This announcement has been a long, long time coming.

5 Million Worlds Press has been going through a rocky and high-octane schedule of podcast episodes, crowdfunding projects, and editing work.

Very little has been writing.

I look back on the frantic release schedule of 2024, and while their quality was hit-or-miss, game writing was undoubtably more fun than running a BackerKit. And those adventure release posts have the highest engagement on this newsletter.

That tells me that folks who dig 5MW Press care most about the adventures.
And I agree. Writing sci-fi adventures is my favorite part too.

Switching to Patreon

Once the dust settles after my move to Martinique, I am expanding the Ansible Uplink Patreon into an all-things 5 Million Worlds space: podcast, game writing, newsletter.

I would love for y’all to follow the adventures of 5WM Press on Patreon.

Join the 5MW Patreon

Patreon has a Free Membership tier, and I’ll start releasing this monthly newsletter on the Patreon platform. I will double-post for a few months, but I will shutter monthly updates on this Substack before 2026 is through. Eventually, over on Patreon, I will add a couple more tiers for folks who’d like early-access to upcoming sci-fi adventure writing, but the newsletter will always be free.

If you do not want to have your subscriber email migrated to Patreon, please unsubscribe from this Substack now.

Sci-fi adventures, you say?

This is going back to the one adventure per month idea. For the Patreon early-access, I’m planning on doing something similar, but for a contiguous star cluster.

Photos above are from my Classic Traveller notebook, the three month campaign that ended just last week. I am going to take a straightforward writer’s approach to this, and rewrite, revise, refine themes, and just overall dig in. Folks will see the pipeline of how these GM notes shift into a playable written manuscript, world by world, and then be able to snag the shiny layout PDF by the end of it all.

Initially, the “look” of these adventures will be plain pdf/epub output, with some rudimentary maps. The goal is to provide writing that is entirely playable, but subject to change as I test the setting in play. And they won’t get the layout treatment until all the bits and bobs are complete and I know there’s nothing more to add.

The first sci-fi adventure project is going to be The Choral Tail, if you recall…

Ansible Uplink: Season One Finale

The Season One Finale releases this Wednesday, 29 July. Follow the release on:

• Spotify / Apple / RSS / Patreon

The other two July releases are a bit out of the ordinary.

First was a TIME WARP review, checking out Classic Traveller’s Adventure 4: Leviathan (1980) with Dutch designer Peter Eijk, a.k.a. Jimmy Shelter. We also spoke about his love for old Vancian sci-fi, and bringing that vibe to his upcoming game, Look to Starward.

Next up, my pals and two-time guests Reece Carter and Norgad took over the show to review/roast my first zine, Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones. I’m not in this episode at all, and while at first I’d planned this to be a bonus release, I thought it’d be a bit of fun to put in as the penultimate episode near by birthday.

The Plan for Season Two

My recording equipment and zines are in a spatio-temporal zone known as “shipping.” Unfortunately, there’s no telling just when our family will receive our things, so I’ve opted to start up Season Two the same time the first one did:

Also, I’ll be living in the land of Eastern Daylight Time, all year round! I suspect this will make it easier to schedule recording times with game designers in the Americas, :)

Finally, I want to make an effort in shift my critical focus in Season Two more onto the science fiction of the modules we review. I can find the fun in most scenarios, which is a useful dial for helping Wardens get modules to the table, but doesn’t make the reviews very critical in most cases. We’ll see how that recalibration goes!

5MW Press Publishing Docket

I’m wrapping up edits and starting layout on Twisting Unseen, at long long, now that the Mothership Month 2025 fires have calmed.

Brandon Yu, a.k.a. Chaoclypse, and I are working on a Mothership module. All Roads Lead to Rome, an adaptation of Alien: Earth where the aliens escaped the spaceship and start propagating throughout the city. And the city is on a world under terraformation out on the Core World edge of the Rim. I’m making this a hexcrawl, and so have been reading Dolmenwood and Wolves Upon the Coast to prepare for writing these hexes that evolve across the timeline.

Then it’s all 5MW-focused writing, starting with the Choral.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

Join the 5MW Patreon

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!

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.

Flatline Finished!

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.

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

  • 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 , 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.

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

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 . 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)

  • My mash-up SWN Patron + Classic Traveller Patron generator

• 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

It’s pretty wild, but the PDF version of Classic Traveller (Facsimile Edition) is free! This includes the first three books on Character Creation, Starship Creation, and World Creation (plus Psionics). You too, can now die in character creation, haha, I highly recommend checking it out.

So yes, I am running a Classic Traveller game, and luckily the scholastic spring break gave me more time to write and worldbuild. After generating a Classic Traveller subsector last month, I kicked off a new campaign. Two, in fact. After just a three sessions, The Royal Belt has taught me a lot about this seminal science fiction game.

Before I chat a bunch about Classic Traveller, I’ve got some publishing news, including more Ansible Uplink to share, so let’s get on with it!

Publishing news

At the top of the month, Josh Domanski and I launched Paramour, an iceball planet heist/bounty hunt for Orbital Blues Month. The project funded in under six hours, and we’ve hit four stretch goals, and another is very close as we enter the final four days!

Additionally, the Mothership Month 2025 pre-order store went up! If you missed the campaign, you can grab Flatline on the Blocks and have it included in the combined shipping that Tuesday Knight Games is organizing for all those zines. Take a peek:

In addition to Flatline on the Blocks, I’m also working as editor on All on Red, Breathe Easy, Drink from the Hippocrene, Rites of Renewal, and The Sunlit Path. Also, I’m in a game of Red Nation with the creator, Mathieu Baguet, and I gotta say, the sequel giving you a different version of The Dream is very exciting to play in. Lots of great modules to check out!

I’ve also recently handed over the dev edits to Luiz at for Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage. Dreadnauts is a Panic Engine game set in the age of sail, and Maiden Voyage is the player’s guide and quickstart to deck out a table with a ship and set upon the Seas of Madness. Give Luiz a follow to read more about Dreadnauts!

Ansible Uplink, Orbital Blues Month

Ansible Uplink, my sci-fi module review podcast, focused on Orbital Blues this month with three guests who know their stuff when it comes to the game.

• The Man We Knew, with Sam Leigh

  • Space noir by Kayla Dice at Rat Wave Games

• Rogue Anthems, with Josh Domanski

  • We read two adventures of the eight packed in this VHS box:

    • Train Heist, Hardsuit Holdup on the Hartwell Limited by Jess Levine

    • Derelict crawl, Voidlock Tombstone by Zachary Cox

• Electric Sheep Shuffle, with Eryk Sawicki

  • Computer con by Grahame Turner

And for the folks that know how to use it: Ansible Uplink RSS

Welcome to the Royal Belt

Initially named the Artemis Subsector (I was generating this sector during the lunar mission launch), this slice of space holds the start of the Royal Belt. Colloquially, it’s called the Buckle. At least, that’s what I’ve name the first cluster:

Each system has a world with its own Universal World Profile, or UWP, which is a series of letters and numbers. It was just impossible for me to look at the list of letters/numbers and get a picture of the greater relationships in this subsector. With this graphic rendering built up, I felt better equipped to start running the game.

Why Classic Traveller now?

Hosting Ansible Uplink, and writing 5 Million Worlds RPG are the two major influences behind this campaign. In fact, I feel embarrassed I haven’t played any Traveller up to this point, even if I played Stars Without Number for a few years before becoming a Mothership fanboy.

Like SWN and Mothership, the original three Little Black Books of Classic Traveller (CT) do not have an established setting. This was an exciting prospect for me, even if the type of sci-fi it’s emulating isn’t exactly my preferred era (New Wave). CT provides a set of rules for running “Golden Age”science fiction stories (1940s through early 1960s), and I make this precision for a few reasons.

First, Book 3 includes rules for Psionics, which was the pet psuedo-science preference of the major (and bigoted) sf editor of the era, John W. Campbell. The second and third reasons go hand-in-hand. The books place strong emphasis on military and state service for character life paths, and upon the capitalism-as-win-state in its stated goal of “the acquistion of wealth and power” (Book 3, pg. 48). For me, these two components suggest a play space with Imperial American values, as did much of “Golden Age” science fiction.

Last year, I read some “Golden Age” sci-fi that wasn’t as gung-ho on these themes, a sentiment which is also echoed in CT. For example, Book 1 contains a “Note on Gender and Race” that insists any character can be whatever they want. In my recent re-reading, too, I noticed some snark I’d missed previously. Despite its restrictive life paths, I understood that the game places its characters to oppose the forces of order in their own pursuit of adventure.

“My vision for Traveller was more GURPS-ish: a universal science-fiction role-playing system that anyone could play against any existing SF texts. It could be Asimov’s Foundation, or Anderson’s Terra. [But] not everyone had read all these great classics: they knew Star Trek and Star Wars […] they didn’t know the vast range of details in the various SF universes. They wanted me to supply details.

[…] I tried to make this future society understandable and relatable. I avoided a universe where interstellar navigation was a monopoly for drug-assisted mutants, or where interstellar governments were ruled by crazed religious zealots. I wanted the players to feel comfortable in the environment, making decisions that mattered to them rather than always fighting against strangeness that was never explained.”
- Marc Miller, interview with Stargazer World, 15 May 2017

But what is Traveller for others?

I’m not one to give much preferential treatment to empires and nobles outside of being baddies (the Distant Authority, as Luke Gearing puts it), so I didn’t think much of the Imperium or the services until my session zero revealed that most players were interested in exploring imperial and nobility schemes.

For them, Traveller was about the Imperium. And I didn’t know anything about the Imperium.

“Traveller was trying to give us the details of daily life in some star travelling future […] stories of classic science fiction don’t really tell us how spaceships work or how much it costs to go from here to there […] Traveller told us how day-to-day life worked in addition to how combat works and conflict works and all that but it told us that it cost you this much to eat and a spaceship cost this much and passage cost this much and those details didn’t really mesh very well with all of those novels. […] But the truth is more people wanted some guidance on how to do adventures than knew how to make their own.”
- Marc Miller, interview with Luke Gearing, 27 June 2022

Well, shit.

The Diadem Empire

When I got the Imperial Curveball, I had to scramble a bit. I was saved by two things: old work and other books.

From the get-go, I told folks this would be a homebrew 5MW x Traveller setting. I’d planned adventures around the theme of synthetic personhood, thinking about 5MW’s Emulants. And two years ago with , we collaborated on an adventure set in the ruins of the vast Diadem Empire, its capital worlds named after gemstones. So I built out a rough Diadem Empire map:

To choose the location of this subsector in the Empire, I made a quick 2d6 table placing highly populous Corewards regions at lower probabilities, and rolled the Painite Arch. So then, I knew this region was in one of the farthest reaches of the Diadem Empire. We’re working with time lag, so Imperial oversight is probably quite lacking. But that wasn’t enough.

