Saturday Night Fever Dreams

This week we speak to Richard Ruane, behold an infinity of ships and embrace cosmic horror storytelling...

Noted Indie RPG and wargame enthusiast Taylor Swift

After last week’s love letter to Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader we head back into the indie underground this week as we speak to Richard Ruane, creator of the ENNIE Award winning Moonlight on Roseville Beach, and take a look at two wonderful looking titles currently crowdfunding, An Infinity of Ships and the 2nd edition of Lovecraftesque.

There’s lots to get through so we won’t keep you from the good stuff but just to hammer home the point that the first four issues of Wyrd Science are still free to download on Itch & DriveThruRPG, with print copies up to 50% off on our webstore (and warning there’s less than 20 copies of issue 2 left).

It’s been great seeing so many people who haven’t read the magazine yet give it a go over the past couple of weeks, so thank you to everyone that has helped spread the word, with so many routes to raising awareness degraded or closed off now everything helps hugely. Now we just need to get Matt Mercer or, hey why not, Taylor Swift to be seen in public reading the mag. Matt, T-Swizzle - our inbox is always open.

Right, on that note I hope you enjoy the rest of The Gazetteer as we’re off to bury ourselves in West End Games’ 1987 Star Wars RPG.

John x

Richard Ruane (R. Rook Studio)

We haven’t done a Wyrd Scene feature here for a bit but with a new hardback edition of Moonlight on Roseville Beach currently on Kickstarter we figured now was a pretty good time to check in with its creator Richard Ruane.

Making his name as a writer and editor for tabletop RPGs for White Wolf Publishing, Richard has gone on to enjoy a flourishing career with his own R.Rook Studio, nominated for the IGDN Groundbreaker Award in both 2020 and 2021 for Dark Designs in Verdigris and Barrow Keep respectively, before winning a Judge's Spotlight Award at this year's ENNIEs for Moonlight on Roseville Beach.

Taglined ‘A Queer Game of Disco and Cosmic Horror’ Roseville Beach is a rules-lite horror RPG the game is set in the eponymous seaside resort in 1979, a predominantly queer community beset by eldritch forces.

The original paperback version of Roseville Beach first appeared on Kickstarter back in 2021 and the game has picked up a devoted following since, not least thanks to the spectacular art direction by Dai Shugars, which beautifully realises the pulp themes.

We’re delighted to see the game get a more deluxe re-release, with several new mysteries also available, and caught up with Richard to see what had been inspiring him of late.

What are you… Playing?

I'm all tabletop right now, and I just wrapped up playing in a two-year campaign of Trail of Cthulhu and a short campaign of Under Hollow Hills. I'm currently running Beyond the Wall for friends and about to launch a short campaign of Moonlight on Roseville Beach at my FLGS.

… Listening To?

I'm weird and my writing projects mostly involve throwing myself into a topic/setting/period like a fanatical Stanislavkian actor. Since I'm working on Dim All the Lights, I'm pretty much living in 1979 right now. There's a good bit of Donna Summer, Abba, and Thelma Houston, but also Springsteen, Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Clash, Curtis Mayfield, The Runaways, and Gil Scott-Heron. When I escape the 70s, I keep finding myself only getting as far as The Pogues.

… Reading?

I'm working on a blog series about what you'd find in a paperback exchange in 1979, so in the last few weeks, I've finished reading or re-reading a bunch of paperback authors who'd show up in used bookstores stores then: Stephen King (Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Stand, and The Shining), Samuel R. Delany (Nova and Babel-17), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt), Vonda N. McIntyre (Dreamsnake), and Thomas Tryon (Harvest Home), as well as Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter mysteries (Death Claims, Troublemaker, The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of, and Skinflick).

I'm currently finishing up Pulp Friction, an anthology of chapters from gay pulp novels with a lot of commentary and notes, and trying to decide what's next.

Solely for fun, I just finished Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Velvet Was the Night and The Daughter of Dr. Moreau—Velvet Was the Night is possibly the best book I've read this year—and am just starting Mason Thomas's fantasy-romance novel Shadow Mark.

… Watching?

I just finished the first season of Castle Rock (I'm late to the game) and then made myself watch all of the 2020 version of The Stand. I'm not sure why I did that, but I got through it. I've also been binging 70s horror movies, which is partially for Dim All the Lights, but mostly just an excuse to rewatch Messiah of Evil, Curse of the Crimson Altar, and Vampire Circus.

