Author: devadmin

It’s been a minute since I updated the ol’ web site here, but I’ve been busy and the news is good.

First off, there’s a new story in the fiction section! It’s called Stranger Lake and I swear the idea seemed horrifying when I first had it, but it just skewed towards comedy more and more as I put words on the page. It’s got an appealing narrator/protagonist who makes bad mistakes and explains things like, “It’s not actually called ‘Stranger Lake,’ of course. Its official name is ‘Strangler Lake.’”

Stranger Lake originally appeared on my Patreon, and it’s free here because the good people there subsidized it. The twist is, they got to read it a year ago. For five bucks there, you get a new story each month, and for ten you get an archive of the last year’s stories–a much better deal now, obviously, than it was a year ago when I started. Also, ten dollar supporters get access to a Discord, and that’s cool.

Finally, check out this graphic.

That’s an unfinished linocut, of the same type I used to make the covers for You: A Fiction and Thank You For Screaming. Though a fun fact about linocut is that it prints mirror imaged. No big deal for the fiction anthology I Dream of Insomnia, which you can tell is getting prepared–I’ll just flip it in layout. But the tangible prints I do as backer rewards when I Kickstart it? Well, I guess I’ll position it as “Own A Piece of Greg’s Stupidity.” The lede I’m busily burying here, of course, is that a new anthology of fiction is on its way.

I’ve also got some news coming on the roleplaying side of things, but that surely deserves its own post when the time is right. Keep your eyes peeled!

-G.

Hey, have you heard Thunderhead Mesa? If not, let me back up. Have you heard of Thunderhead Mesa? No? OK, there’s this podcast called Red Moon Roleplaying that does actual plays, but then edits them down so they sound more like audio drama. It’s an fascinating fusion of forms, and they invited me to run Unknown Armies for them.

The first episode is up now.

Now, before you hop on, let me put up a note about the content. The premise of Thunderhead Mesa is that a young woman loses several days after being struck by lightning, and as she tries to retrace her steps, she learns that (1) she’s not the first person to experience this and (2) a fair amount of sexual stuff happened.

If issues of sex without consent are a stumbling block to your enjoyment of media, hey, I get it. I think we handled it very maturely and with sensitivity, especially since it all happens before the narration commences, but I just want to give a heads-up. Everyone else, I hope you enjoy it! Certainly the players and I did!

If you missed the last update, that’s OK, because you’re reading this now and this is the exciting, important part! I’ve launched a Patreon for my short fiction, and you can join it, right this instant!

The link is https://www.patreon.com/GregStolze and for just five thin dollars a month you can get a new story from me. For a little more, you get access to previous stories — not a big deal on launch day, I admit — but you can also join up a private Discord server.

Plus, the first 20 backers get something a little extra. Check it out, go on!

If you’re at all familiar with my fiction library, you know that almost everything there was crowdfunded collectively. Many paid so that many more could get access for free. This has worked pretty well.

Recently, however, my primary crowdfunding platform has made some questionable decisions about cryptocurrency involvement. It’s not just that I personally have strong reservations. Many of my backers have been vocal about it too. Moreover, I’ve always said that crowdfunding is based on trust. If the tool I used for crowdfunding makes unilateral moves like this without consulting backers or creators, how am I supposed to use it with confidence?

So I’m taking a break from that form of crowdfunding for a while. But currently, I have a backlog of an even dozen stories ready to go—funny stuff, scary stuff, weird stuff. Some quite short, some longer. That’s without getting into the unpublished novellas and novels. If I level with you, what I’d love like a fistful of candy is a regular, predictable income from fiction without the constantly hype and promotion of running a Kickstarter. Especially since it comes with a lot of stress. (Though, to be sure, less stress than juggling a dozen magazine submissions.)

Thus, I’m pleased to announce I’m launching a Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you a story. Ten bucks a month gets you a story and access to all the stories that came before and access to a private Discord chat, which I promise to check regularly. I might add more tiers if there seems to be demand for it, but for now, I’m doing $5 and $10. After a year, stories go up on the normal fiction library for free.

Moreover, the first twenty patrons get something special. It’s not huge, but a nice little surprise.

The Stolze Fiction Patreon launches April 2nd. If you want a reminder or an alert when it goes live, I’m announcing it first to the mailing list. Look at the top of the header for “join the mailing list” if you’re really curious about that “special surprise” for the first twenty joiners.

Hey, wanna hear me, a charmingly systems-promiscuous GM and a British guy talk about games? If you do, click here now. If you want to know more, read on. It’s OK. You’ll have another chance to click that link.

