New Year, Newsletter 2

Endling is out in the world

Last time on Ink & Dice, I did a little 2024 look-back and talked about things I had read, played, and written in the past year. This time, we’ll be doing the look-ahead at 2025, and I’ll share some things that I have planned.

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Inside

• Ink & Dice

• Endling fulfillment

• In Ruins

• Liminal Grimoire

• 2025 Production Schedule

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Ink & Dice

New subscribers from the Endling Kickstarter campaign, welcome! I use this space both as a newsletter and as a game design blog. This issue is mostly newsletter stuff, with updates on ongoing and upcoming projects, but next time I’ll be sure to have some more game design thoughts or playable content for your games.

These usually come out on Tuesdays, and usually about twice a month.

For a sampling of the types of posts you might expect here, check out these top posts from last year:

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Endling fulfillment

As of this writing, Endling has been shipped to 90+% of backers and been released digitally on Itch.io. I’m very happy with how the book (and the tarot cards) turned out.

Endling books and the components of the deluxe bundle.

This was a pretty quick turnaround from the Kickstarter at the beginning of December to mid-January fulfillment, and I’m not sure I will be able to quite match that again in the future. However, with 3 campaigns under my belt from last year, I am ready to look ahead to bringing more TTRPG games and adventures to crowdfunding soon. Including…

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In Ruins

The game that I am planning to launch next is going to be called In Ruins. This will be a collaborative and competitive dungeon-building game. The game will be played in three phases:

• To start the game, the players together decide the history of the castle that they will be building, and then each player chooses a faction from a selection of classic fantasy groups such as kobolds, undead, cultists, etc.

• In the first phase of play, the players build the castle. Players play cards from a standard playing card deck that correspond to room types, each of which has a starting point value. Players take turns adding rooms to the castle, and after they draw each room, they say a little about what is found in that room. At the end of the first phase, each player chooses a room that holds their faction's entrance to the castle.

• In the second phase, the players (again using the deck of cards) ruin the castle. The cards allow them to damage the rooms, decreasing the rooms’ point values to varying degrees.

• In the third phase, the players take on the roles of their factions and claim rooms, starting at the entrances that they have already placed. Players want to claim rooms with high point values that are connected to their entrance (their "territory") while also trying to block other factions from spreading through the castle. At the end of the game, all rooms in a faction's territory contribute points toward the faction's final power score, which determines which faction controls the throne room (and which player wins the game).

At the end of the game, the players will have created a dungeon, fully stocked with competing factions as well as other NPCs, unaligned monsters, traps, and environmental hazards. This dungeon map can then be brought to the table and explored using the fantasy TTRPG of your choice.

The game draws inspiration from the world-building game The Ground Itself, the dungeon-building game Ex Umbra, and the map-populating game Beak, Feather, & Bone (if you are familiar with these games, you’ll notice the phase of In Ruins utilize their inspiration in roughly that order).

Play testing has begun (pictured below), and I hope to have art to share soon!

Play testing In Ruins

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Liminal Grimoire

Last year, I made a couple of adventures for the Liminal Horror RPG for the Liminal Horror Twisted Classics Jam on itch.io (if you missed it, I discussed my work on On The Hill here). I love bringing my digital products to the physical world, so On The Hill was printed as a zine and sold at PAXU and in The Lost Bay Studio web shop. However, One Hour Photo is a pamphlet, so it has not been printed yet.

I have mixed feelings on pamphlet adventures/games. On the one hand, I think it is a very fun design exercise to put everything you need to play a game onto one piece of paper (hence the popularity of the annual 1-page RPG Jam). I also think that trifold pamphlets have a very cool physical presence; opening a pamphlet is like unwrapping a gift, made with love and care by a game designer just for you.

The flip side of the pamphlet as a TTRPG product is that in every other part of our lives, pamphlets are free. Think about a highway rest stop, with its rack of pamphlets advertising local history museums, whitewater rafting excursions, and paintball battle fields. Dozens of pamphlets, free for the taking. When I have displayed pamphlet games at conventions, many people have assumed that they are free to take, and are surprised (horrified even) when I tell them that they need to pay for them.

Recently, though, I had an idea (by “I had,” of course I mean “I saw CBR+PNK and Exeunt Press’s Heist Holo Bundle and thought I could do that too”): What if the product isn’t one pamphlet? What if it’s a set of pamphlets, maybe 4-6 one-shot adventures, a set of solo rules, and maybe a character sheet or two? And what if they come in a box that is intended to sit on your bookshelf next to your other TTRPG books? Now that is something worth printing.

Thus, Liminal Grimoire was born (or at least conceived). This collection of pamphlet adventures for the Liminal Horror RPG will include One Hour Photo. I will adapt my solo dungeon crawl Moe’s House of Meat to the system. And I will write another 2 or 3 pamphlet adventures to fill out the collection (I’ve already got a couple cooking).

I don’t have a timeline for this one yet, but I think I will bring the box set to Kickstarter later this year, maybe as the follow-up to In Ruins. Time will tell.

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January Production Update

Production Schedule updated January, 2025

Here’s the updated production schedule for January, 2025. To help group some of the projects, I’ve added a yellow background to projects that I have written for other creators’ games. Each of these will be released sometime this year, and many will be going to crowdfunding for their initial print runs:

• Incursion on Synteck Station is an adventure that is part of Dirtbags! A sci-fi shooter TTRPG from The Dungeon’s Key.

• Starfall on Tyrian Peak and The Cloudlight Cellar are both introductory adventures that are part of Midnight Muscadines from Pandion Games.

• Down is the New Up is a solo Liminal Horror adventure that is part of I Don’t Belong Here from STATIONS.

The pink background groups the adventures that will be part of Liminal Grimoire. One Hour Photo released last year. Moe’s House of Meat just needs a quick run-through to convert it from The Lost Bay to Liminal Horror. Harvest Fest and Brine are the two new adventures that I am outlining now.

Otherwise, Endling is nearing completion, and In Ruins is heavy in development. The four On Hold projects at the bottom each have the potential for further development this year, depending on how these other big projects go. We’ve got lots of fun things coming!

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Thank you!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. This was a lot of housekeeping and project information. Next time I’ll dive back in with some design thoughts on one of these new projects I’ve got brewing. Until then…

—MAH