Hey friends! Jason Morningstar here.
Several years ago Alex and I wrote Space Station Fobolex on a whim, trying to meet the heavy demand that her intimate two-player game had ...
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Alex Roberts
2 days ago
Sneak Peek at Star Crossed Online!
How do you simulate a tumbling block tower online? Does a game that relies on Jenga® become impossible to play when you can’t meet face to face? The answer is no, of course, but...
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Alex Roberts
2 days ago
FINAL WEEK! Introducing: Sharang Biswas and Ouhie!
We're in the final week of the Star Crossed: Love Letters campaign!
I am SO excited to finally introduce you to the last writer/illustrator pair: Sharang Biswas and Ouhie!
Sh...
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Alex Roberts
4 days ago
Listen to an Actual Play of Solo Star Crossed!
I expected Solo Star Crossed to feel like an “almost as good” version of regular SC. Playtesting revealed it to be a different experience entirely. Somehow, it feels… luxurious....
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Alex Roberts
4 days ago
Backers: Get a sneak peek at 3-Player Star Crossed!
Star Crossed was very deliberately made to be a two-player game. I’ve always tried to sculpt the play experience into a tense but gentle back-and-forth flow. But, of course, it ...
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Alex Roberts
7 days ago
Introducing: Jess Fink and GC Houle!
Okay, so, I wrote two pairings for Star Crossed: Love Letters. Mostly because there were two really cool illustrators I was excited to work with!
Loving the Alien is about a hu...
We're in the final week of the Star Crossed: Love Letters campaign!
I am SO excited to finally introduce you to the last writer/illustrator pair: Sharang Biswas and Ouhie!
Sharang is difficult to sum up in a few sentences. You’d be impressed enough to hear about his IGDN awards, Ennie Awards, IndieCade award, Golden Cobra award, or his contributions to Avatar: Legends, Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, Moonlight on Roseville Beach, Dungeons & Dragons, and many more. Did you know this guy also has a degree in Biochemical Engineering? How is that even real? That sounds like a degree a Spider-Man villain has.
Sharang is full of surprises. He seems equally at home in the fine arts world orchestrating an interactive performance piece, or writing gay smutty fiction for Fantasy Magazine. At the exact intersection of those two things, he also co-edited, with Lucian Kahn, the Honey and Hot Wax anthology of erotic art games - for which I am eternally grateful, because where the heck else was I going to publish my larp about people who have sex with balloons?
So, you can see why I wanted Sharang on the project. He pitched a really interesting idea - a possessing spirit hopping between bodies, and the priest trying to exorcize it. I really didn’t want the same old vaguely Catholic horror-fantasy, with The Devil and crucifixes and other kinda played out things… but I knew Sharang would have something more interesting on offer. And so:
The setting bursts with color - there’s a deeply sensuous quality to the writing, evoking the scents, sounds, and sights of a festival whose excitement borders on overwhelm. Naturally, I needed an artist who could work with this colourful, evocative piece…
Ouhie has a real talent for bringing out emotion and intention through colour. Their work uses surreal colours and very precise, minimal detail - perfect for a project where we’re asking players to take a core idea and develop their own impressions onto it.
Backers can see the full image below!
I’m in love with the way Ouhie captures an intense but ambiguous expression, and in such an impressionistic way - you know when you only glimpse something briefly, as you pass by, but the image of it stays with you for a long time? This looks like that. It’s a look I could get swept away in.
And the thing is, look at Ouhie’s instagram - every piece has this kind of magic!
You can see why I was overjoyed to have this team together. Now that I’ve introduced our wonderful artists and writers, it’s time to show off a little bit of what’s in the book. If you’ve been longing to hear more about SC Online, Solo SC, 3-Player SC… stay tuned for future updates!
I expected Solo Star Crossed to feel like an “almost as good” version of regular SC. Playtesting revealed it to be a different experience entirely. Somehow, it feels… luxurious. You play the Follow, and develop a Lead that is basically whoever you think it would be interesting to be entangled with. I soon learned that, wow, I really like helping players indulge themselves.
