Hello, future party attendees!

We’re very excited about our progress so far;  thank you so much for supporting Dahlia’s Diversions and the eight RPGs within! We have about two weeks remaining to back the campaign, and you can expect to see the party continue to grow as we get closer to the final days. Please help by sharing Dahlia’s Diversions within your social circles – it’s an affordable and approachable way for roleplayers of any familiarity level to jump into different roleplaying experiences without a big commitment.

As we mentioned in our first update, we sat down with our multiple designers for interviews in various formats. We invite you to read through our first interview below:

Ash Cheshire, the designer of Overdue, in conversation with Irene Zielinski (IZ), the editor of Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties.

ASH: I’ve been a roleplayer since high school – back in the ‘90s – and have always loved storytelling. While I was earning my master’s in counseling psychology to become a play therapist, I was taking a lot of refuge in roleplaying with my friends while also studying from a therapeutic angle how play is a healing, self-revelatory process, and started thinking, “what if I design some games to use with my clients?”

Eventually, I found that clinical work was not for me and moved to focus much more on game design, kind of stealing the fire from my master’s program and making what I’d learned about play accessible to more people.

ASH: For as long as I can remember, I have daydreamed about a mystical, magical, interdimensional library. I have taken refuge in libraries my whole life. Some of my earliest fond memories are of going to the library with my mom, where she set me and a friend up to watch VHS movies in the video kiosk. In high school, my friends and I would hang out there after school, often roleplaying in the stacks.

Overdue is a stand-alone game, but it came from a daydream of creating this larger, more intricate, ornate game about the library, with minigames . . . the first minigame would be your apprenticeship, creating characters for your first foray into the library. That’s how Overdue was born!

ASH: I am absolutely delighted! Most of my work is self-published, and I was excited to hand it over to people that I admire and trust and say, “Give this game of mine a glow-up, please!” The graphic design is incredible, working with you on the editing process was such a delight, and the detail that y’all went into on the application form! It’s both beautiful and magical and weirdly bureaucratic – I just. I kvell.

ASH: It was so perfect! And I clearly heard the open offer that, if anything didn’t feel right to me, that I’d be able to share it with you. It was a really good, strong collaborative match – I was never worried that anything that didn’t land quite right was going to go to print.

ASH: I do! I have a game coming out soon from Evil Hat Productions that I’ve been working on for many years now, called Abyssal. The full fancy title that it wears to important dinners and for SEO is Abyssal: A Monstrous Undertaking. It’s a Forged in the Dark historical fiction game about human characters that are slowly turning into something else. You are stuck in your “liminal form” – neither fully human nor fully abyssal – and both worlds are tugging on you.

The settings are places and times with a great deal of turmoil. You can play in 1793 Paris, the year that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded. You can play in 1888 London, the height of Victoriana and the year of Jack the Ripper. Or you can play in 1973 Las Vegas, which has Hunter S. Thompson and Elvis and a lot of fun and weird stuff happening.

ASH: For Abyssal updates in particular, Evil Hat is on the socials, and there will be more updates as our marketing engine spins up.

Personally, I don’t do a lot of social media; I spend most of my time being a weird little cryptid in the woods, making my strange art and vibing. But I put self-published games on my itch.io page, Ash Can Games. An ashcan is an industry term for a game in a rough draft, so it was heartening to realize that I could do a pun for my business name, acknowledging that these are often spontaneous pieces of art that pop into my head.

I also have a Patreon where I give my backers those games, if anybody has a couple of bucks a month that they’d like to toss to an earnest and independent game designer.

 

Hello, peculiar partygoers!

Thank you so much for joining our campaign! We met our $15,000 funding goal late Sunday night; we’re so very thankful for your support, and we can’t wait to share these games with you. With quite a bit of time to go, there’s still lots of time to invite your friends.

Speaking of! We’ve made it easier to grab additional copies here in the campaign in two different ways. First, we have the new “Dahlia’s Host Gift” pledge level: Now, in addition to a set for yourself, you can treat your favorite GM or game night host!

We have also added an option to select add-ons – including additional copies of Dahlia’s – during the campaign. Please visit the add-on page if you’d like to modify your pledge!

Remember to keep an eye out for stretch goals in the coming days!

Thank you,

We’re so happy to have you join us for Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties. This project has been a labor of love, and the whole team is thrilled to finally share it. Your early response was great – after the first day, we are nearly 2/3 of the way to our funding goal! And the party is just getting started . . .

Stay tuned to learn more about the folks who brought these games to life! We have some updates in the pipeline spotlighting our designers, so turn on notifications to stay up-to-date.

Know someone else who might like a collection of peculiar RPGs? Share to spread the joy!