realising a new mid-sized game that I've been working on for a while and talked about here before: Godslingers. It's a rule-lite space fantasy western. You play cosmic cowboys with divine power, power that threatens to consume them. It's a bespoke system for campaigns in the world of Old Gods and Young Guns. It's laid out in a retro comic book style using a mix of public domain comic book art.

I like Godslingers a lot. I think it pulls a lot of different influences together. I think the mechanics support a spirit of collaborative storytelling, longer term play and engaging character arcs.

I have no real idea how it will do. Old Gods and Young Guns does well at conventions, it's a premise people vibe with, but one I think I've struggled to pitch online before. If this launch does well I might look at a print run in the future, I'll have some more details next month if there are harder plans to share.

Next Month

Next month I expect we'll have launched Ritual Magic for Besties digitally and I'll have more details on how physical release is progressing. I also expect I'll have a hard launch date for Godslingers (wanna give it enough space from RM4B that I'm not self-canibalising). Maybe I'll have a launch date in site for season 2 of This is Your Lifepath.

See ya next time!