5MW Rokaner Report #9, Free One-Page Adventure!
RR#9, Tevon, September 2024, Crashlanding on Tevon's Moon
Hello spacers,
The equinox has come and gone, the daylight changes passing solar messages to our bodies to change in subtle ways. Life is weird, innit?
For 5MW Press (i.e. lil ol’ me, Chris), September was a month of deadline after deadline. Personally, I thrive under these kinds of pressures (university habits as student and teacher, I suppose), but I am a bit tired. That constant push to write every day is excellent for developing the craft, I must admit, writing comes easier and the flow remains with me longer. It’s been exhilarating. While two projects are momentarily SECRET, let’s take a peek at what some of the deadlines were for:
All Flesh is Surplus: The Swine & Cursed Cartridge
RV Games: The Cerdo Cycle
When in Rome success
Free Adventure: Crashlanding on Tevon’s Moon
ALL FLESH IS SURPLUS
Iko, creator of The Lost Bay RPG, is hosting this Spooky Month digital convention, an online immersion in the 199X Suburban Gothic of the Bay. Events are spread through the month: APs, Hosted Games on the TLB Discord, and Iko’s been releasing loads of creator support to for an ALL FLESH IS SURPLUS itch.io game jam.
I’ll be running three games in October! Two for The Swine and one for my Jam contribution, Cursed Cartridge.
The Swine is an intro adventure for The Lost Bay RPG—a Slasher/Gross on the TLB module rating—appearing in the hardback collection Urban Legends. Inspired by Jason Vorhees, The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Nightcrawler (2014), 90s toxic masculinity and slaughterhouses, this is a high lethality adventure that pushes players to use the full extent of their PC’s Weird Powers.
Cursed Cartridge is sort of like Tron x Megaman meets The Matrix x Back to the Future, but scary, haha. The cartridge sucks you into its world and what you do in the game effects the real Bay, and vice-versa! Each Eerie-rated “Level” of pairs to a Chiller-rated adventure location in each of the Six Districts. I’m planning on releasing the Sleep District pair for the AFIS jam.
Come check out ALL FLESH IS SURPLUS on Discord.
RV Games: The Cerdo Cycle
It’s been more than two years since my first Mothership adventure, Burn the Vermin on TAMA-81 released. This pamphlet was the first of four set in the Cerdo System. I’d always intended to build out the other adventures, and now with Violet Ballard of RV Games, we are developing these into a campaign setting hardback with art throughout by the incredible Amanda Lee Franck.
In addition to revisions of the four adventures, at least six more full adventures, exploration procedures, and “Miner Job” mini-games will be added, set across five campaign phases (always gotta go for that d10/d5 thematic cohesion, haha). This is my most ambitious project to date, so Violet and I decided to take it slow (her dayjob is managing doctoral dissertations, so it’s a great help!). We’re looking at a crowdfund campaign a year from now, at the soonest.
So far, we’ve landed on reworks of the main factions and deciding how the “Faction Turns” develop throughout the campaign. For faction progression, we’ve taken inspiration from TKG modules A Pound of Flesh and Another Bug Hunt to create a format familiar to Mothership fans.
Adventure, exploration and work hooks are called Scenarios, similar to the Scenario cascade in Another Bug Hunt. After each Scenario, all factions advance their plans by one checkmark—aside from extremely catastrophic setbacks. Scenarios include “win conditions” for each faction, which the Warden interprets to decide which faction(s) gain an extra checkmark to advance their goals. The end of a Phase occurs once one (or more) factions fill all checkmarks in that phase. This sets off Phase Events, similar to how phases function in A Pound of Flesh.
I plan to start playtests once #moshmo ends, which incidentally gives me time to draft the initial Welcome to Cerdo-Sys scenarios, haha. Expect more Reports from Cerdo!
Well, When in Rome blew up!
I keep saying “I should have expected this” but nonetheless, the success of When in Rome came as a big surprise. Since its release, Brandon Yu has done more art, I’ve added a mini-map for the Reactor Core, and more context for the Travellers. This brought the page count up to 24 pages. Both itch.io and dtrpg files have been updated, so check it out if you haven’t seen them already.
And I’ve just finished preparing the files for print! On the digital end, now that the final proofing is done, the next steps are adding bookmarks/hyperlinking to the zine pdf (the plaintext already has these features!), and fleshing out the digital assets.
Crashlanding on Tevon’s Moon
One page adventure, bare-bones, Mausritter style. Major thanks goes to Evyln Moreau and her incredible Patreon library for the map and moonscape on this! She’s truly an indie ttrpg hero.
The culture on Tevon is no longer space-faring, so the sudden crashlanding of an interstellar ship on its moon alerted the system’s Ansible. Simple enough, right?
Click here to download Crashlanding on Tevon’s Moon! As usual, the zip contains a pdf (this one natively printer-friendly), and plaintext file. Download 5MW RPG on itch for the free ruleset and character sheets.
There’s probably some other stuff I’m forgetting, but this seems like a buttload anyhow, doesn’t it, haha. Have a fun Spooky Month, folks!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau