Wyrd Science Magazine

“Moominmamma cooks a real magic potion following Grandmother’s infallible recipe”, by Tove Jansson, as used on the cover of 1989’s exhibition catalogue of Jansson’s work as shown at Finland’s Tampere Art Museum.

can we add to the NOT list

- a Wetransfer link that expired a week ago

Secret Passages #3: An Old School RPG and Oldhammer Magazine Packed with interviews and illustrations, this is the third issue of a new zine exploring the tabletop games that raised us.

Secret Passage #3 is ALMOST funded. Don't wait till the last day and support small press printed old school tabletop gaming magazine!

common mistake, but you have to go into the Queen Vic's cellar, move the out of date beer barrel and that's where you find the entrance to Walford's mythic underworld

The new winter issue of @senetmagazine.bsky.social has arrived, looking forward to diving into this later today

Grab a copy now over on their website where at the moment you can also get 25% off back issues

senetmagazine.com

Wyrd Science Magazine Podcast Episode · What Would The Smart Party Do? · 06/12/2025 · 1h 17m

If you've spent the last couple of days thinking to yourself, oh my god I really want to hear an editor of a tabletop gaming magazine -who clearly doesn't get enough social interaction- talk at a podcast host for over an hour but I'm boycotting Spotify for various reasons, then you're in luck!

much as we appreciate the trend to streamline wargame rules I'm just reading a new one where on page 1 it kicks things off talking about individual arcs of vision and how prey animals have a wider (270 degrees) range than hunters, no idea where it's going from here but I have to say I'm down with it

A low angle on a row of the RPG books we've published, including Fate Core, Scum & Villainy, Blades in the Dark, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Stewpot, Girl By Moonlight, Improv for Gamers, and Monster of the Week.

One week left in our Anniversary Sale!
To celebrate 20 years in the business we're giving you 20% off everything in our webstore. All our games, dice, board games and more - even some overstock of limited crowdfunding rewards. Get a great game (or a holiday gift) today:
evilhat.com/roleplaying-...

The glorious cover to Wyrd Science 7 featuring neon coloured techno barbarians ransacking an ancient vault

A reminder there’s about a day left of @drivethrurpg.com’s site wide sale & you can pick up our new issue for just over £2 or get all 7 issues for roughly a third of the price I just paid for a burger at a Christmas market that I suspect I may see again soon 😑

www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher...

lots of great suggestions of cool print RPG magazines/zines to check out here that aren't just us!

can recommend pretty much everything on this list except for one I've yet to check out and I'm just off now to try and wrangle a few copies of that.

were good enough for issue 7 that we've managed to claw back some of what we lost and we're ok to carry on for now

so yeah, it's one of those ideas that can work but is VERY fraught with risk and nearly finished us off.

anyway sorry for the mammoth replay and thanks again for the shout out!

lose a percentage when subscriptions must be renewed, totally normal, but usually as they're staggered it's not the end of the world but as ours all came at once it was an existential problem

as it happened we lost about 40% of our subs but thankfully picked up lots of new ones & the normal sales

end result took just over 2 years to do all 4 issues, we barely broke even on issue 4, lost a bit on issue 5 & lost a packet on issue 6

to make it worse because Kickstarter doesn't give you people's financial details, we had to get everyone to manually re-subscribe for issue 7, with subs you always

had been to deliver those 4 issues in 1 year.

but we got hit by lots of delays, during which time paper costs rocketed, shipping costs kept going up and up, Brexit happened meaning we had to cover the VAT for our EU customers or they'd get huge fees and basically all sorts of other stuff happened

basically after two reasonably successful issues, I wanted to get our publication rate right up there and figured rather than trying to do that & run four kickstarters a year we'd offer a 4 issues sub

it kind of worked & most people took the 4 issue option. the only thing is that the plan

nice, there's one new one on me on that list (under the dice) but I'm going to fix that this afternoon and try and grab a few copies.

anyway thanks a lot for the mention!

funnily enough the subscription thing you mention Secret Passges doing, we did that with our third and final Kickstarter

The Doctor Who production team now the Disney money's dried up and they're back to BBC budgets

…and here it is in digital form: the Senet/Guardian collab with all the best board-game recommendations.

Monday morning bump for all those who, somehow, had something better to do over the weekend than hang around on social media

The glorious cover to Wyrd Science 7 featuring neon coloured techno barbarians ransacking an ancient vault

A reminder there’s about a day left of @drivethrurpg.com’s site wide sale & you can pick up our new issue for just over £2 or get all 7 issues for roughly a third of the price I just paid for a burger at a Christmas market that I suspect I may see again soon 😑

www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher...

Honestly I’m dubious that the public’s prolonged exposure to me does the magazine much good hence this being only like the 2nd I’ve done in 5 years, but we’ll see…

Well, if anyone wants me to neck a pint of rum & coke and talk at them for a couple of hours 1-on-1 I can set up reservation system

🤔

Thanks so much for having us on, and for your sterling work editing it down!

Thank you so much

It's #selfpromosaturday and we're here for you with some enlightening conversation on what it takes to publish a real, live hard copy #ttrpg magazine in the modern age. Find out all about @wyrdscience.bsky.social here!

I'll be pitching my Dear Deidre rpg agony aunt column for future episodes.

Bones & Betrayals: Silence of the Dead Bones & Betrayals: Silence of the Dead : Ewington, Marks, Ewington, Andrew, Marks, Erica, Alexander Watt, Calum: Amazon.co.uk: Books

So, looks like the freelance writing gigs have dried up for me, I’m now struggling to cover the mortgage.

It won’t save me, but maybe buy a copy of Bones & Betrayals, Silence of the Dead, or the Hero Interviews so I can get a couple of quid in 3 months.

Thanks

amzn.eu/d/iugS1iW

Oh to be a guileless carp in a world of professional crayfish

Is there a giant oak king he must battle, like some kind of very weird anime?

Wyrd Science Magazine

A huge, huge thanks to @evilgaz.bsky.social who invited me onto the UK's Premier RPG Podcast The Smart Party the other week, let me basically talk at him for about 2 & a half hours and then somehow edited my unfiltered stream of consciousness down to something that is actually listenable to