A few months back, Twitter was talking about Old Gods of Appalachia and how to turn it into a tabletop RPG. Someone suggested me as a designer, someone suggested James Wallis, and we had some fun until it was pointed out that James is from England and I’m from Iowa so there’s no… y’know, Appalachia there.

But in the course of the discussion, there was a rising sense that people wanted to hear James and myself go at it about game design, possibly in podcast format. Who’d want to do the donkey work of audio production for that, though?

Enter “Producer Ross” from RPPR. One brief and successful Kickstarter later, and the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast was born.

The plan is, every episode we dissect and discuss a game, typically hitting four points:

• What the game does.
• How it does that.
• How people play it.
• Why they play it that way.

So far we’ve recorded episodes about Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Outlaws of the Water Margin, Lancer and Night’s Black Agents. Those first two are up on Anchor.com for free listening right now, and the rest are in the production pipe. As for what we’ll cover next, that’s up to our Kickstarter backers. Me, I’m rooting for Thousand Year Old Vampire.

This really, maybe should have been two posts, but fickle fate conspired to let me launch one project just as another completes. So let’s do one big newsflash with two headlines.

Dueling Fops of Vindamere is Live on Kickstarter!

I’ve been waiting for this one a long time. My newest game is a Crankshaft Constellation endeavor, and we’re bringing you Vindamere: a fantasy town that’s like Lankhmar’s dumber, less hygienic sister. Injected into this setting are your characters, irresponsible triflers of the upper class who are (effectively) exempt from the laws, well trained with slinky thin swords, and desperately in love.

I’ve described it as “What if Romeo fell in love with Lady MacBeth?” I’ve said it’s like “Bridgerton, but extremely violent” or “hornier Cobra Kai, with swords!” But you can actually get a taste of its vibe right now by watching me in a game of it via Electric Dice, or by listening to the Big Gay Nerds playthrough.

In less hype-heavy terms, it’s a 44 page no-GM tabletop RPG where everyone plays and nobody’s in charge. Three events are set: The opening dance where every character falls in love, the mid-year cotillion where everything escalates, and the fencing championship where everything comes to a head. Between, the characters go into random events that range from your standard erotic machinations and grog-house brawls up through full-on civil insurrection. There’s even a locked-room mystery!

Your sword-swinging swell could end up dead, growing up and getting serious, becoming enlightened or falling into loveless despair and retiring to the moors. You might even have a happy ending, but whatever occurs, it’s never dull and (in my experience) always hilarious.

Check out the Kickstarter and if it sounds interesting, pledge today! Thanks.

New Stories of Unknown Armies Are Up!

Also, there’s one about zombies. These got funded recently, so now you can read them, share them around under the conditions of the CC: license, and generally delight yourself with them. There’s no catch!

Mick and Amanda and Reesa and Craig is about a used-up rock star and unreliable psychic, but mostly about a narrator with a surprising past. They try to save a child. As one does.

Mick and the Spoonbender gives us a closer focus on our feckless ex-drummer as he interviews a mysterious figure who claims to have been a CIA psychic.

Mick and the Fit sends us once more into our psychic rocker’s orbit, but he’s a pretty minor character only showing up at the end, after the main character’s life is utterly destroyed and she tries to pick some mystic enlightenment out of the wreckage.

Then there’s Like Uber, But For Monsters, which is a very short zombie story.

Thanks as always to the backers, here’s hoping you love them all!

2021 is the year I’ve started to suspect that any money I’ve made from fiction has been despite my level of skill at business, and not because of it. But with the help of my fans, I’ve maintained and grown the fiction library on this very website. Now, I’d like to do it again.

I am crowdsourcing funds to release three new stories based on the game UNKNOWN ARMIES. If I get a thousand bucks, the first one comes out. There’s another at $1,500 and the last one at $2,000. But don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it all yourself! Click the link, see how much you think new cool fiction is worth, and make a pledge. (There’s also cool stuff you can get — patches, linocuts, access to novels, something for everyone!) If they get funded and posted, they’ll be under a Creative Commons license, as has been my tradition.

What are these stories? They focus on an affable layabout who stumbled into a successful music career at a young age, got kicked out of the band, and is now living on residuals. Oh, and he’s unreliably psychic. His name’s Mick Peltier.

Mick and Amanda and Reesa and Craig has him as a minor character, alternately irritating and intriguing the narrator, a grouchy retired man with a surprisingly awful history. Together, they’re trying to save a girl from what can only be called an evil spirit. That’s the story you get at $1000.

