Dead City Memories 2 Vote & UB News & UVG News (Patreon)

Dear Heroes!

Thank you for your patience. I wanted to post this vote earlier, but things kept intervening. So, first things first ...

DCM2 Vote

You (or at least, some of your peers) nominated the following quarters of the Dead City for the next volume of the city crawler (I've added a bit of description for them, from the 2nd draft of my notes):

• Cairns and Sphinxes • (Cairns dot the high plain, surrounded by bilious shade trees with degenerate cubist faces. The pounded grey loam is soaked in the rancid blood of hundreds of generations of heathen pustari blood sacrifices. There is no grass or shrubbery, but still baby-headed undead goat sphinxes (L2, sky) mewl as they prance about in idiot riddle dances.)
• Ancestral Park of Hazy Recollection • (Desert ivy cloaks marble follies and memorials. Oily trees droop, crushed limestone walkways loop, benches of softwood dot the parkland. The sun dims to a perpetual twilight. Shade-like folk hide in bushes, while Rememberers drone in their memory circles. Everywhere, the Solarcity pictogram for “bear, hunger, denial.”)
• Cratered Mound of the Saviour General [2] • (A great electro-magical field hums above the pocked burial mound or kurgan, hair rises and life-like steel sculptures of warriors resonate evilly. Steel pillars mark the deeds of the Saviour General and pictographs for “iron / body / cow” warn of the curse. Incontinent clockwork archaics attempt to maintain the abandoned grounds, while hyenas and hyena-clockwork hybrids lope around cackling. Cold winds roar and whine unpredictably. Very Iron Man.)
• Memorial Boulevard of the Fourth Estate • (Winding paths and plazas go nowhere near the promising sculptures of rusting metal that move and revolve of a force all their own. A depressing drizzle slickens everything. Hairless cats with human mouths on their bellies skulk in crevices, chattering and moaning. What looks like grass and leaves turns out to be a shuffling carpet of olive and chartreuse moths. A depressing expanse.)
• Ossuary Canyons of the Ziggurats of the Red Plume Soldiers • (Accreted ziggurats of porous limestone rise to the haze-pale sky, leaving the visitor to wander in shadowed canyons. The ever-damp stone perspires fragrant waters and moss grows on every surface. In niches and alcoves, stand ranks of amber-preserved, lacquered soldiers decked in red silks and plumes, waiting to serve the Dead God King.)
• Orchid Barracks of Necropolis Maintenance [2] • (Eye-marked yellow stones rise from bone-dry ridges, reporting to the Watchers of the Dead. At the heart of the badlands, like a brutal orchid of rough living stone painted garish red and chilling blue, the fortress of the Ébéteen Company of Necropolis Maintenance. A nihilistic wasteland.)

I'm also going to take some feedback on this one. Chibi Canton made a very good point: "Hey! I'd say without intimate knowledge of the setting, it can be tricky to come up with names, personalities and motivations on the fly for the many encounters in the zine. They sure spark the imagination but it seems tricky to actually develop cohesive situations. Just how tense are things? How do the different factions react to the heroes, can they just walk into any of the locations? Maybe bring back the special events table or something a bit more "grounded" to help GMs flesh out whats going on."

So, I'm going to ... rework the quarters and sections a bit. I'll add:

• A few clear characters with motivations.
• Key actions of the local factions in that quarter.
• Local events to complement encounters.

I'll probably present those actions/events for three situations:

• Contested (multiple factions fighting there)
• Occupied (a dominant faction)
• Abandoned (empty of factions)

So, bring out yer ghosts and roll the poll dice! Highest voted location gets made.

Uranium Butterflies & SEACAT

The big news, and main reason I was quiet for the last couple of weeks, has been sorting out the crowdfunding for UB.

So, first of all, there is going to be a crowdfunded hardcover edition. We've started work with EF getting it set up. I'll share more details once we're closer to the launch date. Going to keep some stuff under the belt till then.

There are going to be some name changes. The SEACAT system is certainly getting a dressier name, that captures the psychedelic side of the game a bit more. Uranium Butterflies might get renamed ... I'm honestly a bit thrown by the whole "Putin threatening nuclear war to stay in power" thing. I'm also not entirely happy with the prosody of Uranium Butterflies.

Uranium Butterflies has also gone in for its first round of harsh outside editing. This is ... scary. But, necessary.

I mentioned long ago, how I knew the outline of the game I wanted to make long ago, but then needed to build this elaborate marble block, so I could chisel out the game I wanted to make.

It's a bass-ackwards process, but here we are. I suspect there may be some chiselling, I suspect some core terms might get changed. This is kind of the time to do it, because I'll be refreshing the layout after that, making sure everything fits nicely and that the game works.

I also ... uh ... want to add back the section on scenes and running the game, as well as the bestiary. With the revised layout, I should be able to save some space, which ... good.

Oh, my dog says hi. She just jumped on her chair next to me. It used to be my writing chair, but she doesn't let me use it anymore ...

UVG 4th Printing

Finally, a bit of a shocker!

The 3rd printing of the UVG (softcover) is sold-out. For the 4th printing, Exalted Funeral is going with a new printer. For this occasion, it's going to be hardcover again, with a new cover and it will be part of the crowdfunding as an add-on option to go with UB.

Well! That's a surprise!

The 4th printing is also going to be a 2nd Edition, with a modified layout, using sections to make it easier to navigate (1. Rules, 2. Heroes, 3. Caravans, 4. THE UVG, 5. The World Around) and some revised terms. For example, [+] instead of ↑a.

After all, with the SEACAT rules finished-ish, it'd make no sense for us to re-release a UVG that didn't fit. And yes ... the good heroes here, you will get the pdf :)

So, What Does That Mean?

Well, buckle up.

Next few weeks, I'm re-assembling and re-vising the UVG. And making a pitch video for the crowdfund.

DCM Vol. 2 will be a little slower as we get this big beastie up-and-readie. Always, DCM, gets sidetracked by UVG!

Like a curse ... STILL.

Vote. It's important! You're literally redesigning the Dead City, because the quarter you pick is going to fit in with the existing ones, and rearrange any plan I originally had for the city. Your vote is turning the DCM zines into a collaboration instead of just me inventing the city from the thin voids between my brain cells.

Peace & democracy,
—Luka, Seoul, Fifthday, Last Day of September, Year of Our Hound 2