A Downcrawl Malice
Hello, and welcome to this week’s Gazetteer, especially to all our new readers who’ve subscribed over the past week and/or joined us on BlueSky, which with everything going on in the world right now really seems to be taking off.
To help ease you into our Wyrd world, I’ve extended the sale over on our webstore and for the next week or so you can get 25% off all print mags and t-shirts with the code WYRDWELCOME, alternatively if you’re all about the digital life you can grab issues 1-6 of Wyrd Science as PDFs from both Itch and DriveThruRPG for just £6.
Regular readers might have noticed we’ve had a little facelift this week and we’re currently toiling away in the pixel mines building a fancy new online home for Wyrd Science, all whilst trying to come up with a fresh new look to run across both print and online.
Hopefully the new website will be live at some point before the new year, and we’ll be able to start sharing lots more fresh writing with you but since I’ve lost almost a day this week just trying (and failing) to resolve DNS queries with the new domain name we shall see.
Anyway, in the meantime there are a couple of very cool looking crowdfunding campaigns we wanted to give a shout out to and, what with everything going on in the world, point you in the direction of some of the very good stuff that we’ve been distracting ourselves with this week, so on that note we’ll leave you to read on and catch you next time.
Till then,
John x
DOWNCRAWL (2nd Edition)
“Cheerful skeleton bards sing ballads on fragile lutes. Antlered children race giggling through shell-paved streets. Faceless cultists worship huge red worms, chanting behind obsidian walls. This is the Deep, Deep Down.”
And… I’m sold.
Ok, some of you may need a little more lubrication before opening your wallets, so Downcrawl then is a TTRPG system and weird underworld setting generator from writer and games designer Aaron A. Reed, who some of you may know from his comprehensive 50 Years of Text Games book.
It’s a brilliant trawl through the history of RPGs’ syntax driven pixelated cousins, from early efforts powered by towering mainframes on university campuses through to classics like Zork and more recent efforts such as Fallen London, and as we’ll see none of the research that went into the book has been wasted on this game.
We won’t linger on Downcrawl’s system as it’s essentially derived from Fate, so streamlined, simple, all those things and as advertised can be run with a GM, as GM-less style co-op game or as a solo game, the latter of which is where I suspect Downcrawl might get the most play.
The real sauce here is of course the setting generator, which is powered by nearly 800 prompts spread across 20 tables. In development Reed’s done some funky stuff to make sure that the way these prompts can be combined produces really evocative results and made use of computational tools to cycle through the huge number of possibilities and get rid of any redundancies.
The end result of all this should be a series of prompts that always combine in a satisfying and logical way whilst providing enough space for our own imaginations to take flight. If you have 10 minutes spare I’d recommend having a read about all that here, especially if you’re a game designer yourself as there’s some really interesting stuff there.
Even better for at-the-table play, all these tables have been split up and reproduced on a deck of cards, with commonly combined results colour coded so it’s a simply a case of drawing new cards and aligning them together to produce everything from locations to events and encounters. Which combined with a similarly well thought out set of Oracle tables for resolving your interactions with this strange underworld should be everything you need to delve deep into the underworld.
Simple, but like I said, smart stuff.
In fact in testing Reed found people enjoyed so much using the cards to produce a rich world populated by all manner of strange creatures, bizarre locations and curious encounters that he’s spun off a standalone worldbuilding game, Downcrawl Worlds, where you get to generate your own strange underworld and follow its own progress and changes throughout the ages.
Anyway, at the time of this newsletter going out there will probably only be a few hours left on this campaign, so consider that a heads up to check it out now in case you’re prone to procrastination as we think this one looks pretty special.
SECRET PASSAGES
Every couple of months since we started publishing Wyrd Science I’ve come to count on seeing someone confidently announce on social media that what the tabletop game scene needs is a print magazine again. Normally this cri de cœur is greeted with hundreds of likes and replies from people pledging their axe, bow and indeed monetary support and, as far as I’ve been able to make out that’s about as far as it ever seems to go.
So, with that in mind we’re delighted to see that another team of ink-addled romantics are actually about to join the likes of ourselves and Senet at the print coalface with the launch of Secret Passages, a new quarterly zine “exploring the RPGs and wargames that raised us.”
What that tagline translates to in their launch issue are features on the likes of 1980s dungeon crawling sensation HeroQuest, an interview with Mark Rein Hagen about the genesis of Vampire The Masquerade, and a piece on that strange time the US Secret Service raided the Steve Jackson Games offices to seize copies of GURPS Cyberpunk.
Long time readers will know I’ve often -pretty hypocritically as we’re as guilty as any- bored on about the seductive danger of nostalgia. Still, the fact that Secret Passages includes features on, for example, how Warhammer spinoff Mordheim reflected Britain’s own millennial anxieties gives me confidence this isn’t just the equivalent of a Facebook group where old people congregate to congratulate themselves on being able to remember the existence of things like rotary telephones before being inexplicably racist.
