Hey folks,
This announcement has been a long, long time coming.
5 Million Worlds Press has been going through a rocky and high-octane schedule of podcast episodes, crowdfunding projects, and editing work.
Very little has been writing.
I look back on the frantic release schedule of 2024, and while their quality was hit-or-miss, game writing was undoubtably more fun than running a BackerKit. And those adventure release posts have the highest engagement on this newsletter.
That tells me that folks who dig 5MW Press care most about the adventures.
And I agree. Writing sci-fi adventures is my favorite part too.
Switching to Patreon
Once the dust settles after my move to Martinique, I am expanding the Ansible Uplink Patreon into an all-things 5 Million Worlds space: podcast, game writing, newsletter.
I would love for y’all to follow the adventures of 5WM Press on Patreon.
Patreon has a Free Membership tier, and I’ll start releasing this monthly newsletter on the Patreon platform. I will double-post for a few months, but I will shutter monthly updates on this Substack before 2026 is through. Eventually, over on Patreon, I will add a couple more tiers for folks who’d like early-access to upcoming sci-fi adventure writing, but the newsletter will always be free.
If you do not want to have your subscriber email migrated to Patreon, please unsubscribe from this Substack now.
Sci-fi adventures, you say?
This is going back to the one adventure per month idea. For the Patreon early-access, I’m planning on doing something similar, but for a contiguous star cluster.
Photos above are from my Classic Traveller notebook, the three month campaign that ended just last week. I am going to take a straightforward writer’s approach to this, and rewrite, revise, refine themes, and just overall dig in. Folks will see the pipeline of how these GM notes shift into a playable written manuscript, world by world, and then be able to snag the shiny layout PDF by the end of it all.
Initially, the “look” of these adventures will be plain pdf/epub output, with some rudimentary maps. The goal is to provide writing that is entirely playable, but subject to change as I test the setting in play. And they won’t get the layout treatment until all the bits and bobs are complete and I know there’s nothing more to add.
The first sci-fi adventure project is going to be The Choral Tail, if you recall…
Ansible Uplink: Season One Finale
The Season One Finale releases this Wednesday, 29 July. Follow the release on:
The other two July releases are a bit out of the ordinary.
First was a TIME WARP review, checking out Classic Traveller’s Adventure 4: Leviathan (1980) with Dutch designer Peter Eijk, a.k.a. Jimmy Shelter. We also spoke about his love for old Vancian sci-fi, and bringing that vibe to his upcoming game, Look to Starward.
Next up, my pals and two-time guests Reece Carter and Norgad took over the show to review/roast my first zine, Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones. I’m not in this episode at all, and while at first I’d planned this to be a bonus release, I thought it’d be a bit of fun to put in as the penultimate episode near by birthday.
The Plan for Season Two
My recording equipment and zines are in a spatio-temporal zone known as “shipping.” Unfortunately, there’s no telling just when our family will receive our things, so I’ve opted to start up Season Two the same time the first one did:
Ansible Uplink, Season Two Premier: 14 October, 2026
Also, I’ll be living in the land of Eastern Daylight Time, all year round! I suspect this will make it easier to schedule recording times with game designers in the Americas, :)
Finally, I want to make an effort in shift my critical focus in Season Two more onto the science fiction of the modules we review. I can find the fun in most scenarios, which is a useful dial for helping Wardens get modules to the table, but doesn’t make the reviews very critical in most cases. We’ll see how that recalibration goes!
5MW Press Publishing Docket
I’m wrapping up edits and starting layout on Twisting Unseen, at long long, now that the Mothership Month 2025 fires have calmed.
Brandon Yu, a.k.a. Chaoclypse, and I are working on a Mothership module. All Roads Lead to Rome, an adaptation of Alien: Earth where the aliens escaped the spaceship and start propagating throughout the city. And the city is on a world under terraformation out on the Core World edge of the Rim. I’m making this a hexcrawl, and so have been reading Dolmenwood and Wolves Upon the Coast to prepare for writing these hexes that evolve across the timeline.
Then it’s all 5MW-focused writing, starting with the Choral.
Signing off,
Chris Airiau