The Solo version is a creative exercise solely for your own pleasure and satisfaction, and I ended up really emphasizing this in the final text. Play as if you’re writing a first draft. Play as though no one needs to read it (much less understand or enjoy it) but you. Fill it with the things you like, and the things you’re interested in. The result is pure self-indulgence, a story you can sink into like a warm bath.
If you’d like to hear a playthrough of Solo SC, Star Crossed super-fan and all-around sweetheart James D’Amato is narrating his game over on the One Shot Podcast and I highly recommend giving it a listen!
Several years ago Alex and I wrote Space Station Fobolex on a whim, trying to meet the heavy demand that her intimate two-player game had at conventions. A big room full of people playing Star Crossed would be fine, but we could not resist the urge to do something special with that energy.
So we wrote up a silly space station and tied it into the shared universe from a larp we wrote called The Fobolex Interstellar Corporate Retreat. Then at the event we cast 20 players as weirdos, aliens, and lovelorn space nerds just seeking real connection in the big, empty galaxy. All the characters worked well together—in the sense that they all have something keeping them apart—and Space Station Fobolex has been a big hit at conventions!
For Star Crossed: Love Letters, we wanted to repeat and expand on this success to really show how you can play the game with a crowd. We were both all-in on another pulpy genre, and paranormal romance was right there. Originally titled Fobolex Landing, we sketched out a gritty industrial zone in a big city where the freaky monsters came out to live, laugh, and love. We changed the name to avoid confusion, and Alex laughed when I suggested “Bayshore”—apparently the name of a not-too-appealing corner of somewhere she used to live.
Bayshore Landing wrote itself. We drew up a long list of weirdos (mummies, werewolves, larpers, angels) and an equally long list of adjectives (gentle, lonely, dirtbag, regal) and then paired them up. After that, each got a short paragraph positioning them in a gentle but humorous search for love. I adore them all, but here’s a taste of who you might end up playing:
Dirtbag Werewolf
Clueless Larper
Hapless Alien
These strange denizens of the shadows will work well in two-player as well as three-player Star Crossed. When a worried swamp monster, an overconfident slayer, and a shifty goblin fall in love, it is going to get weird in the best way.
--Jason
What weird and exciting settings would you like to see for playing Star Crossed with a big crowd? Tell us in the comments!
How do you simulate a tumbling block tower online? Does a game that relies on Jenga® become impossible to play when you can’t meet face to face? The answer is no, of course, but getting to yes took a little work - and calling in some experts.
Dana Fried
Gerrit Reininghaus
We asked two friends who have actually thought about this a lot: Dana Fried, who created the “D20 Tower” to play Epidiah Ravachol’s Dread, and Gerrit Reininghaus, who was already playing Star Crossed quite successfully over video chat.
Dana’s original solution involved rolling the D20, marking each time each number was drawn - the tower “falls” after the same number is rolled four times. Gerrit (in my opinion, the expert on Live Action Online Gaming) coupled that with a responsive spreadsheet character keeper, and an ingenious mechanic to replace touching the tower during character dialogue - instead, touching the other player’s face on your screen.
In the end, we’ve included two options in the book - a straightforward adaptation of the D20 tower (for online play, or for anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to pull bricks!) and a more complex spreadsheet-driven version that emulates the uncertainty of the tower in interesting ways.
If you’d like to see Star Crossed Online in action, we recommend this recent episode of Roleplay Retcon, where Alex and RR host Jensie retcon the should-have-been-great Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Jensie called it “the best online character keeper I’ve ever used.” Listen to the episode here!
Star Crossed was very deliberately made to be a two-player game. I’ve always tried to sculpt the play experience into a tense but gentle back-and-forth flow. But, of course, it took about two playtests before players started asking: can we play this with three? So: here you go.
Backers: get the three-player rules using the link below!
First things first: it’s not about love triangles. I usually get frustrated by stories in which two people compete for a third person who must choose between them (because I can always see a very obvious solution). The other thing is that Emily Care Boss already nailed that premise in Shooting the Moon back in 2006. Go play it! I’ve played it. It’s fun.
So, in the Star Crossed spirit (self-indulgence via game design), everybody is into everybody. That doesn’t mean it will be straightforward, safe, or easy.
