Random Loot: Birthday Edition!

It's June and that's my birthday.

Another month, another newsletter. This one is pretty packed, so I’m not going to waffle too much up here other than to say that it’s my birthday on the 26th! To celebrate I’ve put everything on my itch page on sale for 37% off. You can probably figure out why that specific amount.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I’m releasing the first adventure for A Dungeon Game on the 26th as well. I didn’t want to do pre-orders for this, but I decided to do a sort of soft launch here on the newsletter. The adventure is available for sale on Loot The Room right now at an introductory price. There’s the standard softcover version, as well as some really nice limited edition hardback options. The softcover version will be shipping in June as planned, but the hardbacks will have to wait until August (unless I sell ~30% of them as a result of this email, in which case I’ll be able to send them to print earlier).

If you pick the books up today you’ll get immediate access to a digital proof version. It’s missing a bit of art and still needs a final editing pass, but otherwise it’s complete. And once the book actually releases at the end of the month you’ll get a digital download code for the complete digital release as well as your physical version turning up in the mail.

That’s all I’m going to say about that for now, because as I said it’s a soft launch. The next email you get from me will be on my birthday announcing the release For Real For Real. I’m going to leave you with the cover reveal video, and then get into the rest of the email.

What I’ve been up to

• Part of the reason I didn’t want to do pre-orders for Moss Mother was that I’m still elbows-deep in fulfilment for A Waning Light and the alt covers of Troll King and The Wretched. People have been exceedingly patient with this process, which I really appreciate, and there’s finally light at the end of the tunnel. I think I have about 40 parcels remaining to send out and then it’s finally done. What a relief!

• Modiphius finally released Winter Of Atom! This is the first hardcover campaign book for the Fallout RPG and I wrote the first chapter, setting up the quest and introducing wasteland exploration rules to the Commonwealth (because for some reason the Fallout game didn’t have them already). I managed to convince them to let me write an honest-to-god dungeon with random encounters and reaction rolls and a couple of raiders playing Robot Wars, which was very fun.

• With the news that WoTC are raising their prices there was a lot of talk about how people should charge for books in RPGs. I wrote some thoughts over on Detritus, and I’ve now made that post publicly available (meaning you don’t have to be a paying subscriber over there to read it). You’ll see me talking about maybe doing some limited edition hardcover versions of Moss Mother, a decision I obviously decided to run with!

• Over on Cohost I got a little obsessed with treasure tables. I still haven’t written the tables for A Dungeon Game, but I understand them a bit better now and that’s a very good thing.

• Paizo announced Howl Of The Wild! I can’t talk about exactly what I did on this other than to say that I wrote some monsters and some in-world fiction. This is my first Pathfinder credit and very much a bucket list moment, so I’m really happy to see it made public.

• Finally, I’ll be at UKGE tomorrow and (possibly) Saturday. There are train strikes in the UK this weekend and I don’t actually know if I’ll be able to get home tomorrow night, so there’s a slim chance I have to sleep on a sofa in Birmingham. Thankfully Chris McDowall is local to me and is driving down tomorrow morning so I can, at least, get there. I’m hoping to be able to pick up my DCC Tournament Belt from last year’s GenCon, and if they’ve managed to bring it over for me I will absolutely be walking around wearing it for the rest of the day. If you spot me, come and say hi!

Other people’s cool stuff!

• Monkey’s Paw Games announced a new softcover version of their solo Arthurian journaling game, Chalice. Pre-orders run for a couple of weeks and the book will ship in July.

• HAPPY99 has launched a pre-campaign page on Kickstarter. It bills itself as “a cyberpunk RPG about the end of the world in Edge City, Nebraska” and I don’t know much more about it than that, but I’ve seen some previews of art and things for it and I’ve never, ever seen a game that looks like this. Get excited.

• Clayton Notestine released some layout templates that people rightly lost their minds over. I’m a big fan of sidebars, footnotes, and marginalia, which I think is obvious if you look at my work, and I think these look great. I’m also delighted to see people getting excited about books that put the primacy of text front and centre. I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle constantly talking about how you don’t need art to make good books, but maybe the needle is finally moving on that. We’ll see. Either way, these look incredible and by all accounts are very easy to use.

• A very long time ago I wrote a silly post about using Wordle to generate things for your games. Somebody found it, somehow, and has built on it. This was very fun to see.

• Here on SubStack, Iko has been interviewing people about Dungeon23. I also answered some questions about it which I believe will be in the next post in the series, but this month features Zedeck Siew and Anthony Meloro and is well worth your time.

• Luke Gearing took a look at Carcosa, one of the most vile but compelling books ever released for RPGs. I think it’s a really interesting text and it’s nice to see someone looking at it critically and grappling with its issues in a thoughtful way.

• Finally, we had our normal OD&D game this week and were joined by a new player who, as it turns out, is an incredible artist. We fought a gelatinous cube and got the shit scared out of us by doppelgangers, and now there are illustrations to go with it. Very cool stuff.

What’s playing?

What’s this? A new segment? Holy moly.

As I try to pull away from Twitter a bit and share less personal content there (because Twitter can’t be trusted with your personal life) I thought I’d also share some of the music I’ve been listening to each month, since I won’t be tweeting about it stream-of-consciousness style right at the moment I listen to it. Here’s what’s been keeping me sane over the past month:

• Don’t Try - Crumbs is my new favourite song. I’ve been looking for a band to scratch my Comeback Kid itch and they deliver in spades.

• The Used released a new album and it’s… actually… good? Cherry and Pinky Swear are the best songs they’ve released in years.

• I had the same reaction to Take Me Back To Eden, the new Sleep Token album, as I did to This Place Will Become Your Tomb. I was very excited for it, listened to it and liked it but didn’t love it, and then forgot about it. A week or two later it’s somehow become the only thing I’m listening to, and I don’t quite know when that happened.

That’s all for this month. Thanks as always for reading, and don’t forget to grab a copy of Moss Mother at the secret introductory price, if you’re so inclined!

Next time you hear from me I’ll be 37. Send help.

-Chris