Long time no speak. To be honest the past couple of months have flown by in Hippocrene land. It's been really cool seeing the first batch of MM25 modules come through on the pledge manager, there's a ton of good stuff there!
So where are we at with Hippocrene?
TL:DR a bit behind with writing, aiming to get pdfs released in late July or early August, and shipping everything to TKG in August.
Writing To be honest the writing is the only hold up on the module, and that's my bit, unfortunately. I'm still working on some bits as we speak, but the main portion is over with Chris Airiau's queue for editing now and the remaining chunk will be with him soon. The size and scope of this zine—a sandbox setting and 4 modules that intertwine—has been quite a step up from my first module (The Dose Makes The Poison, now available at Iglootree and soon in the TKG store) and I want it to be the best it can be.
Layout While I get the writing to a place I'm happy with, my main goal has been to keep everything else moving. I've been working with Lone Archivist on the layout, which is in a good place and we'll be going into final layout in July once the edit pass is done.
Artwork I've also commissioned some additional spot artwork and a hero city scape image from Luke Oram (who nabbed the Grand Jury prize at the Triptech jam recently with his Seven Stars Remembered module, check it out). I think his style compliments what we've already got from Malachi Ward and which I'm excited to see what he comes up with. I'm also working with Luke on my next project (more to come on that very soon, very excited about that...).
Web App I've been working with a developer pal on the web app to accompany the Hippocrene module The New Sound. This module serves as a 'way in' for players to get access to Malvolio, and is a fetch quest to locate four cassette tapes that are spread out across the Dream. The app will have a boombox and an interface when you drag cassettes onto the boombox to play, building up more of a track the more cassettes you find. Is this an essential item for game play? No! Is it fun as fuck? Yes! we've got a working prototype and will be finishing this off soon once I get a suitably mind bending club track on the go.
The boombox for the web app, also the graphic for the page header for The New Sound module.
Rimwise Wanderer zine Lone Archivist has created a design template for this zine and I'm currently adding my entries to this in Indesign. Since this is mainly a big list of interesting locations, writing into layout seems the quickest way to get this into a workable doc that I can then hand back over to Lone for final tweaking. Think this will be a fun one!
Sticker bundles I've been putting stickers into little cellophane envelopes in batches of 10 for about two weeks now, and am currently about half way through bundling up the 300 or so needed for the campaign. Here's this morning's batch:
Have been putting batches of 10 into bags with my morning coffee. What a time to be alive.
That's about all for now, I'm hoping to give you another update very soon with more cool stuff!
Hello backers, a quick update to say that while I was away in my camper for a couple of days (short review: refreshing; - cold, wet, hailing Scotland, but still refreshing) the Tuesday Knight Games team launched the Mega Pledge Manager.
You should have a link to the survey in your inbox somewhere. There you can confirm your orders and add other projects that you like the look of. There's a lot going on!
I think everything looks good from a Hippocrene POV but if you see anything (or more importantly if any product looks to be missing from your order) let me know and I can flag with the TKG team. Its been a beast to organise and they folks at Backerkit have been responsive in sorting any errors that have been caught.
Also, got some test prints of Hippocrene through, which look great. There's various colour tests and spreads inside (with lorem ipsum text) too, which give an excellent idea of how the book will look. It's going to be colourful internally with each section themed with a CMYK colour (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). I think probably the only debate I've got is whether or not to go for some kind of matt lamination on the cover vs uncoated (the current version below), as this would be a bit more hard wearing. Always love the look of uncoated though!
Drink From The Hippocrene. Hand : model's own.
Short and sweet, that's it for now!
*For posterity's sake I'm going to keep the update titled by month, just see how out of sync the time in my head is vs the time IRL.
Hello backers, Hope yer all good!
Update to let you know where we’re at / that I’m still alive:
Writing - continues! I’d probably say I'm a bit behind on this now, but this is generally part of my process: get behind / create undue pressure / blurt stuff out. It routinely makes things that should be fun less enjoyable, but that’s just the way it is. We’ll get there though!
Test print - While I hold up layout somewhat, I had a good call with Lone Archivist a couple of weeks ago to run through what needs doing, and to keep things ticking along I've ordered a test print of the zine - featuring image assets and page layouts we have so far, and dummy text - so we can assess things like colours and paper thickness are to our liking. That should be with me next week.
Production - The patches have been made in the USA (its v expensive here in the UK as far as I've found, plus tariffs etc), but I've elected to print everything else here in the UK and ship from here to the two TKG warehouses. It allows us to send shipments at the correct time for delivery to warehouses, allows us to make test prints quickly and just a whole bunch of other stuff that makes me feel more in control of things 😬
Oh, and the patches have already been made and have shipped to the USA warehouse already, below is a pic of one of them, taken by someone at the warehouse. It's quite odd creating a product I probably won’t see IRL here in the UK!
Stickers - hoping to get these printed this month, below is some designs for these:
Rimwise Wanderer - I’ve also been pulling together the copy for the additional Rimwise Wanderer player facing zine, featuring ‘100 things to do on the Dream’; that’s been a fun diversion from the more serious work of making the Hippocrene make sense.
Small start-of-the-year update as we come to the end of the longest most hellish January of all time.
Basically writing is ongoing still, I have a deadline of getting my draft over to Chris Airaiu on February 9th for editing. Then hoping to get into layout vibes towards the end of February.
The first of the zine spot art has landed and is looking great. Here's some NPC portraits from Malachi Ward:
Logan Wolftraxx - self-styled ‘District Governor’ of Malvolio. Was rich but rapidly pumping all his money into making the district a success.
Bortheen - owner of Malvolio's extremely exclusive and secretive bordello.
Aros Mains - legendary fashionista, his flagship store is in Malvolio and clothing manufacturing in the wider Dream.
Some other bits of Mothership interest:
Chris Airaiu and Waco Matrixo - two of my MoshMo speed dials - have projects launching early next week for zine month. You should definitely take a look at these:
BLAME!/Halflife inspired shifting megastructures in Twisting Unseen.
Your players are parasitic worms vying for control of a scientist host in Cain Sun.
I also love the sound of this collection of worms-based horror from Terry Herc - I read The Troop last year and it made me think there's not enough worms-based horror in Mosh, so good to see both Waco and Terry taking steps to address this.
That's been a month already since the end of Moshmo25, during which time I've managed to get down from Inverness to Dragonmeet in London, meet a bunch of folks I've only previously met online and catch a brutal con-flu which I'm only just getting over now.
The update on Hippocrene is fairly short this month as it's mostly:
Finishing the script which sits squarely with me. After a lot of stop-start breaks I've got most of the day today and a full day tomorrow on this now, which I'm really excited about.
Art briefing is in progress. I've got layout templates from Lone Archivist that will work for most of the key spreads in the zone, and will be using these to put in my artwork brief to Malachi Ward for the spot art in the zine. I'm very excited to see what we get back here since he did such an amazing job with the cover art.
Patches have been ordered/paid for but not finalised yet. These are getting produced in the USA and I want to stall that order a bit until we're allowed to ship our goods to the TKG warehouse.
The Bonus Pamphlet stretch goal is ticking along well too. I've had the initial script for this through from DG Chapman, which looks like it'll be a fun 'who's got the diamond' jewellery heist in Hotel Mi Casa, one of the locations in the Malvolio district, the setting for Hippocrene.
I think that'll do for now.
Have a bangin' festive holiday when it comes, I'll catch you in January.