The major change that makes this possible is adjusting the Lead/Follow dynamic. In a three-person relationship, the game’s role binary doesn’t make sense. The solution is for every character to be a Lead. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to get three people together in real life: it is no time to be coy. Having six instead of eight scenes, with prompts like “An act of desperation,” also help move things along nicely.
To keep players from over-focusing on one partner over the other, the game still plays out as a series of scenes, but players take their turns in clockwise order rather than back-and-forth. Because turn-taking is so strict in Star Crossed, the triangle emerges organically.One couple can’t really get overly attached before another couple has a chance to bond further.
These adjustments emerged from playtesting, which started out with a system that was slightly more complex and got pared back to the lightest possible touch on the existing rules. (Many thanks to Jason for essentially taking the Sword of Manjushri to my early drafts.) I hope the three-player rules come naturally to players, and that they resonate with experience well enough to help make authentic and meaningful stories.
Okay, so, I wrote two pairings for Star Crossed: Love Letters. Mostly because there were two really cool illustrators I was excited to work with!
Loving the Alien is about a human and an extraterrestrial (in human guise) who have a limited time together on earth. I write about aliens a lot because I often feel like an alien, in one way or another. This particular pairing also reflects my experience falling in love with someone from very far away. I need a way to express how endearing it is when someone gets genuinely excited about seeing a squirrel, or a raccoon, or a bafflingly large tree.
I knew Jess Fink would capture this wide-eyed delight perfectly. Her work revels in weirdness, especially when it's sexy, but more than anything, it radiates joy and pleasure. Also it was just so great to have Jess back after she did such beautiful work for the original Star Crossed, I really wanted her to illustrate one of my pairings.
Backers can see the full illustration below!
My other pairing, The Human Form, takes something a bit more mundane and turns up the heat on it. Two figure models are posing for long periods of time in an intimate embrace, under the gaze of an artist who demands perfect stillness. Really, it’s Star Crossed pared down to its barest essence: it’s hot when you’re really close but can’t kiss.
I wanted an illustrator for this who could bring some brightness, color and excitement to an image that wouldn’t exactly be action-packed. GC Houle is an amazing artist who brings striking color palettes and gorgeous, diverse character designs to their comics and illustration. I knew they would make something unique and, frankly, hot.
Backers can see this full illustration too, below!
I strongly recommend you check out Jess’ and GC’s work. Not to get too sentimental, but both of them are making the kind of joyous art that reminds me how awesome it is to be queer.
You might know that Love Letters comes with a brand new way to play Star Crossed online.
You probably know that I Have the High Ground is Jess Levine's heart-pounding two-player game of loaded banter and posturing before a climactic duel.
And so you must think: those two games would go together really well, right?
Well, Jess and I did play the two games on the Party of Onepodcast, mashed up as one continuous story about alien diplomats who ended up in a chili cook-off for planet Earth...
Click to listen to our high-stakes sci-fi romance at the county fair!
If you've backed Love Letters, you can add the PDF and/or printed zine to your order...
Jess and I used the PDF to play online together!
OR... you can get the limited edition premium version that includes dice, tokens, and everything else you need to play:
Thanks so much to Jess Levine for suggesting this mashup, and to Jeff Stormer for letting us take over his podcast for a week. We had SO much fun playing these games together, and it's pretty clear that Jess and I share a lot of values when it comes to designing games - player collaboration, tension, emotions first, mechanics that draw from life (in her case, from real-life fencing!) and you know... being hot.
We're halfway through the campaign, and have hit an astounding *three times* our initial funding goal. Thank you, backers! I'm so proud to be bringing Star Crossed to a wider audience, and giving SC fans both oft-requested additions and exciting new surprises.
We know we're making this book. Now it's just a question of how far we can share it.
If you want the two player game of forbidden love, and all its new settings and new ways to play, to flourish: tell a friend about it. Tell your gaming group. Post it in your group chat, Discord server, or wherever else you connect with people.
The world of TTRPGs has grown from a little island to a vast and diverse archipelago. Word-of-mouth is more important than ever.
So, that's it. If you love Star Crossed, or are stoked to try it out, or find yourself looking forward to all the new ways to play - tell somebody. We would appreciate it.
