ROACHES & MONSTERS
over 2 years ago
– Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 12:21:52 AM
NINTH STRETCH GOAL -- ACHIEVED!
We unlocked the Bestiary. Thank you, dear friends. We were hoping to get to this point. With this goal unlocked, there will be nine chapters in the REACH OF THE ROACH GOD book, total:
The Adventures:
The Gazetteers:
- "The People of Silk"
- "Stalagmite-folk"
- "Odoyoq's Children"
The Tools:
- "Reach of The Roach God -- Campaign Generators"
- "Islands In The Dark -- Cavern Generators"
- "Life Beyond The Sun -- Bestiary"
That's a nicely symmetrical table of contents. Nine Stretch Goals down, one more to go.
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BESTIARY SNEAK PEEK
So: Bestiary. Since it happened today, both Munkao and I spent our afternoon working on it a little.
(The following preview is missing the bulk of its "crunch" -- ie: ecology generators, the tables that determine how this creature will relates to other other underground creatures. I can't get started on those until we've got the whole lot of the entries done.)
Here are the Nailstealers:
NAILSTEALERS
Caves find surface-folk fascinating, but difficult to understand. Mistakes occur.
They may not comprehend that you are stuck -- that you are struggling to squeeze free. They may feel your desperate scratches as amour. They may hear your strangled gasps as climax.
Happy to tryst with a lover so exotic, they accept your dead flesh as a seed, and raise your children as their own.
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Nailstealers are born of caving mishaps. They appear as ten long, floating fingers -- glowing like candles about to go out. They have bloody wounds under their nails. These are their mouths.
They chatter in repeated phrases:
- 1: “Watch out that’s pretty loose.”
- 2: “No no it is just wide enough.”
- 3: “You have the lamp oil right.”
- 4: “I’ve swam it before it’s fine.”
- 5: “Wait do you hear breathing.”
- 6: “Can’t feel the bottom to this.”
- 7: “It’s a dead knot I know knots.”
- 8: “Smell that smells weird right.”
- 9: “It’s edible a bit bitter though.”
- 10: “Just need to warm up some.”
They eat caving equipment. They may eat your rope; the pitons you are using to mark the way you came. They carry the gear they’ve eaten, undigested, like a snake that has swallowed a rodent.
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WHY ROACHES?
Munkao has been writing some process notes for ROTRG over on his Patreon -- and then posting them on our A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS blog (which we are trying to utilise more):
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MK has posted the third and final part in this series of musings, answering the monstrous question that folks ask us most often, when it comes to this project:
WHY THE HELL DID YOU PICK ROACHES???
" One: ... like many [SEAsian] folks, I’ve had my share of experiencing spooky occurrences.
Spooky experiences are really uncomfortable. My chest tightens and my head hurts (possibly from my own subconscious fear) and then in the corner of your eye, roaches and centipedes add to the high levels of discomfort. I’ve had multiple incidents of them hanging around like extras in a haunted film. The association of them and ominous spooky shit is seared in my head. "
Two: I like animals, and I generally do my best to do no harm ...
Except roaches. Roaches are bad. They terrorize me, they eat my food, they disturb my sleep, they haunt my life.
I will bear the discomfort of looking at references of roaches. The nausea of drawing roaches. I will draw demon forms of roaches. I will bear the pain of this folder full of roach images inside my computer. "
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Unfortunately for Munkao, the exercise of creating roach creatures and characters has made me somewhat less unsympathetic towards the things --
I mean: I'm still viscerally repulsed. But "demon" is a matter of perspective, right?
Right?
(Has the Roach God gotten to me???)
Zedeck
WEEK THREE + FINAL STRETCH GOALS + PRESS
over 2 years ago
– Wed, Dec 01, 2021 at 04:38:42 AM
THE LAST 7 DAYS
When Munkao and I first started peddling our little A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS zines we didn't know what to call them. Fantasy-Southeast-Asian art-first micro-fiction RPG-adventure-setting zines? We sold them at art bazaars and via a G+ post. We honestly didn't know whether people would want the zines, let alone use them in games.
But people do, and people have --
And now we are making a Fantasy-Southeast-Asian art-first micro-fiction RPG-adventure-setting book, with the help of 1,500 backers.
Thank you.
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FINAL STRETCH GOAL
We are very close to unlocking the BESTIARY, our ninth Stretch Goal. There's seven days left on the clock. So we figured: why keep up the artificial suspense? We only ever planned ten Stretch Goals.
