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Uncover the Secrets of Paradise Round in Sunny Days and Rain – A Mind-Bending New Fate Adventure Coming to Kickstarter in July 2026 from Cyclops Road.

Prepare for an existential dive into the psychological deep end. Blending early-1980s analog aesthetics, surreal psychological horror, and high-stakes espionage, this adventure challenges players to escape an astral prison where reality is broken, trust is a liability, and their memories are weaponized.

The agents of Rainbow intelligence Services wake up isolated in a strange, non-Euclidean cul-de-sac called Paradise Round. The interior of their bungalows defies geometry, unbranded food sits in the kitchens, and a radio plays unrecognizable smooth jazz on a continuous loop. Outside, a perpetual circle of road leads nowhere, and the surrounding woods pour down a torrential, impassable wall of rain.

A pamphlet on their nightstands promises “sunny days ahead,” but the reality is far more sinister: Paradise Round is an astral prison built for dangerous agents. The Rainbow agents were sentenced here for a reason. If they want to escape, they’d better figure out what it was.

Featuring:

• Hidden Agendas & Complications: Every player has something to hide. From a Double Agent secretly allied with a rogue faction, to a panicked operative hiding a past crime, to Investigators consuming literal pill capsules scattered through the map to digest their forgotten mission briefings.
• Surreal Sandbox Investigation: To escape, players must navigate a community populated by “dream puppets”—NPCs pulled directly from their own memories—who are currently embroiled in a forbidden, bizarre election between two lifeless marionettes known as the Professor and the General.
• The 8-Track Artifacts: Players will hunt for hidden, impossible 8-track cassettes (baked into bread, or grown into trees) that hold reality-warping properties and recordings of conversations the players literally just had.
• The Secret Master: One player character at the table is secretly the adversary. Having stolen reality-bending psychotronic technology, they have trapped their teammates to interrogate them. But they aren’t omnipotent—and they must play by the rules of the dreamspace to keep the illusion alive.
• Ready-to-Play NPC & Pre-Gens: Features fully statted Fate System characters, including the seven agents of Rainbow, Frank Dixon, an agent of the Entropy Collective who’s entire past is a complete fiction, and Noah Twain, the friendly, faceless entity who serves as the local handyman and watchman.

See the interior here:

The full document with full text, art, and layout is available for review upon request via PDF or POD through DriveThruRPG.

The pre-launch page is here:

And the project homepage is here: https://tonemilazzo.com/espionage/

This is Tone Milazzo’s second crowdfunding effort. The author is available for any interviews or actual plays. Thanks for your time and consideration. Any promotional support would be greatly appreciated.

The first adventure, The King in Giallo is available on these fine platforms:

Check out the interior here:

I finally pulled the trigger on my first Kickstarter!

The general advice for crowdfunding has been, “Don’t bother unless you have a sizable following on social media.” My Twitter never broke 600, but I’ve just reached 3000 on Bluesky, so here I am. Even still, an audience in one place might not carry over to another, so scope is a consideration. Especially when it’s one’s first Kickstarter. It’s easier for people to take a gamble on a smaller project first. So instead of opening with the full game of ESPionage, I’m building a track record with three stand-alone adventures:

The King in Giallo – James Bond by way of Robert W Chambers with a touch of Italian horror.

Sunny Days and Rain – The Prisoner meets The Good Place, covered in late 1970s brown rainbows.

MindGuard – The X-Files in Twin Peaks for a very 90s domestic terrorist thriller.

One thing I’ve learned about Kickstarter, there are essential pieces of advice you must follow for success. And for each piece of advice, someone will tell you you don’t need to do that. With that spirit in mind, here’s the trailer I produced, which is both utterly essential to my success, or a waste of my time:

As I write this, the project is at $652 with 42 packers. I estimate the expenses, art, editing, and layout, will cost ~$1200. My goal wasn’t to make a mint, or break even. It was to mitigate some of the cost, and build the groundwork audience for future Kickstarters. My last project, the novel The Faith Machine cost $2100 in editing (a mistake on my part), resulted in a $200 advance, and only pre-sold 12 copies. Comparatively, this has been a raging success.

Backer levels start at $1 for a full PDF!

