Our Golden Age: The Empire Never Ends (Patreon)

Dear heroes,

First, a very happy new year. I hope you celebrated well. I hope this new year will meet you with health and contentment, and here and there some well deserved fortune and joy. May it be a human year, of games and toil, defeats and successes, and through it all, companionship and community and togetherness.

Now, to the news.

(TL;DR: Read the first release-ready version of Synthetic Dream Machine: Our Golden Age today! It's attached! Right at the bottom!)

You might have followed my journey there and back again with SEACAT. I am very  grateful for your support and encouragement on that path. You've made it possible.

Well, here we are now.

UVG 2E is off to the printers. Despite my hopes for a holiday, I got to spend a fair bit of time tweaking and fixing details. But, the body of that book is now off. I'll share the pdf of it with you once it's ready for release. Spoilers and all.

I bring this up not to tease but because revisiting UVG 2E was very crucial in my whole journey around SDM (synthetic dream machine) and S.E.A.C.A.T. (aka Uranium Butterflies aka BIGCAT).

This is my current plan for the ruleset:

1. We are going to publish the BIGCAT as a limited edition manuscript print run as part of the synthetic dream machine kickstarter. A kind of collector's edition / testament to the project, probably with more comments and notes. I'm going to release just the rules of that, also as a free game, around the same time. Promotion and all that. I'll also publish the pdf & release / edit it for release in parts later on (the magic section is definitely getting its own book).

2. I am going to release the 1 page version as a free game soon (1pgCAT). Maybe next week. This is the version I built SDM on top of.

3. SDM. Synthetic Dream Machine. The distilled, and re-baked game. This is going to be the core of the kickstarter and the ruleset and setting I'll use as a basis for the next cycle of adventures.

Why How What?

Ok, first of all, I'm just guessing that that's what some of you are asking. For your actual questions: comments down below.

One big thing I struggled with when making BIGCAT, besides it getting too BIG, was that it was missing the driving story thread. UVG is super clear: road trip. Witchburner: burn the witch. Longwinter: run before you freeze. Let Us In: don't let them in.

At a certain point I tried making it about going Beyond the Black City, then about mixing together the Rainbowlands and the Dead City. And thru it all it grew and grew. A tad too much. The pandemic, lockdowns, fall of my live gaming group—all that didn't help at all!

Editing the 2nd edition of the UVG really drove that home. It also really drove home that I ran out of creative energy right around the end. The few months after my Dad's death, I had enough juice left to finish the big map and the screen, but they weren't quite what I wanted.

Look at this little map now (see attached). This is what I wanted to make, but couldn't. Side note: this might not be the final version due to paper size limits. So, now I'm trying to get two maps printed, each 900mm long. One for the Circle Sea and surroundings, another for the Utter West. And, hey, leaves space for the Sunwhite Hole in the World to the east.

So we come to Our Golden Age: dystopian garden of eden.

Musical interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwwrZKbJNxM

Oh, and it's also a [][][]lude to the Rainbowlands and the UVG. If you thought the Porcelain Princes and the Spectrum Satraps were freaky, well ... uh ... behold the full and glorious splendor of the Lords of the Dream Canopy. Please ignore the little homunculus behind the curtain.

I'm not going to spoiler the rest. I was really a horrible tease with this, I think ... so enjoy.

It's just 120 pages. Well, and 40 pages of lexicon. But the lexicon doesn't count.

Right?

May your 2023 see plenty of dreams come fulfilled, synthetic or no.

—L.