Become the Mutant in this biopunk, facility-crawl zine for Mothership RPG! **Due to fluctuating global shipping rates, we will be charging shipping fees at a later date. We will keep you updated through Kickstarter Updates for when shipping fees will be applied to your pre-order. Thank you for your patience and understanding!**
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Bad news first: We’re behind on the fulfillment schedule. In short, this is due to workflow growing pains mixed with real life events: I was moving over the weekend, and as I write this update, I am aboard a cross-country train!
To be frank, I’m upset with myself for missing this deadline. I underestimated how time zone differences eat up workflow. I revise—not a ton of work either, maybe an hour—then send those off for a response. Send off revisions. Wait a day. Repeat. A valuable learning experience, sure, but I’m sorry y’all have to bear the brunt of me thinking turnaround would be quicker.
I’m still somewhat confident fulfillment will begin before the end of September. Call me a glass half-full kind of person. To be clear though, maintaining this schedule depends on print quality (more below).
Good news next: Once BackerKit orders lock on August 3rd and cards will be charged for add-ons on the 4th, I can send the pdfs, including the pre-proof of Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones!
Note: “Pre-proof” means that Roz Leahy hasn’t given her eagle-eye stamp of approval! Editors are extremely important to bringing that final polish, and Roz is one of the best working with Mothership writers. When you’ve been in the same document for six months, you just cannot see plain and simple mistakes. All faults, wherever they are, are mine.
Due to the influx of requests I had mid-July, I decided to postpone locking orders until the end of this month. This allowed many people, myself included, some breathing room during these busy summer/winter months.
UPCOMING KEY DATES:
I will be certain to send everyone the appropriate notification emails when shipping charges are due. One major point of frustration during pledge manager/Kickstarter fulfillment are charges that seem to jump out of nowhere. You will not be charged shipping costs without advance notification.
Once orders are locked, those who have completed their purchases will have access to the following PDFs:
The near-final Cloud Empress rulebook just dropped a couple weeks ago, so I still need a little bit more time to polish The Unseen City x Down the Snail’s Spire. (From two pamphlets to a 20-page zine, y’all are getting a heck of a deal on this one!)
I’d like to take a fair bit of space to discuss and display the work we’ve done this month to make Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones a gorgeous and useful zine.
As mentioned before, this zine went from a projected 36 pages to 48 pages. As you can see from the thumbnail view above, the spreads are packed with art, maps and graphics to complement the tables, mechanics, room, creature and NPC descriptions.
An important marker in making a useful game book, especially dense Mothership zines, is to fit ideas to single pages and spreads without separating the info. Rearranging the front matter—adventure set-up, creatures, and mechanics—was the first part to tackle. That was the easy part.
Then, the big hurdle was massaging the manuscript and image sizes to fit each area of the Mountain Forces R&D Facility to one or two spreads. With all the visual assets, it was hard to compact everything into the space, but by Joe, we did it.
Of course, the fun part is bringing the digital into the physical world. I had the zine spreads digitally printed at a local printshop to take a deeper look. We had all sorts of weird digital errors popping up. The most pressing issue was upping the white balance in the art to help match the vibrant look we had on our computer screens.
Then the brutal: pre-proofing as best possible and fixing inconsistencies. Like I wrote above, I’m sure some errors have persisted despite our best efforts. Roz will be able to help ensure the final product has eliminated those overlooked mistakes. Even still, I think it looks pretty good! Can’t wait to get the pre-proofs to you at the end of the week!!
To tide you over until then, Nobody Wake the Bugbear podcast has reached episode 5 of 6 on their Patreon, and episode 4 on the public feed (e.g. Spotify, and other podcast providers). This game really showcases how insane I thought this adventure could become. It’s been a huge pleasure to follow along, especially considering how I’ve been a fan of this podcast for over a year now.
In the first episode, it was fantastic to hear John (one of the players, as Marine PC Charlie Valentine) take the “environmental consequences” bit to heart and start mucking around so soon in the facility, haha. The fifth episode leaves off with a wonderful web of cryo-clone strings to follow. This finale is going to be so much fun, I hope you check it out!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/NWTBPODCAST/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0W1kHQrWLyYd58ug8SuUSU?si=efe5d05661434135
In the interim between the waiting, I’ve been working on a couple of other projects.
The first is a little pocketzine rpg I worked on for the 2023 One-Page RPG Jam. It’s called 5 Million Worlds: Avatar Basics. This lil game is a space adventure hack of Mothership, with an added Limit Break mechanic. The 5MW vibe is Star Trek x Firefly meets the Culture series x Hainish Cycle, and it’s made to be compatible with any Mothership adventure. I’ll definitely be working on this as more time frees up, so keep an eye on the itch.io page.
The second is a much bigger project: Outer Rim Uprising launching on Kickstarter this fall.
In January, iko of The Lost Bay Studio asked me to join a Mothership bundle with a load of bigtime Mothership creators I admire. This was before the Bio/Cryo Kickstarter, so of course I was pumped to be invited to such a fantastic team.
Among other things, I’m writing two adventures centered on the Android Rights Association organization (the ARA) and its corporate foe, Proxi M.T.
The first is Rusted to the Core: a classic 16pg zine set on fuel refinery floating in the clouds of a gas giant—inspired by modern day oil rigs, their associated worker isolation, and environmental ills. The second is Bones on the Ground: a bifold adventure with three in-universe A5 flyers to serve as player handouts during an Outer Rim campaign. The flyers are seeds for the adventure with hidden clues to better approach the bifold’s rescue mission.
Give the project a follow to be notified on launch!
Thanks for sticking with me through this long update. If you have any questions about more project specifics, drop me a line in the comments and I'll be happy to dig deeper and share more, :)
All best,
Chris Air
I hope your summer/winter is off to a good start! It’s a turbulent time here, but what’s life without a lil chaos, eh?
First off, we’re standing at 97% completion of the BackerKit surveys, which is pretty dang good, thanks everyone! I plan to lock orders in two weeks on July 15th.
After July 15th, you won’t be able to make any changes to your order, so if there’s anything else you’d like to add, do it now. Rest assured that should you need to change something later, you can always contact me directly. Shortly after orders lock, I can start planning the digital distribution, and getting everything in order for shipping and fulfillment.
It’s an exciting and busy time! Printing is underway, NWTB’s Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones Actual Play Podcast is live, and layout is nearly complete. Let’s get y’all caught up.
So, I’m bringing you this update one day later than normal because today, July 1st, Nobody Wake the Bugbear released Episode 1 (of 6!) in their Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones series!
This first episode is available now on their Patreon, and will be available with further visual delights on their YouTube channel on July 8th! I had a sneak peek of episode 1, and I may be biased, but I’m really thrilled to see what happens next.
After the unexpected need to do some more shopping around, I’ve come to find a good pair of options. The pamphlets have already entered the printing process! The Sleeper Crew and Cendrillon Mercs pamphlets went through without a hitch, as they have been printed before. The poster/map proofs looked wonderful, too. Using Daniel’s map at this size is going to be a real treat at the table.
I had a little hiccup with the Con/Sen Android Factory Tour pamphlets, and contacting the printer (in California) during office hours from France is not the easiest time zone differential to deal with, haha.
The silver lining is that I was planning to use this same printer for the zines (except Bio/Cryo, since they do not do soft-laminate covers), so it was very useful to see how their customer service handles the troubleshooting for these sorts of issues.
Layout is on the final stretch! Eric has worked through two-thirds of the zine. The work is quicker since he did a layout proof before the module went into editing. Eric is confident his design and layout will be done within the week. He’s busting out every trick he knows to condense the manuscript and make this zine a gorgeous visual treat. Check this out:
The map section is, naturally, the most information dense part of the zine. With Roz and Eric’s great help, we’re making sure all the important bits a Warden needs while running this adventure will be right there on the spread, where your players are interacting with the game.
Getting the supplementary zines to print continues this coming week. Once the layout is finalized, the proofreading will start. Soon after, the delivery of the other bundle components (dice, patches) to the fulfillment center is at hand. Then, I’ll start setting up Bio/Cryo for printing too. As this step nears completion, I will be in touch more often to fill everyone in on dates, digital fulfillment, entering shipping addresses, and the like.
That's all for now. As always, if you have anything to ask, let me know. Take care!
