Leo

this sounds great, will email asap

It is Monday and I am back on the grind so: if you would like to interview me or have a guest on your podcast etc please lmk. Gold Ennie winning writer with a crowdfunder that I can't shut up about until the end of August! Also charming bon vivant, funny witty insightful modest etc

I can only speak for myself but I find keeping the political and emotional aspects of my life away from the public facing one has been broadly good.

Thank you! I clearly have lots to say about the writing process so I’m going to try and get a full blog series from it(?)

I would also like to thank @meatcastlegameware.com and @bradkerr.net for their editing and dungeon development advice respectively. It wouldn't be the same without them. Brad having had a hand in both gold-winning adventures this year feels a Bit Much if I'm honest! A B2C sweep

anyway thank you for all the votes, I really didn't expect to win. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work on something so singular and have almost no editorial oversight. I think @joelhines.bsky.social objected to maybe 3 choices I made (both with good reason)

That said, it's also got some goofy stuff and some jokes too. I remain fond of Gusputh the Head Chef and Valafar the Rat King. They're both really fun characters to play as a GM and I hope other people get to enjoy them too.

There's a lot of grief in the adventure and it's not feigned. A lot of the major NPCs have lost someone important to them and are dealing with that in various ways. So if the text achieved more than standard grimdark fantasy stuff, that's possibly why.

I am a private person and don't speak about my real life very often. A family member was diagnosed with a very serious and rare illness during the early drafting of The Shrike, and on a re-read I can't help but see that diagnosis everywhere in the text and its cast of lost souls.

I actually secretly had quite negative feelings about it once I was done. It didn't quite please me and I didn't think the different ideas meshed together. The Ennie nomination and win have made me reconsider that, but it's interesting how difficult I find re-reading it.

There's lots more I could say about The Shrike, and if I have time over the next year I might try and do a designer deep dive of some sort to tease out a few more of the creative challenges. It was and is an unwieldy monster and I definitely asked myself why I had committed to such a large project

I ultimately was interested in them because they seemed like an interested side effect of torturing a God: that divinity is present even in the blood and effluence, and that this waste product is slowly 'polluting' Hell with mercy and grace (the partials are mostly nice NPCs)

Part of the challenge of the adventure was marrying a lot of different ideas and themes that still added up to a cohesive whole. The Partials are an idea tht doesn't necessarily fit cleanly with the Hell theme. They're inanimate objects granted life by divine blood. Inspired by Beauty and the Beast

So there's not a great deal of THROWN INTO THE BURNING CRUSH MACHINE type torture in The Shrike. The Nameless God gets an eternity of agony, but most of the Sinners are just hungry and cold and aimless and know that feeling will never go away

I digress. The hellish/sisyphean themes also pushed towards an adventure where death itself was impossible. Part of the horror of Hell I think is that there is no release from suffering. I ended up feeling like Hell might not be 'that bad', it would just need to be unpleasant and never change

As an aside I seem to often be drawn to 'what if X but giant' type settings. Gnomon is a giant sundial you walk around on. The Wall in VoV 4 is ofc a wall. The Shrike is a giant rusting nail. On Between 2 Cairns I jokingly pitched a city inside a giant candle that's burning down

As such the 'prison break' format appealed to me, and what's a bigger or nastier prison than Hell itself? I was also thinking about Prometheus stuck on his rock in Tartarus, and wondered what it would be like to be running around inside the rock somehow

I also wanted to marry the dungeon-crawl focus of OSR products with the Grand Adventure Path style you see in 5E type stuff. A big hostile environment that was still designed to funnel you into an overarching plot (although not one that had an author-desired outcome)

I haven't actually talked a great deal about The Shrike's creative process or what the inspirations were. In some ways I wanted to follow up VoV with something that contrasted - dark rather than colourful, claustrophobic rather than expansive, and I guess authored rather than proc-gen

that sounds like a good melange, lmk if you get to do it

Proud to announce that my enormous infernal OSE adventure module “The Shrike” has won gold for best long form adventure at the ENNIE awards! Thank you to everyone who voted for us! You will be spared from eternal life marooned upon the monstrous iron edifice!

Gold for Best Adventure – Long Form goes to The Shrike, Silverarm

Let’s gooooo

The Long Con Blues For the Red Sun

Japanese RPGs! @infrabeige.bsky.social's Vaults of Vaarn! Dragonbane miniatures! Sword & Sorcery films! Lots of other stuff!

It's Friday so it must be the ever-diminishing-returns-now-we've-left-Substack Gazetteer!

Thank you! Yeah I don’t want a giant one really, seems a bit much

Yeah I am (it seems) in the position where I can spend a bit of money to improve my workflow so I think Wacom seems like a good investment

Seconds before a seagull snatched it

Thank you Mark! Yeah it’s been a bit crazy tbh i was hoping we might make 40k in a month

Ty Johan I’ve heard good things about cinitqs

What graphics tablets do people recommend? Looking to upgrade my setup.