Mick and the Spoon Bender was the first one I wrote, and focuses on him much more closely as he tries to start a podcast about the paranormal. He’s on the trail of a man who claims to be the UNKNOWN ARMIES version of the narrator from I Am A Psychic Assassin… Fortunately, this alleged psi-spy asset is a real big fan of Mick’s old band.

Mick and the Fit only brings him in at the end. Mostly it’s the mixed-up story of a fitness instructor. The story starts before a particular event, then skips to after it, and flips back and forth until we zero in on the exact moment her life got ruined, even as we see the way she’s able to transform her trauma into occult power.

I’ve got those stories all written, edited, and ready to go. If those clear, you can bet there’s more where that came from. I have a story about a pleasant old man’s terrifying anatomy, a short and extremely nasty piece of crime fiction along with a longer and more ambiguous one, a story about zombies and a bit of SF set on Mars that goes from funny to wince inducing. So check out the link and let’s see how much of this we can get out to everyone!

I’ve got a new Kickstarter running, and it’s for a book called DIFFERENT TROUBLE, the first supplement for TERMINATION SHOCK.

If you’re already a huge TERMINATION SHOCK fan, I hope this is good news! It’s about 80 pages focusing on playable characters who aren’t human. But it’s more than just “you’re lighter-than-air” or “you have a web-spinner.” I’ve tried hard to dig into what it would mean to evolve without any predators, and therefore no panic instinct. I’ve worked on getting players out of the unexamined assumptions of humankind. (For example, none of the aliens or robots described have genders or defined sexes.) I’ve also tried to encourage depth of culture in these species. It’s not just “the warlike aliens,” it’s “the aliens whose instincts direct violence towards other species and restrain violence against one another, and the different ways their cultures have adapted those imperatives to different climates on their planet.” With robots too, there’s a strong element of “What does it mean to be built for a specific task, but still retain free will?”

(This sounds highbrow, but come on, do you want to cope with the issues of robots that simply cannot do certain actions their players may insistently want to take?)

If you’re not already a TERMINATION SHOCK fan, my hope with this project is to entice you into the fold. We’ve got podcasts!

You can find an assortment of TERMINATION SHOCK actual play podcasts here. It’s a lengthy campaign whose main characters were deliberately designed to be half Han Solo, half Niles Crane. It worked out much better than I’d expected. (Also, the sound quality improves around episode three.)

With the DIFFERENT TROUBLE Kickstarter, we’ve included a lot of that bundle the new book with the original core rule book, so you can not only get the latest supplement, but save on shipping if you want the print versions.

New or old, I hope you check it out. I’ve put a lot of thought into it and think you’ll love the results.

-G.

My long-awaited Mythos horror novel, GOD CANCER, is now live on Kickstarter and blasting straight towards completion! You can get it softcover, you can get it in several electronic formats, you can get a code to buy it at cost if you want expedited shipping (or if you’re outside the US and Europe, sadly).

This book is the fusion of At the Mountains of Madness with the nightmarish realities of cancer, seasoned with a heavy dose of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s adventure, it’s medical drama, it’s certainly horror and it has a surprisingly subtle commentary on gender dynamics. (Since much of the horror centers on the body of an ailing billionaire, the commentary on economics is… less subtle.)

You don’t have to take my word for it! Let’s see what Leeman thinks!

If you don’t want to trust a beloved YouTube personality, you can read a preview chapter! Or, if the preview chapter isn’t spooky enough, there’s a brand new second preview! In .doc file if you need to read it that way!

Did it work? Did the previews make you want it? If so, click on through to…

Don’t delay though. Offer’s only good until midnight on Halloween, and after that the price is only going up!

Hey readers, I’m back on my fiction thing again. Why? Because y’all keep making it so rewarding! What I have for you today is called I Am A Psychic Assassin For the US Army.

If you’re an old hand at how I handle fiction, just click on that link and see if you’re interested. If you’re a newcomer to my web page, my fiction library, or me–hey, welcome! The way I’ve been working it is, I ask for a collective sum from everyone online and, if I get my goal, I put up a story for everyone, under a Creative Commons license.

I Am A Psychic Assassin has, as of right now, hit its goal! That means the story, 8,000 words long, is eventually bound for the fiction library here.

But wait, there’s more!

If my funding hits $1500, I’ll record a podcast of me reading the whole long thing. (I recently did this for another story, After the Cops.) Right now, we’re less than fifty bucks from unlocking that podcast for every backer. So you could back at a low level and get the podcast. (There’s other cool stuff you can get backing for more money, but to learn about that, you’ll have to click through to the project.)

Check it out, read some of the fiction here if you’re undecided and want a sample size to determine quality, but don’t take too long. The project winds down on September 23d!