Hey there! This is a blog for Witch Hat Productions, the creative label of @cheetour and @witchy-rook!
We make TTRPGs, microsettings, and whatever funky types of fiction that strike us. We also have a bimonthly newsletter about small fiction pieces like ours, which you can read here under the #witch hat news tag!
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Itch.io
DriveThruRPG
Designer Dragon - Itch / DriveThruRPG
Designer Dragon is a rules light TTRPG system designed for and by kids. Designer Dragon uses a 2d6 system with only a handful of rules that mainly serve to guide the collaborative storytelling. Easily accessible and with a simple character creation system, you can have a game up and running in only a few minutes!
Spittlewick's: A Witchy RPG - Itch / DriveThruRPG
Fenton Spittlewick's Academy of Witchcraft is a magical college attended by young witches still learning the basics of magic. Enter the great hall and learn which house you belong to to start attending classes at the world's finest magical school! (And don't worry: it's all-inclusive, non-segregated and there are plenty of bathrooms.) We've even provided a personality quiz to tell you which House you belong to!
Maximum Light - Itch / DriveThruRPG
Maximum Light is a Tabletop RPG set in the universe of The Green Horizon and Voiders. Themed around the traditional ragtag group of down-on-their-luck spacefarers, the rules of Maximum Light are roleplay-heavy and designed for you to scrape out of danger by the skin of your teeth.
Aster & Delphinium - Read on Comicfury
Aster & Delphinium follows the story of an ancient magical prophecy, and the guy whose job it is to spend his whole life waiting for it to come true so he can help the hero.
Golden Shadows - Read on Comicfury
Golden Shadows is a sci-fi/fantasy comic about crime and vigilante justice in a strange and mystical space Empire.
I say a lot of stuff on this blog about "play another game" and I really want people to understand what I mean about that. monopolies are bad. DnD has, through marketing and business decisions and luck and capital, dominated the entire hobby in a way that no other creative genre has ever seen before.
Want an alternative to Inktober? Try doing it on 🎁Minigame Mode🎁!
Here are some October Prompt 🎁Minigame modes🎁. Feel free to add your own!
🎃Trick-oct-Treat-tober: On October 1, buy yourself Halloween treats for this specific purpose. Every time you do an october prompt, you get to eat a treat. On October 31, you give the rest away to Trick or Treaters!! (or eat them all in one go. this is the "trick" part)
🥂Drinktober: Get a card. Every time you do a prompt, mark the card. On Halloween, obtain alcohol. Every mark = 1 drink. if you have too many you have to invite friends to help
5️⃣5-minute Rebotkni: Inktober, but with your non-dominant hand for 5 minutes per drawing max.
NASA has released a free, original tabletop role-playing game, and it’s one part educational experience and another part sci-fi/fantasy epic with magic and dragons.
The crux of The Lost Universe, the organization’s first TTRPG,involves a mystery: What would happen if the Hubble Space Telescope disappeared? It’s a simple premise and one that hides the complex backstory underscoring the events of the role-playing game. Without getting into the weeds, the game takes place on a planet called Exlaris, which was once thrown into chaos when a black hole moved too close and kicked it out of its orbit. The planet has since gone back to some degree of normalcy and is now almost completely dedicated to academia. In one city, a scholar named Eirik Hazn made a spell to connect with Earth to study the Hubble Space Telescope, which has famously collected data on black holes. However, the spell and telescope are stolen by a dragon, and researchers working on the project have been disappearing, so the players — Earthlings who worked on the telescope at NASA who were brought through a portal to Exlaris — have to save the day.
The official 44-page gameplay book is available to download for free on NASA’s website. You can play it in a party with 4-7 players, but you may need to fudge a few things to graft this narrative onto your TTRPG system of choice. The book says it’ll take around 3-4 hours to get through the adventure.
This is an archived version of our microfiction newsletter! You can read along on our tumblr, or subscribe here.
Hey there! It's been a few months since you last heard from us, hasn't it? How have you been? I'll go first: I've been bad! Let's talk about creativity and mental health.
I don't speak much about my mental health publicly, but let me summarise it for you; I was a very happy teenager who plummeted into clinical depression at about age nineteen and never fully recovered, and it sucks.
That said, the consequence of this is that I've been in therapy for years and read dozens of books about psychology for both patients and professionals, so even if I'm depressed, I'm also wise as all hell.
(I suspect if I weren't depressed, I would probably be completely zen.)
