Something For The Weekend...

Thanks to the magazine’s stubborn refusal to pay for itself (and/or my inability to budget) I’ve been freelancing all week and still have a few hundred more words to go before I can get fired into a gallon of margaritas tonight, so apologies but this is going to be a bit of a banged out in haste newsletter.

We’ve had a load of new subscribers this week so great first impressions and all that but normal service should resume next week and there’s a couple of things I really wanted to flag up before I inevitably forget so I figured this was better than nothing. Something they always recommend you say in modern marketing textbooks…

Anyway, on that note, I’ll leave you to read the rest and I shall go back to trying to come up with more ways to describe techno kick drums. Till next week,

John x

GAMEMASTERS: THE COMIC BOOK HISTORY OF ROLEPLAYING GAMES

Like I said, crazy week. I’d hoped to send this out before this campaign finished yesterday but clearly failed. Luckily, they’ve gone straight from funding to accepting late pledges, or pre-orders or whatever we want to call it.

Anyway, all that aside, you may have noticed a certain golden jubilee has inspired an absolute deluge of books this year on the history of our strange hobby. Turns out Dungeons & Dragons is good for something after all.

Adding to that pile is Gamemasters from New York Times-bestselling and award-winning comics creators Fred Van Lente and Tom Fowler. As you may have guessed this latest effort crosses the nerd streams, recounting how we got from the likes of Chaturanga in 7th century India to the basements of Lake Geneva in the 1970s in comic form.

We’ve only been lucky enough to see the around a half dozen pages but what we have looks great, a lively romp that distils centuries of tabletop history to connect the various strands from board games and wargames to fiction that would spectacularly come together as RPGs and ultimately lead to the publication of Wyrd Science.

Like I said we’ve only seen the first chapter so I’m not sure how they covered that last part, I hope they captured my best side, anyway you’ll just need to order it and find out next Spring like us…

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PLASMODICS

Will Jobst does the good kind of weird, so when we heard their new game riffed on old school classic Gamma World, but took its mechanical cues from the likes of Into The Odd we were, naturally, excited.

Plasmodics then, as you might expect, is set in an unbleached, flooded future now populated by an oddball assortment of mutant humans, uplifted animals, mechanical men and freaky aliens.

A standalone game, you get everything you need here to create your own gang of mutated weirdos and head off into the irradiated bunker filled landscape in search of curious artefacts, trouble and quite possibly the end of the world

Designed for both one-shots and longer campaign play, Plasmodics looks like just the thing if you fancy giving the gonzo science-fantasy of early RPGs a go. And alongside the main rule book there’s also an adventure zine on offer so you can dive straight into this weird world.

Along with his sometime co-conspirator Adam Vass, Jobst is one of those designers that always brings something special, unexpected and deliriously strange to the table, so we’re excited to get our tentacles on this…

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Look of course I was going to plug the magazine again. At this point you know the drill, 112 pages of features, interviews, news and reviews covering everything from Pendragon to Necromolds. Now with the added bonus that every copy sold means I can spend less time hunting for new synonyms for TR808 snare drum sounds.

At the same time if you’re for some reason reading this but never read any of our actual magazines (believe me they’re a lot more thought out than this) you can also still pick up our 3 issue bundle for just £20 (or local equivalent). That will get you right up to speed, and about a month’s worth of solid reading, as we range across the gaming world looking at everything from folk horror RPGs like Vaesen to fantasy bar crawls…

Head over to our website now to grab a copy or 4 and perhaps treat yourself to one of those fancy looking t-shirts we made, I’ve heard they’re all the rage at skateparks at the moment…

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Finally a collection of things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, found down the back of the internet’s sofa…

• Fantasy metal faves Castle Rat have today released a limited edition blacklight poster featuring the awesome art of Alexey Gorboot. Absolutely burning with desire for this ridiculous thing but the shipping costs to Europe are a bit of a killer. Sad.

• Polygon have news of two former Games Workshop legends, Andy Chambers & Jervis Johnson, who have reunited to create a new wargame for Polish studio Archon Games based on the Heroes of Might and Magic games.

• An old favourite we enjoyed returning to this week, as Jim Moon digs into that staple of wet 1980s British caravan holidays, the Horror Top Trumps decks, and exhumes the *ahem* inspiration behind its almost art brut designs.

• Talking of primitive art that gets right under the skin, over at Rediscovered Realms they’re looking at the illustrations from Gygax's 1979 mega-module Against the Giants, a time before TSR embraced boring fantasy realism.

• Yes, it's another depressing -but essential- story about "AI" art. This time how none of us are really prepared for the river of fake shit that's coming now the sluice gates are wide open.

• Humble Bundle have a pretty good deal going at the moment (& ending later today) featuring digital version of some of the best board games of the past few years. The Root & Wingspan ports get a LOT of playtime here

• Big fans here of Scarred For Life and their looks back at the intense strangeness of 708s/80s Britain and its pop-culture. If -like us- you'd spectacularly failed to pick up any of their annuals, well today's a good time to rectify that as Volume III has just come out and you can get 15% off the lot with the code MYNEWBOOK15 (that code runs out today I think).

• Industry veteran Magnus Seter has written a book on the almost all conquering Swedish RPG scene. It's in English, will be out in October and we cannot wait to get stuck into this.

• A week or two ago we mentioned a German university that were hosting an academic event focused on Warhammer and now Manchester is getting in on the action too, with a full day of talks covering everything from Blood Bowl to fantasy pharaohs. Looks great so hopefully some of it will be recorded.

• Finally there are essays to be written about the role of Paddington in the modern British psyche and having done a stint as a kind of Royal psychopomp, everyone’s favourite marmalade obsessed ursine has now seemingly been elevated to full pagan god status. Good on him we say.