Time to finally get another newsletter out! 😅

Now that my latest project has completed, I’ll try to add more consistent updates here moving forward. Welcome to all those who just joined! 👋

Take a look at what I’m working on. 👇

Over the last couple months while finishing up GG#3, I’ve been writing the first draft of my next project! I’ve decided to work on the quickstart rules for a Monster / Magic / Mecha fusion I’m calling ShadowTech. Currently I’m about 20 pages into the quickstart / playtest rules, focusing on getting the combat where I want it. Over the summer, I was playing a lot of Harebrained Schemes’ Battletech on Steam and it really got me inspired to create a rules hack for Shadowdark that brings western style giant robot combat into the pantheon of genre hacks for the system. I’ve recently commissioned ShadowTech’s first art piece by BigeggsBlackPen that I’m temporarily using as the draft cover. I’ll likely use this somewhere in the middle of the future zine. Perhaps the start of the monster section. Here you’ll see a Shoggoth bursting from below the ice to ambush these brave mech pilots.

As a kid, I would often rent Battletech on Sega Genesis, watch the 90s cartoon, collect the toys and CCG cards, and play Mechwarrior 2 at my friend’s house who had a PC. Here is a drawing I just dug out of my memory box from those days. Good times. 🥲

Over the next few months I’m going to try and bring ShadowTech into a state that can be playtested at your table. Let me know if you’d be interested in running an extremely early version of it and providing me with your table’s feedback. My plan currently is to do a quickstart rules zine late Q4 or early Q1. And if folks like it, try to write a full book for it in 2027! Although everything is massively subject to change at this point, here’s a lil peak from an early page so far:

Basically manufacturer is like ancestry, tech is like class, and upgrades are like the talent tables.

One thing that will be very different from Shadowdark is that facing will matter in ShadowTech, so grid play will likely be the most preferable way to do things. Different parts of your mech can be damaged and destroyed, much like in the many iterations of mech games you may have experienced. Keeping this simple and streamlined, in line with Shadowdark’s core design philosophy, is one of the challenges and fun aspects of this project! I’ve got several ideas I’ll be sharing in future updates, so please stay tuned! 🤗

My friends at Do Your Worst Games are launching NinjaDark: Five Strange Adventures via Kickstarter on the 27th of October!

Five compact, ready-to-run Shadowdark adventures, each on a double-sided A5 card, set in a haunted Japanese-inspired world. Each one uses a different elemental theme and a different adventure structure: dungeon crawl, reverse heist, pointcrawl, dynamic dungeon, and something stranger...

There’ll be digital and printed editions, plus a very limited collector’s edition. Check it out!

Want to get in contact? Feel free to use my linktree here and give me a follow on your platform(s) of choice. I’d love to hear from you! 🤝