I have an excellent relationship with my creative craft, and my evidence for this is that I am both alive and still actively creating things. A lot of people never learn to manage the balance.
Many of the artists and writers I meet are weighed down heavily by the burden of not being good enough. "I'm an artist, but I get so anxious that I only draw once every few months, and then usually throw it away," my friends will tell me, ashamed. "I'm not good at it."
"I'm not really a writer," say the people I meet on discord. "I have this idea for a story that I've had for years, and I've written down some small things, but not anything I can show anyone – I'm not good enough yet."
On the other end of the scale are the creatives who push themselves through constant burnout, who neglect eating and sleeping in order to create as fast and voraciously as possible. A "successful career" may be built on five hours of sleep a day and constant, haunting guilt about keeping up engagement and output.
I think it's very easy to hide in hard work. You can have terrible self-care and self-awareness and be falling apart in every area, but if you work hard, and succeed, you never need to feel guilty about the other stuff.
You know who can create constantly, yet never get tired? Artists and writers who can spend hours every day effortlessly making things, while also being entirely present in their own lives? Children.
Human beings are born with the constant urge to be creative. It's pretty well-studied that imaginative play and brain development are directly linked in small children. It's in their nature to engage in make-believe.
Very few four-year-olds freeze in front of a blank piece of paper, because they know how terrible it feels to be bad at drawing and don't know where to begin with the idea they had without failing utterly. That's a particular madness we learn as we grow up.
I'm biased, but I firmly believe that playfulness is what makes us human. What we describe as "intelligence" in other animals is often correlated with their adaptability – their ability to conceptualise and understand things they've never experienced before, and maybe didn't even know were possible.
This, too, correlates with playfulness. Dolphins, crows, octopuses, and great apes – all very different animals – play games. Despite all having taken wildly different evolutionary paths to get there, they have all separately developed play.
To be human is to create. To imagine is to be human. So that's my way of not worrying about my creative output – whether I'm making enough, whether I'm good enough. I do not create art in order to sell it, or to gain praise for making it, although I would welcome it if either of those things started happening to me regularly.
My art does not need to be good, or valuable. It has the same value and function as the paintings I made at preschool when I was four; it is the byproduct of my humanity.
Let go of the idea of being a "good artist". Nobody is a good artist. The only thing any of us is really good at is being human, which tends to get in the way of the other stuff.
"How do I create more, without letting anxiety or laziness get in the way?"
I'm here again, writing my newsletter. How long until another mental health break knocks me flat again, I don't know. But right now, I feel motivated to put words to paper (or words to mailing list, as it were), and I'm going to follow that feeling until it's gone.
My advice to you is to do the same. Joy is a very precious gift; to enjoy creating something is divine. You are human, and that is enough. Put aside your doubts. Create ambitiously, stupidly, passionately, in any way you can, as long as you're having fun; and once you learn to have fun, the trick of learning how to create more and better is a very simple one.
So, here: Three things that spoke to me about the subject of mental illness, death, and the arts. Let's drink to our good health, eh?
Recommendations
So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder. A series of devastating essays about illness, addiction, dysfunction, and brutal, intimate, visceral emotion. I have few words for this one. I found it indescribably powerful.
Sawbones have an excellent episode about personal mental health stories. This one's much easier to listen to, but it's still quite personal, as these things tend to be. It spoke to me as someone who, at the time, kept a lot of my issues completely secret.
To The Moon by Freedbird Games: At the dying wish of a old man, two scientists must navigate and rewrite his memories of life. A short, funny video game, with very charming characters and hilarious jokes and – genuinely – one of the most sad and beautiful character dramas I've ever experienced in video game form.
Your project here. Do you make art of any kind - visual, written, performed? Are you starting a project or recruiting co-creators? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected].
That's it from me. I'll see you on the flip side, however far away that is. I'm not giving up! And neither should you!
There comes a point in every high-concept indie RPG author's career when one must ask: "Is this piece of orthodox rules tech I'm carefully avoiding really objectively bad, or is it merely present in D&D?"
I'm genuinely only halfway being a smartass here. I've been in the game for long enough that I remember when the received wisdom of the indie roleplaying sphere held that character classes are objectively bad game design, and if Apocalypse World hadn't gotten stupid popular a decade back I'm convinced that might well still be the case!
