Bright Future?

Well, we have returned from the forest in one piece and with our health bar at least a little refreshed from a couple of nights spent sitting out under the stars. Getting out the office was not just a great chance to chill and play games though but also an opportunity to take stock of the past few months, all of which have been a bit of a blur.

As it happens the new issue has been doing pretty well. We still need to shift a couple of hundred more before I can do anything as gauche as pay myself but having almost packed it in after issue 6, things are in a much better place as of today and 2026 is looking like being a big year for the magazine. Print, it turns out is not in fact dead, so once again a huge thank you to everyone that has bought a copy so far.

That has though also thrown our whole online operations into sharp relief, I'd hoped to be able to commission a lot more original writing for the website but so far it's proven to be a net negative both in terms of time and the bank account, so I'm running through a few options this weekend and one way or another will make a few changes next week.

Anyway, that's for me to worry about and you to not and right now I need to get ready for tonight's attempt at pretending we're still in our 20s, so on that note I'll leave you to read about a couple of gorgeous looking new books which showcase what you get when artists and writers can develop a partnership and work in tandem (spoiler: good stuff is what you get) and hopefully enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Till next time,

John x

Currently crowdfunding and well worth a look...

Islands of Weirdhope

Writer/game designer David Blandy and artist Daniel Locke return to the mid-future ecopunk world of their ruin-delving rules light, procedure heavy survival game ECO MOFOS with Islands of Weirdhope. A standalone expansion to the setting, this time your misfit mutant punks get to set sail upon the very high seas in search of Corpo bashing adventures, island exploration, more orb absorption and perhaps even finding a safe haven from which to rebuild the world anew, better.

Despite finding it almost impossible to read the original ECO MOFOS book without occasionally doing an impersonation of Rick from The Young Ones, it was one of the most exuberantly fun RPGs to have dropped through our letterbox over the last year or so. Taking the well tested Into The Odd, Cairn etc engine, ECO MOFOS stuffed it into a kaleidoscopic post-apocalyptic chassis, notably ditching the usual fetish for unrelenting misery porn that comes with after-the-fall games, to produce something weirder and ultimately more hopeful.

Yes, the world has gone to shit, but now all the billionaire freaks who caused our downfall have self-exiled themselves off-planet, the left behind who have inherited this brave new world can start again, perhaps this time learning to live as one with a planet which has gained sentience. I mean it's not all sunshine and rainbows of course and your commitment to peace, love and understanding may crumple the first time you come across a spiked cricket bat wielding giant ant but still, it's the thought that counts.

Arriving with the benefit of an additional two years of play testing and refinement to the system, Islands of Weirdhope then introduces new backgrounds for your punks, new rules for exploring the watery world and generating random archipelagos to investigate and over two dozen adventures sites waiting to be combined into an ongoing campaign. It's strange, it's fun, it looks great, and thanks to this new book we get to be punk pirates, which unlike the amyl is something never to be sniffed at.

Islands of Weirdhope, on Backerkit now until Dec 3

Back it now!

Loin du Feu

Fate, now there's name you don't hear too much any more with even the system's publisher, Evil Hat, mainly focused on PbtA or Forged in the Dark games these days. Still, that hasn't stopped new French publisher Maudit Village from adopting it for Loin du Feu, a lovely looking new RPG which transports us to a dark, magical fairy tale France.

Published in both French and English, (so relax all of you who've been using Duolingo to play chess of late rather than actually do your language practice, or is that just me?), Loin du Feu is split into 4 sections each devoted to a specific region of France, each one featuring a story and accompanying adventure created by a different artist and writer team working in partnership.

Starting up in the North of France Claire Duvivier and Lola Penicaud invite us to Carnival season, where the church's suspicious eye watches for signs of magical heresy. Natacha Forel and Julie Benbassat take us to the mist and monster haunted streets of Lyon, whilst Morgan Stankiewiez and Diane Thirault's chapter deals with witches escaping vengeful inquisitions in the Languedoc. Finally we head to the sun bleached tropics in the company of Ketty Steward and Tarmasz for an encounter between an island's spirits and an unwelcome newcomer.