My second saving grace was a big stack of sci-fi books. I got out Stars Without Number and rolled on the society tables. For the origins of the Royal Belt, before the Empire showed up, a got a double “religious” bit, so I then had to get out Worlds Without Number for its tables on creating religions/gods. Finally, for the starting world of Theru, I pulled from Megastructures, and used District-building tools in Cities Without Number and Augmented Reality to create districts and infighting nobles.

Now I could take the Royal Belt somewhere more complex, ready for the nobility and their political shenanigans. For folks who have time and ample imagination from sci-fi lit reading, you could sit down and ask the questions to make sense of seemingly impossible worlds (it’s a ton of fun), but I am glad to have had these resources on hand to develop something quickly. As the game goes on the setting will come to life with its own quirks and peculiarities, as it always does.

Clusters over Subsectors

One piece from all this has reinforced my design decision for 5MW to stick with smaller Clusters of hexes (though a 25x25 hexfield is way too damn big). Building a small group of systems around a theme, and then engineering how they interact with new neighboring Clusters as you play, that sounds exciting.

And of course, there’s always room for populating individual hexes with other sci-fi adventures, yeah?

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

March was a wild month. Does it ever slow down? Can it?

The number one shout out this month is to Josh Domanski and our collaborative adventure zine for Orbital Blues, Paramour!

Follow the Paramour launch for Orbital Blues Month, live April 1st!

Paramour is an Orbital Blues adventure that tosses your crew onto an iceball world for a tale of dredged up memories of lost love. An Outlaw’s former flame has resurfaced, and is in big trouble. A collision of Cowboy Bebop and Themla & Louise (1991), this module lands your crew in the frozen heart of La Bohème, a city you loved when you were young. Will the crew help out Cassandra Cross for old time’s sake, or make a play to claim the bounty on her head for themselves?

Orbital Blues Month

The folks over at SoulMuppet have brought together six projects for folks seeking space heists and all the emotional baggage that comes with the jobs.

• Outlaws x Corporations: From the OG Orbital Blues team, Sam Sleney and Joshua Clark. This hardback is a sourcebook stuffed with NPCs, adventures and setting inspiration from SoulMuppet Publishing.

• Vaporwave Wanderlust: A high-tech data heist in a polygon-filled, VR powered network. Written by Orbital Blues adventure-writing veteran Grahame Turner of Understory Games.

• Paramour: Help or hunt your old flame on in the now snowswept city of your youth. A combo sandbox and heist zine by Josh Domanski & Chris Airiau.

• F-Inifiti: A high-octane space racing adventure complete with bespoke mechanics for racing, new character options and a star-system of new planets to explore. A massive collaboration project led by Wes Franks at PlusOneExp.

• A Fistful of Stars: From the creators who brought you An Infinity of Ships, grab this interwoven series of adventures set on an interstellar train line written by Kayla Dice. Explore the Galaxy in style, make ends meet, and discover something bigger afoot?

• Jupiter in Eb Minor: From game designer and visual design artist Lone Archivist, grab this planet-hopping adventure that follows the mysterious disappearance of a beloved songstress. Featuring tie-ins to Paramour!

Samantha Leigh also joined me last week for an Ansible Uplink review of the Orbital Blues adventure, The Man We Knew by Kayla Dice. And you can expect more Orbital Blues reviews as the month continues!

Other projects and such

Right, like I said up top, been busier than a bee. Lots of this has to do with my family’s upcoming transcontinental move, and the other half is Mothership Month work. The Spinal Crux Warriors got out the pre-proof/pre-art PDF of Flatline on the Blocks last week, and I turned three edited manuscripts over to their writers.

Children of Thalassa

Folks might recall that asked me onto the writing team for Islands of Weirdhope, back before the November 2025 crowdfund. I’ve had a chance to revisit and punch up the writing as the manuscript is getting ready for prep.

This adventure is a weirdhope adaptation of When in Rome, and for the shift away from the Alien franchise, I took inspiration from Akkadian mythology, Abyss (1989), and Midgar from Final Fantasy VII (1997).

Year 100 Million B.C.

Anachronistic pre-history adventure game!

Right, I didn’t work on this one, but I def want to write an adventure for it! From game designer and layout wizard Golden Achiever, Year 100 Million B.C. launches on BackerKit soon. And if you follow now, you can get the free rules PDF.

Follow Year 100 Million B.C. on BackerKit!

5MW RPG thoughts

Golden Achiever has been “bullying” me about making a GitHub for 5MW RPG, too, which I definitely need to do once the game is done. I’ve been tinkering on equipment tables and loadouts, and re-imagining the rollout.

Part of the reason I’ve been having a hard time, I think, with this game book is that I don’t have a specific sector in mind. I’m trying to write to a generalized setting that doesn’t exist, and I realized I just hate doing that. I despise writing without a concrete backdrop. This happened while I sat down to start generating a Classic Traveller sector (adapted for 5MW’s posthuman characters), the world became real to me.

So yeah, I’ve already said 5MW RPG is going to be about writing sectors, but even now I think equipment lists and loadouts (whole chargen??) will be a part of these zines. Anyway, it’s just a sliver of writing I’m doing now, but we’ll get there.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

The shortest month rounds the bend to its end. Even when I’m not running a crowdfund, February feels like a marathon, and the nearby Winter Olympics (less than 300km from where I live) def contributes to that high-octane vibe. At least Zine Month is way more collaborative and convivial!

On Wednesday, February 25th at 5pm EST I’ll be joining indie ttrpg YouTube channel Weird Place during their all-day Zine Month livestream-a-thon to chat about Twisting Unseen. Gabriel and Le are hosting game designers and special guests between noon and 8pm EST. I’m slotted in for the 5pm-6pm EST window, as is my pal Waco Matrixo. We hope to catch ya @Weird_Place this Wednesday!

Five More Days for Twisting Unseen

The BackerKit campaign for Twisting Unseen ends this Friday, February 27th! The big highlights of the month are hitting the Stretch Goals, and closing in on the Cloud Empress Conversion Kit with cover art by HodagRPG. Here’s the story in images:

Check out Twisting Unseen on BackerKit.

Ansible Uplink

Ansible Uplink continues on its semi-weekly pace. I’ve sent out the first round of backer stickers (we’ll see how fast La Poste is), and I’ve got a steady schedule of shows organized through April. Here are the episodes that have released this year since I last updated y’all on the show:

• Wrath of God & Meatgrinder, with Norgad

  • Spotify / Apple / Patreon

• TIME WARP: Prison Planet, with Luke Gearing

  • Spotify / Apple / Patreon

• Picket Line Tango, with watt

  • Spotify / Apple / Patreon

And for folks who prefer, find the show’s RSS here.

The next episode is on Wednesday, Feburary 25th with a review of Amanda P.’s Resonant with Dave Kenny, Mr. Hardlight of Games himself, haha.

The February Grind

Perhaps I’m a little odd, but when I have a big heavy stressful thing ongoing in my life (e.g. a crowdfund campaign), I like to bury myself in work. Luckily, a good handful of folks have asked me to work on some Mothership Month editing!

In February, I edited three adventures for SpicyTunaRPG including Breathe Easy, and completed the first dev pass on Ryan Creedon & Joshua Justice’s Sunlit Path. Last week, the first manuscript for Rites of Passage and the final manuscript for All on Red came in last week, and I had a development meeting with Andrew C. Manson digging into the adventures for Drink from the Hippocrene. It’s been very exciting to see all these pieces from the same playground of The Dream come to life.

For Flatline on the Blocks, editors Jordan Boschman and Jet McFin completed their copyedits, and now I’m working with the authors on layout copyediting, getting all their wonderful work to fit onto those single spreads:

And if that’s not enough, I’ve started sketching the city of Bohème on Marseille V, and writing location tables for the adventure I’m co-writing with Josh Domanski for Orbital Blues, Paramour. Marseille V is a world of faded fame and failing terraformation towers, turning into snowball planet. Folks call Bohème Slushtown now, but your space cowboy remembers the good old days…

I’m getting to put a lot of myself into the writing for this one, of what it feels like to come “home” to a place that treats you like a ghost, and seeing how all your old haunts have transformed in your absence. The city itself, dominated by Spinward Records, used to be a musical mecca, and I’ve been drawing a lot from French music, notably the city’s name.

Emmenez-moi

In a funny twist of fate, just like the dreams of another Aznavour song, life is taking me and my family overseas to Martinique. We’re moving this summer, and the reality of it all still hasn’t sunk in.

What has sunk in is how much we need to get done before leaving, hahahaha. My online community presence (i.e. Discord/Bsky) is gonna take a big dip for the next couple months as I work around the clock to wrap up in-progress work and prepare for a transatlantic move. But I’ll still post these Rokaner Reports, same as always, :)

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

Happy New Year! Glad to see y’all on this side of 2026, I hope y’all are staying strong fighting the good fight, wherever you are in the world. Over here at 5MW Press, I’m doing what I can making games, and connecting with designers and their projects.

This means continuing with the Ansible Uplink podcast, and meeting with new folk to help showcase their games, which is good because it’s Zine Month! February is the fifth annual Zine Month, where indie ttrpg designers crowdfund new games and adventure zines. Check out what’s caught my eye for this year:

Zine Month 2026

First, my own Mothership adventure Twisting Unseen launches on BackerKit February 2nd through February 27th. Inspired by BLAME!, Half-Life, and yokai folklore, this build-the-dungeon module sends players through a dark and derelict megastructure linked by portal technology.

The zine comes with a map grid and three map piece inserts for the players to cut and paste their own path through the subterranean halls of this failed Jump-9 colony. Can the crew reach the Prime Gate before the continuum twists beyond their reality?

All first 48-hour backers get a free Rai Colony Jump-9 patch!

My pal Waco Matrixo also has a new Mothership scenario launching for Zine Month on Kickstarter: Cain Sun. In this module, players take on the roles of parasitic alien worms, all fighting for control of a single human host through a custom control mechanic.

You are fragile, forced to learn the social dynamics of the crew and exploit their relationships to conceal your presence. You’ll explore the ruins of a dead alien necropolis, learn what destroyed it, and if anything survived.

From the writer behind the one-page adventure Mutiny on the Montgomery comes this eldritch cyberpunk zine for CY_BORG: Dead Internet Theory. Fall down the rabbithole of throbbing cadavercore dance floors, a hidden city of sewer dwelling G0 mutants, a top secret corporate research lab, and a cult enclave with a hideous secret.

David has been working on and playtesting this module over the last couple of years, and I’m excited to see what he and Roque do with this big adventure.

Puzzle Dungeon Gang

I don’t think I can put it better than the puzzle dungeon king, directsun:

A puzzle dungeon is more than rooms filled with puzzles—it is the puzzle. Each space teaches something new, reuses old ideas in clever ways, and slowly reveals how every strange piece fits together. Players succeed not by rolling dice, but by reasoning about their surroundings—seeing how one chamber’s mystery connects to another’s.

