We've entered the final few days of the campaign! It's been a wild ride, and I've one last surprise yet for y'all tomorrow.
Also, hah, I thought I'd already shared the Underthings art, but I was wrong! Compare and contrast the Mothership and Cloud Empress versions of the cybernetic weird lil guy faction:
Art by Paul Enami
Last Light Station Launch!
In a few short hours, Mothership writer and radio host Joshua Justice is launching his first solo crowdfunding project for their zine Last Light Station.
Gear up with new cybermods and equipment, experience new downtime Shore Leave, and even sing some sultry karaoke on Last Light Station. In this tight zine, a conflict is brewing in the Hekate Sector, and the crew can tip the balance, one way or the other.
We've hit the Stretch Goal for more map tiles from Ripley Matthews! She's been hard at work on the Flatline on the Blocks maps (a collab Mothership project I'm part of), and it'll be cool to chain those maps with these new map tiles, thanks everyone, :)
Just a fun Before/After mockup of the map
Twisting Unseen: Conversion Kit
The next Stretch Goal is a digital-only Cloud Empress RPG conversion kit for Twisting Unseen. And now, I'm excited to announce that if we hit this Stretch Goal, the kind and kickass HodagRPG will illustrate the cover! Hodag's art fills The Unseen City, and so I'm very much looking forward to hitting this new Stretch Goal to have him back for the Twisting Unseen Conversion Kit.
The cover mock-up, without Hodag's cover illustration
As I mentioned in my last Update,among stat conversions and faction reflavoring, the Underthings are the faction that change the most. Underthings are a gnome-like cybernetic people from another world/reality that was sucked into Kagami by the first portal disaster, millienia before. For Cloud Empress, I'm taking the Underthings to their Mystling roots in The Unseen City as the Gourdlings. Gourdlings have the same abilities as the Underthings, but are a much more gentle people than their Mothership counterparts.
In Cain Sun, players take on the role of parasitic brain worms who all control one human: Dr. Abelsson. On the unexplored planet of Cain 615, and like a certain scientist in Prometheus (2012), the good doctor put his nose where it did not belong to disastrous (for him) consequences.
This is Waco's Mothership take on the game Everyone is John, except Everyone is Worms. Each player has not-necessarily mutually exclusive goals, and you'll want to accomplish that without tipping off to Dr. Abelsson's colleagues that he's infected by you. Like all of Waco's games, it sounds like a riot, so go check out Cain Sun!
For those that might not know, I host a podcast called Ansible Uplink where I invite ttrpg creators to review a sci-fi module with me. This week, Cloud Empress RPG creator watt joined me to review Picket Line Tango by Emily Weiss.
I was very glad to have watt on the show because Twisting Unseen is linked thematically (and physically) to my Cloud Empress RPG biome, The Unseen City, which is part of the Unseen & Sleeper Crew bundles. Since this module has portal technology at its heart, I felt it'd be a great way to send a table into another game, too.
All Physical Tiers are 15% off retail value
Third Stretch Goal: Play Twisting Unseen with Cloud Empress RPG!
It's a bit of a "spoiler" but the next Stretch Goal after Ripley's art is to make a digital bifold conversion guide for all backers for folks wanting to run Twisting Unseen in the world of Cloud Empress. This includes simple alterations like stat blocks, but also a major alteration to the Underthings and tonal shifts for the main human NPCs and their motivations, all to be more in line with the themes of Cloud Empress RPG and The Unseen City.
Outcast Unseelie and the Ooze Between
And I can't write an Update without spreading the Zine Month love!
In Outcast Unseelie and the Ooze Between for Shadowdark RPG, the mountain bleeds potent arcaneooze from the long-abandoned Brackenhoorg mines, and now fey lords feed upon its power. In this puzzle dungeon, characters manipulate a powerful magical substance, the ooze, through a 30+ room dungeon.
This is Jesse Winter’s second crowdfund campaign, after last year’s successful Shadowdark showing A Haunting in Glass, which was featured on Between Two Cairns.And for all first 48-hour backers, Jesse is delivering a free one-page dungeon!
After one week live, Twisting Unseen is +250% funded! With the first Stretch Goal complete, now the zines will be printed with matte lamination covers, a substantial physical quality upgrade to the zines.
Not only that, but we only need about 30 more backers to hit our second Stretch Goal, adding more map tiles from acclaimed illustrator and cartographer, Ripley Matthews. Reaching this stretch goal upgrades the physical map tile inserts and the Digital Assets folder, for all backers.
Kagami Arcology factions
I also wanted to share some more with y'all about the factions the crew is likely to run into during their delve through the twisted Kagami Arcology, with art from Paul Enami.
Character art by Paul Enami, Faction logos by Jean Verne
The Shawl: Military arm of Kagami. They answer to Admin, and hunt the Underthings and other Incursors. Their coup against Admin set off the events of the module.
Admin: Techno-priestess rulers of Kagami, they maintain an iron-clad grip on all technology, its distribution, and the ritualistic means of its reproduction.
Teknik: Remaining medical and scientist clan who don't truly understand their technology, and maintain systems through religious rituals and recitations.
Kagami: The "normal" denizens who live in the skyless Substrata. Many are missing, as the town has been lost in the Twisting. Most don't know Oldspeak.
There are also the Underthings, the longest lasting Incursors. Like the cybernetic horrors lurking in the depths of twisted Kagami, these ~1m tall cybernetic beings are from another world. We can dig into these strange denizens next time when I share more art and info on the Incursors!
Thanks for spreading the word on Twisting Unseen, and it's my turn to do the same:
I feel like folks should know by now that I love body horror nonsense, and Reservoir pulls no punches there.
Incredible icky art, and a scenario that propels players into grappling with the Elemental Plane of Flesh (c'mon how awful/awesome does that sound? haha), Reservoir is the first crowdfunded adventure from Cameron Maas, a newer designer to keep an eye (or three) on, for sure.
Thank you all for a fantastic first day on the Twisting Unseen launch!
We're already only about 20 backers away from hitting the first stretch goal for a matte cover lamination. I'm thinking we'll hit this one while I'm in bed (good ol' France timezone, it's after 10pm as I write this!).
The next stretch goal after this durability booster is the much sexier goal of hiring Ripley Matthews to illustrate each individual Map Tile. The crew have a choice of four different map tile configurations (and two mean ones reserved for critical failures or spicy decision making):
In total, there are 17 map tiles, so this second stretch goal adds 11 more illustrations to the map inserts! We'll need to keep spreading the word on this campaign to get there, as we'll need ~100 more backers to reach this goal.
That's a bonus bit about Zine Month that I like a lot though, is that this game month is the oldest and all about spreading the word on other folks' games and talking about all the exciting modules and such. I've got a couple of podcast episodes lined up for just that, and then I've been shouting out some fellow projects that I'm excited for.
Adam STATIONS and I reviewed the last collab between David and artist Roque Romero, Mutiny on the Montgomery, and I was thrilled to see they're working together on a larger project. Dead Internet Theory is a three mission adventure module tied up with an apocalyptic cult in the city of CY. David has a great talent for writing perplexing problems with weird NPCs in a tight location, if you're into cyberpunk (maybe as a Prospero's Dream hack?), it's definitely worth checking out! I mean, look at this sample spread:
