I’m sure you know by now, but Murka is a high-fantasy playable parody of the all-too-real, capitalist hellscape known as the United States of America.

What makes Murka different, you (didn’t) ask? I’ll tell you. Furry druids, dragons with guns for faces, food magic, Walmoria, gunchucks, explosives, items that aren’t just cursed, but cursed... You get the picture.

This world is a labor of love that my friends and I have been working on for 10 years oh my god, has it really only been five years? Are we in the finale episode of some television show jumping its 13th shark? What the hell is going on?

I hope you have fun with this little nearly 60-page sampler PDF. We picked stuff that we thought was bite-sized and funny, but there’s around 800 more pages of content where this came from. 

We'd love to meet you, answer your questions about Murka, and welcome you to our community. Just click here to join us on Discord! 

Cheers, thanks for reading this far. See you all real soon. 
Jaron R. M. Johnson, and the Action Fiction Faction 

Hey, gang!

So sorry we’ve been quiet these last two months. A lot has been going on behind the scenes, and I’m so excited to share with you what we’ve been working towards this whole time. Action Fiction has been acquired by Vala Marketing, and will now become Vala Foundry! I know that the term “acquired” sounds like scary corpo-capitalism speak, but rest assured, very little will be actually changing, and in reality, this will open up some amazing doors for all of us.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT!

Last summer, Vala Marketing helped us push the Ratified & Radified Backerkit campaign WAY beyond our expectations. What was supposed to just cover the costs to do some light edit work and reprint books became enough for us to see that Murka (and our other games) has so much life in it, and it’s so fun to make, and perhaps most importantly, we might be able to make it full time. 

As some of you know, the AF gang has never done Action Fiction game design full time. All of us have juggled having a day job, working 40 hours a week to feed the capitalism machine and pay rent, and then spending another 20 hours a week working on stuff like Monsters of Murka, Cthulhu Dreamt, and Goblin Cave (not to mention Conventions where we’ve gotten to meet many of you fantastic people). This is how we’ve always operated, and while it’s been amazing, it has also been incredibly difficult. We’ve burned out a few times, we’ve hit walls, we’ve missed bills—all in the pursuit of making games that we, and you, can be passionate about and have fun with. But now with Vala’s help, we can go full time as game designers.

Grant (the big cheese at Vala) really loved working with us on Murka, and now we get to do so much cool shit together. Meeting Grant for Murka was like finding my long lost twin in a number of ways—it was very apparent right from the rip that he understood exactly what Murka is about and why it’s so important. It’s been a breath of fresh air to work with someone with all the same passions and beliefs, and someone who laments all the same realities that we do. It’s also nice because instead of being acquired by “big business,” it feels a lot more like two small businesses forming a very cool alliance which will open doors for both of us.

At the end of the day, very little will change. The AF gang will still own the intellectual property for Murka, Cthulhu Dreamt, and Goblin Cave. We’ll still be the ones cooking stuff up for you. And we retain all our creative control. Really, Vala is just empowering us to do our thing, and then do some more. We’ve been hard at work polishing Murka and Cthulhu Dreamt and Goblin Cave, but we’ve also started planning for our next few games and what will come next. This will be the first time in AF’s history that we can actually look ahead, we can stop to take a breather and formulate a plan, and we can pay ourselves for our work. For us, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. And for you, that means more games!

Part of our future means Monsters of Murka and Cthulhu Dreamt will be published by Vala’s TTRPG publishing arm, QuasiReal Publishing (perhaps best known for MythCraft), so you'll start to see their logo and branding more. This is because we’ll be splitting our efforts a bit, with all of our TTRPG content moving to QuasiReal, and all of our board game content staying here with Vala Foundry. But it'll still be the same folks steering the Murka ship as before, so you shouldn't expect any major changes!

From here on out, you can expect faster timelines and more frequent updates! Not having to relegate ourselves to 20 hours a week and only when we’re able to muster the energy after 40 hours of day-jobbing means we’re so much more refreshed. It’s hard to describe how freeing it feels. All we’ve felt lately is space to breathe, and a really exciting road ahead.

So, for us, the only real change we’re experiencing (other than all the new resources and focus) is that the A in AF is flipping upside-down. Now we’re the VF gang. (inb4 one of you—probably Brad—says “Vction Fiction”).

Did you know: Your liver is the only organ in your body that can completely regenerate itself. I know this because I am currently like 90% of the way to completely regenerating my own after donating! Ayyy!

Okay now scroll down for some of that good, good Murka stuff.

Cheyenne continues her work laying out the bits of the Murka books which have exited the editing stages, and we finished ALL 23 of the spells from Arcana Americana, which we now present to you for review! 

The PDF is currently currently a work-in-progress; we're still finalizing a lot of the art and layout elements. But the text is in a pre-release state ready for public playtest. Feel free to theory craft, run a one-shot, or start your Murka campaign outright! Then, collect your feedback and submit it in our handy dandy feedback form!

You can find the Feedback Form here, or in the Playtest PDF.

We're primarily looking for any wonky mechanical interactions or obvious balancing issues, so if you catch any, please please submit them! As a show of our appreciation, there's a section in the feedback form to submit your name which will be credited separately in the book as a playtester. This section is optional, so if you'd rather not have your name in the book, that's fine too!

The poll was overall in favor of printing in the 2024 ruleset, but some of you offered some REALLY helpful suggestions on how to mitigate the issue entirely by including both. The most-suggested and best solution we've found so far is to print the 2024 rules with 2014 sidebars, meaning, the default rules assume 2024, and when the two rulesets differ, we offer specifics on how to use the content in 2014 D&D. 

This is also the approach Loot Tavern is taking in their new materials, and having now seen them for myself, it looks great and it's such an elegant solution. So, thanks to everyone who suggested it—this will actually save us some time on layout in the long run, and drastically simplify our processes from here on out!

You can look forward to the next playtest PDF sometime soon, which should include our monsters! Until then, you can find the Arcana Americana subclass Playtest PDF here. Or, you can find the Arcana Americana Spells Playtest PDF here. 

Thanks for all your support! We're nearing the finish line together!


Yours across the plains of Midwesteros,

Jaron R. M. Johnson

And the Action Fiction Faction