After hosting the Puzzle Dungeon Game Jam on itch, three puzzle dungeons are making their way to Zine Month, check these out:

Cameron Maas is funding an upgraded version of their 16pg Puzzle Dungeon Game Jam entry, Reservoir for Shadowdark RPG. I feel like folks should know by now that I love body horror nonsense, and Reservoir pulls no punches there.

Incredible icky art, and a scenario that propels players into grappling with the Elemental Plane of Flesh, Reservoir is an adventure from a newer designer to check out, for sure.

The mountain bleeds potent arcane ooze from the long-abandoned Brackenhoorg mines, and now fey lords feed upon its power in Outcast Unseelie and the Ooze Between for Shadowdark RPG. In this puzzle dungeon, characters manipulate a powerful magical substance, the ooze, through a 30+ room dungeon.

This is Jesse Winter’s second crowdfund campaign, after last year’s successful Shadowdark showing, A Haunting in Glass. And for all first 48-hour backers, Jesse is delivering a free one-page dungeon!

Directsun’s whole thing is writing killer puzzle dungeons (see: the universally acclaimed Aberrant Reflections). A Familiar Tower, an escape room puzzle dungeon for Old-School Essentials, is the long-awaited follow-up!

Inspired by the puzzle box dungeons of The Legend of Zelda series, A Familiar Tower delivers challenges that feel organic to its world—mechanics that click into place the moment you discover how they work.

Wait, that’s not Zine Month!

Josh Domanski has asked me on to co-write an adventure zine for Orbital Blues, Paramour launching in April. I am writing locations, the impeccable Lur Noise is illustrating, and Josh is holding the reigns on it all.

Paramour borrows from Cowboy Bebop and that feeling of returning to your hometown after it has changed beyond what you once knew. I’m looking forward to writing about heartbreak and nostalgia, it speaks to the immigrant (and nomad) in me.

I hope you’ll give these different projects a looksee, they’re all my most anticipated for next Zine Month. Until next time!

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

This is your monthly Rokaner Report on all things 5MW Press.

It’s been a month of continued podcasting on Ansible Uplink, development on Flatline on the Blocks, and writing for 5MW RPG. But before digging into that stuff, I’d like to take a Year in Review for 2025.

Year in Review: 2025

A sort of perpetual problem popped up of me aiming too big, and having to pull back or pull out, again and again to prioritize crowdfunding and freelance work. Like, clearly it’s impossible to Do It All, and I need to stop trying (even though there is SO MUCH cool stuff happening in the indie ttrpg scene all the time).

Here’s a rundown of what I can recall working on over the past year:

• Not Enough Scoundrels, completed and fulfilled on schedule.

• Third print run of When in Rome ordered!

• SWN to MoSh development work for Anodyne Printware’s Sci-Fi Rosetta Stone

• Joined ’s Cloud Empress Jam with the one-page dungeon, The Frozen Wings

• Straight Arrows development and editing

• Johnson Squared development and editing

• Resonant Artifacts of Gnaw Bone, IN, a Horrors of the Americas LH supplement

• Edited two Mothership adventures for

• Proofread The Dose Makes the Poison

• Wrote Perihelion Crossfire for ’s Dying Hard on Hardlight Station: Anthology Edition

• Printed postcard Mothership adventures that I sent out to folk from the beach

• Was creative director and crowdfund manager for Flatline on the Blocks

• Won OVER/UNDER with the Canyonheavy Collective

• Did some community dev and editing for some brandnew Mothership writers

• Started Ansible Uplink, a sci-fi ttrpg module review podcast with a regular, semiweekly schedule

• Sold games at Dragonmeet for the second year in a row, this time with Peregrine Coast Press

Not too bad, despite the numerous unfinished projects I’ve left in my wake throughout 2025, hah. And as I mentioned last month, the editing work is not going to dry up any time soon! The major writing accomplishments I want to hit in 2026 are:

• Twisting Unseen BackerKit launch and production

  • Basically finished, just waiting for the Zine Month crowdfund

• Flatline on the Blocks editing, layout, and production

  • In the fun editing sequence, now

• 5MW RPG: Avatar’s Primer digital release

  • Trad & Emulant version coming soon! (See below.)

• 5MW Sector: CIN Tail editing, layout, and production

  • The hard part is going to be learning software for the planetary maps

• Paramour BackerKit launch, and writing

  • Crowdfund managing and location writing for Orbital Blues adventure

• Children of Thalassa writing for Islands of Weirdhope ()

  • Weirdhope adaptation of When in Rome

• All Roads Lead to Rome, with

  • Fleshing out the skeleton of this city hexcrawl adventure

• Probably a Mothership Month 2026 project because, let’s be real, I can’t help myself.

And finally, this year’s casualties (that aren’t on the 2026 roster yet):

• Strings of the Puppetmaster (sorry Strega, art brief is on my plate for January)

• Rise of the Carvers (The full Horrors of the Americas Jam submission)

• House of Light (languishing TripTech 25 submission)

• Zungeons: Mobra’s Hole / Irric Gate Passage, for ’s The Electrum Archive / Castle of the Vampire (my six year-old’s zungeon, haha)

• Pillars of Creation, Appendix-N Jam (what a hype train that was)

• Ice Caverns of the Toothless, ’s Hexmas

5MW RPG: Avatar Primer

The beta for 5MW RPG: Avatar Primer is still in progress. Check out the updates I’ve been making on my blog:

• 1d100 Past Lives

• 1d100 Mementos

• Sectors, Serpents, and Gameplay Phases

This is still all very WIP, but digital copies of the player’s rulebook will always be Pay-What-You-Can when it releases. I’m planning on adding the two tables, and two Forms: Trads and Emulants. These are the two closest to Mothership, and since I want to test out the system by running Mothership modules with the 5MW ruleset, I feel like it’s a good starting point.

With Roque Romero’s Form art, I can start on those spreads soon, and I am trying to get a digital zine version out next month.

Ansible Uplink Podcast

Ansible Uplink, the sci-fi ttrpg module review podcast, for what little exposure and few episodes I’ve produced received some surprising end-of-year stats on Spotify: Instant Hit and Most Shared.

Since the last Rokaner Report, I’ve released three more episodes (I delayed this newsletter to get in the final episode link):

• TIME WARP episode: Tatooine Manhunt for West End Games’ Star Wars the Role-playing Game, with Josh Domanski.

• Binary Stars episode: Piece by Piece and The Ship Who Swallowed a Spider for Mothership RPG, with Reece Carter, a.k.a. Scarius.

• What We Give to Alien Gods for Mothership RPG, with Christian Sorrell, a.k.a. MeatCastle.

Follow or support the show on Patreon! Ansible Uplink currently has a semiweekly schedule, and only with more patron support would I be able to record, edit and mix more bonus episodes.

I’ve found it cathartic to talk shop with other game designers, folks I’ve mostly known over Discord. Seeing friends, colleagues, and peers even over a videocall has been rejeuvenating, it makes me feel like I am a part of the community and not just an outskirter riding round the castle walls. In addition to having a good laugh, I feel like my design intentions and motivation have focused since the show started. And I do hope y’all have been enjoying our reviews, too.

That’s all from me for 2025. Catch you very soon.

Signing off,
Chris Airiau

This is your monthly Rokaner Report. It feels like several full months has passed since the last newsletter went out, mostly because of Sam Sorensen’s megagame OVER/UNDER. The game helped Mothership Month 2025 reach great success, with Flatline on the Blocks gaining support from over 1000 backers! If you missed the campaign, be sure to follow the page, if you want us to notify you when pre-orders open up.

In other news, I started a podcast called Ansible Uplink, signed on for development and editing to five other MM25 projects, and will be at Dragonmeet in London on November 29th!

Ansible Uplink Podcast

Ansible Uplink is a sci-fi ttrpg adventure review podcast where I invite on guest indie designers to review a module, or a pair of short modules. The show primarily focuses on Mothership RPG adventures, but also includes reviews of system agnostic adventures, and will include TIME WARP episodes for Classic Traveller and other older systems. Current episodes include:

• VR_DEAD, with Waco Matrixo: Discussing Waco’s GM perspective in an adventure with a unique mechanic that hides the macabre.

• The Drain, with Norgad: The first review of a funnel, from Ian Yusem’s Inferno Trilogy. We plan to follow up to finish reviewing the trilogy, later on.

• Thousand Empty Light, with David Blandy & Daniel Locke: We discuss Alfred Valley’s solo Mothership adventure.

• Nautilus of Time & Mutiny on the Montgomery, with Adam STATIONS: This was the inaugural Binary Stars episode, where the guest and I review two one-page or pamphlet adventures.

• Bonus Episode, OVER/UNDER Debrief with Reece Carter & Luke Gearing: Reece was a mod, and Luke a fellow Boss in Canyonheavy Collective.

Support the show on Patreon! I have 5MW spaceship stickers to send to folks, and am hoping to eventually gain enough support to shift from a bi-weekly schedule into releasing weekly episodes.

I’ve got four \guests on the docket, through the new year. Patrons get a sneak peek on upcoming guests and modules, and I’ll eventually hold polls to hear what patrons would like to see added to the review queue. Hope to see you over there!

5MW Press: Editing Division

((Small joke, since 5MW Press is just me.))

I’m honored that several third-party Mothership publishers have asked me onto their projects to share my gameplay and writing experience with them. The work, especially game development, feels almost like the collaborative fun of bringing a game to life at the table. Editing is my favorite part about writing. Working on revisions with other authors to help them bring their vision to life, and create a digestible, fun-to-read manuscript, has been very fulfilling work.

Keep an eye out for these projects that I’ll be working on in one capacity or another:

• The Sunlit Path: I worked with Ryan Creedon on their last project, Straight Arrows. It’ll be great to work with her again, alongside Joshua Justice!

• All on Red: Another writer duo, Jordan DeWitt & Abe Chester, who came to me with for some development work a medical mystery adventure. Great NPCs and gross problems, haha.

• Breathe Easy: A SpicyTuna RPG joint by D.G. Chapman and Marco Serrano. I worked with this pair over the summer, and look forward to see what they’ve cooked up with this F-Zero-infused module.

• Rites of Renewal: From writer Joshua Cable through Peregrine Coast Press, their new Mothership adventure shifts tone into creepy space folk horror. The second Solarian adventure!

• Drink from the Hippocrene: After a workshare, Andrew and I decided to work together again on his new psychedelic mindfuck MM25 project.

• Flatline on the Blocks: We had a round of crossfire development between the authors on first drafts. This week, I start on the second development pass, which is aiming for a holistic approach to interlink and punch up for global cohesion.

Current Writing Projects

Each week (even during OVER/UNDER), I’ve been able to get in at least one afternoon of writing in on All Roads Lead to Rome. This is shaping up to be a big hexcrawl adventure, very much the short campaign tv series adaptation to match the one-shot film adaptation. The monster writing is done, and I’m working on the hex contents now. The city is coming to life, hex by hex.

Josh Domanski asked me to join him to co-write a new sci-fi project. I can’t say much about other than it’s called Paramour, and centers on revisiting a city (and ex-lover) one of the PCs used to call home. Josh set up the framework, commissioned Lur Noise for a cover, and soon I’ll be starting in on location writing. Setting is probably what I’m best at, and I adore exploring homecoming nostalgia with a town not so much your own anymore (immigrant vibes: activate), so I’m aswirl with emotions of lived experience for writing up these snowy city locales.

My most ambitious goal is to fulfill the Year of the Beta Challenge, and release a digital version of 5MW RPG: Avatar Primer by year’s end. More pressing obligations will likely eat up my time, but here’s what’s left to write:

• 1d100 Mementos / 1d100 Past Lives

• Forms: Limit Breaks, Loadouts, and Homes Left Behind

• Equipment / Weapons

• How to Play (Panic Engine + World-hopping loop)

• Skills / Skill Training

• Violent Encounters / Death and Rebirth

• Living the Inner Light (maybe for later?)

This looks like a metric ton, but mostly boils down to four 1d100 tables. Wish me luck!

Come Say “Hi” at Dragonmeet!

This year at Dragonmeet, a ttrpg convention in London, I’ll be working with Eryk Sawicki and Peregrine Coast Press, at Booth L-15/16! I’ll have some copies of Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones, When in Rome, and Not Enough Scoundrels for sale alongside the Peregrine Coast Press offerings including the Milk Bar: Cut Your Milk Teeth edition. Look for me, Eryk, and Laura slingin’ zines all day Saturday!

We’ll be right next to Soulmuppet, Forbidden Psalm, and Copy/Paste Coop! I just had David & Daniel on the podcast, and I’m giddy to be booth neighbors with them. They’ve also got a BackerKit going now, a standalone expansion of ECOMOFOS!!, Islands of Weirdhope. I was humbled that David asked me on to write an adventure for this book, which is gonna allow me to explore some weird transhumanism in a strange vein that might seem familiar to some readers…

Thanks for sticking it out for the Rokaner Report!

Signing off,
Chris Airiau

Today’s Avatar Alert is bringing you the final two mini-interviews for Pipesong by BoRyan, and stand/DELIVER by Ahmed Suffety. Enjoy!

Pipesong, BoRyan

Chris: Hello BoRyan! Glad to have you here, even if so briefly. Must admit, I’ve been into your work since your Vaults of Vaarn release, and was super stoked to see you take your craft to Mothership RPG. Can you give our readers who might not know Pipesong a run-down on your Mothership Month project?

BoRyan: Pipesong is a sandbox module set on a maintenance level deep in the belly of Prospero’s Dream, run by the Molvo crime family. The boss, Horse Molvo, is dead. The new boss, Chin Molvo, is hooked on ceo-brained slicksim influencers, and has a great new plan: what if we sold out to the corps? The family got the pipefitter’s union contract with bullets and blood, but if we sold it off to the company, we could replace all the labor with ox-debtors, and make a shitload of credits.

Following the model laid out in A Pound of Flesh, and mirroring systems implemented in much of my other work, Chin Molvo’s plan will unfold as a timeline of escalating events that change the material circumstances on 04 Deck. Players will see Pipesong transform from bustling little union hab, to security crackdown, to warzone.

No crime family is complete without a cast of criminals, and Molvo delivers. To stop Chin’s plan, players will have to take out or flip the Molvo lieutenants:

• Slick (he/him), a suit-wearing drug-sniffing party-going EVA specialist

• Bunko (she/they), a chromed out bodybuilding enthusiast and fight pit champion

• Zakk (she/her), an educated professional and quickbooks whiz

• Sally (he/him), gangster film enthusiast, owner of a real tommy gun

• Rat (she/her), information dealer, with a small army of informants

Chris: Yo, that’s way more than you’ve mentioned on your BackerKit page! Gotta respect an intense core set of NPCs like that. What’s more, Pipesong hones in on a fundamental reality of a mega-station like The Dream: plumbing and thermodynamics. I am a sci-fi nut, and love to see folks bringing a hard reality to games in a fun way. Can you tell us more about the Tangle, and what inspired you and your partner to focus on the pipes?

BoRyan: You can learn a lot about a place by asking: “Where does the water come from, where does the sewage go?” On a space station like Prospero’s Dream, logistical problems draw inspiration. A big one in space, that’s often not addressed in sci-fi, is waste heat. That was our starting point you know, like “what would it be like in this little corner of the station, where you do critical work that is left off-screen in movies, and if you make a mistake, a million people might die?”

The Tangle is a hostile environment. In the book, it takes the form of a point-crawl, where players have to face hazards, pipe-cultists, and desperate ox-fugitives. There’s the Hives, a network of out-of-date class-0 docking bays used by smugglers and EVA freebooters. The Tangle is a briar patch, a space that locals are able to move around in with surprising speed and finesse, but will straight up kill you if you don’t know the way or aren’t wearing the right PPE. It will have opportunities to get involved in crime, bounties you can go after, and a place to hide if you draw too much heat.

Chris: I’m a sucker for site-dependent gear for area traversal (that’s the Metroidvania sicko in me, I guess). Like I mentioned, I’m already a fan but you’ve hyped me up even more. Happy to see Pipesong has funded, and I hope to see more of those stretch goals unlock! Thanks for chatting, BoRyan!

Check out Pipesong on BackerKit!

stand/DELIVER, Ahmed Suffety

Chris: Hi Ahmed! You’re a new Mothership writer and new to crowdfunding, but are still a seasoned ttrpg creator, having come in from 5e, Forged in the Dark, and MÖRK BORG. Can you tell our readers what compels you about Mothership RPG, and introduce folks to your MM25 project, stand/DELIVER?

Ahmed: While my start in writing and design was proof of concept for 5e, I’ve always been drawn to other games in the industry, from Forged in the Dark and MÖRK BORG, to designing my own systems, available on sufftety.com. Mothership RPG pulled me in with its lethality, horror, and most of all, pacing.

stand\DELIVER is a dueling factions toolkit for The Dek, an entertainment district on Prospero’s Dream. Players take on the mantle of space pirates vying for approval from the fraternity of pirates (mentioned in Wages of Sin) by delivering a shipment of goods. Or as station security operations (SecOps), hunting down these drugs before things get out of hand. The imminent lockdown puts players in tense encounters as the drugs in the district begin spreading and mutating users.

stand\DELIVER adds class breakdowns and loadouts for both Pirates and SecOps, along with equipment like new Drones and fresh Cyberware. New features, Worth and Debt, drive roleplay, giving players ulterior motives, and provide encounter hooks for the Warden to introduce as complications. A new resource mechanic is introduced for both classes as well. Pirates gain contacts, a way to reach the particularly seedy denizens of the stations, for favors or the purchase of contraband. SecOps gains requisition script, a method for acquiring specialized, powerful gear available only to high-ranking station enforcement. All these new mechanics are modular to fit into any Mothership game, regardless of setting.

Chris: Never such a thing as too much cyberware, that’s for sure! One of the aspects of your module that I admire, and that I think Wardens need more of for running The Dream, is that you’ve built up a new district: The Dek. What can you tell us about this district, your inspirations, and what new mischief it brings to the Dream?

Ahmed: The district is a neon spectacle, littered with advertisements, tourists, and dark corners. Expanding on The Dream’s vibe and setting, The Dek has over 10 locations and at least one NPC per location. Each of these interests is tied to Phase Alterations, which can be inserted into any story arc or campaign and run alongside the greater threat of civilians mutating.

The Dek is an amalgamation of multiple inspirations. Some that stick out are bars and social scenes from Blade Runner, The Expanse, Altered Carbon, and Minority Report. I wanted to capture some of the “cyber-grunge” feel of those worlds while maintaining the Mothership vibe. It isn’t meant to be a cyberpunk supplement, but rather a dirty patchwork stepping stone for the uncertain future of The Rim.

As for mischief, The Dek is wrought with it. Lowly sanitation officers crafting monstrosities from the would-be recycled dead. Sleeve storage facilities provide vulnerable hosts for the mutating drug, creating soulless husks hunting for sentience among the innocent. Multiple phases from The Dek’s Locations and NPCs align with the blood thirsty horrors unleashed upon the station.

Chris: That sounds great. My favorite part of this year’s Mothership Month is seeing all these coherent, zoomed-in settings and the stories they hide. Creates such a colorful smorgasbord for Prospero’s Dream, or any cyberpunk city setting. Thanks for coming on, Ahmed, and congrats on funding stand/DELIVER , :)

Check out stand/DELIVER on BackerKit!

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

So, OVER/UNDER has been a trip, yeah? From corporate assassinations, to peace summits, and mass hysteria, it’s been wild times. As a Canyonheavy Boss, I already have a post-game report in the works for this insane mega-game. I can’t wait to get with folks and talk openly about the experience.

This month’s mainline newsletter is bringing together three mini-interviews from creators participating in Mothership Month 2025 who are running a crowdfund campaign for the first time. Check out what these up-and-coming designers—Scott Connor’s The Company’s New Groove, Nathan Taylor’s NO GODS, NO MASTERS, and Zoe Tweedale’s HUNTERS—are working on!

The Company’s New Groove, Scott Connor

Chris: Goodday, Scott! Lemme tell you, it’s always great to interview a fellow European Mothership writer! Your module The Company’s New Groove has what I’d consider an experimental angle: you’ve crafted a prequel to Prospero’s Dream as readers know it from A Pound of Flesh. Can you tell us more about your Mothership Month project and how this unique structure plays into it?

Scott: Hey Chris, first of all thank you for putting a spotlight on the smaller creators of this year!

With this book, I wanted to create something different to your typical Mothership module, something more experimental in terms of how it uses narrative and music. The Company’s New Groove is a Club Crawl where the players are rioters, breaking into an abandoned nightclub to discover that The Company has a hidden facility experimenting with music to brainwash the population. Experiments and all kinds of threats stalk in the darkness and the players need to get out or die trying.

But here’s the twist, the 5 NPCs that help, hinder or hunt the players in this polyphonic hellhole are the same characters that the players have played in the prologue set decades earlier.

For me, music is one of the biggest tools a Warden has to set a certain mood in Mothership. I wanted to use music’s power of atmosphere to its fullest extent in this module. The Prologue is set in ‘The Drunken Monkey’ nightclub full of bass and mischief. The main adventure has you re-explore this now abandoned club; this time silent as a tomb. When the players descend into The Company’s black site, music laced with hidden tones leak out of busted speakers.

Ultimately, it’s the combination of how this book uses music and character interactions that makes this module stand out to give your table a memorable adventure.

