The Once & Future Thing

Banana Chan reveals her culture tips, Mörk Borg heads East, we find a map for lost explorers and some mildly diverting links are provided, it must be The Gazetteer!

First up, apologies to anyone who has been eagerly awaiting us wading into ‘tabletop game review’ discourse ever since I teased that last week. I’m sure there must be at least one of you.

My attempts to put something coherent down have been stymied by my first draft being childishly angry and any attempt at a second defeated by Belgium’s fimbulwinter finally ending. The sun is shining, my beloved guingettes are calling and I don’t like to disappoint them.

As it happens it seems like most people have moved on to getting angry at ‘What Is An RPG?’ sections again now anyway. Still I shall endeavour to get something vaguely professional up next week as time is indeed a flat circle and I’m sure it will soon enough be relevant again.

Right, onwards… this week we catch up with the remarkably busy and indeed talented Banana Chan, we head to Poland to discover a new Mörk Borg hack, check out a new tool for budding game (and graphic) designers and we’ve a bumper selection of ‘stuff’ in our bookmarks section to keep you entertained.

In fact i’ve just been warned this may now be too long for emails so if it cuts anything off just hit the read online button up above. Duff intro aside that’s not too bad for free.

Till next week…

John x

Banana Chan (Game & a Curry)

We last caught up with Chinese Canadian game designer, writer and publisher Banana Chan back in our debut issue to discuss, the then just released, Jiangshi - Blood In The Banquet Hall.

An RPG, principally, set in a US West Coast restaurant run by an intergenerational Chinese family beset by vampires and systemic racism, Jiangshi is as unique a game as that brief description suggests. Nominated in 3 categories at last year’s Ennies, winning silver for best setting, if you haven’t checked it out you really should.

Since then Banana has gone onto to contribute to the latest Ravenloft book, co-write an anthology of horror LARPs for Pelgrane Press, co-design a '“completely logical” party game based on the art of Mr Lovenstein for Skybound, and has contributed to countless other titles from the DUNE RPG through to Kids on Bikes.

With her latest game, Forgery, a supernatural horror solo RPG about an artist recreating a cursed painting currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo, we decided it was time to check in and see what’s going on in Banana’s world…

What are you currently... playing?

I'm currently playing Saints Row 5 and I'm really enjoying giving my brain a break. It's an extremely silly action adventure RPG kind of like Grand Theft Auto, but I enjoy the story a lot more, because it lets me just unwind from my work.

… listening to?

Going back and forth between Cha Cha Cha by Käärjiä and Tiny Holes by Spektral Quartet, Julia Holter and Alex Temple (recommended to me by Lucian Kahn).

They're two very different songs, but I listen to them based on how I'm feeling and what I need to write.

… watching?

Oh gosh, so much. I just finished American Born Chinese which I really enjoyed.

Right now, I'm on Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, which is a kids animated show about the story behind the mogwai from Gremlins that takes place in 1920s Shanghai, and Silo, a sci-fi alternate history show that has Fallout vibes and is about an entire civilization that lives in an underground shelter.

… reading?

The Consultant by Bentley Little. I watched the show and I couldn't help myself and I needed to get the book to know how it ends. It's a horror novel about a creepy consultant hired to help out with a failing computer software company.

… and working on?

Forgery is my solo horror TTRPG about a jealous and disgruntled art forger who's commissioned to recreate a cursed painting, which is now on IndieGogo's InDemand!

I'm planning on closing it out in a week or so, but the game is done and is currently in layout (Ruby Lavin is the fantastic graphic designer behind that).

Tiān Dēng is the next game that's being worked on by Calvin Wong Tze-Loon, Hong Di-Anne, Sen-Foong Lim and I and it's about the Chinese diaspora and players take on the roles of a found family that's traveling through space doing gigs to pay off their sentient ship's debt.

I'm also working on a series of short horror stories about an office building in Manhattan.

The Classic Explorer Template

Ok, so this isn’t a game but it is fun to play with… The Classic Explorer Template is a new release from Clayton Notestine, whose blog - looking at the graphic design of RPGs - we’re huge admirers of.

The Classic Explorer Template then is, to quote the man himself, a “time-slaying, grid-taming, torch-swinging layout template for classic fantasy roleplaying games” and if you’re in the business of putting said classic fantasy roleplaying games together, especially on a budget which if you’re in the classic fantasy A5 zine scene you almost certainly are, you might well find it a godsend.

A fully documented template that eschews filler text for actually useful information and some of Clayton’s design philosophies, it provides the structure for anyone (with Adobe’s InDesign or Affinity Publisher, of course) to both create a clean, lean looking A5 zine with minimal effort and then perhaps push on from there to greater, dizzying, heights.

Whilst it isn’t a fully comprehensive beginner’s guide, both the template itself and the accompanying PDF do walk you through a lot of key concepts, from grid structures and text styles to working with images and tables, and will provide a strong foundation as you work up to breaking the rules.

There’s a free and paid version, both with essentially the same content - the free version just requires you to do a bit more work following the instructions in the PDF rather than just going straight to work on the full template. If you’re interested in levelling up your designs then this is highly recommended.

SLAV BORG - A Post-Soviet Semi-Fantasy RPG

Post-OSR blackened art-punk Mörk Borg has inspired a fair few spin offs since it first made a black & yellow dent in the RPG scene. From the creator’s own sledgehammer sci-fi satire CY_BORG (see our latest issue for our review of that) through to countless third party settings from Farewell to Arms bleak vision of a world at war to Pirate Borg’s sorcerous dark Caribbean and DUKK BORG’s comic fowlness, we thought we’d seen it all…

Until now that is, as we can now add the remarkable looking SLAV BORG to this cavalcade of colourful miseries.

Created by Poland’s Slavdom Studio SLAV BORG uses the “real-world backdrop of the social and economic struggles of the Polish-German-Czech borderland” as its setting to create a post-Soviet fantasy Eastern Europe, where goblin crews hang out on street corners and a greasy tyrant necromancer rules over an environmentally ravaged land.

With multiple modes of play designed for longer campaigns, high octane one shots and rogue like randomly generated misadventures, SLAV BORG puts you in the trainers of a gang of tracksuited, chop shop running orcs and replaces dungeon crawls with gasoline fuelled races, chases and smuggling runs through Zgol’s maze like streets as you fight for survival, freedom or just the dirty thrill of it all.

Now, if that doesn’t pique your interest I’m not sure what will…

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

• Stamps for the stamp god! Royal Mail are celebrating 40 years of Warhammer with a series of stamps featuring Space Marines, Stormcast and, most excitingly for an old sod like me, some of that classic John Sibbick Rogue Trader art…

• Dark Horse have announced a deluxe oversized collected edition of the comic adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology book. Out November, pre-orders are up now and we have to say it looks great.

• Talking of looking great, we first got a sniff that Restoration Games were going to have a crack at re-releasing bonkers 80s favourite Crossbows & Catapults a couple of years ago, and after a few false starts it looks like they’re almost ready to push the button. Sign up to be notified on launch here.

• More Vaesen on the way! After Free League’s game of occult mysteries took a trip across the North Sea to detail British weirdness (read our feature from issue 3 for more on that) they’re heading back to Scandinavia with a new supplement, The Lost Mountain Saga. It’s up for pre-order today and you get immediate access to the PDF.

• With the new Magic The Gathering Lord of the Rings set being revealed this week there’s, of course, been a depressingly rote outpouring of outrage. Over at Gizmodo Linda Codega goes in studs up.

• Fans of indie wargames, kit bashing and various fantasy grotesques should delight as there’s a new issue of the brilliant 28 Mag out to download now for free.

• We’ve quacked on at length about our love for British fantasy artist Ian Miller at length before so we’ll just say there’s now a range of limited-edition giclée prints of his astonishing art available from here.

• Iko from the Lost Bay just sent out a good newsletter which dives into a few people’s ongoing Dungeon23 projects. I’ll be honest ours lasted all of a week but it’s cool to see what others have been getting up to.

• East London’s Jam Bookshop need your help, if you’re in the area then also pop in as this June they’re hosting a small but perfectly formed exhibition of Garbage Pail Kid art!

• Another interesting Prismatic Wastelands blogpost looking at the new Zelda game through an OSR lens.

• We finally got round to watching Who Killed The KLF? at the weekend and i’m happy to say it did not disappoint. Inspiring, infuriating and heartbreaking in places, well worth a watch…

• Well, when you put it like that…

• And finally, there’s a gorilla on the loose in Mexico!