A Lost & Found solo game of a giant robot, its many pilots, and the passage of time.
Mecha stride upon the battlefields of history, carrying out their pilots’ will and changing the world.
You are one of them.
Pilots - each with their own strengths, troubles, and motivations - will climb into your cockpit and charge you into battle. Together you’ll experience stunning victories and cataclysmic tragedies, changing the course of history. Then, one way or another, they’ll leave you behind.
As time - minutes, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries - passes around you, the world will change and the ravages of combat and age will begin to eat at your frame.
Until a new Pilot finds you.
In this way you’ll march through the ages, until your final Pilot bids you farewell.
Where will you come to rest?
What will your own Tale be?
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DriveThruRPG got into the game jam business with PocketQuest a few years back, and in 2023 the prompt was "Out of this World", a science-fiction theme if ever there was one. For once, I had both an idea and a system ready to go.
I had already released Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage by then, so giant robots were still on the mind, and not that long before I had encountered the Lost & Found system by way of Bucket of Bolts. The idea of a giant robot being handed from pilot to pilot, changing the world as it is changed in turn by events and by time, seemed a natural fit. In some ways it ended up being one of my more deliberate game design efforts - I have way more original notes for this than I do for other games, which tend to get only a scribble or two before spiraling off into unrecorded iterations of digital documents.
The original notes from PocketQuest 2023, made in bits and bites and probably way too many different colors.
Tales from the Cockpitwas completed in time for PocketQuest 2023, completely playable, but it was pretty bare bones. Over the next year or so I kept tweaking it, adding more Pilots to choose from, more events for them to pilot the mecha through, and more consequences of the passage of time. I was also able to get JJ Ariosa, who I'd worked with before on Transit: The Spaceship RPG and LATSW, back to do some really nice cover art. In the end: a neat little 18 page game, with the potential for mecha action and sombre reflection in equal measure.
A Silver Bestseller at DriveThruRPG as of this writing (and - since this was the last year before PocketQuest items became exclusive - well-rated on itch.io) Tales from the Cockpit eventually also got put through the travails of layout, and is now available in Print on Demand! However, doing a full print run so that Tales can join its older sibling on retail store shelves is out of reach for me - but not with your help!
The Pilot Options for Act 1: Mecha, Rise
The first goal of this project is to get the game directly into the hands of more players - that's you! All of the profits from crowdfunding will then be put towards a print run that will hopefully see Tales of the Cockpit on the same shelves - from IPR convention booths to your FLGS - that LATSW has been hanging out on for the past few years.
As preemptive thanks, the prices for both digital and print versions of Tales are a bit discounted from what they would usually be if you were buying them direct or Print on Demand. I have LATSW and the third game in my increasingly unplanned trilogy of (mostly) solo mecha TTRPGs, The Cog That Remains as two of the add-ons, which are also at a bit of a discount. There are also a few more games available as add-ons, including two more PocketQuest offerings!
Thanks for checking this project out! I can't wait to hear the Tales you will tell.
- Seamus
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Printed in both the US and UK for shipping purposes!
This game is based on the Lost & Found SRD (https://srd.mousehole.press).
As a game made using the Lost & Found SRD, Tales from the Cockpit is a journaling game that is first and foremost about the journaling - the game side of things comes from the structure, rituals, and choose-your-own options available. That being said, you might want to have some dice on hand (although some of them will have to be funny sizes) if you'd prefer to randomize which prompts you go with.
After choosing some details about your Mecha, you'll pick your first Pilot - while you are the machine, this is the character who guides you into battle and the history books, changing you through your mutual experiences. You'll be prompted to provide some details about them, and then you'll pick an event that occurred during your time together. Some of them will be good, some of them will be bad, but all of them will ask you questions about what happened and how it affected you. Eventually, that first Pilot will stop piloting you - you get to detail the why and the how of it - and you remain behind, alone.
The player will then Rest by picking an option for how much time passes between Pilots in-game, setting a real-world timer, and closing their eyes, putting them in the space of the world moving around them without being able to act on it. At first the lengths of time, in and out of game, will be relatively short. As the game progresses, however, the time between Pilots will increase and your options for Resting will also involve events. Some will be what happens to you the Mecha as time passes, and others will be about the world changing around you.
War, peace, revolution, etc.
Once the Rest is resolved, you pick another Pilot, and repeat the cycle.
