Systems Matter

It's been great seeing so many of you post pictures of your copies of the new issue on social media this week. At the same time it's also slightly weird as our own copies have been held up in Belgium customs for 2 weeks now so we're living vicariously through you. Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think of it, so do feel free to drop me an email any time. And if you haven't bought it yet, you still can! Who knows if we sell three or four hundred more in October we might do another one.

Right, plaintive plea made I will leave you to get on with the rest of the newsletter as I'm heading back to the UK for the weekend, need to leg it to catch my Eurostar and I've already lost half a day struggling to re-do the template for these emails. Read on for a lot of interesting stuff that floated past our retinas over the last week from a fascinating new project that hopes to preserve games for posterity to the return of Tolktober and a revived Nigel Kneale radio play to stick in your ears.

Till next week,

John x

Currently crowdfunding and worth a look...

Art & System

It’s a truth universally acknowledged, here at least, that the roleplaying game scene has the institutional memory of a concussed goldfish. Hence something like 90% of the arguments recorded in Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift, that took place in the mid 1970s, sounding remarkably like the kind of nonsense discourse you probably engaged in on social media last week .

Thankfully with more and more writers like Peterson, Shannon Appelcline and Ben Riggs doing the work documenting tabletop games’ history we are finally starting to establish a narrative that at least bares some semblance to reality. At the same time sterling efforts from publishers such as The MIT Press and CRC Press are making writing on both the theory, history and cultural relevance of roleplaying games available that would otherwise be siloed inside ludicrously priced academic textbooks.

The other strand to all this is, of course, game preservation itself. Something that we’ve seen more and more of with video games but in tabletop terms has more often than not been left to people with eBay habits and a weird fondness for spreadsheets. Enter Art & System, a new project from Central Michigan University Press with a mission to “preserve indie games which have had an impact on game design discourse, and to showcase new work which pushes the boundaries of games even further.”

Admirable stuff indeed. Headed up Thousand Year Old Vampire creator Tim Hutchings, the project launches with a crowdfunding campaign on BackerKit to bring back into print three acclaimed but otherwise hard to come by titles, Liam Liwanag Burke’s Dog Eat Dog (2012), Princess with a Cursed Sword (2025) by Anna Anthropy, and The Mountain Witch (2005) by Tim Kleinert.

This will be the first time that Liwanag Burke’s RPG, focused on imperialism in the Pacific Islands, has been physically available for over ten years. Princess with a Cursed Sword, meanwhile was only previously available as PDF one sheets, and will be published for the first time in a single physical edition, complete with bonus material.

Finally Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch hasn’t been available since 2005. It was last the subject of a 2018 Kickstarter campaign that remains unfulfilled after Kleinert was diagnosed with a brain tumour and through this campaign Cmich intend to also help Kleinert finally fulfill the delivery of physical copies of the game to his 2018 backers.

On BackerKit now until October 30

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

I'm a big fan of print and play games such as David Thompson's excellent little compact WW2 game Battle Card, so Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge definitely caught my eye. Basically a pen, paper and dice version of those end of pier classic electro-mechanical arcade machines, where you roll, write and hopefully cause a cascade of loose change to spill down the levels and into your pockets whilst alien ships attack from above.

Honestly there's not much more to it than that, but it looks nicely designed, doesn't come with two tonnes of unnecessary plastic and is just $3. I mean what's not to like about that.

On Kickstarter now until October 11

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

Roleplaying Games

++ Ben Macready speaks to Andrew Gillis about Girl by Moonlight, a game of hope, transcendence and transformation.

++ Post-Pratchett it's very hard to look at Thieve's or Assassin's Guilds in quite the same way but this is a nice dive back into how they were presented in AD&D and what their existence can mean for your games.

