Don't Call It A Comeback...

Photo by Jordan Whitfield (via Unsplash)

Hello strangers! Sorry for the distinct lack of Gazetteer these past few weeks, unfortunately what with the financial state of the world I had to go back cap in hand to my old industry and earn some money to help cover the costs of the next Wyrd Science print issue. Thankfully after today it looks like I’ll be done with that and so whatever approximates for normal service here should resume.

Speaking of the next issue that’s looking like late August now thanks to both this brief hiatus and the need to rework a couple of key features that have been overtaken by events. Seeing as that’s happened three times now I’m starting to think it would probably be less hassle to move to a monthly schedule to try and head that off but we'll see… Anyway on that note I better get on with finishing up the aforementioned work so we can get back to writing about space wizards and gelatinous cubes as the gods intended us to.

We will be back to our regular schedule next week but in the meantime we have some cultural tips from the ever excellent Chris Bissette, who has just released a brilliant looking adventure for their A Dungeon Game system plus we have two very cool looking Kickstarters that you should check out without delay, especially as Border Ridings’ campaign finishes in just a few hours.

Oh and finally, DriveThruRPG are having their annual Christmas in July sale at the moment and I must have ticked a box at some point as issues 3 & 4 of Wyrd Science are in it (1 & 2 are, of course, still free to download) alongside thousands of other great titles. So if you fancy picking them up and you’re allergic to paper then you can grab them now for something like £2.50, which seems unsustainable as business propositions go but anyway, till next week!

John x

Chris Bissette (Loot The Room)

Whilst probably best know for their anti-survival horror solo RPG The Wretched (see our feature on dying horribly in space for more on that), British game designer Chris Bissette has built up an enviable reputation releasing acclaimed third party adventures such as Treasures of the Troll King for Mörk Borg, contributing to titles like Modiphius’ Fallout: The Roleplaying Game and developing their own system’s such as A Dungeon Game, hailed by Dicebreaker as “a brutally simple take on OSR roleplaying games.”

It is to the latter that we turn today with the release of the first officially released adventure for the system, The Moss Mother’s Maze, a “low-level dungeon adventure steeped in the folklore of the rural north-west of England”, all of which sounds right up our street. Available to order now in both print and PDF, the scenario sees would be adventurers descend into a labyrinthine underworld ruled over by its eponymous draconic guardian and is really worth checking out.

So, with that in mind we caught up with Chris to find out what’s been keeping them entertained so far this summer when not lifting increasingly ridiculous weights or devising horrible ways for our characters to die.

What are you currently… Playing?

I play in a regular Wednesday afternoon OD&D game (well, Delving Deeper, our preferred retroclone). We've been exploring a megadungeon for something like a year and a half now. It's really nice to sit down for an hour in the middle of the day, explore a couple of rooms, and then get back to work feeling refreshed and excited about games.

… Reading?

I'm going through a non-fiction phase right now. I've been doing a chapter a night Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation before bed, as well as reading as many of Robert Macfarlane's books as I can get my hands on. Underland has been a particular favourite.

… Listening to?

I've had Crumbs by Canadian band DON'T TRY on repeat since it came out. I've been hunting for another band that sounds like Comeback Kid for years and I've finally found one.

I've also been listening to Ilsey and Bon Iver's cover of Neil Young's Heart Of Gold a lot, which is a very dramatic shift in tone from DON'T TRY but I love it equally.

… Watching?

My partner and I have been watching The Sopranos from the beginning and are coming up on the finale now.

I've also been spending my afternoons binging Sidney Lumet films - 12 Angry Men has been my favourite film since I was about 15 and I realised last month that I haven't really seen much else of his oeuvre outside of the obvious choices like Dog Day Afternoon and Network.

… Working on?

At the time this goes out I'll be starting fulfilment for The Moss Mother's Maze, which just released. This is the first adventure for my dungeon crawler A Dungeon Game and I'm really excited to finally put it out into the world!

Beyond that I'm spinning a lot of plates. I'm just about to wrap up some layout for a couple of adventures for Leyline Press' Salvage Union, as well as getting through the second draft of my Fighting Fantasy-inspired Troika! book Down In Yongardy, which I Kickstarted in 2021 and have been late delivering. The end isn't quite in sight yet but it's definitely getting a lot closer and I sincerely hope it's going to have been worth the wait when I finally wrap it up.

And once that's done I can get back to work on my first novel, which I feel like I've been writing for 800 years at this point.

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ECO MOFOS!!

Apocalypses are, generally speaking, pretty bleak affairs. Still once the Sturm und Drang of Ragnarok has passed the sun will, as its want, rise on a new day and for those who haven’t perished in countless unfathomably awful ways there’s a chance to rebuild and start again, and maybe this time without making such an ungodly mess of things.

That then is roughly the premise of ECO MOFOS!! a new RPG from artist David Locke, whose wonderfully strange zine Helms of the Multiverse we’re big fans of, and David Blandy, creator of several fine RPGs such as Lone Eons that have themselves touched on environmental themes.