Chris: I agree that music is an incredible tool, and it’s one that takes a ton of time (for me, at least!) to research and set up, so it’s great ot hear this work is done for The Company’s New Groove! Another compelling aspect of your module is that it comes with pregenerated player characters for the prologue that become antagonists to the players in following sessions. Pregens are so rare in Mothership, and I’d like to know, what were the seeds for this idea, and how did it develop or mutate for your module?

Scott: I really wanted to pull the rug on my table in some way, something that can only be done in TTRPGs. In my experience, players seldom connect with NPCs on an emotional level. I was trying to come up with a way to change that, so I thought what if the players were the NPCs? The idea was to have this almost Shore Leave style prologue where the players get this mini sandbox and just be this friend group.

Fast forward three decades, and now the players, with their new self-made characters, come face to face with their characters from the prologue. As is often the case in Mothership, time has not been kind to them. How do the players react to that, how do they survive against these horrors who they inhabited as carefree teens a session ago?

That’s what this module is trying to do.

Chris: Hitting that kind of emotional resonance is a great goal for a module, especially one within a megacity of millions of lives, like on Prospero’s Dream. Thanks for your answers Scott, and congrats on the funding! I’m looking forward to seeing how The Company’s New Groove all shakes down.

The Company's New Groove, on BackerKit

NO GODS, NO MASTERS, Nathan Taylor

Chris: Hello Nathan, glad to have you here! This might be outta nowhere, but for my money, I think you’ve got the most striking cover out for this year’s Mothership Month, and to be clear, that’s saying a lot because so many are 🔥. What’s the run down of what we can find behind that killer cover?

Nathan: Thank you, that’s some high praise considering the quality of everyone else’s work this year! I owe all the credit to Brayz for the cover art. He really knocked it out of the park. I really enjoy the idea of the spark of rebellion, so littered lots of phrasing around tinder, lighting a flame, etc., throughout the pitch I provided to Brayz, and he just ran with it.

The module is about the return of a megacorp, METAStatic, Inc., to Prospero’s Dream. It’s a deal with the devil for the factions in charge as the company has been spreading its tendrils throughout the station. METAStatic is kind of the apotheosis of capitalism, a company that grows for no other reason than an expansion of their own power, like a cancer. Reaching a breaking point, the players’ crew decides to take the fight to the corp and get them off the station for good, by any means necessary.

No Gods, No Masters is my take on a depthcrawl, with all of the generative locations and situations that implies. I did a lot of digging through the design of depthcrawls with classics like The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn, plus Mothership’s own This Ship Is a Tomb. My goal with this module was two-fold: A) Making a tight, compact depthcrawl, and B) making the module as user-friendly as possible. A lot of generative crawls require a lot of page-flipping and my design principle is to minimize that as much as possible. Each level’s page includes all the info a warden needs to run that level, as well as an easy reference set of tables guiding wardens on where to go next based on a given roll.

Chris: I totally understand what you mean with the depthcrawl page-flippery, I’m very interested to see how your information design tackles this. You’ve also teased the existence of the corpo horrors hiding in your tower depthcrawl. What are a couple that you can spill for us today?

Nathan: Christ, because the existence of megacorps isn’t bad enough? I’m mixing up the levels with a melange of the banal and the creepy. I’m just going to list out a handful of my favorites. The Cubicle Farms are managed by overly chipper android middle-managers, all constantly on the cusp of losing their marbles from the pressure of their positions. Another is the Financial Department where financial analysts break into bouts of glossolalia at an uptick in company stock prices and suicidal depression when it dips. There’s also the Biological Research Division, where experiments both mundane and horrifying take place, including a little something called the HK Protocol. That’s a particularly nasty creation that will pursue players from level to level, though there’s a chance that players could turn the tables on the corp if they can make it to Biological Research.

And that’s three of twenty-two total levels, so there should be plenty of variety for folks to enjoy and players to run away from.

Chris: Haha, that’s a LOT of chances of screwing with the corpos, and if there’s one thing OVER/UNDER has taught me is that players will jump at the chance to burn these kinds of characters! Glad to see you’ve funded, and can’t wait to set my players on molotoving these METAStatic sickos.

Find NO GODS, NO MASTERS on BackerKit

Hunters, Zoe Tweedale

Chris: Heya Zoe! Wonderful to see a new writer hitting so much success during Mothership Month, and from what we can glean from the BackerKit page, it’s no surprise! Can you tell us about Hunters, to clue readers in on why folks are so keen to snag your Mothership Month project?

Zoe: I am blown away by the response to Hunters so far. As someone new to crowdfunding, I’m very humbled by the faith the community has put in me as a first-time module creator.

The pitch for Hunters is simple: a death-game set in The Sink on Prospero’s Dream. The player characters find themselves trapped in the plague and monster-riddled ruins of the old corporate heart of Prospero’s Dream, and if that wasn’t bad enough, wealthy thrill-seeking hunters are competing to kill them and their crewmates. Their only way to officially “win” this lopsided game is to kill all of the hunters, which is a steep task. Or, they can use their wits to attempt to break the rules and find their own way out.

Supporting this scenario is the adventure’s location: The Hunting Grounds, a mini sandbox detailing the downtown core of the sink with over a dozen locations, fellow hunted target NPCs, unique monsters, and environmental storytelling. My hope is that Hunters can also be used as a toolkit to help support any campaign that ventures down into The Sink.

Aside from writing Hunters, I am also illustrating it myself. For me, the atmospheric and detailed art bringing life to The Sink is just as important as the text. Even if the players never see it (and I hope they do!), evocative art helps to bring the world alive in the Warden’s imagination, which I think is an essential job for any good adventure module.

Chris: After the artwork I’ve seen you put into Hunters, I have to agree. The NPC cards look wonderful, too, I must say. Which one of these sickos do you love (or love to hate) the most?

Zoe: Thanks! I always appreciate the repeated stat-blocks in the TKG modules like Another Bug Hunt as a Warden, but for the hunters, it’s a bit harder to do that effectively since their characterisation is just as important as their mechanics. So cards are a good alternative, with the added bonus that you can show them to your players without spoiling any surprises.

It’s hard to pick! Especially because once I start play-testing with my main group, they will come alive in ways I haven’t expected yet. That being said, I’m very excited to see The Green Man (the one with 4 arms on the cover) in play. He’s a terrifying and extremely challenging antagonist; he’s playing to win, and enjoys the thrill of the game. But probably my “favourite” is the secret-android corporate spy Anna Yoon. She’s an accomplished liar and at the heart of an assassination plot against some of the other Hunters, and has some fun abilities with her “invisibility poncho” and her android nature allowing her to continue fighting until the players find a way to completely destroy her. But most importantly, she’s a hook for the players to get involved in the melodrama and backstabbing of the ultra-rich if they so choose; because while the hunters are monstrous, it is important to me that these are unique characters who are fun for the Warden to play!

Chris: That’s the rub isn’t it? Because Wardens want to have fun too, and making the complex characters is a great way to do that. 750+ backers seem to agree with me too, haha. Major congratulations on your campaign, and I’m eager to see the Hunting Grounds come to life!

Check out HUNTERS on BackerKit

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

With Mothership Month 2025 in full swing, I thought I’d revive last year’s mini-interviews, featuring designers new to crowdfunding to help bring their modules to a wider audience.

In the first of this three-part series, I’m bringing on Abe Chester from All on Red, and Chris Foley from Cleaning Crew.

All on Red, Abe Chester

Chris: Howdy-hey Abe! Welcome to the madness of MM25, I hope it’s been treating you well. As a developer on your project, I know the whole story behind the central mystery of All on Red, so what bits of intrigue can you divulge about your neon noir Mothership Month project?

Abe: Thanks Chris, it’s been going great so far, a bit overwhelming for a first-timer but so much fun! We appreciate the dev editing, it’s been invaluable!

Our primary goal with All on Red was to add a small but dense neighborhood to Prospero’s Dream, and make sure it could add something exciting to any Warden’s arsenal of content. We’ve made sure to build in a variety of physical and conceptual links to The Dream, making this module super easy to connect with any table’s version of the station. I think it would make a fantastic place to start a campaign as well as the perfect module to slip in as soon as someone important (PC or NPC) gets badly wounded and medical facilities are needed post haste.

The central mystery of “What happened to Dr. Haddaway” is a great 3-4 session investigation for a crew to tackle, but while doing so they’re also going to run headlong into other hooks and threads. Our test groups have had to make hard choices about finding Dr. Haddaway ASAP vs. dealing with other ticking time bombs such as an infestation of alien worms, handling the vicious gang exploiting the clinic, or foiling/aiding an attack on the station by a dissident faction.

Chris: It’s true this zine is packed with tons of cool, game-changing ideas, and like the neighborhood itself, this helps the station at large come alive. But you’re not alone in packing this zine with intrigue, you have teamed up with veteran Mothership writer A. Jordan DeWitt to form Glue Trap Games. Can you tell us how this came about, and some of the wild ideas you two cooked up together for this collaboration?

Abe: I met Jordan initially playing FIST: Ultra Edition by CLAYMORE RPGs. That online group had been mostly playing Mothership, and after the hilarious FIST one-shot, I joined a long Mothership campaign and Jordan and I and hit it off. We got to chatting about random ideas, and projects we were writing.

I think I started riffing on his re-sleeving facility heist mission pitch of “Anderson Frink is trapped in a box. A hard drive, to be precise,”. Ideas bounced around and I believe he suggested we just write it. We had this bizarrely fast process of just blasting out ideas and hopping around in a google doc looking at what the other person wrote and embellishing on it until we ended up with a pretty decent sized module called BLOCK PATTERN. We tested it a bunch and refined it, and we’ll come back to that after All on Red is complete and shipped.

As for wild ideas relating to All on Red, we’ve got a cybernetic cannibal, an absolutely disgusting parasite worm with a fucked up life cycle that could spiral out into the rest of Prospero’s Dream, and a hardcore rebel faction with an axe to grind against the Novos. The market with its deadly train running through the middle is wildly effective at pumping up stress and making random encounters even more dangerous and pressing. There’s also a corporate vampire. I don’t think many will find him, but he’s there for those players that just can’t help but open the thing they shouldn’t.

Chris: And what is an OSR/NSR module without such wonderful forbidden fruit, eh? Thanks for your answers Abe, and again, congrats on your funding! Looking forward seeing to the next draft of All on Red!

All on Red On BackerKit

Cleaning Crew, Chris Foley

ChrisAir: Heya Chris, thanks for coming onto the newsletter! I gotta say, the pitch for your module as a “Janitor’s Handbook” cracks me up, and hits on a point I’ve been stuck on before: Normal jobs for folks on the Dream! Can you tell our readers about what kind of gaming materials you’re including in Cleaning Crew?

Chris Foley: We’ve really tried to hit a few different angles with Cleaning Crew to create a sourcebook for all things janitorial! Starting out our focus was very much on equipment—scrubbers, cleaning canisters, disinfecting lasers and the like—but we quickly spread out from there. New chemical rules like wounds and examples, roll tables for various encounters for janitors working around the Dream, a new class for those wanting to get to mopping & scrubbing and eventually a small adventure within: Slip Hazard.