Here it is:
USD95,000 -- MORE PRINT-OUT TABLETOP TOKENS & PLAYER CHARACTERS
We unlocked tabletop tokens and player-character options a while ago. We want to top these off.
Hitting this Stretch Goal will allow Munkao to create more tabletop-scale tokens, printable for use as 2D cardstock miniatures, made available in free PDF. Populate your underworld with Albino Sharks; Unworms; Nailstealers; Maybe Men (which I've been calling Escarguys, on account of them being snails, hur hur)-- and more.
We'll also round out our player-character packages, with two additional ROTRG-y professions. System-neutral, but designed for play with popular RPG rulesets; made available in free PDF.
- The Speleothemherd hails the galleries of the stalagmite-folk, a stoneworker able to persuade living rock to do their bidding.
- The Blind Errant comes from the City of Bats, a chiroptid noble who spelunks the nightmare floor-worlds to burnish their own honour.
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"We hit all the Stretch Goals we planned!" would be nice to say. Please help us get there!
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PATREON POSTS
Munkao continues to be a dynamo of energy. In the past month he's been: recovering from a medical procedure; and arranging shipping / distribution; and making more art for ROTRG; and blogging on his Patreon.
Here he muses intentional mundanity in A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS:
" Frankly, I’m still figuring it out why most of ATTI poses tend towards boring. Sometimes I would find drawings that I find too dynamic and I'd redraw a duller version of it.
Non dynamic visualizations suggest that however absurd the fantasy is, it’s a part of that world, nothing to be moved by. It’s absurd but it’s boring.
And poses that are less glamorous also helps to situate a character and place it in this world we are building, how it exist in this world. "
-- The Cave I: Boring and Grounded
For REACH OF THE ROACH GOD, we had a problem. There are no references for deep-cave-dwelling SEAsian cultures -- because there are no real-life deep-cave-dwelling cultures, SEAsian or otherwise. So how can we ground things? Munkao does some heavy thinking:
" Where is that Centre if where we are coming from is imagination?
Two things I've come to realize while working with this series.
This is what Centre-ing is about too, the freedom to move away from that Centre. Not being stuck in representing identity, having the ability and imagination to go further and be comfortable with it.
The other thing is that it was never a place of pure imagination, it came from somewhere, based off something, stuff I've read, experienced, heard or a trails of thought that I'd follow. "
-- The Cave II: An Undergrounded Approach
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PODCASTS & MENTIONS & PRESS
More talk about ROTRG, floating about the ether:
- " The art is gorgeous, the premise is fascinating and intriguing, and though the campaign is fully funded, their stretch goals only serve to make the book better. " -- Cypher Chronicles, Monte Cook Games' newsletter. (Super chuffed to get a mention from one of RPGs' OG outfits!)
- " This project was made by Malaysia-based collective Centaur Games, who were also behind the local hit card game Politiko. " -- IGN Southeast Asia
- " A non-Eurocentric setting -- written by non-European people, right? That's the key, right? " -- The Weekly LIVE, Upturned Table
- " Think underground rivers, entombed jungles, caves of all types, and roaches. " -- RPG Crowdfunding News, ENWorld
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And more me mouthing off on podcasts:
The Lost Bay - "How Munkao & I Started Making Games", basically. (Honestly one of the best creator-feature TTRPG podcasts now running, mainly because Iko takes a lot of care in editing / contextualising his interviews? Think a magazine feature article, in audio form.) Thanks Iko!
The Maniculum - A chat with actual medievalist scholars about the Classical Malay texts Hikayat Hang Tuah and Sejarah Melayu, and how they tangentially inform ATTI. (Am really proud of this podcast, personally!) Thanks Mac & Zoe!
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BONUS CAT PIC
Here is my cat, Prawn, chomping down on a minion of the Roach God. Sacrilege!
May the Roach God forgive you.
Zedeck
ACTUAL PLAY + POST-MORTEM + DESIGN NOTES FOR "A QUIET LAKE"
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 07:09:10 AM
Last Sunday, for four hours, I ran QUIET LAKE -- the first adventure in REACH OF THE ROACH GOD, and also our Preview PDF -- on RPG-actual-play channel Plus One Exp.
With the wonderful imaginations of Tony Vasinda, BJ Recio, Richard Ruane, and Charlie Ferguson Avery. Using Plue One Exp's in-house minimalist Old-School-RPG system Down We Go, by Markus Linderum.
