5MW Rokaner Report #30, Physical Debut: Not Enough Scoundrels

RR#30 June 2026, Final Omen

Calling all Avatars,

I hope your solstice season has been cooler than ours in France. It was an inglorious 40°C (104°F) all weekend, with all the blackout shutters closed and a standing fan blowing constantly in my face. Last night, a glorious storm head rolled past, and as I type this, it is a lovely 25°C (77°F) with the sun on my back.

Not Enough Scoundrels Physical Release!

Featuring my much-used home copy, haha.

The big news this month is that Not Enough Scoundrels is available on the Tuesday Knight Games webstore, at long last!

Nab a copy of Not Enough Scoundrels!

Not Enough Scoundrels is a space trucker campaign framework for Mothership RPG. It contains new ships, loads of scumbag NPCs, and contraband to smuggle. Most notably, the zine has spacecrawl procedure with a reputation system among the major factions (Union, Smugglers, Corpos) that gates access across the sector.

I wrote Not Enough Scoundrels while running an open table Mothership westmarches campaign, it’s a product of weekly play made to make Wardens’ lives easier. The zine makes full use of the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit and the box set at large.

"Not Enough Scoundrels is an overflowing, rusty toolbox of everything you need to fill out the rough-n-tumble elements of a blue-collar, industrial sci-fi galaxy. Simply put: there’s no way I would run an open-world Mothership campaign without this book at my table."

- Christian Sorrell of MeatCastle GameWare, The Bloodfields of Blackstar Station, FIREDROP, Tacticians of Ahm.

Flatline Finished!

Covers and interior art by Scragend.

The brunt of my work this month was finishing up Flatline on the Blocks and its companion materials, 20pg adventure supplement Organ Failure, Min’s Unending Bowl Menu, and Rival Racers: MAGENTA EDITION. Folks who backed Flatline on the Blocks now have all of their digital content, and RV Games is printing the zines and pamphlets to assemble and ship to TKG’s warehouses by the end of August.

Block maps by Ripley Matthews, Background map (p. 2) by Guy Pradel

Already, we’ve had loads of positive feedback on the zine which feels pretty good considering the amount of time I’ve spent on the project in the past year. I feel like it has potential to be the Hull Breach for The Dream. Lots of talent came together to make it happen!

5MW Press Editing

I’ve harped on about editing Mothership modules quite a lot in the past few months, it’s work that I really enjoy. The work hits at both my lifelong love of writing, and the decade I spent as an ESL teacher here in France.

I’d like to share a few words about the projects I’ve been working on so far in 2026 (in order they were finished/in progress):

• Breathe Easy

  • Marco Serrano is a real friend, a super kind and supportive fella, and I was glad he invited me to work with D. G. Chapman. And wow, D. G. really knows their stuff! The races are fun, but the core is the Leaderboard conflicts.

• All on Red

  • I think Jordan and Abe at Glue Trap Games are rising stars in the indie ttrpg scene, and their first foray won’t disappoint. Disgusting, grim and grimy, like you’d imagine for a train tunnel town on The Dream.

• The Sunlit Path

  • Ryan invited me back after our work on Straight Arrows last year, this time with Joshua Justice too! Their Solarian sect digs into star-gods and astrological readings, and a disturbing case of possession in The Choke.

• Flatline on the Blocks, et al.

  • Working with 12 writers on a single creative vision was a true thrill, a “career” highlight for me personally, so far, but that goes beyond just the editing.

• 90 Seconds to Midnight

  • The newest on this list, A. Hunt of reached for his Casio resort catastrophe and bank robbery module, and I’m chuffed at the social interplay the module offers as we finish up the first pass. Fun place to visit, I think!

• Rites of Renewal

  • I’ve rarely seen modules as ambitious as this one. Josh Cable has written a single neighborhood with the density of A Pound of Flesh. The Solarian sect festival at the heart of this could be a great recurring event for gaming tables.

• Drink from the Hippocrene

  • After last year’s popular The Dose Makes the Poison, Andrew comes back with a docklands intrigue on The Dream with four adventure sites. I’ve only had the time to skim this one, but it’s next up on the docket!

• Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage

  • This is a PANIC Engine game by HexploreRPG, focusing on an Age of Sail twisted by cosmic horror. I’m working development on this one, with just a couple sections to resolve now until it’s ready for a “zero edition” print!

• Milk Bar RPG

  • Eryk Sawicki’s Polish post-soviet delve into the genre of The Zone (Roadside Picnic, STALKER, Pacific Edge, Death Stranding, etc.). Admittedly, we’ve been a bit methodical on development for Milk Bar. This is a very personal project, and it means a lot to Eryk to get it right.

I’m looking to do more editing work moving forward. It connects to the game design community more meaningfully than what feels like the near-constant crowdfund promotion I’ve been doing for the past year.

Editing conversations with designers has been reminding me of that first year of Rokaner Reports where I did those free cross-collab short adventures. It was a major grind, but I enjoyed the hard work. I’ve had a similar feeling about Ansible Uplink, too: lots of work and it’s been a meaningful way for me to connect critically with friends and designers.

Ansible Uplink

Every two weeks, I release an episode of Ansible Uplink, a sci-fi ttrpg module review podcast. I invite game designers and creators onto the show to review a zine with me, with the episodes are split between spoiler-free and GM sections. Here are the two latest episodes:

• Decagone, with Daniel Hallinan

  • The hit time-travel adventure by WacoMatrixo

• The Earth Above, with Yochai Gal

  • Mining colony disaster survival by James Hanna

Recording, editing, and mixing these episodes takes a lot of work. To help keep the show going for season two, support the show on Patreon! A new episode releases this Wednesday, July 1st for a TIME WARP covering a Classic Traveller module.

Classic Traveller & 5MW RPG

The month of July will see out the final sessions of my current Classic Traveller campaign. I plan to continue running more games in this subsector, and all its Emulant intrigue, to flesh out and develop adventure material for 5 Million Worlds.

The event card for this week’s session.

As I play more Classic Traveller, I’m thinking about how to simplify certain rules I’ve written for 5MW RPG. Or to just simply remove. The juice of Classic Traveller is the generation tools for character generation, sector building, and creating situations ripe for adventure. The resolution mechanic is just a bog standard 2d6+Modifiers to hit 8+.

While running the game, I’m rolling most often on the Trade, Encounter and Reaction tables (as well as the plethora of support materials I shared last month). So far, players roll very rarely, and mostly when we’re condensing work done over large amounts time (often using the OP Admin skill, lmao). The play, for our table, has been in deciding who to talk to and work with, how to manage their social maneuvering in an foreign environment, and making connections with subsector factions.

I spoke about this a bit with Yochai on Ansible Uplink, but I think setting is the prime importance in a star-hopping space game (as opposed to “Oh, I need a setting to write this game, I guess”). My task now is finding the sweet spot between writing modules of established worlds and sectors (i.e. a hexgroup of of 3 to 7 systems), and providing GM tools to help generate worlds that fit into the 5 Million Worlds.

I am left asking myself: Should I even write this game? Why not just write modules?

I still haven’t figured out the answer.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau