5MW Rokaner Report #18
RR#18, Rai, June 2025
Happy Solstice Tidings Folks,
June has been a major production month for Not Enough Scoundrels—postcards, patches, stickers, and zines—oh my!
Meanwhile, I’ve been finalizing my Infest the Rat’s Nest-inspired Mothership adventure, and diving into numerous editing projects: a Mothership adventure for
at SpicyTuna RPG, the final copyedit pass for Straight Arrows, Milk Bar development, the solo journaling game Passing By from , and another I can’t talk about yet, haha.But what I can talk about more is the next project for 5 Million Worlds Press, Twisting Unseen, and I’d like to offer a development diary on this project’s progress.
What is Twisting Unseen ?
Twisting Unseen is a 36pg Mothership RPG adventure inspired by BLAME!, Pandorum, Half-Life, and yokai folklore. While on ice, the colony’s Gate-technology twisted the arcologies with distant worlds, timelines, and realities. The Sleeper Crew was lost, and the colonists locked deep underneath the surface with the Incursors. Untold years later, the Crew awaken within a subterranean superstructure whose inhabitants have forgotten open skies exist. The recently reactivated Gates are their only ticket out of this churning transdimensional nexus.
In this installment of Sleeper Crew Adventures, the players Build the Superstructure with Map Tiles of Twisted Substrata illustrated by Ripley Matthews, against a Voidcrawl-inspired 1d100 event table of Relics, Omens, Factions, Hazards, and Incursors. This zine is fully illustrated by Paul Enami (a.k.a. Meatborg), with layout and visual design by Jean Verne. On words, the incredible duo of Christian Sorrell for development and Will Jobst on editing have helped me get this manuscript layout ready by the time the project launches in late September.
Sign up now to be notified on launch! But what’s the story? It all starts in 2021.
Takachiho Nurikabe
In April 2021, I wrote Takachiho Nurikabe as an adventure location in my second Stars Without Number campaign. This “lost town” was a dungeon on the fourth or fifth world my players explored. This was the initial seed idea:
![A screenshot of a desktop wiki page. It reads, “Takachiho Nurikabe. The Nurikabe, a spiritual concept redefined as an esotech phenomenon. At its origins, the Nurikabe is a spirit–an invisible serpent that constricts and twists space at its whims. In reality, it’s a runaway twisting of spacetime due to poorly maintained (or improperly operated) teleportation esotech. […]”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkZl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6783c1b5-36e4-4022-9164-57f0c000fa2a_1456x525.png "A screenshot of a desktop wiki page. It reads, “Takachiho Nurikabe. The Nurikabe, a spiritual concept redefined as an esotech phenomenon. At its origins, the Nurikabe is a spirit–an invisible serpent that constricts and twists space at its whims. In reality, it’s a runaway twisting of spacetime due to poorly maintained (or improperly operated) teleportation esotech. […]”")
Funny enough, globally, the general layout of the map is rather well intact, but the Twisting mechanic is completely different.
In that SWN adventure, they got split up pretty quickly by the portal tech mishaps. The old mechanic was triggered by a few doorways. From the outside, they were normal hallways, but any PC entering them had to make a Mental Save, or be teleported to a 1d10 random room. This wasn’t well received by my friends, hah, and does not exist in the final version as written.
They loved the portal weirdos, had contempt for the petty faction conflict, and fixed their machines while wagging their fingers at them, basically. (The effort put them in a good place with the Canyontown Council for Humanoid Representation—long story, posthuman gorilla-crab colonizers, etc.)
Sleeper Crew Adventures
One year later, I was six months into playing regular Mothership games, and published The Sleeper Crew in April 2022. I had already written and playtested BioCryo, in its pamphlet form (if you can believe it), and I especially felt that the Twisting could work better as a Sleeper Crew Adventure, and drafted a handwritten pamphlet.
Unfortunately I don’t have those initial draft pamphlets anymore. (I looked. A long time.) Both were fine as lil dungeons, but I wanted to offer folk something more at the table than a dungeon with weirdo baddies. If I wanted more though, I couldn’t do that in a sole pamphlet.
I was happy with the factions and creatures, and put my efforts into developing those. But for the unique game mechanic for the module, I didn’t find the answer until over a year later.
The Unseen City, A Cloud Empress Biome
After the success of BioCryo during Zine Month 2023, I contacted Paul Enami, a.k.a. meatborg, for some NPCs and the Incursors (Mystlings, at that time). We had a great time working on this, and I shared my vision for the cover. He started on a literal interpretation, but was struck by a sudden inspiration and asked if he redo it.
Look folks, if you’re not a visual artist yourself, always listen to the artists you work with. It has never done me wrong, I mean:
Another stepping stone was the development of The Unseen City for Cloud Empress RPG. If it wasn’t clear from the titles, the two are interconnected. Portal technology is neat that way, isn’t it?
Read more about my development process and lessons learned for The Unseen City in this Nov. 2023 newsletter, where I first teased my work on Twisting Unseen.
One major point I don’t mention in the above November 2023 retrospective is that the origins of the Mystlings came from Takachiho Nurikabe, especially the encounter table in Down the Snail’s Spire. Many, if not most of, the Mystlings are re-imaginings of yokai as transhuman peoples. That aspect still carries into Twisting Unseen.
Lost Substrata Map Tiles
We’re still in November 2023. I’d sent the pallet of BioCryo and Unseen City zines to the US, thinking it’d be in folks’ hands soon after the holidays (it took another, very frustrating year).
But oblivious-to-the-future-Chris (I’m not Muad’Dib, here) started drafting the third version of Twisting Unseen, and began thinking about the map problem more earnestly. It must have been during the fall break, playing Carcassone with family, that I had the idea to try out Map Tiles for the exploration of the “in between space” of the main map sections.
I continued working, digging into the faction re-writes, and then I was treated to a wonderful surprise.
The MeatGrinder, and playtest playtest playtest
In January 2024, Christian Sorrell invited me to their ttrpg writer’s workshop, The MeatGrinder. Before I got a draft together to submit to them, I started in on solo playtests of the map-building mechanic. The solo playtests worked out well. It had some clunk to clean, but it was fun.
I wrote a Voidcrawl-inspired 1d100 event table for this adventure, and one of the workshop members was a co-creators of the Voidcrawl, Josh Domanski. The MeatGrinder gave me plenty of actionable feedback: faction clarity, naming conventions, and cleaner language for the map placement procedure.
At this point, I knew I was keeping this mechanic. I had some ideas of changing up the tiles to tetrinominos (that I abandoned; way too hard to make that work with the map space), but I knew the core parts of the dungeon would remain the same. I contacted Ripley Matthews to illustrate these main Map Sections. With those in hand, I started a summer-long series of playtests.
Runway to BackerKit
Then Mothership Month 2024 was announced. The “Crime” theme did not fit my adventure, so dug out my space trucker & smuggler notes, all based on the months-long Outer Rim Marches game I’d been running before playtesting Twisting Unseen (and continued to play after). MM24 kept me busy until about March 2025.
Luckily, Not Enough Scoundrels gave me the leeway to get Christian on development for Twisting ahead of the crowdfund, and ask Will Jobst to be the editor to follow-up. I’m now sitting on those editor notes, with one final revision ahead of me before going into layout.
And now, the Pre-Launch is live on BackerKit, set for launch September 23rd, 2025!
Lessons Learned
It’s always a good idea to keep working. Even when delays with other projects get you down, having a clear goal in mind and making progress—even if scattered, as you can see above—can make a big difference for your creativity and peace of mind when it comes time to release the thing out into the world.
I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am.
Signing off,
Chris Airiau