I can't say I had a Fate RPG on my bingo card for the remainder of 2025 but Loin du Feu looks like a beguiling book from an ambitious new publisher (special shout out there to Bruxelles based artist Coralie de Bondt, whose stunning cover first caught our eye), and seems like a good opportunity to dust off those fancy Fate dice, at least, one more time.

Loin du Feu, on Kickstarter until Dec 2

Back it now!

Previously in The Gazetteer...

The Spectral Vision of Gothic Romance - art curator Thomas Negovan's Century Guild presents an exploration of witchcraft and the occult through"vintage paperback cover art" - On Kickstarter until Nov 14.

All the gaming stuff that's kept us staring into the black mirror this week...

Roleplaying Games

++ If there's one thing I've learnt doing Wyrd Science the last few years it's that tabletop game publishers (from scrappy self publishers to the biggest companies, in fact the latter are often the worst) are absolutely terrible at promoting their releases. Like seriously, with one or two notable exceptions awful to a degree where I spend a weird amount of time trying to work out whether I've somehow managed to offend 90% of the people we've either covered or want to cover (I mean tbs that's not that unlikely...).

Anyway, we (obviously) have a lot of thoughts about what people do wrong but if you want to start figuring out what to do right then Clayton has thrown up some useful tips here, and tonight he'll be chatting with Ryan from The Weekly Scroll about just this on their twitch channel (tonight, Friday 10pm PST), so check it out.

++ WF Smith is organising another blogwagon event, this time it's a seasonal focused hex focused affair that you should get involved in, I shall leave them to explain it all in more detail.

++ The Melsonian Arts Council have just released a new free super cut down In Your Pocket edition of Troika, which you can download here (you'll want to click the Free Troika Quickstart Rules link in the demo section).

++ More interesting exegetical reading of the AD&D manual on the Blog of Forlorn Encystment, this time asking where are all the high level NPCs hanging out?

++ the Alpha test of the MORK BORG video game, Heresy Supreme, is now up on Steam for those who likes their seven miseries in eight bits.

Wargames

++ Nothing to report apparently, though GW are doing a big Warhammer reveal tonight, so hopefully some fun stuff will be announced there. Actually, if you read any good wargame focused blogs do give us a shout as it feels like slim pickings right now but I'm sure there's plenty of good stuff out there we're missing out on.

Boardgames

++ The second part of Mollie Russell's interview with Root/Molly House etc designer Cole Wehrle is up now on Wargamer and well worth a read.

++ Turns out ultra deluxe editions of boardgames might not be a license to print money after all...

Art, music, books, films, tv, weird shit, just all the other stuff we like...

++ Good to see Wyrd Science faves Castle Rat make The Guardian ahead of this weekend's London gig.

++ Sticking with The Guardian, this is an enjoyable look back at the making of classic 80s horror Poltergeist, complete with real skeletons, maggots and ghost semen.

++ Published earlier this year in Speculative Insight, we only stumbled across Abby Roberts's essay on national myth making and Tolkien this week, but we're glad we did. A much needed tonic after all the hand man of Gondor bullshit the world's worst man was spouting last week.

++ I very obviously do not need a £300+ Lego Starship Enterprise and yet I haven't closed this tab on my browser for three days now. Curious...

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/star-trek-u-s-s-enterprise-ncc-1701-d-10356

Seeing as we're off to abuse our eardrums and watch Leftfield play live tonight, like the 90s rave pensioners that we are, let's end this week's Gazetteer with their banging Guinness advert soundtracking Phat Planet, yep it still slaps.

Islands of Weirdhope

Loin du Feu

Roleplaying Games

Wargames

Boardgames

Made it this far, you obviously like something that we do, so why not buy a magazine and enjoy tens of thousands more words of it...