You're My Obsession...

Afternoon all, so first up just a huge thanks to everyone who put in an order for the new issue of Wyrd Science, started a print subscription, bought one of our 4 issue bundles or just shared the news over the past week. Like I whined on about -at incredible length- last week, in terms of the future of the print mag this issue is make or break, so every little thing is really massively appreciated. With that said I reckon that's enough of that for now, you subscribe to our newsletter I think we can leave the hard selling there for today.

Anyway, having for my sins worked in public relations for much of my adult life I'm no stranger to the incredible wheeze that is an 'awareness day'. For the uninitiated this is where you gin up an official looking event to celebrate something (that just happens to be best represented by your client's products) and hope it's a slow enough news day that someone like BBC London picks up on it for an upbeat 'and finally' piece after they've spent half an hour telling everyone how shit the world is.

This week for instance, depending on where you are, you might be lucky enough to mark National Prosecco Day, International Left Handers Day or even World Lizard Day, to name just three of the approximately 30 or so events taking place. If that sounds like I'm immune to their charms then you couldn't be more wrong. After all I suspect in many cases the difference between many an 'awareness day' and a beloved folkloric event is just one of time.

It's often said that if you spend more than 5 minutes looking into most things celebrated today as authentic representations of ancient pagan beliefs you'll find something that began as a Victorian Christian custom. I suspect for most the rest it was the result of some canny medieval publicity scribe working overtime. Too much cheese this year sire? Verily, let us roll a few truckles down a hill and get the peasants to chase after them. Fast forward a few hundred years and we're still very happily at it.

All of which brings us to next Wednesday, August 20th, and what I'm hoping will be the first of many National Collector's Days. Organised by auction house Stanley Gibbons and Baldwin's and, relevant to our interests (Gazetteers passim), Hornby Hobbies - owners of the Scalextric, Airfix and of course Hornby model railway brands, National Collectors’ Day is "designed to celebrate the rich and enduring world of collecting" and "honour the passion, history, and community that collecting fosters, in all its forms."

Yep, finally us hoarding scumbags get our day in the sun, back in line lizards.

Anyway, it's fair to say that this one feels personal. Right now as I type this I'm sat in what I like to euphemistically call our office, but what my wife would suggest bears more resemblance to the building they stick the Ark in at the end of Raiders than any serious place of business.

To my left a wall of around 5000 records (roughly half my collection), next to that a kind of leaning tower of cardboard boxes bearing the Games Workshop logo dating from the early 80s through to whenever Legions Imperialis came out. On my right meanwhile we have several kallaxes loaded down with boardgames, hardback RPG books and random toys. Most the floorspace is, of course, taken up with longboxes stuffed full of zines and comics old and new.

And that's before you get into the boxes of magazines, shelves filled with novels that I last read ten years ago and various vessels containing dice, unsealed packs of trading cards, stickers and god knows what else. It's a sickness, and one I know runs in my family, my mother having recently cleared out the homes of at least two relatives who had moved on to the next plane of existence leaving no forwarding address for their own vast collections of football programmes, beer mats, stamps and other lovingly, if obsessively, accumulated cultural detritus.

It's no secret that for many of us tabletop game enjoyers, collecting can be as much a part of 'the hobby' as actually playing. Whether it's RPGs, board games or wargames, we even have a somewhat derogatory term -the shelf of shame- for all the untouched yet frantically bought gubbins we surround ourselves with. But perhaps National Collector's Day offers us a chance to celebrate rather than denigrate this significant part of our lives.

Rather then looking askance at those dust covered trophies perhaps we should consider ourselves curators of our own personal museums, building shelves of opportunity rather than shame. What's more let's not forget we're bankrolling a creative industry, one that lest we not forget only exists because many of use stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that all you really need is a handful of dice, a pen and some paper. Really when you look at it like that it's a philanthropic endeavour, we're basically renaissance era patrons.

Anyway, to cheer you up here's a few choice numbers culled from the report Hornby commissioned on the UK's collectors and which should hopefully put things into perspective and get you in the mood to celebrate your own collections next week.

As you can see the average collector will spend £15,000 over the course of their obsession, whilst Stanley Gibbons estimates their top coin collectors get closer to £75K (tip to SG here, those are rookie numbers find yourself some Warhammer collectors). 40% of us have our collections proudly on display whilst only 13% play with them (again I think our community could pump that up a bit...). When it comes to tracking their collections, 19% cop to using spreadsheets (looking at you Phil), whilst 20% have lost track completely and given up even trying to.

Finally if you want to fill better about your habits, more than one in five of Britons consider themselves collectors with around a third of us starting on this journey before the age of 16. So there you go, all very healthy, normal and correct and absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. On which note I'd just like to point out again that if you're looking to fill in any gaps in your Wyrd Science collection, issues 3-6 are currently available in a super discounted bundle, better get in now than be like whoever handed over £50 for our first issue on eBay a year or so ago.

Right, that's it for this week, do sound off below about your own relationship to amassing unnecessary tat as we'd love to hear how you mange your collections and the weirdest stuff you can't get enough of. Thanks again for all the you know what and catch you next week.

John x

Ok so many a medium soft sell. Wyrd Science 7 on sale now, out sept, full of awesome stuff, but then you already knew that.

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Crowdfunding campaigns for things both diverse and interesting...

Dragon Reactor

For a genre that, on the surface, is focused on massive robots beating the metal shit out of each other with their massive robot fists, Mechs seem to be the choice right now for game designers who want to say something interesting about our identities, the human condition, the state of society or the deleterious effects that never ceasing (massive robot) wars have on our souls.

