Mid July Surprise! (Patreon)

transmission 22714//

Dear heroes,

Before I left on holiday, I decided to try out how the new standardcat template worked with some ... uh ... extant text.

So, I took a look at Dead City again, and it worked well.

Then I redid the map for it and figured out a nifty isometric tool in Affinity Designer, and liked that.

I looked at it and thought to myself, well, this has legs. I could get it to 24 pages. That's a zine, isn't it?

And for a while, I'd had an idea for how to deal one of the core problems with Red Sky, Dead City.* A way to present a difficult, messy, complicated situation (a war) to player characters who are, by their very physical nature (humanoid agents assembled to salvage cultural artefacts from destruction by an other-dimensional demiurge) outside of the course of events.

So I wrote up the Memorialist archetype for Seacat, since I already had Uranium Butterflies done and could quickly assemble a bundle of skills and traits.

Finally, having that in place, I added a second quarter (or most of it), and suddenly I had a 32-page zine.

My apologies for any and all typos, weird art and other stuff. I made most of this zine in the last week. Uh. Since the last post.

Hope you enjoy it!

Now I'm off on my vacation.

Probably no posts till mid August.

Take care, everyone.

Use sunscree* ee* ee* ...*

//transmission cuts out

—Luka

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*For all the normal people who don't remember, I had a core problem with Dead City.

I initially wrote Dead City aka. Necropolis in 2017 - even before UVG - when I was in a quite difficult period of my life and processing the workplace harassment that very much derailed my career in 2016. A core conceit was that it was a biting satire of military adventurism, but written from the perspective of a conquering regime's propaganda department. It took aim at a whole series of empires and regimes, drawing parallels between the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistant, Soviet invasions and conquests, Nazi germany, Mongols, Romans, yadda yadda. The whole nine yards.

Then, to go further, while it fed most closely on the fight between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union (two horrible regimes), in that both the Ebéteen and Iksans were quite irredeemable, it went one step further: it put the players in the uncomfortable shoes of the invaders.

But I became quite uncomfortable with this. While this premise is interesting for a one-shot or a few sessions, it becomes unworkable with a longer campaign. How to deal with it? As farce? (bumbling invaders? Show the invasion over time from different perspectives?

I was getting further and further from what I already had: half of a massive, sprawling imperial capital (of an empire of necromancers and flesh wizards) right after it was conquered by a self-righteous 'reasonable' empire (of assimilating cyborg wizards).

So my challenge was, how to salvage the sandbox setting (the city) from the frankly, uh, now unpleasant proposition of presenting a whole campaign where the heroes are, actually, the baddies.

This problem became completely acute for me with Russia's latest invasion of Ukraine. After all, uh, who wants to play a bunch of vicious murderous looters in a war zone after seeing what the Russian imperialists get up to?