In ECO MOFOS!! the world went to shit a couple of hundred years ago, those with the resources to fled the planet leaving Earth to the rest of us poor mooks. Now after hunkering down in bunkers it’s time to head out and rebuild your community in a world that has taken a decided turn for the weird whilst humanity was otherwise engaged. Who knows, with all the billionaires self-exiled on Mars it may even be possible.

Featuring lots of stuff we like, such as simple rules, life paths, a solo system, giant mutated critters and the ability to stuff orbs inside yourself and harness strange mutations, ECO MOFOS!! bills itself as a more optimistic, “weird-hope”, take on surviving in a ecologically ravaged, post apocalyptic hellscape, and seeing as we’re inexorably heading towards such a future ourselves right now, i’ll take all the hope that’s on offer.

There’s just a few days left to go on this campaign but they’ve already smashed through most of their stretch goals, so alongside the work of Messrs Blandy and Locke, you’ll also see contributions from a veritable roll call of indie RPG’s great and good, such as Zedeck Siew, Brandon You, Samantha Leigh, IKO and Logan Dean, so head over to Kickstarter now and get involved.

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BORDER RIDINGS

Border Ridings is a GM-less map making game by Jo Reid which looks at “maps, boundaries, borders, and the way we use rituals to maintain and shape our community” and takes as its inspiration the annual ‘common ridings’ that take place every summer in many of the towns in the Scottish Borders.

If you've never experienced these events in person they are for outsiders bewilderingly strange affairs that usually involve up to several hundred riders setting out at dawn to mark the boundaries of the town and check for any English interlopers, before a cavalcade of bands march through the towns, various folkloric rituals are enacted, fairs are set up, games played, grudges settled and more alcohol consumed that you might think possible.

The game itself comes on a large fold-out map-like poster and 3 of you will take turns to draw maps that create your community and its neighbours and guide their progress down the years as the settlements grow and rub up against one another. Turn by turn you’ll be prompted to map out the town’s destiny, and explore, expand and elaborate on the stories of each generation who come to call this place home.

Having survived several Common Ridings myself that by 10pm have looked like something out of Warhammer it’s good to see that this isn’t just about the niceties of rural life but also explores idea such as “how arbitrary borders can create real long-lasting divisions between communities, and how petty village rivalries can turn into full blown conflicts”.

Drawing inspiration from games like Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year, Everest Pipkin’s zine-game The Ground Itself and Iman Tajik’s project Bordered Miles this looks like a beautifully designed, fascinating game. You’ll need to be sharp though as this one ends this Friday 5PM (UK time).

A collection of other things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, culled from around the web...

• Long time readers will know we’re both a bit partial to 80s fantasy gaming gateway drug HeroQuest and Risograph art, so of course when Gavin Mitchell, one of our favourite new artists, brought the two together we had to pick up these (ltd edition) prints of the game’s iconic heroes and villains for the office wall.

• A great little look here at W.F. Smith’s Barkeep on the Borderlands by Idle Cartulary, a gorgeous looking pub-crawl adventure/setting that we’ve been anxiously looking forward to getting our mitts on ourselves.

• the 2023 Ennie Nominations have been announced and whilst I know they usually provoke a fair degree of consternation amongst the indie scene I think it’s a reasonably decent list this year, one or two head scratchers and it’s now just a popularity contest but still quite a few titles on there that we’ve featured in some way over the past year or so.

• Still for all that it’s worth reading this on the costs of participating in the awards. One of the myriad reasons we didn’t bother submitting Wyrd Science this year.

• Those who read our most recent issue will know that we had mixed thoughts about Dice Men, Ian Livingstone’s recently released history of the early years of Games Workshop, but that hasn’t stopped us getting excited about Magic Realms, a follow up of sorts that focuses on the art of Fighting Fantasy and is currently crowdfunding on Unbound.

  
  Meanwhile if like us Dice Men left you wanting more then Talking Miniatures might be just the ticket, a new book out later this summer that interviews many of those present just as Games Workshop really started to take off in the 80s.

• New one off zine from the wonderful Weird Walk folks, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man. is well worth picking up if you’re into that kind of thing.

• Speaking of both anniversaries and folk horror adjacent things, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass Experiment is getting a special one off live reading at Alexandria Palace this September, with the likes of Mark Gatiss and Alice Lowe involved, to mark 70 years since that was first aired.

• What with the continued slow death of social media there’s more and more interesting newsletters springing up, especially here on Substack. Personally I’ve found it quite refreshing to both get a regular supply of emails that aren’t spam and get to read what people have to say when not limited to 280 characters.
  
  Anyway we had planned to share several that we’re currently enjoying, which we’ll try and do next week now, but in the mean time have a read of this week’s Twenty Sided Newsletter which only went and did that themselves this week. Such great suggestions here of other newsletters to add to your pull list.