Everything in Cleaning Crew centres around the arrival of a new company to Prospero’s Dream: Hygeia Interplanetary. A cleaning megacorp, Hygeia has every intent in making its presence on the station a formidable and permanent one and will stop at nothing to accrue workers to their fold. However, Hygeia has no intention of footing the bill. Cheap second-hand equipment, gig-economy work and underhanded tactics are sowing discord on Prospero’s.

Slip Hazard is the culmination of that. Hygeia has found a part of the station they are particularly curious about and have had remarkably bad luck cleaning it out. Bad enough that they’ve had to call in the cavalry, Player Contractors, to sort it out. Players venturing down into the Slip find themselves knee deep in grime, grease and something far more sinister lurking down there, all whilst Hygeia’s presence unravels.

Cleaning Crew really brings all of these elements together under one roof, expanding the Dream as a whole.

ChrisAir: And doesn’t everyone love to hate a corporation, especially on the Dream? You’ve also hit a boatload of Stretch Goals for your project! Can you tell us more about the pamphlet Hygeia Automotives and the zine, Unions and You?

Chris Foley: We wanted to build two branches from Hygeia’s arrival on Prospero’s Dream that go a bit beyond what happens in Cleaning Crew!

Hygeia Automotives is styled as an advertising pamphlet to the richest of investors and contractors, offering to exchange their cold hard credits for a variety of formidable engines. Some of these are utility minded like the armoured Domovoy Cleaner-Tanker or the radiation-eating Tiangou Sink, though others like the Caduceus aerial bomber and the ExecuCab are clearly geared towards the more corporate-minded. It’s Hygeia’s corporate victory lap, showing fancy new offerings that came with their investments in the Dream.

Unions and You delves deeper into the darker side of Hygeia. Both A Pound of Flesh fans and current OVER/UNDER players might be familiar with the Local 32819L, the Teamster Union of Prospero’s Dream. Having been pushed to the sideline by this megacorp’s arrival, their discontent has swelled rapidly.

Faced with the threat of mass uprising Hygeia has responded with a polished iron fist. Players are introduced to dangerous Union contraband (from brand-removing steam cleaners to treacherous chem-bombs) and the newly unleashed Garrison, Hygeia’s elite ‘custodial’ unit. It should give some insight into a Dream back under threat of violence from above and below!

ChrisAir: That sounds like a properly thorough exploration of the janitors of the Dream. I can really see PCs starting from the bottom of the job market, and making a rise through the ranks aboard the Dream as they combat Hygeia! Congrats on funding, and thanks for sharing Cleaning Crew with us, Chris!

Cleaning Crew, on BackerKit

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

In case you missed the Avatar Alert last week, Mothership Month is upon us:

October 14th through November 13th grab your 1,000 Pounds of Flesh, as over 30 Mothership projects develop and expand upon the legendary X-class space station, Prospero’s Dream from Tuesday Knight Games’ module, A Pound of Flesh.

This year, I’m working with 17 other veteran Mothership designers to bring a chunk of the Dream alive: the Spinal Crux district.

Flatline on the Blocks

Flatline on the Blocks details a 20-block stretch of Prospero’s Dream between the Chop Shop and Tempest HQ that straddles the hull of the outer ring. “Protected” by OcuSec, “supplied” by the Siphon, and “maintained” by the NERCs, the plans of these three seedy factions are about to boil over.

Our team came to Flatline with a laser focus: One Block, one spread, one writer.

Between the thirteen of us, we have 20 Blocks and a tower spread ready, the makings of a companion bonus adventure zine, and in-universe “noodle shop” menu along side.

Follow Flatline!

The writing team submitted a complete draft to Tuesday Knight Games in August, and we are currently wrapping up the first round of development. Meanwhile, I’m playtesting the setting (gone through 8-of-21 Blocks), adding notes for my eventual “full view” development pass in October.

I can’t wait to share more about the Spinal Crux district, and show off what we’ve been working on for 6+ months now. Its purpose lives in that OSR ideal of delivering a density of ideas to help folks make Prospero’s Dream come alive.

Click here to follow the campaign for its launch on 14 October!

All Flesh is Surplus 2025

October is a busy TTRPG month! All Flesh is Surplus is The Lost Bay RPG digital convention, and this year is very special as it covers the new implementation of the rule set, The Lost Bay Reborn, modeled after Trophy Dark. These changes strike at the cinematic heart of the game, and game designer Iko’s French gaming sensibilities.

As part of All Flesh is Surplus, I’ll be running The Hollow Hitchhiker and The Swine in the first week of October! The Hollow Hitchhiker is set in the winding concrete spaghetti of the Highways, cursed with sudden car crashes. In The Swine, your characters were taken, wake up in bloodied, unplugged sports drink freezers, and must escape the lair of The Swine.

If you’d like to see how the game runs, and play along, join The Lost Bay discord community and check out the games:

Click to join The Lost Bay Discord server!
Note: invite link expires October 6th.

All Roads Lead to Rome

As I mentioned last month, even before the first episode dropped, I started writing a hexcrawl set in a city on a Rimward Core world. I got in touch with Brandon Yu a.k.a. Chaoclypse, and he’s deep in sketches for this zine!

I’ve teased this last month, but clearly, my mind has been on Alien: Earth since last month’s debut. Let me lay out my (lukewarm) Hot Take: if you set science fiction on a near-future Earth and ignore climate change, you’re doing the genre and your work a disservice. I was thinking about how humanity could be likened to the aliens as an invasive species to our own planetary biomes, but that’s not on the show’s menu.

Well, that’s where I’m taking it. This planet is a “joint” terraformation project between five Core world companies—Electorenzo Resources, Proxi Marchandises Technologiques, Algernon Astronautics, Xiāo Corporation, and post-Core wars rising star: Daybreak Combine.

If you’ve seen the show, this will sound familiar: an Electorenzo Resources deep-Rim research vessel crashes into the Daybreak Combine capitol. The five alien species break loose in the city. Your player characters are employed/sentenced by Proxi Marchandises Technologiques to recuperate the five species, and are given enhanced (super illegal) Sleeves to accomplish the job.

…And then at some point, I gotta do episode five, too. Holy hell, what great TV that was, eh?

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

Bringing you this Avatar Alert to announce two important updates for 5 Million Worlds Press.

Mothership Month 2025:
Flatline on the Blocks

Flatline on the Blocks is a thick 52pg zine from 18 veteran Mothership creators. Visit the Spinal Crux district on the megacity X-class space station Prospero’s Dream, and interact with 20 Blocks over 20 Spreads and their scheming factions. The ticking doom mechanic, inspired by Mythic Bastionland’s Myth Omens, beats the pulse quicker to disaster.

The first couple days are critical for the campaign’s success, so we’re offering a free and exclusive 100% embroidered, iron-on patch to all physical tier backers in the first 48 hours.

Xeno-plants crawl through the vents, noodle shop mobsters operate black markets, monobikes burn rubber down dingy streets, rogue slugtech creeps up out of toilets, a dead warship slumbers, scrappers chip away at the infrastructure underfoot, and crowds clamor for the new MindOrb cybermods unknowingly powered by a sinister source.

In the Spinal Crux District, every Block has its secrets. Most bad, but some good—if you know where to look.

Sign up for Pre-Launch!

Twisting Unseen, for Zine Month 2026

My work on this Mothership Month project took a much larger amplitude than I had foreseen. Combined with some advice I received, I’ve decided to postpone the Twisting Unseen BackerKit launch for Zine Month in February 2026.

This actually works out better because this way, the 5MW RPG will have its official beta release before the project launches, which makes it easier for folks to tie it in with the DIN Tail zine, too. You can still follow along here.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

Tis the season to get Back to Work, Back to School, and all that bit of rentrée funsies, eh? And check it, we’re cruising in a new spaceship, straight from Carly A-F! About time I upgraded from that ol’ public domain junker that did us so well for so long, eh?

Other than prepping for BIG THINGS™, I had my vacation this month. Spent a good amount of hours in the sun, and got out over thirty sands-of-Toulon-touched Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption postcards to folk. Still technically on staycation this week, but you know how the old saying goes.

In this month’s Rokaner Report, I’m chatting up Twisting Unseen one last time before its 23 September Launch, got a digital release sale on Not Enough Scoundrels for y’all, and I’ve statted out five creatures from my in-universe Mothership zine SEEN ON THE VOID’S EDGE #043.

Twisting Unseen

With less than one month to the BackerKit launch, I’d like to talk about what folks will be getting with Twisting Unseen.

First up: the Rai Jump-9 Colony Ship patch, which is free for all physical tier backers in the first 48 hours. This is the crew patch for all the dedicated folk, including the player characters, who joined this wild venture to this far-flung world of Rai.

Then of course, the zine itself. It’s looking like this will be a 36-40 page adventure module, with layout by the lauded . Every physical zine comes with three inserts: double-sided map tiles for the players to build the Superstructure: one side is the initial, player-facing grid and the other side features cartography from Ripley Matthews!

Along with the core zine pack are two thematic bundles. Since Twisting Unseen is a continuation of the Sleeper Crew Adventures series, you can also grab Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones and the Sleeper Crew Duo. With the Unseen bundle, you can continue the adventure in other Panic Engine games with The Unseen City with Cloud Empress RPG, and the brand new 5MW Star Cluster: DIN Tail for 5MW RPG.

I’m especially excited to get back to planetary adventure writing with the DIN Tail, a series of stars controlled by the authoritarian Dani, and illustrations from Carly A-F! Follow the launch to learn more as the campaign unfolds!

Not Enough Scoundrels: Digital Release Sale

I am super pleased to announce that RV Games has gotten the first lot of Scoundrels out the door to backers!

Dag, it does feel good to hit a schedule on time. Just one major hiccup, this go-round, with the patches. I’ll spare y’all the details, but in the future, I will order patches much sooner instead of waiting until the zine goes to print (and use a different vendor).

With backers receiving their copies, Not Enough Scoundrels is now seeing its digital release! For one week only, it’s 20% off, on sale for $8 USD. If you missed the BackerKit, this is a good time to grab this space trucker & smuggler zine of spaceships, star systems, and scumbags.

Five Dangerous Xenos

Ok, clearly I’m inspired by the ongoing Alien: Earth. No spoilers, but the show is turning out to be a whole hell of a lot different than I’d imagined… Even before the show started, I started sketching out some notes:

That’s right, the Travellers have returned, for All Roads Lead to Rome. More on that soon(ish). For now, let’s look at some other freaky and dangerous aliens that you can add to your Mothership games:

Thumbhead

C: 65 Maul 3d10, I: 65, W: 4(30).
Dactyl Crush: Body Save or take 1 Wound (Blunt).