Book

The Witch’s Daughter

I discovered this autobiographical tale from Azure Ray’s own Orenda Fink’s appearance on The Dana Gould Hour. An interesting account from a high-drama family where the mentally ill and magical-thinking mother twisted the entire family unit around her will. And a daughter’s journey of understanding, the leads to escape. A lot of people are breaking from their parents these days. While this family fracture isn’t political in nature, the moves are all the same.

[Powell’s Books]

Blu-ray

Blake’s 7

In high-school my Sundays nights were spent watching imported BBC on KPBS. The space adventure, Blake’s 7 was my favorite of the offerings. My wife got me season 1 on Blu-Ray and I’m happy to say “The dirty half-dozen in space” still holds up, 45 years after production. An ensemble cast that lets everyone get some time in the spotlight (even the women), the disks provide updated effects, but the shoe-string visual effects of the time hold a spot in my heart.

[Blu-Ray]

RPG

Grimwild

Fantasy adventure remains the gateway into role-playing games. Even after Wizard’s of the Coast’s numerous missteps and attempts to sabotage the industry at large, D&D is still the fist and last RPG most people play. Hopefully, games like Grimwild, will chip away at this dominance, while providing an updated experience for new plays, rather than starting with the dated rule set descended from the 1970s. I’ll be running Grimwild to truly grok the rules, but from what I’ve read I see a lot of potential in this system. It might be the basis for the next two games I write.

[DriveThruRPG]

My submission email to Evil Hat was ready to go. I checked the guidelines one last time to make sure all my ‘t’s were crossed and ‘i’s dotted. And right there, at the top of the page,

“As of August 17, 2023 our submissions are currently closed. We don’t anticipate re-opening them until late 2025.”

Well…crap…

If I hadn’t spent months developing all the ancillary material I could have submitted back in August. But I’m not going to wait ~18 months for a chance at acceptance. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to publish it myself, financed with crowdfunding.

Step one; get a new cover and temporary layout. The hostility to AI art has grown since I first did the Betawave edition. I’m going to purge all that imagery. I still feel I applied the technology as ethically and legally as anyone can, but that’s a hill I’m not willing to die on. Crowdfunding depends on goodwill, and I need as much as I can gather. I’ve contacted cover and layout artists. The text has already been through an editor, so a minimum viable product is close. Stretch goals will include interior art, and additional materials (most likely adventures) contributed by interested, professional game developers.

There will be four crowdfunding campaigns, three quickstart ESPionage adventures building momentum toward the full book. Two of the adventures are good to go. I ran The King in Giallo and Sunny Days and Rain a dozen times including at Gamex last month. I feel they’re both ready for publication. The third adventure, originally Petty Acts of Retribution, wasn’t nearly as strong and I’m re-purposing the NPCs from it into a new adventure, Operation 61, which is currently a page of notes.

The adventures should be crowdfunding through early next year, and the full game will this time next year. There’s a light at the end of this tunnel. Thanks for sticking with me so far.

Music: AD4PTION by woob

Looking like it was pulled from the Sam Goody bargain bin an sounding like the soundtrack to a lost John Carpenter movie. This album managed a horror movie narrative while remaining ambient enough to work to.

Role-Playing Games: Dogs in the Bark

If you know the legendary role-playing game, Blades in the Dark, this is exactly the same setting. The dirty, dark, crime ridden fantasy city of Duskvol. Except you’re a pack of dogs. I ran this at Gamex where the party found the victim of a murder and had to eat enough of the corpse before the rats showed up, the crows brought the Spirit Wardens, or the victim’s ghost manifested. With that premise, the characters spent most of their time rolling to eat corpse, so I need a better premise for next time.

Comics: Local Man

What if you’re legally bared from doing the one thing you’re good at, the one thing you’ve dedicated your life to? If you’re Crossjack, you move back to your hometown where everyone hates you and try to start over. Should strike a cord with everyone who did everything right and ended up failing.

Podcast: Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff

Consistently my favorite podcast. Not only are Robin D Laws and Ken Hite two of my favorite game developers, their interests in esoteric film, fiction, and history overlap my own.

Tech: Espanso

If you really need a typo fixing service on your PC, but you’re like me an don’t trust a key logger that sends every thing you type off to God knows where, get Espansso. You can use it to build text shortcuts, like today’s date or that email address you enter 20 times a day. I also use it to fix the fact that my finger can’t reach the apostrophe. Noe every time I end a word with “n;t” Espansso fixed it to “n’t.”