5MW Rokaner Report #29, Last Week to Pre-Order Flatline on the Blocks
RR#29 May 2026, Spinal Crux District
Calling all Avatars,
This is the last week you can grab Flatline on the Blocks on the Mothership Month 2025 Pre-Order store!
For the whole month of May, I’ve been neck-deep in editing and layout for the Flatline on the Blocks companion materials: Organ Failure, Min’s Unending Bowl Menu, and Rival Racers: Magenta Edition with Marco Serrano. My companion in crunch, our illustrator scragend, has been working hard on the 50+ interior illustrations for the zine:
We’re aiming for a June 1st “Hit the Big Scary Print Button” date, and to keep our numbers straight, our pre-orders will drop off the pre-order store next Monday.
Convention Weekend
This year, France had a matching long weekend with the US. We took the opportunity to head to Octogônes, a French tabletop game convention in Lyon. Among a dozen different board games, we played in a Pirate Borg game hosted by Arkhane Asylum Publishing, I ran a 1-on-1 session of Classic Traveller in the Artemis Sector I mentioned last month, and I hosted an impromptu Mothership one-shot of When in Rome for a some attendees that was a whole lot of fun.
Arkhane Asylum is the French publishing house who translated Pirate Borg, Shadowdark, and many Free League games. They are also working on translating Mothership RPG. I had a chance to talk to them at the con, and they’re looking at early 2027 for getting Mothership out! They told me to drop them a line, so I’m hoping to get a lil headstart on translating an anthology version of my adventures for the francophones crowd and get myself to more conventions, :)
Classic Traveller Tightrope
Learning the ropes of becoming a Traveller referee has been quite a trip. The shift from weekly Mothership games running pre-written modules and playtest materials to weekly games where you’ll get “‘Kaldamar 0401-E745326,’ figure it out, lol” is a pretty rough transition in playstyles.
The game forces you along a tightrope. One end of the pit is the all-consuming prep monster, and the other end is a quantum “just bullshit it” pit of fabrication. This is my own personal preference, but if I had the time, I’d jump into the open maw of the prep monster and explore those guts. That’s why I do this. I want to write, to explore, to make up weird scenarios. But Classic Traveller kinda asks you to bullshit it.
My safeground to keep tippin on the tightrope is to set up and elaborate. From the Classic Traveller main three books, this is implied and then explicitly suggested in some of the modules I’ve read. So to keep my balance, I take all the help I can get.
Here’s a list of what I’d recommend to have on hand:
Classic Traveller (the PDF is still free!)
Encounter spread, Trade spread, and Ship Encounter page
Took a peek at A00 Imperial Fringe & A04 Leviathan for a vibe check
Megastructures, art book for flavor
Donjon.bin, Sci-Fi Name Generator
Shout out to the Traveller System Generator
The Perilous Void (this has THE JUICE, essential, imo, I need to order the POD…)
Augmented Reality, for details in sci-fi/cyberpunk cities
Stars Without Numbers tables (because I know them well)
Intergalactic Bastionland (Playtest Version) People/World/Port Sparks pages
Lots of modules I’ve peppered through the subsector that I can’t list right now because I have some players subscribed to this newsletter, haha
I generate what I think I’ll need ahead of time, and then try to rely only on random tables to enhance and elaborate on what’s already been decided ahead of the session. It’s a lot more work than running a Mothership hexcrawl campaign, which is very Job focused in comparison, as I found in my Outer Rim Marches campaign.
The adventure in Traveller is the travelling (no shit, right?). It’s creating weird people in weird places. Traveller’s at times bonkers-seeming planet generation lays the groundwork for this by making you ask yourself, “How could a medieval society with a religious dictatorship exist on a terrestrial planet with only trace atmosphere?”
Traveller does a good job of planting the seed, but gardening’s a load of work.
Ansible Uplink
Ansible Uplink is my sci-fi ttrpg module review podcast. Every other week, an episode has come out consistently since October. Join the Patreon to help support the show! Two episodes have released since last month’s Rokaner Report, if you’d like to check them out:
Terrors from the Cosmos, with Alfred Valley
Aphrodite Luxury Space Yacht by Maher Sagrillo
The Logorrheum by Nimrod Tzarking.
Mouth Brood by Amanda Lee Franck, with Luke Simonds
Master class in alien(?) ecosystems
And for the folks that know how to use it: Ansible Uplink RSS
Luke Simonds, a.k.a. Cats Have No Lord, is also hosting the Typhoon Sinlaku TTRPG Relief Bundle on itch. Typhoon Sinlaku struck the Mariana Islands on April 14, 2026, causing extensive damage on the islands of Saipan and Tinian. The charity fundraiser goes towards Micronesia Climate Change Alliance and their continuing efforts on the front lines shipping in supplies, providing direct aid funding, and organizing volunteers for door-to-door delivery of drinking water, food, and sanitary supplies.
The bundle over 90 games, modules and supplements from indie ttrpg all-stars, available until June 1st!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau