5MW Rokaner Report #12, Free 16pg Review Zine!

RR#12, Earth, December 2024, Weirdo Faves 2024

Greetings Orbital Travelers,

I just had to be one day late on the last newsletter of the year, haha. 2024 has been a busy year of steady progress and accomplishments for 5 Million Worlds Press. Most of that was planned, but more than one success blew me away this year.

Not Enough Scoundrels

Mothership Month was nuts. So many times, Sean was telling us (paraphrasing), “This is an experiment, we have no idea how this will go, you 3pp folk are taking all the risk, and we all need to be there for each other to rally all the projects!” I think we rallied well—big thanks to Cameron and Ben King—but also the Mothership Month experiment went exceedingly well!

This was a humble scuzzy trucker zine and now I get to supercharge it full of spaceship and NPC art and have the spacecrawl procedure developed further with Josh Domanski… I always believed this zine would be helpful but now I’m feelin’ it’s going to be a star supplement on the Mothership 3pp scene. So for probs the millionth time, thanks to all the backers (and if you missed it, pre-orders are already up).

5MW Press Projects

A year in review. This whole year feels like a great blur. From Yukwanine in January to Raider Bounty of Gilgamesh-VII, I’ve completed 15+ adventures this year. Granted, most are four pages or fewer, this momentum has done wonders for my game writing. Heck, even my layout designing has improved a bunch in one year. Constant output slowed other projects, but we’ll chat on that after the lists:

2024 Complete

• Nine 5MW adventures: Yukwanine, The Spotted Sun, Graveyard of Armored Hearts, Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption, Diadem Empire: Sapphire, The Star’s Lash, Fruit from the Vine, Crashlanding on Tevon’s Moon, As the Beacon Burns Low.

  • The five bold titles were collaborative design exercises with 5MW guests Marco Serrano, watt, Allen Hall, Samantha Leigh, and Violet Ballard.

• Buzzkill on the Mind Trip, for An Infinity of Ships.

• Two Dungeon Levels for Return to Perinthos: A Memorial Book in the Memory of Jennell Jaquays (also did some editing for this book): Nest of Gates for Cloud Empress RPG, and Face of Hgradal for Cairn 2e.

• Three Mothership RPG adventures: When in Rome, Iron Hearth Harvest (in Devil’s Due, also wrote the Dark Arcana pirate crew and No Prey, No Pay: a 1d100 table of ships for space pirates to raid) and co-wrote Raider Bounty of Gilgamesh-VII with seven Mothership Month creators.

• The Swine, for The Lost Bay RPG.

2024 In Progress

• Twisting Unseen went through two and a half drafts this year. Woof.

• Not Enough Scoundrels funded and is in its first development revision.

• Cursed Cartridge for The Lost Bay RPG. I thought I could lay this out with creative commons pixelart assets, but it looked very bad. The art funding needed to hit the spot I want with this module is TOO HIGH for me rn.

• My #galaxy24 entries. Sob story: I did one stellar system per week through mid-August, and left the moleskin on an airplane, losing E V E R Y T H I N G.

2025 Projections

• Not Enough Scoundrels Q3 release

• Milk Bar RPG development and writing

• Twisting Unseen, A Sleeper Crew Adventure crowdfund campaign

• Untitled Liminal Horror uni campus module

  • Probs gonna write a faction for the Horrors of the Americas Jam, too

• Untitled The Lost Bay module

• Your Dark Harvest: The Cerdo Cycle hardback (working title)

• 5MW RPG: Avatar Builder

5MW Rokaner Reports in 2025

This past year, the idea of working on planet or space station settings quickly escalated to full-on adventures. I apparently cannot stop myself. But hey, as a result of all that extra work, my adventure writing improved!

Buuuut maaaaaybe, I ought to be writing 5MW RPG so people can play it on more than pocketzine rules, haha. Truth be told, Game design writing is harder for me than adventure writing. So, following the above logic, if throughout 2025 I write parts of 5MW RPG for the Rokaner Reports, my game design should improve too, right?

Won’t know unless I try.

Weirdo Faves!

A strange cut’n’tape handmade zine reflecting on the year. Sixteen pages of weird things I liked from 2024. Books, ttrpgs, places, and weird lil guys. Pick it up on itch.io!

I made this in the train yesterday. The images are almost all photos I took, except where it’s rather obvious I didn’t. It’s like last year’s but in color, and a little bit longer, I think. The whole thing is handwritten, and I hope it’s legible!

That’s all the juice I got in me, for now. I kinda wish I wasn’t wrung dry and tired, so I could think and write some in-depth retrospectives. I’ll hold one in the can for Zine Month, perhaps.

Enjoy your Orbital Completion celebrations, folks!

Signing off,

Chris Airiau