Oh! Hi. I didn’t see you there. You just caught me doing absolutely nothing, staring blankly at Reddit while I wait and see whether my brain is going to let me work today. Luckily I have this newsletter to distract me from doing the things I’m meant to be doing. As always you can read previous issues here and support the newsletter on Ko-fi here. And if you somehow stumbled across this without it being delivered directly into your inbox, but you’d like it to be delivered directly to your inbox in future, you can of course subscribe to make that happen.
It doesn’t feel like 6 months since Twitter was in danger of imminently disappearing under us and I started this newsletter, but somehow it has been. The thought of that is terrifying, frankly. I would personally quite like time to just chill out for a bit, maybe take a week off so I can catch up.
Last month I mentioned that I was finally starting on meds for ADHD, and that has actually happened now! It’s been interesting so far. On the days when they work well it’s amazing, life-changing stuff - but on days like today it’s like nothing has changed. But a small improvement is better than no improvement, and I’m really glad that this (very long) process has finally made some forward progress.
But enough of that. On to the fun stuff.
As always if you have anything you want me to draw my attention to for this newsletter, feel free to drop an email to chris at loottheroom dot uk. I can’t promise to cover everything, because I want this to be curated and not to just spam links at people, but I do promise to take a look at anything you ask me to look at.
What’s new with me?
A couple of weeks ago we discovered birds (and squirrels!) in our loft, and alongside them we discovered that our 70-year-old roof was very much due to be replaced. I put everything I’ve ever released on itch on 50% sale to help raise some funds for it, and people were very generous. As I write this there are men directly above me continuing the work, and my books and games and soundtracks are still on sale to help pay for the rest of what we owe them.
I continue to take orders for A Waning Light, my new adventure for Mörk Borg. I had hoped to have sent it to the printers already so I had copies to take to Sweden with me next week (see below), but layout and art is taking much longer than I anticipated and so I haven’t been able to do that. The upside of that is that the order window is open longer! This is a limited edition that will only be in print, and I’m only printing as many copies as people order. I know some people were worried that they wouldn’t have money until payday, but orders are now going to be open for at least another few days. You can grab it here along with the (also limited edition) reprint of REGICIDE.
I also wrote a companion album to go with A Waning Light. It’s streaming for free on Spotify, or you can exchange money for it on Itch and Bandcamp. If you like droning, doom-laden ambient noise I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.
Next weekend I’ll be in Gothenburg, Sweden for Gothcon! I’ll have a small amount of stock to sell (not a lot, because I can only take what I can fit in carry-on luggage) and I’ll hopefully be running some games and things. If you happen to be there please do come and say hello. Gothenburg has been on my list of cities to visit for a very long time, so I’m really excited about this.
Over on Cohost and Detritus I’ve been playing with thermal printers, randomly generated dungeon maps, and notebooks to make myself a portable dungeon-writing kit.
As a thank you for subscribing, use code WYH5BQKY to get 15% offwhen you spend £20 or more at the Loot The Room store!
What’s cool with everyone else?
At the time I write this, Batt’s .dungeon Remastered has just 4 hours left until the campaign ends. The original is incredible, this new version is going to be fantastic, and you should definitely check it out. I’ve been a huge fan of everything Batts does for a long time and it’s really amazing to see this campaign do so well.
At long last, UNCONQUERED is here! Self-described as “what you get when you take the bones of Into The Odd, mix it with eldritch sorcery and forbidden science, and staple Spelljammer onto it”. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time and it’s great to see it finally land.
Speaking of UNCQONQUERED, Luke Gearing wrote an adventure for it called Where The River Meets The Sea. It’s available in physical or digitally on itch, and if you pre-order the physical version at the same time as you pre-order UNCONQUERED you get 15% off the latter.
I’m at risk of this month’s newsletter turning into the Monkey’s Paw Games fanclub letter at this point, but that’s fine. Noora was on the Asians Represent podcast to answer the perennial question, “What is the OSR?” It’s a really good listen that’s well worth your time.
My good friend Nevyn has a Kickstarter running for You’re In Space And Everything’s Fucked that has a few days left to run on it. I haven’t seen the game itself but I worked with them on Kitchen Knightmares a while back, and Gun&Slinger is one of my favourite indie games of the past few years so I’m positive this is going to be very good. And when the pitch is “a tribute to sci-fi survival horror and gore-filled splatter films” I pretty much know I’m going to love it.
Kitchen Knightmares also makes for a very nice segue into talking about This Discord Has Ghosts In It, which Kitchen Knightmares was a hack of. The world’s premiere Discord-based haunted house LARP game has a new and expanded edition that does a lot to flesh out the game and give people guidance for how to get up and running with it. The original game was a really unique, fun experience, but the book itself very much felt like the beta-test version. Now it’s getting a full release, and it’s even better.
Babe, quick, wake up, new Terence Walsh just dropped. Walsh-heads have been gradually uncovering more works by the RPG industry’s biggest enigma. If I’m being honest I’d prefer to see the original scans of Maze Of The Minotaur, but this conversion to bastards. is still very good.
The Ironforged Jam starts tomorrow and runs until May 1st. Make some fun stuff for Ironsworn!
That’s everything for this month. Thanks, as always, for your attention.
-Chris