5MW Rokaner Report #13, First New Rule Drop!

RR#13, The Chrysalis, January 2025

Jan 31, 2025

Hello spacefolk,

Glad to see you on this side of 2025! I hope y'all have been able to make the best of this year so far. January has been a complicated yet productive time for 5MW Press, so let's take a look!

A collage of four images. The first is a yellow & cyan Milk Bar RPG header with half-tone blue smokestacks. The second is a b&w illustration by Lur Noise of a punky-lookin scoundrel for Not Enough Scoundrels. Third is Evangeline Gallagher’s b&w Shifter illustration for The Lost Bay RPG, a face emerges between other faces whirling in waves. The final is the Hull Breach cover art of a hole in a spacecraft with Sci-Fi TTRPG Rosetta Stone under the title.

This month, Eryk Sawicki and I dove into his work on Milk Bar RPG to deliver a gameable alpha; Lur Noise, Carly A-F and Tim Zygor have been updating me on their art progress on Not Enough Scoundrels; writing on The Dispatch and TLBS projects with Iko continue, as well as exciting new playtests for The Lost Bay RPG; and I answered Ian Yusem's open call for consulting on the Hull Breach Vol. 1's sci-fi ttrpg “Rosetta Stone” conversion kit, specifically for Mothership <-> Stars Without Number.

But that's not all, haha, let's dig into some other fun news I'd like to share with y'all:

Zine Month Showcase
- Kickstarter: Universe at Your Door - The Traveller
- BackerKit: A Secret Chord, for Mothership *RPG*
Cloud Empress Winter Jam
5MW RPG Development
- The Chrysalis

Zine Month Showcase

A pastel yellow and blue moth with ZIMO 2025 on its wings, in flight.

Zine Month, for those unfamiliar, is a February crowdfunding event for zine ttrpgs and modules across platforms like itch.io, BackerKit, Crowdfundr, and Kickstarter (where it's known as Zinequest).

It's a great time to support indie ttrpg designers, and I'm always on the lookout for fun new sci-fi games, and these have caught my eye.

Universe at Your Door, The Traveller

Over a background of a fushia and lavender spacescape is that title and playing card suits designed as mechanical sci-fi motifs containing their own illustrated spacescapes. — Follow *Universe at Your Door* on Kickstarter!

Lola Johnson is launching a science fiction exploration game, Universe at Your Door - The Traveller, where the player(s) incarnate a crew seeking a new Earth. Initially a solo game, an updated version brings this game to print for the first time with new art, new layout and GMless group rules.

A Secret Chord, for Mothership RPG

An abstract Art Deco rendition of a golden cello alongside the title. — Follow *A Secret Chord* on BackerKit!

The Black Emperor is rising. What can you do to stop them? In the 48pg zine A Secret Chord, your PCs travel aboard David’s Harp to the clandestine supercollider base where a spatial anomaly has manifested. Just so happens that underground is also a temple dedicated to the Black Emperor, saint of those lost in the void of space. Will they be your saint too?

Cloud Empress Winter Jam

There are two days left in the Cloud Empress Winter Jam! Thanks goes out to Peter Elroy a.k.a. Fanterland for launching and hosting the jam, and to Cloud Empress creator watt who provided excellent Affinity Publisher templates. The Weekly Scroll hosted watt for a How to Write for Cloud Empress talk (Podcast/YouTube) to help folks put together an impactful piece for the jam.

For my entry to this jam I’m working on finishing The Frozen Wings. Wings as in the halls of The Marble Palace, an adventure location in The Unseen City to be precise. This is a small dungeon hidden away within The Marble Palace. I wanted to write the full location as an 8pg zine, but realized too late I couldn’t do the Ageless Queen justice in the week I had left.

Zine cover for The Marble Palace. Within the golden illustrated border is an illustration of several statues of men surrounding a fountain. Grecoroman pillars stretch into the distance — Discover **The Unseen City**. Art by HodagRPG.

Keep an eye on my itch page for this one, sliding in last minute all Indiana Jones-like. Eventually, I’ll get that zine up, and continue to build out each of the Bold adventure locations in The Unseen City.

5MW RPG Development

Right, so I’ve been tinkering and cogitating on how to do this for over a year now. Working with Eryk on Milk Bar RPG made me think, “Chris, learn to take your own damn medicine!”

You gotta play your game to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And obviously, you can’t play the game if you don’t write the thing. (And Eryk has made much more progress than I have in the past year–check out the Milk Bar alpha.)

To recap character generation in 5 Million Worlds RPG: Avatar Builder, a PC has the seven Stats/Saves of Mothership, a Wound threshold, and Limit. Players then add two more parts: Mind and Form. Mind is a reskin of Mothership 1E’s classes: Esoteric, Bruiser, Anarchist, Savant, Machinist. Form takes its lineage from Cairn 2e’s Backgrounds and The Lost Bay RPG’s former Vibe structure, which was based on Lumen. 5MW:A/B starts with five Forms: Trad, Looper, Flesher, Visard, Emulant.

A screenshot of an Affinity Publisher two page spread. One page has Trad, its description, a space for their “powers” (still haven’t figured out a good name for that), space for an illustration and How You Use Limit (for project progress). — I’ve landed on a pretty solid spread for the **5MW RPG** Forms, though. Thanks to Iko & Adam Hensley for layout inspiration.

I was able to spend an hour or so every couple days on this the last two weeks, and it took all that tinkering—and, likely, those Milk Bar talks with Eryk—to realize I need to sort out the Past Life tables before moving on to the Minds and Forms.

An Avatar’s Past Life comes out of two 1d100 tables, Old Job and Mementos, inspired by Mothership’s Trinkets/Patches and Electric Bastionland’s Failed Careers. Except Avatars are competent characters, hah, so their Old Jobs give ‘em a skill and Mementos provide odd lil useful tools for creative players. Both feed worldbuilding and lore of 5MW Space. February’s 5MW rule drop goal is the 1d100 Old Jobs table.

This time around, I’ve got a shorter weird rule that was teased on the 5MW RPG character sheet.

The Chrysalis

So interstellar spaceships in 5 Million Worlds Space come in all stripes. From those unshielded to Hyperspace like in Mothership, to the safe waking travel in An Infinity of Ships. Avatars tend to travel in crafts closer to the latter, yet they still go into some version of cryosleep: The Chrysalis.

Explains the five uses: Stasis, healing, changing Forms, Mind backups, and connecting to simulated space. An addendum discusses the risk factor for Divergent Minds.

The special bit at the end has to do with how in 5MW RPG gaining (and losing) new Skills is more simple than in Mothership due to greater access to time and technology. These Skills, however, carry a lifetime’s worth of expertise, a weight which strains the Mind. What happens to Avatars who accumulate multiple lifetimes’ worth of experience? Well, they Diverge. I feel like questions over identity within a centuries-long lifecycle, as well as cloning and mind emulation, feed into this Divergence event. How do players handle this, how do they see these characters becoming unique persons? This is the kind of “problem” I want to see how people tackle at a sci-fi gaming table.

Until next month!