Fundamentally, game rules are opinionated: about what the experience of play should look like, about what kinds of stories the game should be used to tell, even about who gets to participate in play. This is unavoidable. It's very difficult to point to any rule, or any execution of a rule, that's bad in principle; about the closest you can get is to establish that a given rule (and its implementation) is more or less fit for a particular purpose.
Of course, we can approach it at one remove and argue that certain rules are bad in principle because no one should ever wish to have the experiences of play those rules want to create, or to tell the kinds of stories those rules want to tell, but that's not an argument that the rules in question are structurally bad; "one shouldn't wish to have this experience of play" is a moral position, and deciding which ways to pretend to be an elf are morally bad is beyond the scope of this post!
Being positioned both in gamer culture and by corporate decree as the RPG that can do anything, Dungeons & Dragons – as a text and as a fandom – doesn't really want to acknowledge any of this. Sure, there are token gestures toward it, like the "rules versus rulings" discourse or all that stuff about Rule 0, but ultimately, many of the baked-in assumptions of the game's rules are foundational, and can't be changed by making small tweaks around the edges. It's less that D&D's rules and structure are "bad" in principle, and more that D&D is very keen on telling you that if you and the rules have a disagreement about what kind of game you're playing that can't be fixed with an off-the-cuff house rule, it's because you're a bad player or a bad GM.
This is where a lot of indie RPG authors trip up. They've seen through the corporate marketing bullshit and recognised that game rules are opinionated, but then they turn around and go "well, these rules foster an experience of play which I dislike, and experiences of play which I dislike are objectively bad, therefore these rules are objectively bad". They convince themselves that there has to be a single objectively correct way to pretend to be an elf, and everybody who claims to enjoy other ways of pretending to be an elf is just too stupid and brainwashed to realise that they're not truly having fun.
To an extent, this is understandable. Many inde RPG authors are former fans of one of the big "universal" systems who've spent their formative years being gaslit by a culture of gaming which insists that game rules are value-neutral, and if you can't make the system du jour do what you want it to, then you're just Bad At Games. "Actually, no, and also fuck you" is a totally reasonable reaction! But it also leads to a whole lot of stupid arguments where folks insist in complete seriousness that if your game acknowledges the concept of hit points you might as well be sucking Hasbro's dick.
This is an archived version of our microfiction newsletter! You can read along on our tumblr, or subscribe here.
Which archive, you may ask? Well, it's quite simple.
Our own one.
Yes, like many twenty-somethings in the creative field now, I was forged in a rather specific fire – the classic Internet pipeline of Neopets, Deviantart, Tumblr, Twitter, usually interspaced at some point with either a gender crisis or a formal diagnosis of mental illness.
You see, for a young nerdy preteen in 2010, you have two sexy choices made available to you, neither of which you will perceive until it's too late. You will choose either the path of solitude (voraciously consuming and creating content in incredible loneliness and feeling like the only person in the world who does so), or the path of the internet, where you will learn at an incredibly young age how to receive and handle a death threat. I was raised on a raw, unfiltered diet of fandom. (Sonic the Hedgehog. The world has not been kind to me.)
The fans and the hermits have a lot to teach each other. In fact, as easy as it is to make fun of – well – most people on the internet, there is something valuable to be learned from every subculture of creativity, including the horny ones.
So let me make a confession to you: I'm a fanfiction writer. I have a shameful record of 155,821 words, none of which will ever give me a scrap of credibility with anyone, including other fanfiction writers. (Heavy is the head that wears the dunce hat of Adventure/Comedy.) Hell, I've spent over a year picking away at a fancomic project. For zero dollars and no publication accolades, I have written at least five full completed novellas, which will never be published, be recognised, or prove anything except my big, fat crush on the uncle from Encanto.
My god, was it freeing.
The social pressure to monetize your art is insane. I took my first art commission before I even had my first bank account. It was my teenage dream: to be paid is to obtain credibility. The label will hang over your head like an execution hood: PROFESSIONAL. Of course, the loop never really stops; start making money and suddenly your eyes are open to how many opportunities you're missing, and how little you make compared to others, and how wide the chasm is between you and full-time creation.
(That's not to say the money and recognition aren't nice! That part I do recommend.)
But making fan content, and making friends who also make fan content, and building up a small audience of people who just want to be there for fun is incredibly liberating when you're not used to it. Get a bunch of friends who create together, join a community that makes its own memes and creates a bubble of mutual feedback and appreciation, and you start to realise: this is how they made the old tales, the oral ones before the printing press.
Here's two lessons from the archives.
