Theft and bloggery

It's things what I read and liked and remembered recently here we go:

Firstly I'd be remiss not to mention the motherfuckin BLOGGIES are on right now, you can catch up and still vote on some I think, sachagoat hosting this year, click here. I was a finalist last year and I got a little rabbit

Dungeon doll does OSR character creation bloodborne style, really nice design

Gorgon Bones on why RPGs are wargames, I think we all know this here but it's nice to read it written out so clearly

Cool little dungeon by a swamp in space, you can get it as a pocketfold too

Columbary ttrpg interviews Jettila Lewis who did the art for one of the coolest looking Mothership month zines, some other good interviews on the feed too

under-stars making paper minis hell yeah

Excerpt of some cool as hell upcoming non-european sword and sorcery if you just feel like reading a story

One of the most OSR bands out there Castle Rat just crowdfunded their next album and you can still get in on a late pledge

Interview with one of my fave game designers Suda51

see you space cowblog...

GRAVEROBBERS 2025

 (once again!) RETURN OF THE MACK (top of the world!)

Took a break for much of 2024. Creative burnout, but mostly the realities of trying to make this hobby work as a career were proving untenable. I'm not saying it can't be done, I know plenty of folks who make it happen and kick ass, but my approach wasn't working and I needed to rethink and regroup.

So here it is - all major personal projects still on indefinite hold. I can fiddle with stuff in my free time or work for hire, but the middle ground of self publishing just doesn't do it for me. Sales from my personal online store have hit pretty much absolute zero

I'm proud of what I did with GoGoGolf! on my own for instance, but since PWG has taken up publishing that game I've had a much better time of it. I love partnering with folks on stuff, the great reception to the Mothership box last year was further proof that this is the way forwards, even if I only had a small role in that one.

Anyway, time to get back to work.

2025:

- New stuff releasing. Bits I worked on last year, some even longer ago. If you like it when I write weird Mothership adventures you will be well fed.

- New new stuff. As in not RPG, early days on this one but your boy's got big plans, stay tuned

- The blog. Gonna try and get back into the swing of posting notes and other bits, no kind of regular schedule but all the sort of stuff I used to post fairly often. If there's anything specific you want to see on here just ask and I'll probably do it at some point

and a couple of other important bits

1. The big project. I've been calling it Odai 57 (and before that it was Odai 47, idk why I changed it, what do you like better?) But it's at the stage now where giving it a name is going to help, so allow me to announce

SPILT MILK
[and other mysteries]

A hardboiled mystery campaign setting for the Mothership RPG.

This is technically just for me so it doesn't count as self publishing, shut up. But I will be posting it in one form or another eventually. if you haven't seen me talk about it before it's basically:

a) a self-contained MoSh setting presented as the phonebook of a remote space station truck stop and the attached retail park. d100 working phone numbers, each attached to places, people, hundreds of new items and things to spend credits on. A hub world or rest stop for your campaign, or a just big load of scraps for you to scavenge from.

plus

b) a neo-noir mystery campaign taking place entirely within that setting. Players are adjusters, corpo detectives for an agency that insures androids. Say one goes missing, or shows up dead. Is it malfunction, or malfeasance? Get to the bottom of each case so that your company can pay out as little as possible.

That's enough on that for now but I'll be posting more about it as I continue tinkering. Call it the Odaiaries. I want to get this out in one form or another this year

and

2. Work. I fucking love doing this job folks, and I'm good at it. If you want to hire me, now's the time.

I've worked on huge projects with established companies and little zines from first time solo publishers. I write games and adventures, I edit and proofread and everything in between.

Get in touch, graverobbersguide[at]gmail[dot]com

Happy new year x

Rough Terrain Cards

I posted on bsky a little while ago about the Trench Crusade kickstarter, I’d followed the project for a while and was happy for their success but mentioned it wasn’t really my vibe

Well for something that’s not my vibe I’ve been doing a whole lot of hobbying around it already lmao

A lot of games have a rule for rough terrain, moving over particular surfaces affects speed and can incur penalties or damage. I think in TC it’s called difficult terrain, and then there’s also dangerous terrain

I thought an easy way to create some scatter pieces that could be used to implement this rule would be with old plastic cards. I used an expired cinema membership and train card. Idk if there’s a standard size for these for legal reasons or if every company uses the same manufacturer but they’re the exact same size, I reckon most cards will be. Not that it matters but it ends up looking nice and uniform whatever you use, and it’ll be easy to make more later

Anyway I just slapped some texture paste and paint on one side of each card and stuck down some bits, cardboard and lolly sticks from the recycling plus some citadel skulls. The idea was to make them still basically flat so that I can store them easily and models can stand on and move through them. But using these as bases for terrain with more height to provide cover would also work ofc

 also ended up using some resin which I hadn’t before, got mixed results but I’m p happy with how it all turned out. Idk how well they show up on camera but these look great in person. I was going to add more colour and pick out the details but I kinda like the monochrome effect of base coat/drybrush/wash. These are background after all. And I can always go over them later with more detail if I want

girl, same

It was a fun little project that didn’t take long at all and should be useful in games, I’d recommend giving these a go. You can even slip them back into your wallet to transport them

Oh and I ended up backing the ks after all, the rulebook’s a mess but the basics look fun and I expect they’ll clean it up before release, plus those Sultanate minis were too good to pass up. But it’s all free online and you can use kitbashed models anyway if you want to get stuck in

Mothership Month!