-Chris Airiau
The month of May has seen lots of work on finessing the manuscript with Eric in layout, further developing the interactive terminals, running playtests of The Unseen City, and the launch of the BackerKit pledge manager.
After a successful smoke test and two weeks running, 92% of backers have already filled out their BackerKit surveys, which is great, thank you! For the 40 or so who haven’t completed their BackerKit, be sure to check your Kickstarter-associated email to answer the survey so you can get your rewards smoothly when the time comes!
For the expanded Unseen City, HodagRPG delivered the final art pieces, and initial playtests are going very well, so I’ve been able to knock out nearly all the layout. Watt released the Cloud Empress setting zine draft recently, so I’ve only got one additional table to add to bring the zine in line with the official biomes.
First, my goal to print proofs by the end of May was not possible. When Eric turned over the first half of the zine by the middle of May, I realized I needed to be more severe in the editing choices to the intro section.
I was happy to expand the planet/faction lore after the discussions with Ariane Li, the cultural consultant, but that also means this section is the newest and least refined part of the book. After a week of rewrites, I feel the Player Knows/Warden Knows section is more concise and gameable.
I also cut out some over-enthusiastic zine designer notes, explanations of the Sleeper Crew pamphlets, and the ToC (which will make an appearance in the PDF version, for accessibility). If enough people are actually interested in my designer remarks, let me know in the comments. I’d be happy to pop those notes into a plaintext document to share.
Another bit that has me combing through the manuscript again are the Interactive Terminals. Through their development, I’ve been able to offload some diegetic material from the zine onto the terminals, to help tighten the spreads.
I have been having a ton of fun writing and developing the Interactive Terminals using gparali’s Terminal Maker on Twine. To remind y’all, Twine is an open-source application for writing interactive fiction. It produces html files that can be opened in Firefox or Chrome, and sent to players so they can discover information in-character. Additionally, I plan to make the whole Mountain Forces Terminal Network free to play on itch.io once backers begin to receive their rewards.
To be clear, the Interactive Terminals are not required to play this zine, by any means. As I may have mentioned in the past, I developed a simple version of this terminal for playtests a year ago, and I figured it’d be a shame not to develop and share this resource for everyone.
When it’s all said and done, I will include Twine editing instructions as a readme, as well, so that Wardens (who don’t know html) can edit these files in Twine too! Also, full disclosure, I am not trained in html at all, so this has been pretty slow trial-and-error work at times, haha.
This google drive link contains a draft copy of one of the terminals in the facility. Its contents are subject to change, but it definitely gives a useful sample of the Interactive Terminals vibe: https://drive.google.com/file/d/161JfMCrLtIYb4vMXy5ELVTi1kWepgMpt/view?usp=share_link
You’ll also get a chance to see them in action soon, on Nobody Wake the Bugbear Podcast!
I mentioned this last month, but I’ve got some more details to share. First, check out this sick character display they’ve got built up for the YouTube video!
I’ve been a fan of this AP group since they started playing Mothership RPG last year, around the same time I first released The Sleeper Crew. It’s great to have such a dedicated Mothership AP podcast in the scene. And they’ve got some other visual treats in store for viewers, too, so follow them on YouTube at nwtbpodcast. Or, if you support them on Patreon, you get early access to their episodes.
Their playthrough of Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones is next up on their schedule! I’ll share those podcast/video links with y’all as soon as they’re live.
The layout work will continue during June. Eric has been doing graphic design and layout for his entire professional career, so know that these delays are on my end as I learn the workflow of getting a bigger project to print. I hope I can deliver the finished layout to Roz for final proofreading before the end of June. This potentially eats through our cushion time, and pushes fulfillment back. If that’s the case, then I’ll be sure to provide the digital files before physical fulfillment begins.
My rose-tinted glasses as a first-time Kickstarter had my hopes too high. This zine is not the same as the small zines and pamphlets I have released in the past, and I’m feeling a different sort of pressure (good stress!) to deliver not only as flawless a zine as I can, but an incredible gaming package.
To boot, I’ve been hearing about some disappointing experiences a few fellow creators have been having with print quality, which has me shopping around a bit more for different printers. I hope to have this sorted by the end of June, and will report on the progress then!
Thanks for sticking around this long, and see y'all at the end of June, at the latest!
All best,
Chris Air