Love characters. Fall in love with their vulnerable moments, their jokes, their relationship dynamics, the little unseen parts of them that you can never put in a real story because there's simply no point. Linger on the details. Develop a little crush. Project all your issues and obsess over nothing. Love your own characters, and you'll find suddenly that creating art about them changes from a chore to an act of affection. Learn what makes you fall in love with other stories, and look for the same aspects in your own.
Making art to impress a large audience will disappoint you; making art to impress a social circle of about ten interested people is how life is supposed to be lived. The early humans who painted mammoths on cave walls had no audience except themselves.
Here's a quote I like, from Prof. Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at University of Southern California: "Contemporary Web culture is the traditional folk process working at lightning speed on a global scale. The difference is that our core myths now belong to corporations, rather than the folk.”
Here's another quote I like, from twitter user @FarfinFarfin: "the fastest way to improve your art is to become some sort of pervert, doesn't really matter what kind, whatever you're comfortable with".
Reviews
The Northern Caves by @nostalgebraist. The Northern Caves is a cosmic horror story about unwary scholars who delved too deep into the ancient texts, except the scholars are a group of hardcore nerds on an early 2000s fan forum for a mediocre fantasy series, and the ancient texts are fan theories about the author's baffling final novel. I know almost nothing about original fiction on Archive of Our Own, but I recognise a wonderfully online scary story when I see one. Psychological, terrifying, and twistedly fascinating reading for anyone who's ever watched an online community implode.
Songs for Girls in Love by @phemiec. PhemieC was one of my favourite musicians as a teenager, and when I got into my first relationship I rushed into the familiar arms of their love songs. They also were making, at the time, Homestuck fansongs. But when I was 15, this music made more of an impact on me than any classic musician ever could. Songs for Girls In Love has a number of fansongs mixed in, largely for things I've never consumed, but you'd never know it from their lyrical subtlety and I'm still a huge fan.
Digital Land Grab: Media corporations are stealing our cultural heritage. Can we take it back? By Henry Jenkins. Okay, okay, this one's not exactly micro or fiction of any sort. But it is the article that I quoted earlier, and Prof. Jenkins could be described as the grandfather of fanwork studies in academia. A good read about the history and creative validity of fanwork, and the ways in which corporations suppress it. I highly recommend it, even if you know nothing about fanfiction.
Your project here. Do you make art of any kind - visual, written, performed? Are you starting a project or recruiting co-creators? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected].
Slowly actually making progress with it - in the next page (whenever that comes out) we might even get some Serious Plot which, y’know, is neat. It only took over a year-
This is an archived version of our microfiction newsletter! You can read along on our tumblr, or subscribe here.
Myself and Tata, as you might except, do a lot of worldbuilding and setting creation here at Witch Hat HQ, and I like to think we’ve come to know a thing or two about it. I personally lurk in a lot of worldbuilding communities, so I’m often witness to discussions about worldbuilding advice, what pitfalls to avoid and so on and so forth. Some of it’s useful, some of it’s…less so. With that in mind, dear readers, I’d like to go on a little rant today about what I think makes good worldbuilding and how you too might make a good world in your very own home.
There’s a lot I’d like to say, but to save this becoming a thesis, I’ll try to keep it brief. In my opinion, the best, catch-all, all-purpose advice I can give any aspiring worldbuilder is to world build less.
That may seem counter-intuitive, but I mean it!
There are plenty of people out there who, when they’re making a setting, they detail every little thing down to the amount of food a given town provides to the flags of every municipality everywhere. And that’s fine - great, even! - especially if it’s something you enjoy, but I think what some people forget is that you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to have encyclopaedias about every minute detail of your setting. You can do a lot more with a lot less.
I confess, I’m awful for minute detail (which is a lovely paradoxical Irishism which means I love it). I can’t get enough of micro-worldbuilding: I love making flags, and cities, and weird little social norms. But over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of macro-worldbuilding. Creating the themes, the overarching narratives - the very foundational ideas of a setting.
Tata’s especially good at this latter style of worldbuilding, but I’m getting there myself. It helps to ask yourself what your world is about - what’s its purpose, at a meta level. If the idea is just to have a fun, generic fantasy setting, and leave it at that, that’s fine - but for all the minute detail you give it, it will feel like a generic fantasy setting. If you’ve ever read a book or otherwise encountered a world that felt kind of…flat, I think it’s because it suffers in this department.
I often encounter people who have reems and reems of details for the worlds in which they want to set their stories, but they don’t actually know much about the world itself, not at the meta level. If you hammer in early what purpose your world serves, and if you isolate a few themes, then no matter what you do or don’t create, it will still have a particular flavour to it. Beyond that, it will even help you pin down what you should and shouldn’t be spending your time creating.
Recently, I’ve been working on my own little setting called Cyberscape. It’s a homage to the JRPGs and the translated anime/cartoons I grew up with. It focuses on one city - the rest of the world exists, in theory, but I’m never really going to talk about it in the story, so I don’t worry myself about what it looks like; those parts of the world just aren’t relevant to the major themes and plotlines I want to explore. Despite the fact that I’m actually doing less creation, I think the setting is still better for that tighter scope.
A world has to be believable, sure, but it doesn’t have to be completely explained. After all, ours isn’t - and even if it was, I doubt any of us would know absolutely everything about it.
And honestly? It’s quite freeing. It’s nice, sometimes, to remember that you don’t have to detail everything.
And I think your worlds may just be better for it.
Reviews
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Rangers by @do9bessa. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, if you’re familiar with it, is a great example of ‘Less is More’ worldbuilding, and I think its success in this regard is typified in the sheer volume of comics and fan works set in this universe. There’s something about Pokémon being adventurers and heroes that is so charming, even if the world itself is often left unexplained. There’s a lot of PMD fan material out there, but Rescue Rangers is our favourite - and it’s been updated relatively recently! If you’re familiar with the games, this will seem familiar - but not too familiar, as Bessa is very much taking it in its own direction.
Faustian Nonsense’s Audio Dramas by Various. Audio Dramas naturally lend themselves to ‘less is more’ style storytelling, and Faustian Nonsense’s vast catalogue of shows really demonstrates this with creative worlds and interesting approaches to storytelling. Not all of them are fiction shows, but those that are serve as a good lesson in this style of creation. Chain of Being, which we’ve recommended before, is one of the shows in their network!
This Gun That I Have In My Right Hand is Loaded by Timothy West. And on the other side of the coin, for a masterclass in what not to do, this radio play satirises everything that makes bad, dense dialogue and narration so horrible to listen to - all while being genuinely enjoyable for its absurdity. Sources are vague on this, but it seems to date from the 60s and to have been produced for the BBC, but regardless I think it’s quite timeless.
Golden Shadows by…me, Luke Sophia! Golden Shadows does not necessarily fit this theme, but it’s my webcomic and I’ll do what I want with it. It’s a science-fantasy story about vigilantism and justice, and though there’s not very much of it yet, I did finally put out a new page after about 6 months. I’m very much hoping it won’t take that long for the next one!
Your project here. Do you make art of any kind - visual, written, performed? Are you starting a project or recruiting co-creators? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. A proper submission procedure will be created if needed, but for now, it's open season - show us anything. Fire away.
This is an archived version of our microfiction newsletter! You can read along on our tumblr, or subscribe here.
ST: The other day, I was talking to someone who had just finished an art course and was looking to get started making comics or cartoons, who asked me, "How do you get into the industry?"
I'm not overly qualified to answer this question - the only people I've ever worked for professionally are indie writers, not industry names, and my books have never even been printed on paper. But I guess that's more experience of the world of publishing than some. It's enough to know the answer to the question, "How do I get into the comics industry?". It's, "Make comics for free until you have some proof of experience to show the publishers."
At the community college where I studied animation for a year-and-two-months, our tutor, Kevin Taylor, had been an animator in the 80s and 90s. He studied graphic design at college, happened to be living near a studio in London, and was hired pretty much fresh out of university to start working on cartoons, a job he learned at the studio, having barely studied it at university. He had some talent and intelligence and became, when taught, a pretty good animator.
But that was the 80s, and if there's any animation studio in the western world hiring fresh inexperienced college grads for full-time living wages, I've never heard of them. Which kind of sucks, huh? The hustlers among you may think, "Well, you've gotta work for what you want." But isn't it a shame that studios don't take on the risk of training young eager employees anymore? At least not in this part of the world. Kevin Taylor left the animation industry for teaching, despite his experience and aptitude. "I like animation," he told us once, "But I hated being an animator." Quite a few of the modern, progressive animated classics - Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Owl House - had some bulk of their animation work done in Southeast Asia, by employees being paid fractions of their equivalents in the US for their very demanding work.
So... how do you get into the industry? Many ways. Some of my old friends from community college have jobs at Netflix and Cartoon Saloon now. But you've gotta figure out if you want to get there first - most people get partway there and then realise it ain't for them.
LS: Hi there everyone! Long term followers of Witch Hat Productions will recall that this is a two-person operation, and since Tata’s asked me to step in to help with this newsletter, you’re getting a little bit of my editorial voice too, for a change. This issue’s theme is ‘Starting Fresh’, so you might imagine that this change is somehow in fitting with this, even though this is only the second issue.
Anyway! I suggested the theme ‘Fresh Starts’ or ‘New Beginnings’ or ‘Getting Started’ to Tata when we were out walking and we were trying to think of a theme for this newsletter. I was thinking about Colin’s kickstarter, and about how, as creators, we’re constantly starting new projects, revitalising old projects, moving on to a newer and fresher ideas. Personally, I have some settings and stories in my head that are on their umpteenth iteration, and others that are only now starting to blossom.
Tata’s editorial up there questions the struggles of making it in the creative world, and whether it’s actually worth it. The best advice I ever received in this regard actually came from Tata herself: enjoy the process, not the product. I like to think if you make fun, beautiful projects, then at least even if they’re not commercial hits, you’ve had a good time along the way.
Reviews
When Language Fails by writer Colin O'Mahoney and artist Mari Rolin is currently on kickstarter until Wednesday, 7th June. Colin was actually the first editor I ever had - he explained the basics of lettering to me when I was the wee age of 19, and I've been following his advice ever since. When Language Fails is set to be sad, and funny, and painful, and appears to prominently feature clowns with guns as a plot point.
Relatable Girl by @adazaster. As it says in its very own blurb, Relatable Girl is a ‘comic about the daily struggles of Frannie, a girl who is very Normal and Relatable.’ Relatable Girl is hilarious and pretty absurd, with just a touch of horror about it - which at Witch Hat (and being Irish) are two things we love. It updates Tuesdays and Thursday, and in fitting with our ‘Starting Fresh’ idea, it’s pretty new - but it already has five full parts of story already out for you to enjoy!
External Memory by My Murphy (@externalmemorycomic). External Memory couldn’t be more similar and more dissimilar to Relatable Girl if it tried. It’s a diary comic, whose four panel strips focus on snapshots of My’s life, and are consistently funny, charming and heartfelt. Diary comics are a wonderful little look into the lives of their creator, and the window My’s comic offers is a pleasant one indeed; the way the characters are written and the events are depicted is just so charming. The comic sometimes touches on darker themes (as life itself does, y’know how it is), but these are nonetheless extremely heartfelt. Also, My has just recently moved to Ireland - hi My!
Your project here. Do you make art of any kind - visual, written, performed? Are you starting a project or recruiting co-creators? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. A proper submission procedure will be created if needed, but for now, it's open season - show us anything. Fire away.
This is an archived version of our microfiction newsletter! You can read along on our tumblr, or subscribe here.
Hi there! Do you remember signing up to some newsletter from someone you kinda know on twitter? That's me. I'm the newsletter, and I'm here to letter you some news.
For real, though, I have a lot to say about this newsletter. If you know me (I'm Samantha Calthrop, by the way, not a sentient email, hi) then you probably know that I make comics and TTRPGs, which are met with critical acclaim by my extensive audience of almost nobody. I spent my teens in fandom spaces and my early twenties making standalone games.
In other words, I make things, and I put them online, and not a lot of people see them. C'est la vie.
In recent years, I've been drifting increasingly away from social media, and towards real-world creative spaces. I'm fortunate enough to have several social outlets for my art. Between my local comics group, my university, and my small group of mutuals in Irish journo twitter, I feel accomplished enough to be proud regardless of how many Instagram followers I have. (It's 151, much like the original Pokédex.)
That's the problem with the Internet. Even in the coolest and most supportive rings of Twitter and Tumblr there is nothing to achieve but online fame, which has been famously awful for everyone who has ever obtained it. (I imagine social media to be divided into rings, much like the rings of hell in Dante's Inferno.) There are very few spaces online that feel personal and contained, because by nature the internet is large and completely impersonal.
The consequence is that being an up-and-coming creator is like shouting into the void, except the void has a handful of your confused friends and relations in it, some of whom are giving you the thumbs up.
