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Hey hey hey, I got some big new regarding ESPionage, the Role-Playing Game of Psychics and Spies.
We finally have a cover illustration! Showcasing 5 NPCs from the game representing the five kinds of characters in the setting, and Drawn by San Diego’s own Joe Phillips
Meanwhile, Elliot Balson‘s been working on the interior art. Firstly, the seven agents of Rainbow Intelligence Services, pre-generated player characters for the three upcoming adventures:
Crowdfunding on the quickstart adventure, The King in Giallo is planned for January of 2025!
San Diego ComicFest is Coming!
I’ll be on three panels:
Saturday, October 26th, 2024, 5:00 PM – 5:50 PM [Room: Del Mar]
With nothing more than a stack of blank index cards and the rules for the game Microscope, witness our panel of writing professionals create a world right before your eyes.
Panelists: Jonathan Maberry, Marion Harmon, Tone Milazzo, Motoki Tomatsu
Sunday, October 27th, 2024, 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM [Room: Solana]
Writing fiction isn’t just stories, especially when it is genre fiction. There are writing opportunities for sentimental text for known properties and lore of all kinds of games.
Panelists: Jonathan Maberry, Marion Harmon, Tone Milazzo
“Screw It, I’ll Make It Myself!”
Sunday, October 27th, 2024, 2:00 PM – 2:50 PM [Room: Solana]
The road to traditional publishing, even small press, is long, tedious and littered with gatekeepers. But the opportunities for creators to do it themselves are abundant, and the tools are readily available.
Panelists: Marie Andreas, Marion Harmon, Tone Milazzo
If you’re in San Diego for the weekend of October 25th, check it out!
Music
I slept on Common when he was coming up. The Bling Era loomed so large in those days, I’d checked out of mainstream hip-hop and moved on to the LA Underground and Nerdcore. If I’d of know there was still one conscious rapper out there I’d of been all over this. Especially this album, Be. Say…
Who produced this?
Oh no…
Oh well. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t imprint on this at the time. Makes it easier to kill the author now.
RPG
Mothership is more of a traditional game than I usually play. I’ve been looking to mix it up a bit without going full 5E. This is a quick moving, simple game of freelancers trapped with the horrors of outer space on one side, and the economic dread of capitalism on the other.
Simultaneous turn orders, no social skills to roll, and NPC stat blocks that take a single line of text. This might be the basis for my next RPG, a dystopian super game called Torn Capes.
I just rant his last night with three players also new to the system and it went off without a hitch.
Comic
I just re-read Jonathan Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four. I’d picked it up in bit and pieces before, but driving straight though from beginning to end it’s amazing how cohesive the run is. Expanding on the idea of the FF as a family, Reed has taken a number of supersmart kids under his wing, while events unfold that demonstrate how dangerous Mister Fantastic is without his family to ground him.
Book
The stories in Interzone must have blown so many minds back in the 1950s, but by today’s standards it barely raises an eyebrow. Especially the last part, WORD, I assume a product of Burrough’s cutup technique. Transgressive in it’s time, today reads like scanning 4chan.
Podcast
The disaster at Pompeii fascinates me. To imagine what those people went through. No understanding of volcanoes, they must have thought the gods had abandoned them. But as we learn in this episode of Radiolab, the fish sauce survives.
Tech
I finally found a tablet for reading comics and RPG PDFs. The Starlite from the Starlabs on Earth Prime. I nice big screen, decent battery life, and none of Windows or Android’s spyware. That said, I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone, because of all the work I had to put into it before I could put it to use.
It came preinstalled with MXLinux, the XFCE desktop was an odd choice for a tablet. The system font’s were so small I had to use reading glasses and a magnifying glass to adjust the settings. And they were never good enough.
I wiped the drive and installed Debian 12 with the Gnome Desktop, and it was almost perfect. Even still, I had to apply a hotfix to make the display rotate correctly.
I do enjoy it, but I think a lot of users would have give up instead of fixing it.