5MW Rokaner Report #10, Free One-Page Adventure, Interview with Violet Ballard!
RR#10, Burrow, October 2024, As the Beacon Burns Low
Hello stargazers,
Happy Eve of Halloween Eve!
What a month! Gotta say, I’m very happy about the great X-odus, though. Bluesky is a hotbed of indie ttrpg activity, and it’s been fun talking with new folk and old friends on there. To help connect folk with the Mothership scene, I created a “Mothership Creator Starter Pack” so people can follow 70+ accounts with just one click!
I hope it’s useful for following the upcoming Mothership Month! My own entry, Not Enough Scoundrels is (space) truckin’ along. Remember, those first 48 hours are vital for crowdfunding success, so please follow on BackerKit and I’d appreciate any help sharing the project pre-launch link over on Bluesky, :)
For this month’s newsletter, it’s with great pleasure that I present an interview with my friend Violet Ballard. Under her publishing and distribution company RV Games, she’s producing wild micro-games, a charity-driven book Return to Perinthos in memorial of Jennell Jacquays, and Mothership modules like Hecate Cassette Archive, QA, and Orgy of the Blood Leeches.
Interview with Violet Ballard
Chris: Violet, I’ve been waiting to get you on the Rokaner Report, and I’m excited it’s for your boxed campaign adventure, Orgy of the Blood Leeches. What a name, what ambition! I have so many questions, but let’s start with the simple ones: What’s the pitch for Blood Leeches, and what are the primary sf inspirations driving this module?
Violet: Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a boxed campaign adventure modeled after immersive sim games with a social twist. It follows the investigation of the death of a trans sex worker, Brianna Pilgrim, by vivisection. Her murder took place onboard Trellick Station, a highly populated luxury living space station, that is in the midst of an outbreak of three different types of Blood Leeches. Infected individuals become highly aroused and aggressive, necessitating the station to be quarantined with highly secured Isolation Zones established in areas lost to the infection.
Your party works for the Interstellar Sex Workers’ Union, and you must find the culprit from among ten named NPCs before Brianna’s death is used as a way to start a galactic war involving 5 named factions. Explore and investigate within the sprawling Trellick Station, featuring 7 districts and 70 areas in addition to 7 Isolation Zone crawls. It features incredible art from Amanda Lee Franck, and we will be writing a seven spread graphic novel as part of funding. Amanda’s full color, mixed media illustrations will tell the story of Brianna Pilgrim’s final two weeks of life.
Designed with solo and wardenless play in mind from the ground up, Orgy of the Blood Leeches, supports all different types of Mothership games with extensive print and play Warden and player aids included with all versions of the game: the box set, the hardcover book, or the digital edition. The box set provides NPC and Creature cards, a sheet of counters, and printed large format maps, with cardboard standees and mounted maps as stretch goals. We’re also super excited to offer a vinyl with a solo gamebook adventure in the fold out with music and ambiance by the Seattle based post-punk noise rock band Anthers.
All of these Bingo card influences are included in the adventure, but five largest are: Shivers, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Crimes of the Future, Society, and Azhanti High Lightning as the model for the boxed set.
It’s been described by watt, the creator of Cloud Empress as a “twisted descent into a sex-soaked, blood-filled Queer horror story.” Building a Queer influenced piece of art has driven me to create this module over the last two years. I am a trans woman with a trans child, and I want to make work reflecting how the world views Queer people. I wrote this for my son because it’s ultimately a work about empathy and the beauty in what may be initially viewed as grotesque. I want to live in a world where my son has a better life experience than me.
Chris: That’s the dream, isn’t it? To make a module with a message. I have a hard time imagining achieving that in a shorter work. As I mentioned in the last Rokaner Report, we’re working on a campaign-length Cerdo hardback, and I’ve heard tell of a Hecate Sector project in the works too, so it seems Orgy of the Blood Leeches is the first large project like this out the gate for RV Games. What do you think drives you towards large-scale projects for Mothership, which is notorious for its one-shots?
Violet: Mothership is a flexible system in a fascinating implied universe that I think has a lot more design space than only creating haunted house one-shots. There are so many interesting ways for characters to progress through gaining and healing conditions, body modifications, and custom character projects that don’t get explored when focusing on one-shot play. The stubborn part of me wants to show that you can play Mothership in a slightly less lethal way that still requires smart play.
