Three Goblin Art
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
izzy's playlists!
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@keftiu
hi there! still dealing with the dust of yet another digital migration - wild, considering my last one was leaving here. it'll be a little bit before this is properly up and running (especially as i'm loathe to ditch twitter until it completely sinks!), but this space doesn't hurt to have. in the meantime:
you can buy my tabletop games here
and you can donate to broadly keep me alive here
your online pets are worried about Y2K
The Solo Sci-fi RPG that Embodies Capitalist-Horror
Thursday is my friend. I met her because she was talking loudly and passionately about Songbirds. She did a read-along thread on Bluesky. We’ve talked a lot since then. About games and other things. When she made Hardcase, I was immediately smitten with it and knew I would write something about it. I say all of this to say that this is not a review. I am bias. No, this is a love letter.
Dear Hardcase,
I wouldn’t be playing Citizen Sleeper right now, if it weren’t for you. Which is a massive compliment. So often it’s the other way around, right? You play a video game, get inspired by some use of mechanics, and go to find a TTRPG that suits that vibes. Or you create one yourself, citing it as inspiration. You are a game that is in direct response to Citizen Sleeper, so I should have started there and then found you, but instead I found you, and now I want to go backwards and see what I missed from my initial brush with Citizen Sleeper.
This isn’t even to say that you are reduced purely to your inspiration—we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and the giants you’re standing on are sporadic and wonderful. You are a book that is in love with other tabletop books. You are a book that wants to share that love with others, much in the way that Citizen Sleeper is in love with Blades in the Dark. That energy of sharing and wanting to be shared is found on the first pages, when you say you are modular, that you should be taken apart and pieced back together, as if you yourself are a spaceship and I can take you apart to make you faster, or add a gun on the nose if I feel violent, or add more places to sit and stare out into space if I’m feeling homesick and melancholic.
When reading you and playing you, I started remembering my time with Signalis, which is so funny to me because you aren’t from there, so to speak. But, in much the same way that Signalis is a love letter to survival horror and is a game pieced together from the media that inspired it, and wears that media proudly, and yet is able to transcend those inspirations and homages and allusions to become something that is whole, with a unique identity to itself, you too have accomplished that impossible task.
I can point to the modular bits and see the timeline of the mechanic: clocks from Blades, stress from me(?), basic move from Apocalypse World, and on and on and on. But even though I can point to those and say “this is where they come from,” it doesn’t lessen you one bit. It makes me even more enamored that these pieces have created something new. Something infused with a very 1980’s fascination and fear of space capitalism. A world that is at once recognizable in its mundanity (I am transported back to the warehouse job from my early 20’s, only now I’m in orbit of Saturn) and so spectacular in its specificity.
You really come alive in that specificity. Every NPC begs me to role-play them. Every locale desires me to haunt it. I want to roll the slots until I get every outcome. I wanna waste my money on cigarettes and snacks. I wanna do drugs and get psychic powers. Roll tables, my god; your use of roll tables is intoxicating—each entry isn’t just a possibility, but a truth that exists in the world. Reading each of them in order creates mood, vibe, atmosphere. It clears the fog of war that pollutes any new setting, worming its way into my brain ridges. Even in the work, the bounties and the salvage, everything makes me feel like I’m present. I’m living it. I’m working paycheck to paycheck and wasting spare cash on whatever I can just to feel something. To feel alive? No. To feel the itch of starvation again.
You understand the trap of capitalism. It’s ultimate goal of distraction and obfuscation. You understand that the systems in place aren’t there for me to be able to change them. That they all exist in opposition with change. I think it’s poetically terrible that the only way for me to escape that life in Hardcase is not death, but “fates worse than death” (your words, not mine). And those fates are jobs: cigarette quality control smoker, retail worker, biological crash test dummy. There’s no retiring. No revolt or revolution. What system is truly built to enable those? The system is built to keep me here, keep me docile, and keep me glued to my screen as I waste my nights playing “Conqueror,” the game-within-your-game that provides me a way to continue my daily grind, only in a digital space this time (much, much better).
You are part of the Capitalist Horror genre, which I think Cyberpunk was born from and is nestled inside. Sci-fi greats like Neuromancer, Alien, and Blade Runner are trendsetters in this genre. Literary greats like The Great Gatsby and American Psycho delve into the horrors inside a person ingrained and in-love with the trappings of the genre. Jacob Geller found it in video games like A Night in the Woods and Tacoma for his essay “Capitalist Present, Collective Future.” And I find it horribly biting and painfully real, here in Hardcase.
Thank you,
Snow
You can find Hardcase on itch.io.
And you can find Thursday on Bluesky.
To support writing like this, there’s my patreon or my substack (where you’re reading this). I’m on bluesky as well, for less-words and more-posts.
Have you played HARDCASE ?