A load of zines from 3rd party creators are all crowdfunding at the same time right now over on backerkit, along with the big new MoSh book and magazine. I'm involved with two of them:

Awaiting the Burning Gods is about tomb raiding on an alien world. It includes a faction of smugglers and a whole sub module for them with generators and loot, plus a one shot I wrote to induct PCs into the criminal underworld. This is a social investigation adventure, a Coen brothers style clusterfuck waiting to happen on a remote space station. Some really good NPCs in this one, not to mention all the other stuff you get

The Dose Makes the Poison is an investigation behind the facade of big pharma. I did some developmental editing on this one and it's a lot of fun, hits all the notes you want from a Mothership game but with a more Bioshock esque art deco aesthetic than usual MoSh stuff. Comes with in world audio which is always a good time in play

Check them out and support some independent creators! There's over 20 projects to look through, I personally love the look of PK49 with its Y2K punk vibes, and The Interloper looks great, Joel's stuff is always good. Every project is already successfully funded too, so you can just browse and pick up the ones you want

So many new ways to die in space. Have fun x

GoGoGolf! is out now!

Head over to the Possible Worlds store and pick up a physical copy of my OSR style adventure game that’s about golf for some reason for just $5USD! Click right here

Still working on the Mothership mystery setting - phonebook is about 90% mapped out and 1/3 filled in, and I’ve revised and reiterated the cases yet again, think I’ve got a solid starting adventure down now. Will try to playtest soon, hopefully can get the whole phonebook working by then too! Man, it’s tough writing something that needs so much prep work before you can even start testing it

Conversely, I’m back at work on the miniatures game, which I’m constantly testing and iterating on. It’s pretty good you guys. Very cool to have a game I made that I can just play a bit of for fun whenever I want?? Hope to have more to share on that before too long.

Busy busy! Feels good to be back in the saddle

Mysteries within mysteries

 Working on the phonecrawl adventure - a murder mystery setting for Mothership, mapped as d100 working phone numbers. Twin Peaks in an airport mall.

Once again it’s being rebuilt from the ground up, but progress is still being made from before as I’m using a lot of the same Lego pieces. Folks who supported the project by buying the ashcan version way back when will still get the final thing when it comes out. Also idk if it’s still called Odai 57. We’ll see.

Anyway. Update number one is that I’m shifting the campaign frame slightly. A maintenance worker being drawn into these cases as auxiliary mysteries to their main job is a fun conceit and would be great for a short story or two, but in game it’s an unnecessary layer between the players and the juice of the thing.

So now they’re insurance adjusters, getting to the bottom of android accidents and malfunctions and finding someone to blame so that their bosses don’t have to pay out. This has a more cynical MoSh feel and gives us some great actionable verbs for each case: Find fault, recover assets, prevent further losses. I’m this close to calling them the Android Claims Adjustment Bureau or something lmao

Right now I’m building out some of these cases. The structure here is vital as this adventure doesn’t have one otherwise - all areas being theoretically available at all times negates classic dungeon exploration, and I’m avoiding combat scenarios almost entirely  - though they still make a great failstate.

One of the main inspirations for the setting is the Phoenix Wright games. In those you examine a scene until you find all the clues, then the game unlocks the next scene and you can travel between locations freely. Obviously there are key differences between mediums, here players decide when they’ve found enough clues and where they want to go next, but the flow is similar enough.

Looking into how this flow is built in these games is proving helpful for organising my own cases. The above image comes from a presentation by the series director and covers the progression of a case in-game. You don’t need to understand the text, the key bit is that little loop in the middle. There’s a similar diagram in the Warden’s Operations Manual. Basically, the body of a case is a series of smaller mysteries, little question-answer loops that build until the denouement and climax.

These loops are crucial to play in a mystery-focused game. The overall solve can, and should, feel huge and out of reach, so players need these little victories that propel things along. Structurally I’m thinking of them like rooms in an exploration game or fights in a combat based one. They’re not the treasure or boss at the end of the dungeon, which the players might not even get to, but without them there’s really no adventure at all.

The difference is in the verbs. Players fight a monster and explore a room, but what they need to be able to do with clues is make connections. Everything has to point to something else, building up the staircase of little answers to hopefully get to the big one at the end. As the WOM says, the game also has to work if they fail, but ultimately this is a game of connecting dots. I’ve just got to write a whole load of dots.

Will try to keep posting as the project develops. Don’t want to give too many answers away though x

Mothership 1E

 

Five years ago I started working in ttrpgs. One of my first jobs was a little pamphlet adventure for a game that wasn’t really out yet, but that I’d seen enough of to know it was going to be cool. It was fun to write, people seemed to like it. I hadn’t even seen Alien.

Fast forward five years and 2d5 published adventures later, and Mothership has finally landed. I’m so proud to see this little game grow into the horrific behemoth it’s become.

You can get the box set for Mothership here, including a new starter adventure that I contributed to. You can also get the core rules for free. Also free are a companion app for Apple and Android (no relation), and more community resources and helpful fellow Teamsters than you can shake a space stick at.

I hope you all have fun dying horribly for many years to come x