Newsletter #1: Mothership Month and my games on the go
September came and went pretty quick for me. Between handling the last pieces of fulfillment for Emergence, working through layout review for Devil's Due, and getting my submissions in for Flatline on the Blocks, I spent some time getting this new website and newsletter up and running.
Flatline on the Blocks
Chris Airiau pitched this project with the original title of “Block Wars” back in April. The idea was to build out a whole district on Prospero's Dream, the city-state-sized station featured in Tuesday Knight Games’ A Pound of Flesh. Across many writers, we figured out what each block of a cramped district might look like, who lives there, and who are vying for control. Flatline is crowdfunding during Mothership Month 25, and combines the work of 18 members across writing, map design, illustration and editing.
My contribution is a pair of district blocks and a major faction. The most likely way the player crew might first interact with my work is Min’s Unending Bowl, or its myriad franchises across The Dream. The chef owner, Min Carradine, has built this restaurant empire with her own (cybernetically) enhanced hands. The restaurant proudly features alkaline noodles, and the iconic red takeout boxes litter the streets.
Min’s empire is powered by a block-sized factory, The Alkaline Ward, where an army of workers transforms raw ingredients into usable product for the restaurant’s central kitchen. In exchange for long, gruelling hours, workers are rewarded with housing in the prefabs that surround the factory.
Min officially has no comment, but it’s always been suspicious that the local crime syndicate, The Siphon, leaves her businesses alone. They hit up other shops with their protection racket, and the flow of drugs and other crime never seems to stop.
So what’s the connection between a noodle shop empire, a caustic factory floor, the driven chef, Min, and the shadowy Siphon leader, known only as The Judge? Back Flatline on the Blocks on October 14 to find out.
Other news
Devil’s Due continues to progress. We’re looking at the last few days of work before an internal alpha release is ready for review by our project team. It shouldn’t be long before we’ve got a pre-production version out for backers while we get this 188 page monster into the print queue. I’m really looking forward to getting this into everybody’s hands.
I’ve been receiving a steady flow of packages as other crowdfunding campaigns wrap up. Over September, I had a number of parcels land in my mailbox, so I wrote up a little walkthrough of what I got and why I’m excited to dig into them.
Carson Brown
Games I’m playing
Delta Green. After watching Quinns’ fantastic video covering the system, a good friend of mine organized a short campaign. We’re three sessions in, and we’ve: made enemies of the local law enforcement; neutralized a troublesome key suspect; likely infected ourselves with a terrible alien fungus; skipped judicial authorization and faked a warrant; and found a treasure trove of explosives at a Green Box dead drop. This game rules.
Forbidden Lands. A Shadowdark campaign I play in wrapped up once we found a way to open up the Necronomicon we found. Once opened, portals appeared, and we picked one that took us into this cursed world. We’re only a single session in so far. I’ve been excited to play Forbidden Lands for a while, and so far it’s been a great use of the Year Zero engine. We just arrived at our first adventure site.
Picket Line Tango. While most of the players have reservations about being scabs and breaking a union strike line, one particular player has a marine that’s straight to business. They’ve just figured out the big mystery, but the mining unionists have had just about enough of these PURE Refinement Inc stooges. We’re two sessions in, and I think there’s one final climactic session left.
Helium Hysteria (Hull Breach). A module so nice, I’ve run it twice. This is a great one-shot bloodbath, with military-focused characters within an off-grid base on the frozen dwarf planet Mandella IV. I’m happy whenever I get to pull out the tidy Hull Breach tome.
The Zone. When a planned TTRPG session falls through, this game has my back. There’s an excellent demo/online version you can play for free, just spin up a video call on the side and have a blast dying in the weird, wonderful world you create, right at the table. The base game draws big inspiration from Annihilation, but the Book of Twists in the physical game box can keep things fresh.