… Working on?

Dim All the Lights is my priority project right now, and most of my work is on that. I'm especially enjoying work on "The Last Halloween at Beverly's Bar," a scenario set at a Gulf Coast's town's gay bar where the regulars realize the town's being overrun by vampires.

It's designed to work either as a one-shot or a prequel for a Roseville Beach campaign. In the fall, I'm hoping to get back to my zine project Nottingham and finish up another zine-length game, Saturday Morning Mysteries. I'm also making notes for a horror game tentatively titled The Gloaming about life in a small town. My current design obsession is horror TTRPGs that break with the Lovecraft-fueled focus on "madness" and "sanity" in favor of social and ethical stakes.

I'm also anxious to return to work on sequels to my first game zine Barrow Keep too, and already have some art commissioned for it.

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An Infinity of Ships

Long time readers will know we’re pretty partial to Rob Turpin’s art, and for a while now we’ve been banging on about how someone needed to make an RPG based on his Weird-Field World book. Well it looks like our prayers have been kind of answered in the shape of An Infinity of Ships from Adam Good and Jamie Perez, a new system agnostic RPG book which makes extensive use of Turpin’s wonderful spaceship art.

A toolkit for designing anything up to a whole fleet of cosmic craft for use in any number of sci-fi settings and systems, An Infinity of Ships features over 100 tables for generating everything from bio-mechanical nautiloids to sleek interstellar racers, battered haulers to scientific research vessels, plus all the weird technology and even weirder crews that you might find on board.

If you’re in a hurry and need a spaceship STAT there’s also a good few dozen pre-generated ships ready and waiting for you, all of whom have been brought to life by Turpin’s pen and ink, and which are also available as a handy deck of cards, ready to be quickly dealt into play.

As well as providing you with the means to get around the galaxy, An Infinity of Ships also gives you plenty to do once you’re out there traversing the cold void, and comes complete with a whole load of plot hooks, adventure seeds and one-shot scenarios written by some of our favourite indie folks such as Alfred Valley, Jess Levine, Evelyn Moreau and Chris Air.

With layout and graphic design by the always on point Lone Archivist, additional illustrations by Shaun Beyond, a Traveller floorpan by Gavin Daddy and editing by Samantha Leigh it’s looking like a pretty tight package and that’s before you look at the few remaining stretch goals and see the tantalising prospect of both a new faction and extra art from Ultraviolet Grassland’s Luka Rejec and, honestly I love games, a 3D model of a lesbian spaceship designed by Holly Jencka.

The campaign runs until November 17 and there’s all kinds of extras and add-ons available including a rather tasty looking holographic foil cover, so head over to Kickstarter and check it out now!

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Lovecraftesque - 2nd Edition

In our last issue we spoke to Becky Annison about her work on the, then, recently released Liminal - Werewolves of Britain book and her love for getting darker subject matters to the table, it’s a good interview so check it out if you haven’t.

Anyway, alongside her fellow game designer Josh Fox, Annison is back with a new, 2nd, edition of their award winning game Lovecraftesque. No prizes for guessing that some amount of disturbing cosmic horror may be involved here, although the pair have gone to some lengths to work around, deconstruct and subvert some of the less than peachy beliefs and ideas that run through old HP’s work like a stick of bigoted rock.

A GM-less storytelling game where everyone shares control of one main character - the witness- Lovecraftesque earned Fox and Annison all manner of plaudits when it was originally released back in 2015 and would go on to influence many more RPGs. Fast forward 8 years and the pair have decided it’s time to give it a spit & polish, apply the lessons of the past few years and make use of their higher profile to produce a more definitive, and frankly swanky, version.

The game is now entirely card driven, with 18 scenarios (6 in the core box and 12 available in add on packs) to delve into and hundreds of prompts to drive the narrative and its protagonist along towards an, almost certainly, terrifying conclusion.

Along the way each player takes turns to reveal new clues that develop the mystery, narrate new scenes and work in secret on their own particular theory as to what the Cthulhu is actually going on. Then, once all the clues have been revealed and the witness has inevitably seen a shoggoth too many, one of the player’s theories is revealed to be the ghastly canonical truth.