• Named for the nest of the digit-like eyestalks that sprout from its wide-based body. Over two dozen many-knuckled fingers sprout from its circular underside, and another whirl of manipulator finger-limbs fidget nervously under its massive mouth of jagged molar-canines.

• An adept hunter of its forests, climbing and digging and running for its prey: creatures with much more sensitive senses than humans. Smart enough not to ignore an easy meal. Repulsed by Androids, avoiding them unless they pose a threat.

Eye-Horse

C: 40 Kick 2d10, I: 35, AP: 5, W: 2(20).
Loving Stare: Sanity Save, or a rush of adoration fills your brain or Logic Core. Justify your adoration to your fellow crewmembers, and bring this majestic creature a delicious gift. Suffocate: Body Save, or its tendril-hair wraps around limbs and snakes into open orifices. STR Check[-] to escape (See PSG, Oxygen pg. 33.1)

• Moose-sized. Travel in small herds of 1d10+5. When faced with predators, they arrange in a pattern to stare all together. They do not harm any who come bearing gifts of fruit or other herbivorous foodstuffs.

Meltoid

C: 34 Melt 1 Wound (Fire/Chemical), I: 56, W: 7(10).

• Nasty, stinky gastropod-like creatures. Vary greatly in size and form. These carnivorous creatures pirate their prey’s DNA to create slug-analogues, like deformed copies. Black orbs grow in irregulat places across their bodies, their fecal eggs.

• When taking the first Wound, it splits into two W: 3(10) Meltoids. On second Wound they split into two W: 1(10) Meltoids. On final Wound, they burst in a gush of acid, scattering their fecal eggs. Body Save, or 2d10 DMG (as Flamethrower, but it’s Acid).

“James”

C: 66 Slash 3d10, Fire Breath (as Flamethrower), Tail Gore 1 Wound (Bleeding) I: 66, DR: 5, AP: 10, W: 1(80).
Deploy Wings: Blown to the ground, prone.
Grab & Fuck up: Body Save, or grabbed. If flying, this fucker’ll drop you.

• Nearly 4 meters tall. Cyborg wingspan of 12 meters. Multifaceted scales reflect laser fire. Takes double DMG from rocket fire.

The Drummer

C: 55 Concussive Blast 6d10, I: 50, DR: 2, AP: 7, W: 5(20).

• A smidge smaller than an Indian elephant, with a lower backside and wider face. Its back is covered in a tear-proof carapace—protection from flying predators. Similarities between xeno ruins and the Drummer’s physiology leads exobiologists and sophontologists to posit them as relatives to the extinct civilization.

• The Drummer’s face is capable of extremely powerful sonic propulsion, common to many creatures on its world. With each Wound lost, its Concussive Blast loses 1d10 in DMG.

I’ll likely add these to the quiet (neglected) 5MW Blog soon, so they can live there on their own. One day, I’d like to update that SEEN ON THE VOID’S EDGE in-universe zine into a rebel conspiracy alien hunter’s guide. Give each creature its own adventure, kind of similar to Distress Signals. Add more creatures. Too many project ideas, too little time!

Signing off,
Chris Airiau

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.

Sign up for Twisting Unseen Pre-Launch

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

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:

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?

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.

Sign up for Pre-Launch!

Signing off,
Chris Airiau

Where do the days go? Feels like last week I was sending April’s Liminal Horror-themed newsletter out. Pas de repos pour les braves.

May was layout month for Not Enough Scoundrels. Last week, I sent pre-print PDFs to backers and ordered a test copy print. The community support I received to turn this modest ships + tables supplement into a 44pg, full-fledged space trucker and smuggler module was a true privilege. I’m very proud of this work. I think it really brings some solid, grounded tools to a Mothership campaign, and I’m excited to hear back from folks using it.

If you missed the campaign, you can sign up for a Late Pledge of Not Enough Scoundrels on BackerKit. With RV Games, we’re aiming to begin the fulfillment process by the end of June.

Twisting Unseen Pre-Launch

Since Not Enough Scoundrels is quickly wrapping (learning from the last go-round!), I am thrilled to at long last announce the pre-launch for my next Sleeper Crew Adventure: Twisting Unseen!

Twisting Unseen is a 36pg Mothership RPG adventure module inspired by BLAME! and Pandorum, where the players Build the Superstructure. While the Sleeper Crew were on ice, unstable Gate technology twisted this failed colony with distant worlds, timelines, and realities. Then the Gates died. Untold years later, the Crew awaken within a subterranean superstructure whose descendants have forgotten open skies exist. The reactivated Gates are their only ticket out of this transdimensional hellhole.

Twisting Unseen has been through three rounds of playtesting, two development cycles, and is now in editor Will Jobst’s hands. Crowdfunding will bring us the final mile to get this adventure into production. This will be the quickest turnaround yet, :)

Sign up for the Pre-Launch on BackerKit to be notified when Twisting Unseen goes live this fall.

Physical zine releases!

When in Rome is a 24pg one-shot Mothership adaptation of last year’s hit film, Alien: Romulus. Evade (legally distinct!) parasitic xenos, illustrated by Brandon Yu a.k.a. Chaoclypse, and a navigate much more interesting Android problem that await you on the space station Caesar/Augustus.

After selling out its first run, When in Rome is available again at RV Games and The Lost Bay Studio.

Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones is 48pg Cronenbergian mystery where the Sleeper Crew awaken in a decrepit mountain bunker turned to a sordid biomech factory for disgusting lil creatures. Little do the PCs know, they’re on a timer before they Become the Mutant… and have to start again.

For now, Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones is only available at ratti incantati. They’ve only got a handful, so nab ’em while you can!

Itch Game Jams to Check Out

I know I swore off impromptu games until I finish what I’ve started, buuuuut sometimes a little palate cleanser goes a long way. These are the jams that have most tickled my fancy recently:

Build a Better World TTRPG Jam

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” Ursula K. Le Guin

Along with Iko and The Lost Bay community, I’m glad to invite game makers to the Build a Better World TTRPG Jam. Come help folk imagine a better future, and explore ways to build a better world through your games. Designers can submit any kind of TTRPG material—games, hacks, adventures, settings, handouts—for any system or kind of game.

Find jam resources and potential collaborators at The Lost Bay server. The jam lasts until summer solstice on June 21st, 2025.

SF Game Jams

For the fourth year running, Staggered Amusement is running an early summer game jam for sci-fi one-shot adventures. Each year, the entries are fun and ususally free, I’d recommend folk check out Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam 2025. I hope to submit a one-page 5MW RPG adventure (the first since October 2024!), which will double for my Build a Better World Jam entry, :)

Now, how about a Mothership RPG pamphlet game jam? The Triptech 2025 Game Jam just ended on May 25th, and received 25+ entries! I really wanted to submit a pamphlet for this one, but just ran out of time. I spent the better part of last week writing and laying out a DOUBLE FEATURE adventure, THE HOUSE OF LIGHT.

I had the idea to play with the format with a hexmap overlapping between the flaps, with the “dungeon” on the inside center & right. It’s a hexcrawl funnel, with the survivors becoming normal PCs to go into the dungeoncrawl. I’ll definitely release THE HOUSE OF LIGHT at some point though, and I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, check out the pamphlets of the Triptech 2025 Game Jam here!

Finally, the Horrors of the Americas Jam for Liminal Horror was extended to July 15th! For submissions that follow the template the LH team released, they do hope to create a POD book collecting them all.

To better represent my home state, I whiled away a day vastly expanding the map of Gnaw Bone I submitted last month, with the hopes of writing NPC owners for each of the Flea Markets, and adding a Motorcycle Bar, Winery, and a Whisky Distillery. (Also, with a town name like Gnaw Bone, it’d be too on the nose to do weird zombie-likes, right? Right?)

La Esquina del Rol

Lastly, from La Esquina del Rol had me on their newsletter for an interview about 5MW RPG. It was revitalizing to talk about the space game again, as I’ve been so occupied with other projects and far from the stars that always call me. Mario’s been on a roll with some great interviews, I’d definitely suggest subscribing to the La Esquina del Rol newsletter to keep it on your radar.

Otherwise, this summer brings some more editing work, development on Milk Bar RPG, continued playtests for A Dark Harvest (we just finished Phase 1 of 3), drafting some more Liminal Horror, and wrapping Scoundrels fulfillment. Carving out some time in the between spaces is the goal. I’ll keep y’all in the loop.

Signing off,
Chris Airiau

April was an intense month writing and editing.

Working with Ryan Creedon on Straight Arrows has been a very rewarding process, her writing is some of the most incredibly human I’ve seen in Mothership. I built on ’s Twisting Unseen development notes and turned that over to Will Jobst (phew!). Last Friday, I received Marx Shepherd’s final editing notes for Not Enough Scoundrels, and layout crunch begins NOW. I’ve felt immensely grateful this month to work with such talented folk, and they’ve all kept me very busy!

This month’s 5MW Rokaner Report brings us through the veil of reality to an Earth twisted by the cosmic terrors of Liminal Horror, an investigative horror ttrpg by , Josh Domanski and Zach Hazard Vaupen! The team is running a Horrors of the Americas Game Jam (this month’s freebie is my submission!), and their 350+ page book, Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition went live on BackerKit two weeks ago!

I’m five sessions in to a Sunday night game of Liminal Horror, putting my players through a Shadow-altered version of The Bloom, and the game’s Deluxe Edition is my most anticipated project this year. I was eager to talk to Josh Domanski about this chonky book, so let’s get to it!

Interview with Josh Domanski

Chris: Heya Josh, thanks for coming on for 2025’s first interview! This newsletter focuses more on the Sci-Fi side of SFFH, so in case folks don’t know, could you tell us about Liminal Horror, you and the team, and what this new Deluxe Edition is all about?

Josh: Liminal Horror is a rules-lite survival horror RPG about normal characters and their fight against horrors in a contemporary time period. It’s a descendant of Cairn and Into the Odd, with crucial tweaks to make it sing for running scenarios that feel like your favorite horror movie or TV show. It’s a game about surviving mysteries rather than definitively solving them, with a big focus on how the horrors tangibly change your characters.

Goblin Archives wrote the original Liminal Horror zine, released in 2021. I joined the team in early 2022 as a co-writer and main designer for most of our projects since, though that’s a role we often trade back and forth. We expanded our team in 2024 to include Zach Hazard Vaupen as the official art director, though Zach made the cover for the initial zine release, so he’s been working closely with the system even longer than I have.

The Deluxe Edition takes that original 40ish page zine and blows it out to include additional player options, advice on running and creating horror, and a whole slew of new tools for getting your horror to the table. The end result is looking like it’s going to be over 350 pages once we wrap up the layout.

Chris: One big reason I’m stoked for the Deluxe Edition is to dive into those tools to build new Liminal Horror investigations. We’ve worked together on a couple of Mothership projects, and you have an incredible critical eye for what a GM needs at the table. Could you talk about what experiences helped you develop this skill, and how you approached this work for the Facilitator’s Guide in the Deluxe Edition?