(Next week, we'll be sharing details and samples from Solo, Three-Player, and SC for a Crowd!)
Hello, dear backers! I hope you had a lovely weekend. It was nice to tune in this morning to Star Crossed: Love Letters tip-toeing over the $14k mark. I’m so proud of all the support and love this project is getting!
DRPG is a really cool talk show on the Nerdsmith network (who also host friends of Star Crossed Roleplay Retcon) exploring all kinds of different RPG systems and ways of playing. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know I’m a huge advocate of trying as many different games as you can. It’s enriching as a designer and as a player! And it’s fun!
Anyway, you can catch me nerding out about Love Letters, tonight at 6pm PST, on twitch.tv/wearenerdsmith
FYI: Alex will be on Discovery RPG, hosted on the Nerdsmith twitch channel, Monday November 20th at 6pm PST / 9pm EST! Don’t miss it!)
Today it is my pleasure to introduce you to two of our contributors, James Mendez Hodes and Bloomer!
James Mendez Hodes is probably best known for his game of samurai action and drama, Thousand Arrows - described by a friend of mine as “the best time I’ve ever had at a con.” I hope so, anyway, because it’s a good game and he’s a talented designer.
There’s a chance though, that you know Mendez more as a cultural consultant, and from his writing about everything from Orcs to fortune cookies to thoughtful representation of fictional religions. Mendez plays many roles, but one of them is The Guy Who Carefully and Insightfully Explains to the TTRPG Industry If and How Certain Things Are or Aren’t Racist. I'm not making a joke about that - Mendez has contributed more than anyone can really measure to the state of TTRPGs today.
I’ve worked with Mendez before in that capacity, and I’ve always found it an enriching experience. But I also decided after our last consulting gig that I wanted to work with him just, like, as a fellow designer and writer. So of course I invited him to pitch a pairing.
Mendez wrote a piece called Taxi Dance, about a Filipino labourer and a white nightclub dancer falling in love in 1934 California. It opens like this:
I would describe this as not fucking around. Mendez carefully establishes the stakes of a very real historical context - including anti-miscegenation laws and the continuing threat of racialized violence - and then gives us two loveable, interesting people whose connection feels like a single note of grace in the midst of it all.
And then Bloomer captures that moment:
Backers can see the full image below!
Naturally I wanted a Filipine artist to work on this, but I also needed someone who could capture expression, realistic texture (as you’ll learn, fashion is surprisingly important in this setting), and the tension of a stolen moment. Bloomer fit the bill.
Take a look at their instagram and you’ll instantly know what I mean.
I am delighted to have Bloomer on what is their first TTRPG commission. Bloomer handled it with sensitivity and style, giving a gorgeous romantic vision to the painful context in which our characters meet.
I love this pairing for some of the same reasons I love Jason’s Psikusha - reminders that love doesn’t need any particular conditions to bloom; it grows like roses in a garden or like dandelions in the sidewalk, and it’s beautiful every time.
One week in and you’ve pledged over twice our funding goal. You’re great. <3
Today I’d like to introduce an incredible duo:
Banana Chan
You probably know the 2022 Dicebreaker Designer of the Year, the multiple-ENnie-winning game designer behind An Exquisite Crime, Suburban Consumption of the Monstrous, and Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, whose name graces books of Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, and (most exciting to me) the Dune RPG.
I associate her work with an unsettling sense of dread, perhaps epitomized in the frantic paranoia of the video-pervasive larp They’re Onto Me. However, my favourite of her games is a small (unpublished?) freeform larp called Welcome to New Jersey, about a seemingly endless road trip to a game convention. You sit in a car with people you barely know, passing the Welcome sign over and over and over again. The game ends when someone finally screams.
I invited Banana to contribute because I wanted some of that surreal strangeness, the horror, and perhaps some of the mundane-meets-fantastic that makes Jiangshi such a resonant game for so many people.
But no.
Banana has exceeded all expectations, and given us a pairing that is based on the John Woo masterpiece(?) Face/Off. Yes, the one where John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play an FBI agent and the criminal who killed his son. For complicated reasons, Travolta gets Cage’s face transplanted onto his own, and then Cage gets Travolta’s face, and there are a lot of explosions.
