Napoleon Melta Bomb
Stay Frosty Kids!
A very happy Friday to all who celebrate. This week has mostly been spent trying to get a grip of all the really boring stuff that apparently is necessary to keep what occasionally passes for a business running. Still, having learnt several new acronyms and allocated an extra 5% to our business skill we’re sure that world domination clearly beckons.
Unfortunately that does mean though that we haven’t had any time to figure out why everyone seems to be angry at the OSR again this week, or angry at people angry at it, or… look I don’t know I’m afraid you’ll just have to figure this one out for yourself.
Right, moving swiftly on, this week we have an interview for you that we did with Chaosium’s Lynne Hardy about the Rivers of London RPG, we welcome the return of Casey Garske’s Stay Frosty and down in the bookmarks section we have some great stuff to keep you busy this weekend, including the mind boggling news of a new documentary film about Napoleon Dynamite trying to track down Warhammer art-magus John Blanche (as Luke pointed out on Bsky he could have just messaged him).
Right, till next week…
John x
This week author Ben Aaronovitch announced a forthcoming new book, Stone and Sky, the next in his best selling Rivers of London series. Great news and it made me realise we’d never published the interview we did with Chaosium’s Lynne Hardy about the RPG based on the books’ occult shenanigans and magical metropolitan police.
So here you are, ripped from the pages of Wyrd Science issue 4 is Scry Me A River, in which we discuss everything from stalking Aaronovitch to developing a game that might be many people’s first RPG and, of course, talking foxes.
Sticking with the detective theme, this issue also included features on games like Brindlewood Bay, Liminal, The Troubleshooters (which you can also read online here) and lots more, so if you enjoyed that maybe buy a copy, it’s good.
STAY FROSTY (REMASTERED)
Originally released way back in 2017 as a much loved, fairly rustic looking zine, Casey Garske’s Stay Frosty gets a glow up in the shape of a new remastered edition from Melsonian Arts Council.
An old school style (it started as a hack of The Black Hack) RPG of sci-fi grunts getting ripped apart in shitty space stations by acid dripping aliens, chitinous bugs or inter-dimensional demons, Stay Frosty was perfect for anyone who liked board games like Space Hulk and boomer shooters like Doom but also wanted the opportunity to give your doomed little space soldiers some character and perhaps drop a monologue before getting turned into red mist.
The original version was, as you might expect, fairly lite in the rules dept. Four 3D6 Stats -Brians, Brawn, Dexterity, Willpower- which you need to roll over on a D20 when the shit hits the fan, you can have Advantage/Disadvantage on rolls which works as it does in most games these days, ammo supply dice, etc etc etc. If you’ve played an RPG before then you should have a handle on it by the time you’ve rolled up a character.
Where a lot of the game’s individual flavour did come from was the various tables for when things start to go really wrong and a mission’s Frostiness level inevitably tricks up. There was a FUBAR Table for combat results, a SNAFU table for when you roll a 1 on a skill test and our favourite the GOING APESHIT table for when the tension gets all too much.
In terms of rules this new remastered edition essentially seems to keep most of that as it was, just incorporating the errata and some of the additional content that has been published over the years. In terms of actual brand new stuff, there’s an all new starter adventure to get to grips with, a skip load of new art from Andrew Walter and Noah Brown and the whole thing gets tidied up and put inside a decent looking hardback.
Since it’s original release it’s fair to say that Mothership has pretty much taken the number one slot for horror tinged OSR in SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE games, but with its singular vision Stay Frosty remains a great choice for when you just want to leave all subtlety behind, go on a bug hunt and fire off a few pithy one liners alongside your BFGs.
Your regular reminder that we do have an actual magazine filled with great writing on everything from hauntological Warhammer action figures to the politics of board games and which are currently on sale.
Head over to our webstore where 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 the ridiculous price of just £6.
Finally a collection of things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, found down the back of the internet’s sofa…
Whilst there’s been a lot of fevered speculation the past year or so about a big budget Warhammer 40,000 TV series or film, starring or maybe produced by Henry Cavill, I cannot say I’ve seen anyone even hint at a documentary featuring the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) stumbling around the Midlands on what appears to be some kind of vision quest to find John Blanche. And yet here we are… [Trademark Films]
Astonishingly scientists have discovered that despite their name Aztec Death Whistles don’t in fact play jaunty little ditties and actually make terrifying eldritch noises that mess with our brains, whodathunkit! [Science Alert]
With over 50 Kickstarters under their belt EN World know a thing or two about the platform and now reckon they can pretty much predict how much a campaign will make from just the first 3 hours takings. [EN World]
Christian Lindke’s started a new series looking back over the history of non-system specific RPG magazines (so basically not White Dwarf or Imagine/Dragon/Dungeon, a subject that is obviously close to our hearts. [Geekerati]
There’s been a fair bit of freaking out from various games publishers and model makers and the like this week as news filtered out that a new EU regulation (GPSR) is about to come into force requiring everyone to do stuff if they want to sell stuff to people on the continent.
Unfortunately as is the way no one quite seems to know what it is they have to do. Personally I’ve been asking for clarification from various people we work with and no one seems any the wiser, still for those who are trying to make sense of it all this Rascal feature might help [Rascal]
Colin from RPG publisher By Odin’s Beard breakdowns the financial realities of their recent tabling at ThoughtBubble [By Odin’s Beard]
Would you like a remarkably in depth video about how they made the title sequence for 1980s Gerry Anderson puppet show Terrahawks? Of course you would, that’s exactly the kind of nonsense you subscribe to this newsletter for… [YouTube]
Over on Bluesky we spent an otherwise unproductive morning bemoaning that we don’t get amazing TV adverts for tabletop games anymore and revelling in some of the classics made for the likes of HeroQuest, Space Crusade, Dark World etc etc. [Wyrd Science - Bluesky]
For a relatively short-lived series ITV’s Robin of Sherwood has, for many reasons, quite devoted fans, indeed I once travelled to another country for the day just to attend a lecture on the show’s pagan elements, as you do. Anyway to mark the show’s 40th anniversary The Guardian spoke to some of those involved. [The Guardian]
Talking of things from 1984, this week the classic episode of LWT’s South of Watford focused on the UK’s nascent fantasy gaming scene from RPGs to LARPs celebrated its 40th birthday too. Always worth a watch. [YouTube]
Going back a further decade and Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t the only thing launched in 1974, as astronomers in Puerto Rico fired a message out into the stars, one that thankfully hasn’t yet been answered by the arrival of an invasion fleet. To mark the occasion the daughter of the man who created the message writes movingly about both it and her father for Scientific American. [Scientific American]
And finally, we missed this on its release a few months ago but we’re currently utterly obsessed with this wonderfully joyous Mermaid Chunky track Céilí. Who knows maybe you will be as well now…