5MW Rokaner Report #19, Free Postcard Adventure - 24hrs Only!
RR#19, Sater’s Redemption, July 2025
High Season Greetings starwalkers,
Up here in the northern hemisphere, summer vacation is fast approaching and I am planning on spending some time writing postcards. More on that shortly!
Here’s what hot on the 5 Million Worlds Press (and other projects) this month: - Not Enough Scoundrels, pre-fulfillment checklists
Twisting Unseen, BackerKit launch prep
Playtesting adventures in [REDACTED]
Collab project for Mothership Month 2025.
Writing a 5WM Sector, tied to Twisting Unseen & The Unseen City
Postcard Adventure! (as if I’m not doing enough, right?)
Postcard Adventures: Personalized writing & free digital
So, for some sitting-in-the-sun downtime, I printed out a stack of postcards to write to folk during my upcoming vacation time:
Digital versions of Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption are PWYW for 24 hours. Perhaps familiar to longtime Rokaner’s Report followers, this version of Sater’s Redemption is updated for Mothership RPG, and adapted to a postcard format.
A limited-run on these 5 × 7 inch physical postcards is live thru August 8th. Each postcard I send will contain extra (handwritten) personalized instructions—twists, encounters, hazards and traps—to make your version of Sater’s Redemption unique. (And I’m sure I’ll be cackling as I write them, there’s something wrong with my head, I’m telling you.) I’ve only got 50 30 of these left, grab your specialized version of Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption while they last.
Twisting Unseen tie-ins
An ongoing series of insights into the development of my next Mothership RPG zine: Twisting Unseen. Follow the launch now on BackerKit.
I’m a sucker for weird portal tech in science fiction. Probably in part because I saw Stargate (1994) at the cinema when I was a kiddo, and likely exacerbated because even then, I remember my frustration at the dearth of nonhuman aliens. (Fun Fact: Ra was not even an alien in the original Stargate script; that was a post-production change.)
Naturally, Half-Life is more my speed. I only ever played Black Mesa, years after even Half-Life 2 came out, but for me this game was a big “Duh, of course it’d be awful and weird.” At the same time though, the portals do feel claustrophobic. Leading only to the Combine, to one possible set of awful aliens. And when writing for Mothership, Cloud Empress, and 5 Million Worlds RPG, I wanted to keep the weirdness within the realm of the humanity’s diaspora.
The Unseen City, Cloud Empress RPG
When I wrote Down the Snail’s Spiral, the adventure in The Unseen City which contains Gates similar to those in Twisting Unseen, I wanted different folks living behind those gates, in those worlds. While a few encounters are directly dangerous, only two are irrevocably hostile (and one due to unthinking famine rather than malice). Each of these Gates holds a world, one where people live, whether just surviving or trying to thrive. The Kagami arcology in Twisting Unseen is one of those worlds.
One of the Stretch Goals for Twisting Unseen is a digital bifold guide for adapting the module as the Mystling Vault adventure location in The Unseen City. The playtest I ran using Cloud Empress RPG worked very well, but since Kagami abused the portal tech, their Gates lead to less friendly worlds. The encounters require some recalibration for CE. Holding the deep within the Unseen City also helps Summer Parties use the Prime Gate to travel closer to a desired location on the vast Cloud Empress overland map.
5MW Star Cluster: DIN Tail
Twisting Unseen also has a connection to 5 Million Worlds RPG, with a voyage to an alternate version of Mossadegh, now called Oravera which resides within the DIN Tail. The DIN are the Dani Interstellar Nations. Its tail is a suite of stars the Dani exert power upon. The Dani are those posthuman gorilla-crab colonizers I was on about last month.
An open “meta” secret of the 5 Million Worlds is that there are no aliens, just posthuman people. This is my cheat code to present human-miscible “aliens” to 5MW Space, and imo, also an under-explored starting point for science fictional positioning in ttrpgs (as always, I’m super into sf ttrpg reading recommendations, leave a comment!). I asked Carly A-F to join me for this project, and threw these mood boards her way:
Mothership or Cloud Empress PCs could potentially end up in this far-future sector where humanoid Forms are freedom fighting against the DIN, and become Avatars in the process. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently, so the technofeudal Dani are taking notes from Cardassia and the Dominion. And Oravera is just one of the worlds within the DIN Tail.
MM25: Mothership Month 2025
Another round on the carousel, here we go.
Right, so I announced the launch date for Twisting Unseen before we knew when MM25 was kicking off. Now, the end of the campaign crosses over into Mothership Month territory. While 5MW Press won’t be launching an official MM25 project, I am working on a collaborative project with 12 other veteran Mothership writers on this year’s theme:
I’m afraid I can’t really speak too much on our project right now. Our module takes place on Prospero’s Dream, and will be a zine like all the other modules. The concept going in is: one block, one spread, one author. I’ll just drop this concept development image, but that’s all for now:
Look forward to hearing more about this project as we get closer to the Mothership Month 2025 launch on October 14th.
That’s all until August, when I’ll be cruising into the Rokaner Report with a brand new spaceship. Stay safe, folks.
Signing off,
Chris Airiau