Full recording >>>HERE<<<
Was super nervous about this! I've played rarely and GM-ed less, this year; and I've run games for live broadcast / live audiences never.
I had blast. It was thrilling to see these characters and players, which had previously been lodgers in only mine and Munkao's minds, come alive in other folks' heads!
Highlights:
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BJ's stoic Gatpuno, an absolute unit of a warrior, greasing a cavern squeeze with coconut oil, just so he could get through;
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Tony's inscrutable Dunum, bronze-scaled mystic, yeeting an enormous (ie: person-sized, but also chubby) cobra, Fastball Special-style;
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Charlie's imperious Pensive Storm-Cloud, aforementioned cobra, reluctantly licking a goat (his saliva had healing properties);
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Richard's bookish Akram, a scholar with hidden depths (and weapons), teaching legal philosophy to a child-sized roach.
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AFTER-SESSION THOUGHTS
- I was fortunate to have players who "attacked" the adventure with their characters. Akram's attempt to teach a roach ethics is a good example; it offered me an reason to have the main antagonist (the philosophically-inclined Roach Centipede) show up at the very end. There's symmetry to that ending, even if it was less than climactic.
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QUIET LAKE is designed to be an open-ended adventure, with many threads to pull. Maybe too many? (The events spooking this lake-side community come from two separate, unconnected sources; a third faction is encamped nearby, pursuing its own goals.)
- Cavern spaces comprise half the geography of the adventure -- but caving is pretty scary! Savvy characters won't go spelunking if there's no pressing motivation, and no obvious way back.
I do believe that overabundance is a virtue in adventure-writing, and many of these issues would probably resolve themselves in a second session (QUIET LAKE has a ticking clock built into its encounter tables).
But I did do a fair amount of pushing-threads-at-players than the current text doesn't quite instruct you to do -- so there's an actionable thing for when we do a second-draft pass at the adventure!
Every game is a playtest.
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DEE WEE SHREE, BAT ASCETIC
My one regret from Sunday's game was that players didn't get to meet Dee Wee Shree, the giant bat "monster" behind many of the goings-on, described thusly: "Emotes like a stage actor."
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WOULD YOU LIKE TO RUN QUIET LAKE YOURSELF?
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The star Elalela took pity on the demon Odoyoq. She kissed his wounds, salved his skin. As she
did so she taught him stories -- of language and war; of music and medicine; of temples and
kingdoms.
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We realise that the preview PDF of QUIET LAKE lacks vital orientation / context necessary for GMs to actually run the adventure. (Those bits were left out of the preview because they aren't finished yet ...)
And what's the use of a preview adventure, if folks can't play it?
So here's an assemblage of summaries and design explainers for QUIET LAKE, mainly from derived from my own game notes!
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Design Notes downloadable >>>HERE<<<
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Of particular utility is the CHARACTER STAT BLOCKS section, where we outline our schema for the single-line, natural-language "stat blocks" that will be in REACH OF THE ROACH GOD, and how to adapt them to your ruleset of choice.
(The document includes D&D5E-specific notes, because that's what I tend to run, at home -- but the book will include guides for other systems, too!)
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If you do run QUIET LAKE, please please please let us know how it goes. What worked, what didn't -- and what you had to do to make up the difference. Help make our work better!
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May the Roach God guide your skitterings.
Zedeck
SIGNS OF A ROACH + NZ SHIPPING CLARIFICATION
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 09:31:53 PM
CROWDSOURCED SIGNS OF A ROACH -- COMPLETE!
Last week I asked you, dear backers, to suggest descriptions that signaled the close proximity or imminent arrival of a roach -- how they smell, what they look like, what they feel like.
You delivered. You even submitted entries for how a roach might taste. (I'll not judge. We all have culinary preferences others may find outre.)
I compiled and edited your submissions. Munkao laid them out in a PDF, adding terrible (TERRIBLE) illustrations to accompany them.
Lo: possibly the most cursed TTRPG thingmajig ever conceived:
SIGNS OF A ROACH
(Also available for download from Itch.)
Edited from suggestions by:
Anton Belov, Simon Forster, Thomas Harney, Derek Kinsman, Vyasar M Ganesan, Shane Craker, Mark Krawec, Verity Lane, Roxual, Hobbie Regan, Handy Haversack, Greg C, Coagulopathy, Daniel MacPhee, taichara, Dirk Schlobinski, HandwashBigpan, Uther, Daniel Fowler, vickyradcliffe, kamingusu, Rat Man, Craig Chouraki-Lewin, Chad Vest, Karma Choying, Jason Blasso, Elizabeth Stone, Sharon Chin, Zedeck Siew, Sean Craven, Bob H Boyd, Bugbearballs, Aaron Böhler, Nariz, Bevan Anderson, Alex Agran, Scott Beattie.