By Thursday Garreau
Heliopause Heavy Industries holds the solar system in its crumbling, capitalist grip. The gears of its machine are Heliopause Contractors, those poor bastards trying to make ends meet with whatever needs doing.
HARDCASE is a solo roleplaying game about being flat broke in space. It uses lightweight d6-based mechanics, including some familiar to Powered by the Apocalypse designs. The core of the game fits in the first 4 pages; everything else is modular.
In HARDCASE, your HC might break down orbital mines for scrap, claim bounties on those who can't (or won't) pay rent, get into big, stupid arguments on dial-up forums… and then wash it all down with an ice-cold can of Apogee Cola.
Have you played ?
Yes I have played it
No but I've read it
No but i've heard of it
Never heard of it
HARDCASE: TRUTHSEEKER out now!
HARDCASE is my solo game about trying to survive the gig economy in a hyper-capitalist space future, and the first official expansion is out now: TRUTHSEEKER!
Prone to conspiratorial thinking? Delve into 5 Mysteries with a new Carved from Brindlewood-inspired subsystem. Overwhelmed by the pressures of HC living? Distract yourself with Doomscrolling, Virtual Pets, E-Dating, or the hunt for Lost Media. Enjoy 2 new Online Servers and 4 more Islands for CONQUEROR, the in-game fictional MMORPG. Crawl inside your Terminal as a HeliOS Cryptid, a whole new mode of play where you're a disembodied code-creature! It's a love letter to computer gaming and the better internet of yesteryear, inspired by things like Hypospace Outlaw and the fake BBS in the old .hack// games.
If you're new to the HARDCASE universe (or solo gaming in general!), you can pick up the core rulebook alongside TRUTHSEEKER at a discount through the end of August! I'd love to hear what you think of it <3
Home designed by Donald L. Maxcy (1990)
"A below-grade handball court turned "Raiders of the Lost Ark" temple—all things are possible with the sorcery of designer Donald Maxcy. A three-story structure in Pebble Beach, California was built on the site to include gymnasium, pool table, video room and nightclub. By day, sunlight warms the "temple" stairwell; by night, this same space is treated to theatrical lighting, conjuring up a sunset or shadows of jungle leaves. In the seating area, high color-rendering fluorescent lighting is artfully combined with planting in pockets of space built into the room. Mirrors back these alcoves, letting the eye wander into a grove of reflected trees. The coffee table conceals movie-theater-quality sound equipment to coordinate with the TV monitor hidden behind the filigree panel. Craftsmen in faux turned this unit to apparent stone. Their decorative archaeology includes sandstone cast rosettes and a subtle bas-relief of a foreign god." —Molly Siple
Description and photos scanned from a 1991 issue of Designer's West Magazine, additional photos scanned from the book Residential Lighting by Randall Whitehead
My new solo TTRPG is out!
HARDCASE is a light-weight solo TTRPG about trying to make it to payday in space. If you're a fan of grimy sci-fi and hate corporations (or just really like Mothership, 2400, and World of Dungeons), there's a lot for you to love with it!
You can grab it half-off for the next week <3
I bought this and I love it. It has flavours of the video games Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Citizen sleeper. Worth picking up for the delicious layout and design too.
Darker dreams await beneath the former Lakeview Mall.
My new solo TTRPG is out!
HARDCASE is a light-weight solo TTRPG about trying to make it to payday in space. If you're a fan of grimy sci-fi and hate corporations (or just really like Mothership, 2400, and World of Dungeons), there's a lot for you to love with it!
You can grab it half-off for the next week <3
About Victorian nipple piercings
So I stumbled on an article (part 1, part 2, part 3) about Victorian people getting their nipples pierced and the great thing about it is that it gives evidence, actual quotes from Late 19th century newspaper, accounts from people having had their nipples (or various other parts of their anatomy) pierced.
But before I shared it, I was seized by doubt? What if it was all bogus? What if the article’s author had made it all up? Luckily I managed to track down an archive of “The English Mechanic and World of Science” magazine, and I eventually found the parts quoted in the article (although the author got his dates mixed up : the story starts in april 1889, not 1888). It’s all true, people! There was a nipple piercing fad in the 1880s in Europe…
Keep reading
2024 is soon which means... ttyd remake soon
Qualifiers round 1, part A
Which is your favorite F@TT song out of these?
Eve’s Light Parade
Spring in Hieron
The Duke at Sunset
BRIDEWELL. CANDLEFLAME. BARROW.
PRIORITY. FLASHOVER. PRIORITY.
Doppelgänger
Eat
sweater weather ^^
this was up early on my patreon! some of the next few big pieces will be exclusive there (and for the artbook) but I'll still be posting bonus sketches between the public ones ^^
mountain spirit
I have to do everything my fucking self huh
It’s been a while since I’ve last drawn mecha.
