shilling

In the upper right corner is a suitably subtle little icon, a few parallel lines, that indicates there’s more to see. What’s there is a set of links (among other widgets). I want you to click those — that’s partly why this blog even exists — but I also don’t want them to intrude on your reading. So I kind of shoot myself in the foot with this subtlety. This post is me digging the bullet out.

You can buy VSCA games from some of those links. We have made a diverse set of games, from Diaspora (a Fate-based hard science fiction game) to the latest work in the Soft Horizon series. These are all hippie games. They will insist that players have agency as well as their characters, that emerging stories are shared property, that there are important aspects of story other than violence (and sometimes shine a light on that by forcing you to be violent), and they are all in some sense political. Beyond the obvious “all art is political” political, I mean. So go buy those.

Come yell at me. Or with me. With me is better.

You’ll also find a link to our Discord server, where you can chat live and yell at me to my virtual face. I’d rather we just chat about the games, though, and maybe play some.

And you’ll find a link to the VSCA Patreon page. This one is really important: the regular if thin stream of income from Patreon is what keeps our tools sharp and lets us make time to fabricate games and think about them in public. It’s why there’s art, it’s why there are blog posts, it’s why I’m able to do this at all. Now, every month patrons re-evaluate where their money’s going and some drop out. I do that too. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the pulse and breath of the tool. It’s half of how Patreon metabolizes. The other half is new subscribers. So consider it, even just a buck, if you’re enjoying the blog, the chat, and most importantly, the games.

Part of the reason Patreon works is not even the money. Not directly, anyway. What happens is that I feel an obligation, keenly, to produce. When people are cheering me on even just by waving dollar bills, I feel like I have to make something for them. That pressure it what has turned the VSCA from a once-every-three-years publisher to a two- or even three-games-a-year publisher. Your support supercharges our output out of all proportion to the amount you choose to pledge. You make me owe you, and so far that’s proving to be all I need to deliver.

So, consider clicking the things and nosing around. Regardless of whether or how you support, getting more eyeballs is essential: when you repost, boost, review, or otherwise get our message out to your audience (who are people I don’t know and can’t reach!) then you expand our reach. Find us new people. Often someone comes by who I know fairly well but still never saw my posts and didn’t know we’re back in business. You enable that glorious shit.