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DESIGN NOTES
The smell, sight, and touch tables are d36 -- ie: roll d6 once, then roll d6. The taste table is a more modest d20.
Crowd-sourced tables can sometimes feel hodge-podge and uneven, which hampers their usefulness. I decided that it was important for these roach tables (already of, shall we say, specialised utility) to be lean and consistent.
Every submission has been heavily tweaked for length and consistency. In many cases the core idea of the submission is given extra relationality and specificity. Some were repeats that I had to merge.
The end-result is something that I am proud to say fits A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS as a whole, yet still retains a broadness of imagery only possible with the participation of thirty-seven imaginations.
Thank you, all.
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NEW ZEALAND SHIPPING UPDATE
Following a question by one of our NZ-based backers, Munkao did some further searching, and found a slightly cheaper shipping option for New Zealand.
Who knew that shipping books from the UK is cheaper than shipping them from Malaysia or Australia? Definitely not us. (Is it a Commonwealth thing? Then again: Malaysia is part of the Commonwealth.)
Again, these are just estimates. We are only able to confirm shipping costs when the book is ready to be shipped.
And, while the difference in cost isn't much, we hope it helps ...
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Praise Odoyoq, dear friends in the dark.
Zedeck
WEEK TWO + KICKSTARTER RECOMMENDATIONS
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 06:37:22 PM
THE FIRST 21 DAYS
Everybody we spoke to warned us about the week-two plateau -- the tendency for the steep rise of a Kickstarter project to flatten out in its middle. It's a psychological thing: the slowing of growth feels like a shrinking.
We have to remind ourselves that REACH OF THE ROACH GOD has already been successful beyond our expectations: USD74,546 raised by 1351 backers (as of this writing); six-and-a-half Stretch Goals unlocked.
It's not as if we've been idle, either -- Munkao managed to arrange EU-friendly shipping; I got to press-gang backers into creating roach-themed random tables together.
Pretty effing good for low-profile first-time KS-ers from the Third World. We have everything to be thankful for.
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PROJECTS WE LOVE
Time to give back. Here's a list of currently-funding projects that we are personally supporting (not including Mothership and CY_BORG, because come on, you are already backing these right???) and why:
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Moonlight On Roseville Beach -- hours to go -- Zedeck: "Richard Ruane is a great designer and cosmic horror always needs queering but if I'm perfectly honest I'm backing this solely on the strength of DAI Shugar's pulp cover."
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Upriver, Downriver -- hours to go -- Zedeck: "Riverine adventure campaign, dice- and tarot-based mechanics. I like river things. (A fact I learned recently: traditional houses in Negeri Sembilan, my home state, always have their verandahs orientated to the closest river.)"
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Be Like A Crow -- 6 days to go -- Grace: "I come from Klang, a town infested with crows. Klang people have embraced crows. It's a game about crows. I wanna be a crow. Cannot help it."
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Mostly Harmless Meetings -- 7 days to go -- Munkao: "I like the writing, it's cute. And it has cute art choices. I am just charmed by it."
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The Cleaning Of Prison Station Echo -- 7 days to go -- Zedeck: "Another insta-back because of art. Evlyn Moreau's line art is always a pleasure."
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LATAM Breakout -- 14 days to go -- Zedeck: "Solidarity with #RPGLATAM is one thing, but if I'm being honest this is another art-based back. Check out Lino Arruda's illustrations for 'here, there, be monsters!' -- dope."
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Down In Yongardy -- 15 days to go -- Zedeck: "Daniel Sell's prose is one of Troika!'s undersung virtues. Here Chris has spun a whole gamebook from a paragraph-long player-character description. An excellent flower from excellent blood-watered soil."
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Carved In Stone -- 16 days to go -- Zedeck: "This project is bait made for me! System-neutral gazetteer with a strong sense of specific geography (and in this case, time). I don't know much about Pictish 7th-Century Scotland. I want to know more."
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That's it: everything we are backing, this crowded KS season. Go support these projects, if you can!
See you folks for the (hopefully, hope I haven't jinxed it) week-four final push!
Zedeck