This scenario was actually played out at Big Bad Con 2018, to the horror and amusement of all who laid eyes on it.
Hm. Actually, maybe I did get the Lynchian skin-crawling horror I was expecting.
Milsae Kim
What I love about Milsae’s work could be summed up in one word: lesbians. She has a talent for drawing cool girls in suits doing cool stuff and also kissing. All of her characters seem to leap off the page with energy and distinct personalities. So, knowing the source material for this pairing, I knew Milsae had the only way to both reference and improve upon it:
Backers can see the full illustration below!
You can find more of Milsae’s work here, and my favourite of her own pairings here.
Three-player Star Crossed has been one of the most requested features since I first started playtesting the game. I’m very pleased to offer some solid (and relatively simple!) rules for 3PSC in Love Letters.
But maybe you’d like a trio of characters to play? And a romantic setting for them to swoon in? Well, ask Jason Morningstar and you get this:
I’m a big fan of Night Witches, Jason’s Powered by the Apocalypse game about women at war. More specifically, it’s about the real-history 588th Night Bomber Regiment, a group of Soviet women pilots who bombed the German military in outdated wood-and-canvas biplanes from 1942-1945.
In this scenario, a trio of characters meet at a Soviet psychiatric hospital (known as a "psikhushka") in the mid-forties. Given that homosexuality was one of the “illnesses” that could get you locked up there in the first place, there’s a lot on the line for our would-be lovers.
I love this setting, and these characters. Star Crossed can be fanciful, silly, adorable - but stories of forbidden love can be truly heartbreaking, too. Jason gets the full range of the game, and really delivered on the more tragic side of SC. I mean just look at this:
We promised some very special content just for Backers, and here it is! Backers can see the download link below!
If you play these miserable characters fighting for a scrap of joy in a cold and heartless world, please be sure to tell us all about it.
First things first: thank you, sweet backers, for pledging over ten thousand dollars(!) to our humble project. Thank you!! We’re not even a week in and I’m already running out of ways to say thanks. Gratitude overload. It feels kinda nice.
Anyway, on to the main focus of today’s update. I get to introduce you to Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, co-authors of the contemporary Star Crossed story par excellence - This is How You Lose the Time War. It’s a story told in correspondence across pasts and futures, two people intertwined by a conflict that seems not just endless but beginning-less(?), falling for each other. You probably already know this because it is a famous and beloved book that won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Aurora and British Science Fiction and Fantasy awards. (And then earned the love of perhaps the last great Twitter Main Character, bigolas dickolas, but that’s a story for another time.)
What you really need to know is that I read it because my friend Jenn read it, and loved it so much she immediately sent a copy to me. Not her copy - my own. Overnight delivery. A pretty strong recommendation.
Amal doesn’t just write time-twisting enemies-to-lovers award winners, though. She writes beautiful poetry, and thoughtful critique, and more. We somehow missed each other when we both lived in the same city (for years!) but had a lovely correspondence when she was using one of my games as a teaching tool in her creative writing class. I’ve been hoping for a chance for us to work together again, and I think we can all agree that Love Letters is the perfect fit.
I met Max at a house con many years ago, and I can say that besides being an acclaimed writer he is a delightful player to have at the table. You’ve probably heard of his many beloved fantasy novels, so please do me a favour and check out his games: Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: The City’s Thirst, because I know you want to play text-based necromantic legal thrillers.
I have a hunch one or both of these two will be making TTRPGs next. Just calling it now. Because wow they know how to make a compelling Pairing. In Tender is the Knight, a solitary dragon and the knight sent to confront them find a surprising connection. From the introduction:
^This is how you capture the player’s imagination in a way that catapults them into their own dreams.
Sovanny Vorn
Sovanny is also someone I’ve been itching to work with for a while. Her work glows with texture and feeling, and always gives me the sense there's more happening (physically and emotionally) than the viewer can immediately see.
She is also really good at drawing cool birds and handsome gentlemen of a certain age. So when I said, “bird dragon and silver fox knight, please!” she needed no further instruction.
Backers can see the full image below!
