There’s a very real chance that by the time you read this, we’ll have cracked the £100,000 threshold which is, uh, pretty cool. It also means we’ll be under £10k away from our next stretch goal, and this one’s a doozie.
We’ll be making enough money to lure a genuine academic down into the Metadungeon with us. Oh yeah. Dr. Emily Friedman, of the University of Auburn and many of your favourite actual plays, is going to write us a chapter about play culture over the decades. Emily is both smart and brilliant, and while I’ve never been lucky enough to be in one of the rooms where both she and Kieron are present, I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall there.
This isn’t going to be adventure material: Dr. Friedman’s chapter is an essay about how play, and players, make the hobby. This is fascinating to me personally, and I hope also to you. It also means that, as well as being one of the greatest adventures Rowan, Rook, and Decard has ever published, we’re going to be able to double down on this book actually teaching us all about the story, and history, of TTRPGs.
Prepare yourself by checking out some of Emily’s TTRPG-related work here. And if the study of TTRPGs is one of your interests, I heartily recommend Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age, which Emily contributed to.
COOL PROJECT ROUND UP
While Metadungeon is the most important TTRPG crowdfunder currently running, it’s not the only one. If you haven’t checked out the rest of Backerkit’s Megadungeon Month yet, you should take a peek. There’s a dungeon in there where you can beat up the Beatles, and that’s the kind of wordplay I appreciate.
Out in the wider world, Mythworks are running their Kickstarter for Breathless: Frightmare Edition. Survival horror, with memory loss and attendant identity crises, heavy consequences, and transient, diminishing power. And the box looks like a VHS tape.
Meanwhile, also on Kickstarter, Poorna M. and Valiant Dorian are raising funds for a really ambitious webseries called A Whole New World. The plan is to snare talented designers, make them live-build a TTRPG, and then playtest it. Grant Howitt and co-founder of RRD Chris Taylor have already recorded what I believe might be the pilot episode, and Poorna is valiantly attempting to corral some of the RRD team to finish the playtest. As a result, I have inside info that this series is a great insight into the design process, and also very entertaining.
They’re very close to funding, and it’s worth getting them over the line just to enjoy Grant and Chris affectionately bullying each other for an hour or two.
Gareth and Kieron have been kicking around ideas for the ‘80s level of the Metadungeon, and the best (and funniest) way to not get sued into the ground by all the TTRPGs we can’t name for licensing and copyright reasons. Kieron’s also had a look at your suggestions for his stretch goal dungeon, and is having ideas.
Oh, and this happened.
This is an extremely British reference, so please enjoy the source material (if you're reading this email, it just looks like a weird image; if you're looking at this on Backerkit it's a video):
Anyway - enjoy your weekends, play some games if you can, and I’ll see you next week.