Josh: This sounds glaringly obvious, but one of the most important things for me as a writer is that I run games. After Covid hit, I started weekly online open-table sessions. I was running a different one shot with a different system every single week, and that same server is still going to this day. While I favor rules-lite games, I run a mix of neo-trad, OSR, and storygames, so I’ve gotten a feel for a bunch of cultures of play. I believe I’ve run or played in north of 100 systems at this point if you also count hacks. When you have very little time to prepare and you run this many new things back to back, you start to get a feel for the type of material in games and published modules that actually matters to the experience at the table.

In the Deluxe Edition, the Facilitator’s Guide is my baby. When I got into horror RPGs, it took about a dozen sessions before I felt like I truly nailed the right tone and tension. Running effective horror is quite a bit different than running standard fantasy or sci-fi. For the Facilitator’s Guide, I’ve distilled years worth of lessons into 70-ish pages, with a focus on learning to run the game better and actually get your ideas to the table. We’ve also included sections often missing from similar systems like how to write good clues, make good monsters, and adapt your favorite horror stories or modules to Liminal Horror. The major focus of the book is to support play, so this section is a key part of that.

Chris: That’s a metric fuckton of experience to share. I feel like Liminal Horror games have a greater effect on me, as a Facilitator and player, than standard Lovecraft mythos games because the horrors are new. The Deluxe Edition contains a whole bestiary of new horrors. Can you talk about you and Gobin Archives’ process for writing the Catalog of the Strange?

Josh: The basic stat blocks for Liminal Horror take up all of about two lines of text, easy to generate. For the Catalog, we focus on that core principle of supporting play. So we read a bunch of bestiaries, like Monster Overhaul from Skerples and theMerry Mushmen’s Folklore Bestiary, and pulled out common, interesting elements. Along with stats, you get an explanation of these creatures to help figure out how to use them, a list of creature variants, and additional elements like monster-specific Fallout. Most are set to roll tables, so you can just grab some dice and let fate decide.

The Catalog of the Strange is the single largest section in the book. We wanted to make sure we had three things: enough distinct creature types to cover a wide range of scenarios, classic creatures and fantasy analogs for quick conversion, and truly unique entries. Beyond those goals, what makes for a good range of creatures? Annoying minions, tough creatures, incredibly intimidating “bosses,” and because this is Liminal Horror, strange cosmic horrors. We’ve broken that down into Lesser Horrors, Greater Horrors, Resonant Horrors, and Ritual Users, and this expands further into Factions, Cults, and Dead Gods.

These categories provide the basic roles for the creatures, making it easy to focus on the horror aspects. A big focus of Liminal Horror is corruption, so many of these creatures were once human, while others have leaked into our reality from strange dimensions. Then we have a little fun with the entries, like the Opportunistic Radioactive Cannibals (ORCs). My favorite entry is the Creepers, a play on the Fresno Nightcrawler. That’s one for the true cryptid freaks out there. I can almost guarantee someone is going to read a little bit of text in there and immediately know they need to inject the Creepers into an upcoming session.

Chris: Haha, that’s not the first time you’ve teased the Creepers, looking forward to reading about them. At the time of writing, the Deluxe Edition has unlocked five Stretch Goals, including the new physical zine Case Files 001. From the name, I feel like you have more planned, eh? What’s in Case Files 001, and what other Stretch Goals have you excited?

Josh: The Case Files format comes from stuff like Thoughts & Prayers from Stockholm Kartell and Carcass Crawler for OSE, a collection of small things that wouldn’t get printed alone. We’re reviving slashed pieces of the Deluxe Edition for Case Files along with a few short scenarios. This is the first issue in what we’re planning on at least doing annually to get new scenarios and ideas out to folks. They’ll be solid interstitial releases while we work on pulling bigger projects on our plate together.

One stretch goal I’m excited about, but not quite sure we’ll ultimately hit is The Bureau: Remastered. The 2022 module is a fan favorite that has temporarily fallen out of print. We’re using the reprint opportunity to tweak the module a bit, add a new encounter system, toss in a bonus floor, and make some quality of life improvements. Hitting that stretch goal is going to ensure our attention is focused on wrapping that first in lieu of some of the other projects we’re working on.

Chris: Gotta say, I would also love to see The Bureau: Remastered come to fruition quicker! But also other projects, 👀, haha. Thanks for sharing your process and work, Josh, really looking forward to this big beautiful book. I highly recommend folk check out the Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition, on BackerKit now.

Horrors of the Americas Jam

The setting for Liminal Horror focuses on the Pacific Northwest, and the Horrors of the Americas Jam invites designers to include their own regional horrors, settings, weird folk and locations from anywhere in North and South America. What’s wonderful too is that the Liminal Horror team have provided free design templates, with the goal of including the 25+ entries into a Horrors of the Americas POD book.

I’ve lived in France for 15+ years, but I grew up in southern Indiana. My entry focuses on fictionalized flea markets, operators, and Resonant Artifacts of Gnaw Bone, IN. Grab it for free on itch! If I have the time before the end of the Jam, I would love to build out the Flea Market NPCs, Resonant Artifacts, and Wares tables with another spread. This micro-setting also connects to the Liminal Horror module I’ve been tinkering with for over a year now. I wonder if any southern Hoosiers will notice what event I’m aiming to create a module around…

Signing off,

Chris Airiau

Hope y’all had a nice equinox. The daily increase of daylight here in France has boosted my mood, and I am looking forward to even more sun.

March was an intense month! I finished:

• A new draft of Twisting Unseen to hand to Christian Sorrell for development.

• Revisions on Not Enough Scoundrels to include Josh Domanski’s development notes, and handed it to Marx Shepherd for copyediting.

• My portion of editing work on Devil’s Due.

• The lion’s share of editing on Johnson Squared.

• An outline draft and playtest for an adventure a publisher invited me to write (secretttssss).

And of course, none is truly done yet. Even still, I’m amazed I accomplished so much in four weeks. I was also invited to a couple of interviews, including my first podcast interview forthcoming on Diogo Nogueira’s Weird Games and Weirder People.

Lastly, there is art for the 5MW Forms! I decided it was best to work with an artist I know and whose work I adore: Roque Romero. And holy moly, what a good choice that was. Check it out at the end, :)

Liminal Horror Deluxe

On Sundays, at long last, I am running a Liminal Horror campaign. I shot my players the free Investigators rulebooks, and we slid from One Night at Shelterwood Inn into The Bloom. While I often rally about science fiction, my primary school years were filled with horror reading, from Goosebumps-obsessed to King-obsessed, while writing (bad) horror/slipstream fiction. Playing Liminal Horror feels like a dark homecoming, invigorating and exciting.

So naturally, I’m excited for the Liminal Horror Deluxe BackerKit on 15 April. Goblin Archives has been giving sneak peeks at the investigator, facilitator and “bestiary” chapters, with future looks at the new book coming up, too. If you’re into contemporary horror—think: Control, SCP, X-Files, Delta Green, but you play a normal person slowly transformed by dimensional horrors—check out the Liminal Horror Deluxe pre-launch page!

At the Deluxe launch, two other Liminal Horror projects are also launching! Adam STATIONS is working with Strega Wolf Eden on I Don’t Belong Here, a supplement filled with horrors, Fallouts, Resonant Artifacts, spells, oddball NPCs & environments and a solo adventure by Allen Hall. Perhaps without surprise, this thick, art-stuffed sparkbook is inspired by the lyrics of Radiohead. Sign up to be notified on launch!

Allen Hall is also crowdfunding his own Liminal Grimoire, a box set of pamphlet supplements, including five adventures and solo rules for playing Liminal Horror. This is the perfect kit for solo roleplayers and GMs starting a Liminal Horror campaign. Join the launch party for this collection of terrors!

A Dark Harvest, Cerdo remaster playtests

This month, I started playtests for A Dark Harvest, my remaster of the Cerdo Cycle, building it into a system-wide setting and filling each point of interest with encounter tables, faction intrigue, and adventures. I’d like to present my homegame materials I’m making for the players, as I run and write this game. The weekly pressure has been a bit intense, haha, but it’s sort of like a nonstop game jam, as I write chunks for the game, each Thursday.

As I mentioned back in the September 2024 Rokaner Report, this campaign has multiple successive scenarios, inspired by the structure of Another Bug Hunt. I’m testing out the corporate espionage Sleeper Crew Directive set-up: steal intel on Electrorenzo Resources and Cerdo-Sys activities. Out of the two choices for their “Official” job in the system—Rock Hopping and asteroid mining, or Gas Diving the clouds of a Super-Jupiter—they chose the latter on the C2-Thunder Aerostat Station.

Building off the players’ reactions to the barebone prep material has filled me with confidence that the setting holds tension and intrigue for players to dig into. They’ve spent a lot of time investigating factions and their motivations, and have plans to put in place next session before boarding the Gas Diver Platform. I’ve written a push-your-luck gas diving mini-game we’ll test, and then I’ll probably have time to set up the main adventure for C2-Thunder: The Sinking of Waning Twilight.

5MW Avatar Forms, Art Reveal

Meet the five Forms of the Avatar’s Primer for 5MW RPG, courtesy of Roque Romero!

A friend from The Lost Bay server, Roque Romero is an artist from Spain, known for his work in Cairn 2E, Picket Line Tango for Mothership, Codex R for Troika!, and his character illustrations for Valley100. Being on the same timezone were able to work closely on the iterations for these character portraits, but tbh, it was mostly me just being like, “YES! YESS! YESSSSS!” Roque just saw straight to the heart of the project, and I feel like the game’s vibes are superbly reflected in the Form art.

Roque’s art jump-started the writing for the Forms. I find it immensely inspiring, and started outlining possible recent past and current ambitions and the tools to pursue them. Visards are getting a spectrum of unique Uplink VR/hacker tools. Fleshers come with various biotech seeds. Emulants, a range of cybernetics and programs. Looper specialities are their contacts and the spacetravel equipment.

The Trads took a minute longer, but after my talk with Diogo, I decided to go with the cultural baggage that comes with the hubris of being ill-equipped for space but still goin’ for it. What worlds would they come from, that insisted on space travel when the other Forms are so clearly better suited for it? An fun writing exercise, as I’m not just seeking any Trad world, but those who strive for space travel.

Anyway, I’m waiting on that news I hinted at in the last newsletter to kick into overdrive for writing 5MW RPG. In the meantime, I’m hoping in April to complete Not Enough Scoundrels for digital fulfillment (fingers crossed!), hand in the SECRET adventure, get Twisting Unseen into editor Will Jobst’s hands (this is a big maybe), and start another Mothership Month editing job for RAC Computing’s Straight Arrows.

That’s all from me this month. Take care of each other, folks.

Signing off,

Chris Airiau