The 2nd edition comes complete with new art from Vincent Sammy and Paul Tomes, much of which features hidden details only revealed when illuminated by a UV light (one comes in the box, in case you don’t have one just lying around) and includes scenarios written by some well known names such as Chaosium’s Lynne Hardy and Kenneth Hite.

The campaign is running now over on Backerkit and is live until November 9, so if you too like the idea of indulging your dark side in the company of friends then check it out now…

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Hey you made it this far, congratulations! Before we get to this week’s bookmarks just another reminder that our first four issues are currently free to download from both Itch.io and DriveThruRPG, and for those who prefer print copies you can find them on our website with up to 50% off back issues at the moment. Grab issue 1 now and you might even have finished reading its massive Kieron Gillen interview by the time issue 5 is released where we catch up with the DIE author.

Right, on you go…

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

• As you do we were thinking about just how badass the dragon on the cover of the Mattel Electronics Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game was the other day. Any clue as to the artist? All my searches have come up blank.
  
  Anyway, it reminded us that someone created an online version of this 1980’s oddity and if you’ve never played it, well, it’s actually pretty good fun. Give it a go…
  

• Really good looking exhibition opens today at the British Library in London, Fantasy - Realms of Imagination runs until Feb 25 and explores “he beautiful, uncanny and sometimes monstrous makings of fantasy” from the likes of Studio Ghibli to Terry Pratchett.
  
  Alongside the main exhibition there’s also a series of events running over the next few months that all look really interesting too, from talks with authors like Neil Gaiman and Phillip Pullman to a board game fest in Dec. Seeing as we happen by chance to be in London this weekend have to say we’re quite tempted to give the pub a swerve and check out the talk with Susan Cooper tonight…
  

• Hasbro released their latest quarterly financial results this week and, well, let’s say if it wasn’t for Wizards of the Coast they’d be in serious trouble right now.
  
  With every other part of the company in the red, it was the continued growth of the tabletop games division, and mainly increased revenue from Magic The Gathering and what they’ve skimmed from Larien for the Baldur’s Gate 3 video game, that gave them something to shout about. Expect even more calls for Wizards to be spun off from Hasbro in the near future.
  

• “The woods were moving like the sea this morning” sounds like the opening to a pretty decent folk-horror story, though I guess depending on your thoughts on anthropogenic climate change it might still be.
  

• Talking of that cheery subject, looks like geo-engineering’s back on the menu. BBC Future looks into its implications and the chances of a nation following the lead of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel Ministry for the Future and deciding to unilaterally alter the atmosphere to slow down, or even try and reverse, climate change.
  

• This is a fairly random but nonetheless interesting read (hey that’s what we’re here for) as Eye on Design looks into the last man standing in the floppy disc business.
  

• An interesting piece from Lin Codega over on their Substack looking at their work and how it is interpreted and who we write for, sparked by some recent Reddit rage about a Tolkien x Magic The Gathering op-ed on Gizmodo.
  

• And whilst we’re on the subject of how Tolkien’s stories have been adapted over the years, this -about how a heavily abridged and illustrated version of The Hobbit ended up appearing in 1960’s British girls’ magazine Princess- is a fascinating read. Especially worth checking out the illustration of Gollum, who seems to have been modelled on some French New Wave film star.
  

• Normally we’d give the side eye to anyone starting their Christmas shenanigans before Halloween. Saying that, 2000AD have just put their range of Dredd themed Xmas Jumpers back on sale, last year we spent so long trying to decide which one to buy we missed out, so we’ll allow Tharg this one and will be putting in our order early this year.
  

• Jennell Jaquays is one of the pioneers of tabletop games, responsible for some of the most important early RPG modules such as The Caverns of Thracia, she is also currently in hospital being treated for Guillain–Barré syndrome. It’s going to be a long, hard and, of course, expensive road back from this, so if you can afford to chip anything in there’s a GoFundMe here raising money to help.
  

• And finally, we just wanted to highlight this wonderful video (X/TikTok/YouTube) about Wyrd Science by Sam Leigh. Honestly this was just what we needed to hear after what has been a less than spectacular month.
  
  Since starting their many channels Sam has been an incredibly important voice championing indie RPGs, and we should also say creating their own, so if you haven’t already check out what they’re doing, do. It’s the good stuff.