I was thinking about the lack of digital spaces for exploring any kind of fiction that isn't short stories or published novels, and how many cool things have been made by people I know, which nobody ever sees. I thought, man, I wish somebody would start a newsletter about it or something. Then I realised that I was somebody, and I already had a creative label which I'd been using to publish things already. Then I turned to Luke Sophia and said, "Hey, we're starting a newsletter", and wrote this before I could be stopped.
So I guess this newsletter seeks to fill that missing niche; a small, personal space that celebrates obscure creative projects. We're starting out primarily with creators that we know already - friends, past collaborators, and things we're already fans of. That means right now, it's mainly webcomics, podcasts, TTRPGS, and other types of online storytelling.
To that end, here's your bimonthly dose of local talent. By coincidence, all these stories are set in space, and all of them have a wonderfully weird take on the sci-fi genre. Check it out:
Neokosmos is about the horror of being raised by people you don't understand. This series of illustrated sci-fi stories follow the last living humans, who are being raised in captivity many years after the destruction of the Earth. Neokosmos is a deeply beautiful, deeply weird, and deeply visceral story about love, cruelty, and family between completely different alien species. The first book made me realise I like speculative sci-fi. The second book made me sit on my bed, put my head in my hands, and think about how I spent my early twenties. I can't recommend it enough. Neokosmos is in open beta right now, and is available to read for free online.
Chain of Being is a delightfully strange eldritch-horror-ish audio drama by Cai Gwilym Pritchard. It's set in a mystic sci-fi universe with deep folkloric roots, and it's both written and performed unlike any other podcast I've come across. I recommend listening with headphones just for the editing. Chain of Being is also casting voice actors for Season 2 right now - more info here. They're paid roles, and actors with non-standard podcast accents are encouraged to apply.
Fetch Quest by @toonlynnk is a silly fantasy adventure in a spaceship universe. Unambitious Hugh the human is happy to settle for an NPC career and a lifetime of mediocrity, but is instead dragged into the life of an adventurer-for-hire. A webcomic set in a video game universe, and is promising to be the kind of PG comedy adventure that ends up wrenching your guts out, in the style of Owl House and Amphibia.
Your project here. Do you make art of any kind - visual, written, performed? Are you starting a project or recruiting co-creators? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. A proper submission procedure will be created if needed, but for now, it's open season - show us anything. Fire away.
That's it for now. All going well, I'll see you in a few weeks!
Us too - we make TTRPGs, webcomics, and microsettings. We were thinking about how there's not really anywhere great to publish or advertise small creative projects like those, and how it's not easy to network with other creators, and the general lonliness of freelancing over social media.
That's why we're starting a newsletter!
Sign up for regular updates about works of weird fiction from us and other creators. (Or follow us on tumblr here, where we'll be archiving all the issues!)
If as a novice game designer you understand nothing else, please understand that writing for a rules-light system doesn't mean you don't need to know basic statistics. I've seen multiple Apocalypse Engine titles whose authors are clearly under the impression that every possible sum of 2d6 is equally probable. I've encountered at least one that included sum-of-2d6 based lookup tables with twelve entries.
Assuming that you're using fairly balanced d6s, all 36 of these results are equally probable. (You'll have to take my word for this part – proving that the distinct compounds of equally probable events are also equally probable is beyond the scope of this post!)
Now here's the illustrative part.
Above, the pairs are sorted by whatever the first die rolled: all of the pairs that begin with a 1 are in the first row, all of the pairs that begin with a 2 are in the second row, and so forth.
What happens if we sort them by their sums instead?
See what's happening there? When sorted by their sums, those 36 equally probable results end up in eleven distinct buckets, and some of those buckets have more results in them than others.
To put it another way, you're six times as likely to roll a 7 as you are to roll a 2 because there are six times as many ways to roll a 7 than there are to roll a 2.
This V-shaped distribution holds true for all sums of two identical dice, with the peak at exactly (number of sides + 1).
(This is the central statistical trick behind the Apocalypse Engine, incidentally. Rolling flat nothing feels like it ought to be risky, but in fact you'll get a 7+ about three times in five, with 7 itself being particularly common. Under these conditions, rolling exactly 7 feels like you just barely made it, but it was in fact the single most likely outcome!)
Fenton Spittlewick’s Academy of Witchcraft is a school for young spellcasters full of magical secrets. It’s also got private bedrooms, cross-school friendships are encouraged, it openly supports trans rights and it’s had unisex bathrooms installed for all of its history. ✨
🧙♀️You can take the (new, updated!) quiz to determine your house here!🧹
i’m sorry did you say street magic (which does actually have that capitalisation in its title) is what you might tentatively call a ttrpg, but could more accurately be described as a collaborative worldbuilding exercise. A hack of Microscope by Caro Asercion, it guides the table through creating a city and its neighbourhoods, landmarks and residents. This is not a new game by any means, but we played it recently and it was an absolute riot.