The game proceeds through three Acts, with two pilots each featuring in Acts I and II and the end of Act III being triggered by how long you have Rested so far. Once that threshold has been reached the next Pilot will be your last, and the last options you choose will determine your final resting place and the end of your Tale.
Like many Lost & Found games, that doesn't necessarily have to be the end. After all, you've just told the story of your giant robot and left it behind, so perhaps a player character in another game might stumble upon it...
Shipping fees for the softcover version of Tales from the Cockpit will be collected post-campaign in the Pledge Manager.
Printing will be done in both the US and the UK, which gives this project a bit of extra reach before shipping costs get too astronomical. Estimated shipping costs for several countries - calculated for a single book - are below.
$3.82 | Shipping to: JP
$4.27 | Shipping to: NL
$4.42 | Shipping to: HU
$4.50 | Shipping to: US
$4.75 | Shipping to: ES
$4.96 | Shipping to: NO
$5.06 | Shipping to: FI
$5.21 | Shipping to: UK
$5.27 | Shipping to: IL
$5.27 | Shipping to: MX
$5.27 | Shipping to: CO
$5.51 | Shipping to: DE
$5.59 | Shipping to: AT
$5.78 | Shipping to: SE
$6.11 | Shipping to: BE
$6.18 | Shipping to: FR
$6.43 | Shipping to: PT
$6.72 | Shipping to: DK
$6.90 | Shipping to: GR
$7.43 | Shipping to: CA
$7.72 | Shipping to: IT
$9.26 | Shipping to: IE
$29.09 | Shipping to: AU
$32.43 | Shipping to: NZ
$36.41 | Shipping to: BR
Obviously those last three are... oof. I won't exclude them, but neither can I recommend anyone living there go in for a softcover - although I might perish of flattery if you went ahead and pledged for a copy anyway.
The Stunning Victories that you and your Pilot may get to pull off together.
Digital rewards will go out as soon as the funds delivered and surveys completed! Out of a surfeit of caution, I'm estimating that they'll be sent out by the end of March 2026.
Physical orders will be placed around the same time, but of course take time to print and ship and all that good stuff, so I'm estimating that they will start landing in mailboxes around the end of May 2026.
The Cog That Remains Print Run Stretch Goal and Reward
We've successfully reached the Tales from the Cockpit Print Run's goal, which means people are going to be getting their games(s) and a print run is going to be sent off, hurray! However, the degree of that success has introduced a conundrum.
The print run - that is, the copies sent off to be put on convention booth or game/book store shelves once all the backers have gotten their copies - can only be so big! So realistically there's actually a cap on how much of my share of this campaign can be used towards it. Right now, that means I'm going to have some money left over. I could take that spare money and save it for future projects but we're already here and, well, I've already got something in mind.
The third part in my increasingly unplanned trilogy of (mostly) solo mecha TTRPGs, and the younger sibling to Tales!
The Cog That Remains is a Wretched & Alone solo game about a mecha mechanic and their (probably doomed) effort to keep their machine in the fight and the pilot alive (you might recognize it from the add-ons), and after Tales from the Cockpit it’s the next print run project in the queue. After adding some more JJ Ariosa art to the interior, a play log from Leslie Trautman, and time spent on edits and proofreading, a proof copy is on its way to me as I write this.
So, let it be known that I’ve crunched the numbers and triple-checked the math, and that Tales from the Cockpit Print Run now has a Stretch Goal!
If we reach a goal of $1600.00 total, I’ll be able to fund a The Cog That Remains Print Run without needing to run an entirely different campaign, and as thanks for helping me get there every backer at every pledge level will receive a Print-on-Demand coupon for The Cog That Remains that’ll let you get a copy for $5.00 instead of the $14.95 it will usually cost. To point out some math, that means if you’ve pledged for The Cog That Remains PDF add-on and use your coupon, your total bespoke TCTR PDF+PoD bundle will be $12 – which is the same as the Tales from the Cockpit PDF+Print bundle in this campaign.
Thank you again for all your support so far, and let’s see of we can keep this cog turning towards greater success!
💥 Zinetopia 2026
This project is participating in Zinetopia! A Small-format TTRPG event celebrating Zine Month running February 2–27, 2026.
📖 What is Zine Month? Zine Month is a month-long online celebration observed every February by the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) community where creators share and launch new DIY zines.
🔥 Unlock the Limited Zinetopia Freebie! Receive the limited edition Zinetopia 2026 Group Zine when you back 5+ projects featuring 60+ pages from participating creators full of mini-games, sketches, activity pages, and more!