I have to say for myself I’m particularly intrigued by the promise of a dive into the first ever Warhammer 40,000 novels by Ian Watson, which… well, I won’t spoil them for those who’ve never had the pleasure but let’s just say that if Games Workshop had taken them as the template for their nascent universe, we’d be talking about a very different game today.
Admittedly we’d almost certainly also be talking about Games Workshop in the past tense too but I guess that’s the tightrope between selling millions of toy soldiers to kids worldwide and producing wonderfully depraved BDSM art that we all must walk in this life.
Anyway, editor James Hoare’s assembled a solid looking team of writers and has plenty of experience himself in magazine publishing so Secret Passages looks set to be a welcome, and hopefully long lasting, addition to our shelves. Check it out now on Kickstarter.
Finally a collection of things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, found down the back of the internet’s sofa…
If you’ve been struggling to find anything cheerful in the news of late then rejoice as The Onion, with the support of 8 of the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, have bought conspiracy/pill peddling webhole InfoWars and have plans. For real. [The Onion / CNN]
It might not have been the first sci-fi RPG (Stu Horvath gives that title to Ken St. Andre’s Starfaring over the more regularly cited Metamorphosis Alpha in his excellent Monsters, Aliens & Holes in the Ground) but Game Design Workshop’s Traveller is almost certainly the most important (I don’t say influential as I reckon West End Games’ Star Wars gets that award for its impact outside of gaming - debate me in the comments nerds!).
Anyway, the game’s current (and now permanent) stewards Mongoose Publishing have recently opened up the game to 3rd party content from the community, so if that inspires you to take your first steps into the game then they’ve also created a free Starter Pack, including the basic rules and two adventures to get you going. [Mongoose Publishing]Sticking with Mongoose they’ve also just released their annual ‘Statement of the Mongoose’, laying out how the company has fared over the past twelve months. As ever it’s refreshing to see a company be so transparent and to be continually be striving to do better by their staff, an inspiration to many, or at least they should be.
Matthew also reveals some refreshing self awareness to realise the company aren’t great at marketing, which, well yes indeed. Still, if its any consolation since i’ve been doing this I’ve encountered 2, at a push 3, companies in this business who aren’t terrible at PR & marketing, and one of them just laid off the person who was doing such a good job for them, so at least it’s a fairly level, if dogshit covered, playing field. [Mongoose Publishing]Talking of sci-fi RPGs it’s Mothership Month over at Backerkit. There’s every chance we’ll spotlight a couple of these in coming weeks but for now dive in and check out the wonderful array of strange zines, card decks and more being crowdfunded by some of our favourite indie creators for everyone’s current favourite survival horror OSR adjacent miserable space simulator. [BackerKit]
Right back to fantasy shenanigans. Having already provided one of our favourite looks at the 2024 PHB, Idle Cartulary turns her gaze upon the new Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. Having been surprisingly upbeat about the first book in the updated triptych how will the DMG fare? [Playful Void]
Yes we’re always linking to Alec Worley’s writing and yes we’ll carry on doing so as long as he keep knocking out bangers like this week’s look at the animated film that destroyed million’s of children’s fragile psyches, Watership Down. Fair play if you don’t have to choke down at least one sob reading this. [Agent of Weird]
A good essay on the ever thorny problem of Tolkien’s orcs and how that problem, as acknowledged by the big man himself, found its way into so much of what begged, borrowed and stole from Middle Earth including, of course, Dungeons & Dragons. [Heat Death]
If you read our interview with illustrator and tattoo artist Gabriele Cardosi in our last issue, loved his Warhammer inspired designs but weren’t quite ready to get a technicolor goblin permanently inked on your skin then you’re in luck as he’s just added some cool pin badges to his shop. [Gabriele Cardosi]
Over at Skeleton Code Machine they’ve been looking at some of TSR’s adventures in the board gaming realm and concluded the series with Wyrd Science favourite, the Dungeons & Dragons’ Computer Labyrinth Game. Well worth a read and for once read the comments too as there’s a link there to play the game online. [Skeleton Code Machine]
More reflections on Godzilla’s 70th birthday and why the original was 'A film that only Japan could have made.' Also apparently the world has enough kaiju scholars now that some of them can even be described as ‘leading’, which is nice to know. [BBC]
And finally, according to multiversal theory somewhere out there is a reality where the final four minutes of Ouroboros, the final track on Goat’s recently released and wonderful self titled new album, extends into infinity getting progressively weirder and heavier as it spirals its signal out into a grateful cosmos. Sadly in the reality we live in we just get those final four minutes but I guess it’s better than nothing. Enjoy!