Street Magic‘s main selling point is that it enables the players to build a city that none of them would have been able to dream up individually. Our starting set of adjectives was ‘old’, ‘grungey’, ‘mythic’ and ‘science fiction’ and from there we created a city of advanced technology steeped in old traditions, which harvests dreams to power its spaceships, whose governance and economy borders on the dystopic at times and which is the last bastion of civilisation after a mysterious apocolypse destroyed the rest of the universe - and all in about 4 hours.
Somnia: The City of Dreams at the End of the Universe
In Street Magic players take it in turns to develop parts of the city through building blocks of increasing specifity. The top level elements of the city are its Neighbourhoods, which contain Landmarks which house Residents. Each round, one player gets to declare a ‘compass’, which is essentially the theme for the round. At the end of a given round, the leading player also dreams up an Event, which will affect one or more of these elements in some way (and which are the tented cards on our table above.)
This system works really well, and is excellent for encouraging players who might not normally worldbuild or GM to take the reigns of creation. It relies heavily on the principles of improv, and works especially well if all the players are willing to take on board the ideas suggested by others. While making a given element, the active player has the final say as to what goes on the little flashcard that represents that element, but after that it is on the table for everyone to interact with as they see fit.
Each ‘element’ - Neighbourhood, Landmark, Resident - has certain aspects that need to be detailed by the players. Street Magic encourages conversation, and the written details are meant to be short reminders rather than verbose descriptions - as the game itself says: what is said is more important than what is written. Consequently, the game also places an emphasis on what it calls ‘liminal cartography’ rather than concrete spatial geography: this is a game about stories and emotional connections rather than lines on a map.
Street Magic excels at enabling the players to map out the emotional and social contours of the city they create, and it’s a lot of fun to watch it grow and spread and to see the story of the urban environment unfold over the course of the play session. The only area where Street Magic falls a little short is in the clarity of its terminology. A Neighbourhood, for example, is required to have a Title, a Reputation and a True Name. A title is its commonplace name (in Somnia we had things like ‘The Factory of Sleep’ and ‘The Garden of Paradise’), while its reputation is broadly what its known for and what the inhabitants of the city think of it. The True Name, though, is the bread-and-butter of Street Magic: it’s the vibe of that place. A True Name should ideally comprise two or three sensory images that capture the essence of the location. In Somnia (yes, we called it that for this joke) our Neighbourhoods had True Names like ‘New Tech Propping up the Old’, ‘Nightmare Fuel’, ‘Blinding’, ‘Anything can be bought or sold’. The True Names can be as detailed as desired but should ideally be short and snappy, and it was a lot of fun trying to boil down complex places into a few words or sentences.
Beyond Neighbourhoods, however, the terminology starts to break down a little. Landmarks have Titles, Addresses and True Names, while Residents only have Titles and True Names. At our table, we kept giving Landmarks reputations even though they don’t technically have them - and eventually we decided to swap out ‘Address’ (which is a vague indicator of where in its attached Neighbourhood a Landmark is) for the same Reputation field that Neighbourhoods have. There doesn’t seem to be a reason why the other two elements can’t use the ‘Title’, ‘Reputation’, ‘True Name’ schema that Neighbourhoods use so well, as it just causes confusion to have each of the three building blocks require different descriptions. Furthermore, ‘True Name’, while being a fun descriptor, can at times be difficult to wrap one’s head around. We generally found it easier to refer to it as the ‘Vibe’ of a given element or its ‘Essence’.
Ultimately, this semantic issue doesn’t spoil the game in the slightest, but at our table it did lead to some confusion. At the end of the day though, it doesn’t really matter: the information on the flashcards is for the benefit of the table, and thus can be whatever you want it to be. If you’re sitting down to play Street Magic, it might be worth considering whether you want to house-rule any of the terms, especially if your players seem confused by the given system after having it explained to them.
To sum up, then, we had a lot of fun with Street Magic, and it offers a very different experience to most ttrpgs. Definitely check it out if you’re looking to do something different with your rpg group - or if you want to give people who normally only play a chance to partake in what is usually the GM’s exclusive activity.
