5 Million Worlds Newsletter, #4

Issue 4, Dec 2023:

Warm end-of-year greetings, folks. It’s been a busy administrative couple of months for lil ol me, giving me plenty of time to reflect on coming plans for 2024 while waiting on the horn trying to ignore cheezy “on hold” music.

And over Xmas, I made a free “zine-ass zine” (as Christian Sorrell puts it) for a strange sort of year in review. It’s a bit deranged: Weirdo Faves of 2023.

Lemme give ya a quick run-down of this issue’s main points:

• Outer Rim Uprising

• 2024 5MW Press Projects

• Iain M. Banks’ The Culture in 5MW RPG

Outer Rim Uprising

The BackerKit store is up for the Outer Rim Uprising campaign! We’ve got loads of add-ons in the store from the contributors, so it’s a great opportunity to nab a zine or two you may have missed out on.

A spread mockup from Rusted to the Core. Station Art by Holly Jencka.

Outside of admin tomfoolery, I spent much of this past month working on ORU layout and implementing edits from Samantha Leigh. The editing and revision process is one of my favorite steps of creating, and it was doubly wonderful working with Sam.

Other than that, the final piece for Rusted to the Core is landing soon: creature art from Ollie Schirmacher. Their sci-fi art is so much my shit. Definitely keep an eye out for their work in future 5MW Press projects!

Hm… I wonder if this QR Code is just for show?

Putting the touch of authenticity to the diegetic “in-universe” posters in Bones on the Ground has been a trip. Weaving how they all link to the bifold adventure and other bits of the ORU bundle has been loads of fun. Seeing that moment when the clues in the flyers CLICKS for your players is gonna be a riot.

2024 for 5MW Press

First and foremost, the big 5MW Press project is getting the physical orders of Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones out to Kickstarter backers! For those who missed the KS Update, long story short: sorting out French customs for exportation took five weeks.

Mockup of the 5MW Avatar Builder: 5 Classes, 10 Backgrounds.

For Zine Month, I’m planning an itchfund for the 5MW RPG character generation zine: the Avatar Builder. The funds go directly towards paying for art. The initial goal is to pay for character art covering the 5 Classes and 10 Backgrounds. If the itchfund goes well, I can cover new cover design costs, spot art for equipment, and if we’re lucky a few full page illustrations.

Art by Paul Enami. Two creatures in Twisting Unseen: Bone King & Gnawling.

Concurrently, I’ll be developing and playtesting Twisting Unseen for (fingers-crossed) a Kickstarter in April. The exploration in this module takes on a “board game”-like element. In short, players choose how the pieces of the map connect. Each game ends with a unique map for that playthrough. This procedure will need lots of ironing out to squash edge cases, so it runs as smooth as possible.

Unnamed world, sketched in the train. I like that southern land bridge. Gonna put my focus on that zone.

The other big project is for you, the folks following the 5MW Newsletter!

Starting in January, I’ll be creating one/two page supplements for 5MW RPG. Planets, Stations, Factions, Backgrounds, short adventures, and creator toolkits. What’s a newsletter about five million worlds without any worlds? Time to change that!

The Culture & 5MW RPG

This was the runner-up to the poll from September, so I decided to give it a small spotlight here. If people want to chat more about the Culture and 5MW RPG, please leave comments! I’m always game to talk sf lit, :)

For those who don’t know, the Culture novels are ten books by Iain M. Banks set in a shared universe. Like Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, each novel is a standalone, and grapples with those living in the fringes of starfaring society.

My recommendation? Read The Player of Games, first.

The quip is that the Culture is “fully-automated luxury gay space communism.” AI Minds run the show and keep their humanoids safe. Except when their humanoids elect to be unsafe and join Special Circumstances, a sort of CIA send humans to humanoid civilizations with fascist leaders to destabilize the baddies and help them join the utopian Culture. What a can of worms, eh?

5MW RPG is space adventure. Not as grandiose as the space opera of the Culture, but PCs should have a chance for heroism on a personal scale (for persons with access to wild sci-fi tech). Importantly, I wish to explore tools of non-violent force. Undermine and fuck up fascist regimes, without bloodshed. To take on the Company, and stick their nose in the mud by giving the people the power.

All this faction play lives in scribbled notes and my head, and I wish to develop it for a much further down the line “GM Guide.” Since it felt so far off, I opted to talk about the Unseen City last month. Anyway, I think it’s best to get those B I G ideas out to those who play it, yeah? The formal presentation see light after the central game design is sorted.

First, I gotta write the Avatar Builder.

Thanks for sticking with me. Happy New Year, and talk to y’all soon.