++ I wanted to highlight something that Nova -one of our occasional contributors and indeed the writer of the new issue's lead review of Cairn- wrote about reviews last week. Apparently this was in response to 'discourse', something that over the last year or so I've decided I've no need to bother myself with. Still, it is a subject that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about myself and have a lot to write about. I've run out of time and space this week, but I'll try and get something down next week.

++ More Appendix N business, this time Clayton from Explorer's Design chips in.

++ An interesting piece from game and graphic designer Jean Verne on the choices he made laying out their new adventure, Raging Storm on Merlin Five, for the F.I.S.T. game.

++ Over at Rascal Thomas Manuel looks at Shadowrun, the TTRPG everyone loves to hate...

++ d20 reason to have a hoedown. The line 'Celebrations are an oft forgotten part of worldbuilding' does actually remind me that somewhere on this hard drive I started a Mausritter supplement, A Ritual Year, that was just going to be 12 nature focused/seasonal festivals to chuck into your games. Really need to dig that out and do something with it...

Boardgames

++ A typically thoughtful piece from Dan Thurot on 'Fun' and what it means.

++ Shut Up & Sit Down rave about The Old King's Crown, a game it feels like we've been waiting to play for about 3 years now. Hopefully we'll get a chance soon.

Wargames

++ Sam Pearson was one of the driving forces behind some of the best Warhammer games of the past few years, so it's a shame that he's now left the company though that does hopefully mean we'll get to see him do some even more interesting stuff in the future. In the meantime he's launched a new YouTube channel where he's been looking back on some of the stuff that he designed or has been an influence on him.

++ As research for his forthcoming book Tomas Rawlings continues to explore the background to Warhammer's cosmological shenanigans (more of which you can read about in our new issue where we spoke to Warhammer creator Rick Priestley about some of this stuff!).

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

++ It's Tolktober! For those unaware it's one of those month long creative prompt things where those of you good with pen & pencil are encouraged to create Middle Earth inspired art with the best ending up in one of Rogue Print's fabulous A Middle Earth zines. List of prompts above, follow on on social media with the hashtag #tolktober2025

++ A lovely piece in The Quietus as Robert Barry speaks to Iain Sinclair about his groundbreaking book of London psychogeography, Lud Heat, 50 years on from its release.

++ He's the grand wizard of our imaginations and now 2000AD are bringing all of Alan Moore's early work for the Galaxy's Greatest Comic together in one multi-volume collection, starting with his Future Shocks and Time Twisters one shots, and various short stories for the likes of Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors and more.

2000 AD Shop : The Complete 2000 AD By Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories Slipcase Edition

2000 AD is Britain’s cult sci-fi comic, and has been at the cutting edge of contemporary pop culture since 1977. It’s a multi-award winning cocktail of explosive sci-fi and fantasy, infused with a mean streak of irony and wry black humour.

2000 AD

++ Nicely timed to go with our little feature on Nigel Kneale in Wyrd Science 7 the BBC have just uploaded a new recording of Kneale's radio play You Must Listen. Originally broadcast in 1952, it was never recorded at the time but has now been recreated with a cast including Reece Shearsmith, Toby Jones and Caroline Catz and is now available to listen to on YouTube. A perfect start to spooky season.

++ Sticking with things spooky, the good folk at Hellebore have just announced their first fiction anthology, Tales of Occult Britain. Out in November it's up for order on their website now.

++ And one more... what better object to read those Samhain stories by than a grisly hand of glory, and this new limited edition one from Mithras Candles comes complete with historical instructions freshly translated from the 15th-century Le Petit Albert by Max Moo n (who you may know from things like Mörk Borg supplement Abyss of Hallucinations or the Twelve Years games).

Playing us out this week is the video for Echo In The Field by the wonderful Kelly Moran, whose new LP Don't Trust Mirrors is out today on Warp Records and will hopefully be spinning around on my deck in a few days. Sublime stuff...

Art & System

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

Roleplaying Games

Boardgames

Wargames

Made it this far? Reward yourself with a four issue print bundle of Wyrd Science back issues. You deserve it...