2018, despite being a shit year for pretty much the entire planet, was a good year for the VSCA. For me.
On the home front, though Jackie’s mobility and other functions continue to decline thanks to Multiple Sclerosis (you want to help cure something horrible? Send your Christmas money to the MS Society of Canada) other issues are largely under control. My place is still a mess, my time soaked by pretty much everything and Jackie unable to assist, but that’s really a minor issue. There were no major hospitalization incidents and mania and psychosis are under control. That’s pretty good. That lightens my load a little and is a big factor in the rest of this review.
Elysium Flare got released! And it’s my first full-colour project. We even managed to bring in some art from Colombian art-genius, Juan Ochoa. It’s a really lovely book and a tidy little Fate-based science fiction game. It features a lot of loose setting material out of my own head and represents my best effort at grabbing some enthusiasm for space opera as a genre. Now look, I had fun making it and I think it’s a great little game. And it’s beautiful, especially in hardcopy. But I’m not likely to do space opera again unless it’s pretty psychedelic and I’m not likely to do another Fate game.
This project also got me to figure out the Drive Thru RPG POD system. It’s convoluted and frustrating but it works. As a publisher experience, Lulu is much nicer but you can’t beat the integration and the storefront of DTRPG. Both make nice books.
We started and then abandoned a Diaspora second edition. That’s probably not ever going to happen.
I started the Patreon to keep this new effort running and it’s been very powerful for me: feeling like I owe people regular product makes me make it. I can’t emphasize enough how well this works for me. Thank you to all my patrons: you have made this a great year.
I almost secretly released a little zine-sized product called anomaly digest. It’s for sale in hardcopy only and it’s at cost — there’s no profit in it. Add it to your cart when you buy everything else! It contains a number of little adventure hooks and mini-dungeons created as part of the RPG Talk (that’s a Discord invite link) regular content contests. I don’t participate in these any more since it kicked me into making games and that’s where the energy goes now. This went our as a physical reward to some patrons.
And finally the Soft Horizon gelled and I got out the first issue, The King Machine. A game I’m really proud of, but I’ve talked about it elsewhere.
And now the second issue is out for playtest (really a textual playtest — the game itself is already heavily tested but now I need to see if the text works). So Sand Dogs could be out in January.
And then there was the impending for real death of G+ which forced me to make some plans about where to communicate and get communicated at. That bore this blog, a remake of my old one (and I’ll repost some stuff from there occasionally), and some exploration of other spaces. So far I can be found at:
- Twitter (@BradJMurray)
- Discord (RPG Talk and the VSCA channel)
- Some Slack services like The Gauntlet
- RPG.net. Yes some people still read this. It has its … limitations.
- Mastodon dice.camp (@Halfjack)
brad j. murray 