All of which brings us to Dragon Reactor, a new RPG for 2 or more people designed by Samuel Quinn Morris and Nevyn, a free demo of which is available here whilst it's crowdfunded on Backerkit. The demo provides a pre-determined setting and scenarios but in the full game you'll create your own war ravaged world, with at least one person taking on the role of Poet -controlling that world- and the others Pilots who will strap themselves into the cockpit of a titular Dragon and experience all the big feels that come with those big fists.

Each session starts with an initial objective determined by the scenario and then is played out in a series of scenes described by the poet to which the players must react. To achieve their goals players must complete a ten segment clock, each step filled in after a successful action (resolved via d6 dice pools) with the number of steps decided by the magnitude of your effort. Failures meanwhile result in pilots amassing burdens, both emotional and physical, or worse conditions which materially affect either themselves or their big robot buddies.

There's an emphasis on big robot war being hell here, so if you're just looking to shout with glee as your bus sized fist goes through someone's chest maybe stick to Adeptus Titanicus. On the other hand, if you want to lean into the emotional aspects of plugging yourself into a skyscraper sized hunk of metal and cradling a dying rival in your big robot arms whilst all you care about burn to cinders around you then this is one to check out.

Find Dragon Reactor on BackerKit, campaign ends August 29

Previously featured on The Gazetteer & still running...

After The World Ends - Brave the world of wasteland warriors with this lush book from French publisher Pulse that looks at all the post-apocalyptic movies that followed in the dusty wake of films like Mad Max. On Kickstarter, campaign ends August 28

Serving Up Disaster - Inspired by Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares this lovely looking RPG zine sees you try to turn around a failing restaurant in time for the big end of episode reveal. On Kickstarter, campaign ends August 31

Being where we share all the other stuff, gaming and related or not, that's held our attention this week...

++ Last week in this very space we recommended you have a read of Alec Meer's post on Marvel UK's brutal Transformers' series Target 2006, and if you didn't here's your chance again. Anyway, to add to the mounting evidence that the UK comic industry of the 70s and 80s had a habit of going harder than it had any right or reason to comes the news that Hibernia Comics are reprinting the Doomlord photo strips from the relaunched 1980s Eagle.

Whilst they got a fairly mixed reaction at the time I can safely say that as a 5 or 6 year old at the time they absolutely freaked me right out and today are an interesting example of a mostly abandoned narrative medium. Hmmmm... maybe we should bring back photo stories in Wyrd Science?

++ Sticking with Doomlord, because why not, a few years ago the brilliant Bob Fischer spoke to Mike Mungraven about being the (human) face of humanity's alien judge, an interview well worth revisiting.

++ Since they provided the headline of this week's newsletter let's take a quick music break and have a listen to Animotion's 1985 synth pop banger Obsession. What a tune.

++ Right, very exciting news that Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans are retiring to the world of DIE with a new series this autumn, DIE: Loaded, that picks up a year after the 'heroes' last escaped from goth Jumanji. Not only that but the recently released DIE RPG quickstart will be getting a special comic book edition too, which is all kinds of awesome. Finally it sounds like they're opening up the licence too so you can soon publish your own DIEs, might have to revisit that old therapy session after all...

++ Essential new fit for when your mate introduces a new 12 hour setup, 100 page manual boardgame to the weekly get together.

++ Ken Lowery's Bannerless Games is again providing ten grants of $200 to indie RPG folk who need a little leg up. You have till August 31 to apply.

++ Shout out to Jordan Sorcery for going in deep on the history of the Games Workshop logo, seriously we really need to go back to the fucked up Mickey Mouse/Goofy chimera. When he was promoting his book Dice Men I tried to get Ian Livingston to produce a range of tees with that logo on again but sadly failed. Must try again.

++ A fascinating little post looking at dungeon design in light of the principles laid out by architect Christopher Alexander in his books, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language.

++ It's been nearly 50 years since the first ALIEN film was released and it's really cool how absolutely none of the series' themes of amoral corporate greed leading to ordinary people enjoying the worst days of their lives have become stale in the time since. Anyway, as of writing this the latest iteration, Alien: Earth, is finally available to watch and the word is it's actually pretty solid. Maybe we should write something about this in our new issue? Sounds like a plan.

++ Whilst we're on the subject of ALIEN, Comics/Games trade press ICv2 spoke to Free League's Tomas Harenstam about the company's upcoming releases, and in particular the ALIEN RPG's upcoming new edition. Can't say there's anything particularly new here but interesting to get a feel for what's coming up and where things are with the Invincible RPG.

++ If you're looking for something to read by the pool and don't want to get your copies of Wyrd Science wet then Gizmodo has a pretty handy guide here to all the upcoming sci-fi. horror and fantasy novels.

++ We deserve some good news (well some of us do) and this is nice, apparently scientists have discovered that whales and dolphins like to hang out. Which is good timing as I've just watched an Attenborough series where a load of orcas absolutely massacred a blue whale, the bastards, and was feeling a bit down on our cetacean cousins.

++ Anyway, to wrap this week's Gazetteer up, the reason you're receiving this on a Thursday not a Friday is that in my continued attempt to confuse the algorithm I'm off to see Kraftwerk tonight before heading back to the UK and see Green Lung. So with that in mind why not turn the volume on your speakers right up and annoy your neighbours with this lovely little number.

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