“Dragon and Knight” might sound like an action-focused pairing for some, but Sovanny went with a much more intimate and, well, tender image. I love it. It’s so quiet and subdued. Somehow, the word that comes to mind when I look at this is: cuddly. I just want them to have a nice little nap together!
Okay, that’s enough fangirling for one update. If you want to keep up with these talented folks, check out Max’s work here, Amal’s here, and Sovanny’s here.
And stay tuned for tomorrow’s update: we’re getting some bonus content from Jason Morningstar!
I'm SO excited to introduce you to another writer/illustrator set you'll find in the pages of Love Letters.
Cecilia Tan
Cecilia is kind of a badass. She doesn't just write sci-fi BDSM erotica (and lots of other erotic/romance fiction) she founded Circlet Press, a whole publishing house devoted to it. You might recognize some of her titles: Slow Surrender, The Prince’s Boy, Mind Games, The Hot Streak, White Flames, Edge Plays, Black Feathers, The Velderet, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords, as well as the Magic University series of paranormal erotic romances. My favourite accolade, though, is that Cecilia has the distinction of being perhaps the only writer to have erotic fiction published in both Penthouse and Ms. magazines.
Imagine my delight when this real-life erotic romance author expressed a fondness for Star Crossed??? I was flattered to say the least.
When I invited Cecilia to contribute to Love Letters, she immediately sent over some interesting pitches that unfortunately overlapped with some other contributors' pairings. When I asked for more, she very hesitantly pitched something... a little darker. A little too real, maybe. In a dystopian way.
If you like near-future sci-fi, intense power dynamics, and medical weirdness, you are going to love Fever. I certainly do. One thing I really like about it is that through carefully varied options, she really lets the players decide how kinky they want things to be. When I reached this part of the google doc we were working in:
I’m pretty sure I let out a full-on cartoonish villainous laugh. Is there any higher praise?
HamletMachine
I have been into HamletMachine's work for years, ever since the early days of their sexy m/m space drama STARFIGHTER. It's one of those rare works of art that feels like it was made for me. I mean, I'm a BIG fan. I played the visual novel the day it came out. (And then I played it again.)
HamletMachine's work contends with intense, complicated dynamics that are sometimes as unsettling as they are compelling. And it's always hot. I'm thrilled about her new ongoing project, MICKEY + JESSICA, a gritty butch/femme D/s romance that is sometimes about people reconciling with hidden and rejected parts of themselves - and is sometimes just about really hot sex.
Her piece for Fever really captures the heavy, claustrophobic desperation that pervades the pairing. So much is conveyed in this single image.
If you love this kinky intensity half as much as I do, please check out HM's work here and Cecilia Tan's here.
Also: We are so close to $10k in pledges? Will we hit that amount today???? An astounding sum for our little book. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart :)
This is the first post in a series of introductions, in which I excitedly gush about our handpicked team of talented writers and illustrators! So, first…
Kieron Gillen
Kieron and I met when he interviewed me for an issue of DIE, his angsty (positive connotation) meta-TTRPG comic about players trapped in their own co-created fantasy world. DIE has been a big hit with TTRPG players, but I was already compelled by his earlier The Wicked + The Divine, about gods incarnated as pop music stars. Kieron has also written for some pretty famous characters (Thor, Iron Man, Uncanny X-Men, Darth Vader(!)) so you can imagine I was a little starstruck when it turned out he (and his lovely wife!) had played and loved Star Crossed!
I was hoping Kieron would bring some big super feelings to his pairing, and oh wow did he ever. Imagine a young mutant rebel and the robot built only to hunt and destroy them: A Love Most Uncanny.
Mye Bi
I had to pick someone to bring their artistic vision to this superpowered drama, and I gotta admit, it was fanart that got me. Mye Bi had been drawing some adorable Links, sexy Ganondorfs, and one of the cutest versions I’ve ever seen of my current fav ship, Hubert and Ferdinand from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
I actually looked at a lot of shipping fan art (more than I would in a normal day) when researching for Love Letters, because I wanted illustrators who could convey a complicated relationship in a single image. Mye nailed it - and turned out to be a delight to work with, too! Look at this!!!!
Thank you all for your support - the campaign is going wonderfully so far and I look forward to sharing more about our fabulous team.
