Newsletter #3: Project Prep and Conventions

Near the end of last year, I figured the first three months of 2026 would be my most productive. My pieces in Flatline on the Blocks had minor edits to resolve, Devil's Due was moving into pre-production with the manufacturer, and the frigid Ottawa temperatures meant I'd have plenty of time indoors to tackle my project backlog.

Even though that plan folded immediately in January, I still felt like I got things done.

• The menu pamphlet for Min's Unending Bowl (an in-universe tie-in for Flatline) took more time than expected to write meaningful dishes and secret menu connections.
• Devil's Due had quite a few devils-in-the-details in order to meet print requirements. I've learned more than I ever planned to about Total Area Coverage of ink, PDF transparency layers, and more.
• Proofreading is an art. I've found the slower I go, the more I'm able to find. Jordan and I were able to correct what was needed in Devil's Due, and Chris has tackled everything the whole crew had raised for Flatline.

We have recently closed the late pledges for Devil's Due, as we're pulling final numbers together. If you want to pick this up later, it will for sure be available at both Tuesday Knight Games and RV Games web stores. We'll have an ETA for backers once we're in full production with the manufacturer, which should be imminent.

Flatline on the Blocks, as part of Mothership Month 25, is available for pre-order in the MM25 Mega Pledge Manager along with the rest of the projects. They'll all ship together in one box!

Pre-order any of the 25 projects

I've committed myself to the goal of tracking each game I run and play for the year. Looking back at the past three months, I'm surprised at the diversity of systems. I ran just over 25% of these 26 sessions:

January. There's one callout I want to make outside of my usual haunts. No Nut November is a compact game about post-apocalyptic squirrels trying to survive the winter by building up their food stores. The hit-and-run dynamic the system encourages is really fun. The mutations and calamity in this game is unhinged. The author, Mitchell Daily, is gearing up for a print run, too.

It's played with d8s, and your squirrel's 4 stats define how many you roll for a challenge. Each one of these actions costs a point of energy, and the quality of your success is based on how many 7s and 8s are rolled, called hits. The injury system is simple and you don't roll for damage. Energy is recovered by (finding and) eating nuts. Every kind of food is simply called a nut; better food is worth multiple nuts.

February. I'm sure you can see the dearth of games over that month. My partner and I took a lovely holiday in Aotearoa / New Zealand over part of that month. I had a great time, and listened to plenty of episodes of Rascal Radio, Between Two Cairns, 5MW Ansible Uplink, and Game Studies Study Buddies.

March. Now, how about this rainbow tower of games! I had the opportunity to hit up two conventions, nearly back-to-back. Terminal City in Vancouver, BC, and Breakout in Toronto, ON. They might be the two biggest tabletop conventions in Canada.

At Terminal City, I signed up to run three games of Mothership, bringing my favourite adventure out of Hull Breach Vol. 1, Vibechete! For most of the players, it was their first time playing Mothership! I definitely overprepared on materials to bring to the con. I made condensed booklets of the Mothership rules in 8 pages, a stack of pregen characters, and a tidy module cheatsheet for myself.

It's important to track time in Vibechete! so I used a neat app called Seconds on my watch. It was a simple looping timer that vibrated my wrist when it was time to trigger another tick.

My Death Cup, dead centre of the table photo below, got a few uses. I love that piece of pottery, made by my buddy Chris.

These conventions were my first chance to play Classic Traveller, Deathmatch Island, The One Ring, and Monster of the Week. The organizers at both cons put together great conventions, and I would love to attend both next year.

While at both cons, I volunteered to help out staffing the booth for the inaugural Canada Roles Awards, which was a great way to introduce some excellent Canadian games to attendees. Online voting for those awards will be opening soon. It was fantastic to meet so many other folks making and playing TTRPGs!

Hanging out with Joshua and Jasmine from Compose Dreams, Gabriel from WatcherDM, Christoph from Random Alien Games, and so many others was a blast.