#42: New Year, New Game, Same Newsletter?
This one has a pretty big TTRPG-related update, as well some other news regarding the future of the Penflower Post, and some new art (finally!).
Hello dear Readers,
You can consider this a follow-up or “part 2” to my previous newsletter earlier this week. Let’s get cracking.
Time to Green the City, Jackers
First thing’s first: Greenjackers is now officially published!
Here are some photos I took for promotion over on itch.io:
After roughly a year of development (I had the first idea for a solarpunk vs cyberpunk RPG around December 2022), Greenjackers is finally complete.
It’s very much the product of everything I’ve learned on my game design journey so far: it’s thematically a spiritual successor to both Come Rain Come Shine and Loot the Plutes, and mechanically to Stravagante. I’m very proud of how it’s turned out and especially of how much I’ve been able to include in such a compact package.
After the success of Stravagante, there is a part of me that is worried Greenjackers won’t resonate with as many people as its predecessor. After all, Stravagante is a setting agnostic generic fantasy game with a bit of whimsical flavour… Greenjackers is a combination of two slightly more niche genres of science-fiction, not to mention a damn sight more political.
Of course I’ll be happy if people simply play it and enjoy it, but I won’t give up hope that it might also encourage some people into learning more about direct action and intersectional solidarity.
I’ve submitted the game to the TTRPG Collective’s Hope Jam 2023, hosted by Mean Green Press.
As with Stravagante, Greenjackers! is set to Pay What You Want, with any contributions going towards an itch-funding campaign. As I mentioned in my last newsletter earlier this week, the funding goals this time would be pre-written scenarios/adventure modules.
Back to the Drawing Board
No, not in that sense. That’s just my very funny and clever way of saying that I’m finally back doing drawings again. After the trio of cartoony teens I drew back in mid-December, I decided to have some more fun with exaggerated body shapes and expressions.
This time, the characters are Call of Cthulhu related. Over the winter break I enjoyed some more of Mystery Quest’s run of The Saturnine Chalice scenario, as well as Chaosium Inc’s own Bookshops of Arkham: so much so that I decided I wanted the game itself. My partner and some of our friends are gearing up to start a campaign of Horror on the Orient Express, so I thought I’d have some fun designing my investigator character concepts.
My main character concept is Miss Affinity Clementine, a secretary and personal assistant to a professor. Her name and look are heavily inspired by Felicity Lemon, Hercule Poirot’s secretary. Of course, she is nowhere near as confident as Ms Lemon, but she is working on it. She is quite a nervous young woman, but also an incurable optimist. The cup pictured is her most treasured posession, a thank you gift from her employer. He clearly hasn’t learned how to spell her name, but Affinity convinced herself it was a clever pun (the mug is perfect for “a fine tea”!).
These three are other investigator character concepts, which I might end up picking up and fleshing out, if Affinity meets an untimely end at the hands of some horrifying elder being or bloodthirsty cultist.
These were all tremendous fun to draw, and I’m really enjoying this less realistic character design style.
Extra Extra! Preliminary Plans to Migrate Newsletter Foiled!
In my previous newsletter I mentioned that I was going to stay on Substack for the time being, despite their decision to allow literal nazis to peddle their hate via the platform.
My reasoning was that I am not contributing monetarily to Substack, as I have no paid subscriptions… however, as one of you pointed out to me in a reply to the last issue, I would still be providing them with clicks and traffic (the next best thing to money, in these craven ghouls’ minds).
In light of this, I decided to investigate the Squarespace option.
It was a fairly straightforward matter of importing my mailing list from Substack into Squarespace’s “email campaign” feature.
I had to tweak the pre-set templates quite a bit: they all scream “marketing” and are clearly primarily intended for short glossy advertisements.
Eventually, though, I got it looking just right. I typed up a test newsletter and sent it to myself to check. All good so far.
Then, suddenly, a hitch. I would have to add verified sender details, so as to avoid having the newsletter end up in my subscribers’ spam folder.
Squarespace recommended using a custom domain email rather than my free gmail. That’s easy, I thought: I already have a domain, that I pay for every year, on which I host my website. Surely it will be a simple matter of adding a custom email, right?
Well, actually no. I quickly learned I’d have to sign up to Google Workplace (sigh) in order to purchase an associated email domain (sigh) at yet another yearly subscription fee (SIGH).
Suffice to say, that option has been shelved for the foreseeable future (or at least until I can figure out some kind of workaround). For now, I am still at least somewhat pleased to have drastically narrowed down the number of platforms I use. So far I’ve deleted my facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram, and mastodon. As of now, in terms of social media, I have my YouTube channel, my private Discord server for friends, peers and patrons, and this newsletter. Not too bad, all things considered.
That’s all for this week!
As always, thank you so much for reading. One last reminder that if you feel like supporting my work, you can buy something from my website or itchio, join my Patreon, or commission me.
Until next time,
- Penflower