5MW Rokaner Report #14, Zine Update!

RR#14, A5 Zine Format Update, February 2025

Hello spacefolk,

How was your Zine Month? I hope you found a little something you liked, and were able to support your fave indie game designers.

Some of my favorites!

Metastasis: Firestarter is a set of adventures of ~160pgs for the card-based meatpunk game Lichoma. Bogfolk included a tier that includes the base game packaged with, too! They’re so close to hitting their goal, and there’s three days left, check it out!

My month otherwise was a weird, complicated one. In our part of France, winter vacation was the middle two weeks of February, so I kept busy with small pieces of my projects however I could. This is a snapshot of what I chipped away at this month:

• Not Enough Scoundrels 3rd draft and most art complete

• Devil’s Due copyediting in progress

• Johnson Squared development complete, editing starting

• Re-organizing Twisting Unseen for revisions

• Prepping A Dark Harvest: Cerdo Cycle playtests

• Milk Bar RPG development and playtesting

• Submitted to the Cloud Empress Winter Jam

• 5 Million Worlds blog posts

My effort towards 5MW RPG this month went into transferring the pocketzine contents into an A5 format. This helped give me an idea of the amount of characters I’ll have available for the loadouts (tables are finicky), and potential art.

All this work has me presenting you with the Second Annual Edition of…

The Line Between A Lot and Too Much

Despite my attempts to the contrary, I’m still riding that line between a lot and too much these days. Just bringing some order to the noise (because that’s life innit? Hearing the harmonies in the cacophony?) is hard enough, without stretching to find the time for all this stuff:

Green: 5MW solo projects. Blue: Collab work. Pink: Jams. Red: SECRETSSSS. And as is tradition, I forgot one: Horrors of the Americas Jam.

Starting now, I am setting my efforts onto That Which Has Begun. I accomplished a lot last year, but put the above list side-by-side with last year’s, and all my To Do List pieces for my personal 5MW Press projects (in green) are still under construction. I must admit, and give myself credit too, that these projects are quite large and have progressed quite a bit.

My goal, from March moving forward, and this is going to be VERY DIFFICULT FOR ME, is to finish one “green” project before starting any other project. Ideally, I ought to finish TWO before starting another but, baby steps. Unfortunately, I’ll also miss The Electrum Archive Jam deadline, and have to put my ZUNGEONS on hold.

I’m Blogging Now?

My limited time this month propelled me towards a new pastime: ttrpg blogging. I was inspired by

Prismatic Wasteland

’s call to blogging as a way to get ideas out into the wild. While I was finishing up The Frozen Wings, and idea struck me, and instead of bottling up an idea I’ll likely never use, I allowed myself the fun of seeing the thought experiment through.

Art by Brandon Yu “Chaoclypse”

First, I wrote about a fantasy NSR baddie, the Hatespawn. This pretty transparent take on goblins is a rather overt criticism of “creatures for murdering” in fantasy games, how hate breeds hate, how it infests minds and regions over generations, etc.

Then I joined the Blog Bandwagon on the theme of Elements, and put a science fiction twist to write about the use of matter in sci-fi settings. It sounds fancy, but it’s just a d20 table of spatial superstructures that I wrote following the framing work for the 5MW Odd Jobs table.

From Neil Blevins’ Megastructures

I think I’ll be posting more blogs too. Blogs are a great way to just let go of gaming ideas, and share their existence. Strangely, it feels somewhat cathartic? Haha, well, you can expect a monthly blog reel in this newsletter going forward, :)

Free Cloud Empress Winter Jam Release

Available now on itch.io!

Set within the Carved Marble Palace of the Unseen City, The Frozen Wings is a single spread dungeon where your party must decide between bringing back a decadent queen’s sexy paramours from frozen stasis, or helping a bugfolk bring back their lost bugherd. In either case, some creepy Gogga centipedes aren’t gonna be too nice to ya.

Truth is, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Unseen City, and how I’d like to revamp this setting biome generator into a fully-fleshed setting pointcrawl, complete with multiple dungeons and adventure locations. I’ve also been thinking maybe it should be system agnostic.

These reflections are due to all the interconnectivity I see between the science fantasy settings of Cloud Empress, The Electrum Archive, Vaults of Vaarn and Ultraviolet Grasslands. My IRL gaming table dream is to whack these all into a massive overworld map (using generators from ECO MOFOS!! and Electric Bastionland too) and slap the Unseen City underneath it all as the Gate-tech connective tissue. (But also, see The Line Between A Lot and Too Much, hahaha.)

I’ll try to write a quick and fun blog about it, make some maps to interconnect them all—though I might wait until I get my hands on Cloud Empress Life & Death and Our Golden Age.

5MW RPG Dev Log Update

This month’s 5MW RPG update is the launch of the A5 zine for 5MW RPG: Avatar Primer. In this “major update” for the game on itch, I’ve taken the pocketzine, and reformatted them into an A5 format. The pocketzine is still downloadable, and remains the only place to get its included adventure, for the time being.

Download the new 8pg zine version of 5MW RPG!

Work on the 1d100 Old Jobs table continues! I am plugging away at both of the the Past Lives 1d100 tables, taking sci-fi inspirations from Minds and Forms, thinking up spatial superstructures, living places, worlds and cultures (yes, inspiring The Matter Wars blogpost), which gave the tables a nice framework to continue working on.

I think too, I will start making itch pages for last years’ 5MW RPG adventures. It’s high time they get an “official” release, :)

Character Generation Design

So why am I taking so long to get out this updated Character Generation (chargen) design? This comes from two points, a mechanical problem and the design of anti-canon writing.

For the mechanical end, both sides of 5MW RPG’s chargen design interacts with the fundamental mechanic of the Panic Engine: managing Limit (i.e. Stress). I won’t get in the weeds, but basically I need to make a decision on how this “mana economy” works and start playtesting. I can already tell managing Limit is going to require the most tweaking to get right.

For the prose end, the Jobs from Cloud Empress are the preeminent inspiration for 5MW Minds. They come packaged with a roll table question: “What were you doing last?” This places the character’s Recent Past in a history of behavior for the player to take over and develop. This aligns with how Cairn 2e amplifies the Recent Past by asking a bespoke question to each Background, and providing a roll table of answers. The Lost Bay Reborn also evokes a conflicted past that drives PCs with a Drive table.

My design goal is to carry characterization through from Minds into Forms, and using this contrast to amplify these chargen roll tables. What does it mean to be an Anarchist Flesher vs. a Bruiser Flesher. How do Esoterics differ among Trads and Emulants? I want the the roll tables to compound, not contradict. Yochai Gal spoke about this a bit in a recent episode of Between Two Cairns, The Story of Cairn [1e]. The design challenge is ensuring the cascading chargen tables don’t overlap too much because players tend to fill the gaps on their own.

I’m not sweating the writing, to be honest, the difficult part is making the time between all the editing and adventure writing. But also, I’ve found a way to give myself more time for 5MW RPG, so keep an eye out for some big news via Avatar Alert in March!

Signing off,

Chris Airiau