I’ve also spent the last two years building my skills with everything I have written, produced, and distributed. A project on the scale of Orgy of the Blood Leeches has always been my vision. Working with pamphlets and zines has felt like making student films to get me ready for my first feature film. I also want to help the folks who work with RV Games get to this scale of projects, and other established or ambitious publishers are also starting to upgrade to larger books with more expansive content and ideas. Tuesday Knight Games is leading the way with Wages of Sin, but I will continue to support smaller creators at the zine scale in addition to building bigger projects. I am relishing the opportunity to make something that is sprawling and dense, taking on a depth not possible in a smaller book
Chris: I also think as more people play Mothership, more people will realize it’s not only a one-shot kind of game. Getting weirder PCs, or a wider cast opens the door to all sorts of explorations of horror, like the investigation in Orgy of the Blood Leeches. We’ve spoken about the investigative procedures in Blood Leeches, which was influenced by Brindlewood Bay mechanics. Can you peel that back a little bit?
Violet: In order to support solo, Wardenless, or Wardened play in the module, I developed investigation systems that don’t have a predetermined killer and lean on procedural clues. Things are surprising for all types of players. Players need to piece together what first appears as a random selection of evidence into a coherent case file that a prosecutor could actually use to get a conviction. However, it’s not a narrative investigation simulating a story, it is simulating a world with defined systems for investigation. This is what differentiates this module as a social immersive system; there are more traditional procedural gameplay systems and lightweight social procedures that allow for a broad simulation of the world of Trellick Station. Story is uncovered and emerges from interaction with the world, and this has benefited by incorporating a variant of some of the systems from a PbtA narrative game like Brindlewood Bay.
Chris: I know many folk appreciate the mechanical support for solo and Wardenless play. And I definitely like that this process builds in surprises for the Warden too. You’re really doing the legwork to make this game easy to run at the table. And you’re not just working on your own BackerKit project, that’d be too easy, right? We’re partnering up for distribution of Not Enough Scoundrels. What can you tell us about your other Mothership Month work?
Violet: Including yours, we’re distributing five different modules for Mothership Month. Partnering with creators to get their works into print is something I enjoy and have the infrastructure for. I’m really excited to be distributing:
Devil’s Due, by the Azimuth Gang (20 creators)
Death Pays All Debts, by Octopus Ink Games
Starships & Soldiers, by Brenden Carlson and Hammer City Games
Operation Golden Cut, by Krakenhund Studios
Not Enough Scoundrels, by 5MW Press
Partnering for campaign fulfillment and acting as a distribution broker lifts a lot of the administrative burden away from creative folks, giving them the brain space to do what they do best. I help them develop and price their products and get them to backers, distributors, retailers, and individual customers. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort building a distribution pipeline, and it’s exciting to see it taking off in addition to work that we fund and develop ourselves.
Chris: Well, I’m happy to say it’s been a great pleasure working with you, and getting to know the folk publishing under RV Games. Orgy of the Blood Leeches has long been a project I’ve looked forward to, and I’m immensely excited to see its success.
Immerse yourself in Trellick Station’s imminent meltdown, and follow the launch for Orgy of the Blood Leeches!
As the Beacon Burns Low
For this month’s sci-fi freebie, Violet and I collaborated over Evyln Moreau’s wonderful art (yes, the same great artist as last month). Violet first said she always wanted to do something with Evyln’s space station. In fact, we came up with a zine-length idea looking at her aliens, haha, but shelved that for a later Mothership collab. The character portrait the Folk Astronaut brought our focus back in. This piece reminded Violet of the A24 film, The Lighthouse. We piled on inspirations from this film and other lighthouse, maritime folklore. And what might the Beacon be? Well, read to find out!
Click here to download As the Beacon Burns Low! The zip file contains printable and plaintext pdfs. Download 5MW RPG on itch for the free pocketzine ruleset and character sheets.
Avatar Alerts
As you may have noticed, the monthly 5MW Rokaner Reports are now supplemented with Avatar Alerts. During Mothership Month, November 12th - December 10th, I plan on peppering in about one a week, featuring some of the participating game designers as well as revealing the interconnections of Not Enough Scoundrels with other Mothership Month projects. So keep an eye out for those!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau