Ex Libris
over 2 years ago – Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 09:44:45 AM

Hey! Today’s update isn’t about BROKEN LUCK, it’s all about a kick-ass project: Ex Libris.

What’s Ex Libris? It’s a website, a digital catalogue, and a tool for listing and showcasing RPG content – all in one.

It looks beautiful! How do I know that? Because it’s already live - take a look here: https://exlibrisrpg.com/. Ex Libris has been around for a while, and now the creators are taking it to another level.

Ex Libris started out focused on Mörk Borg content. You know, that punk med-fan Swedish post-apocalyptic game? Walton Wood, the creator and curator of Ex Libris, has collected feedback from the Mörk Borg community, and is remodelling Ex Libris to better serve the needs of the wider world of RPG nerds.

This means that the new version of Ex Libris will be open to other games besides Mörk Borg! Curators will be able to create lists dedicated, for example, to a certain genre, a particular theme, personal favorites, and so on and so forth!

Imagine being able to keep track of zines, games, modules, updates, adventures, all with a single tool. Imagine one place where you can follow everyone else’s weird and wonderful lists and collections. That’s a tool I’d use! I’m going to make a nifty Troika! module/zine list.

I’ve already tried a few Troika-related lists, but some zines are on itch, others on drivethru, and I want to include blog posts as well. It’s a mess! Where can I keep all this beautiful, useful stuff together and share it with others? Wait, I know, on Ex Libris!

I can already tell Ex Libris is going to be an extremely valuable tool for the community. It’ll give visibility to our own projects and help us discover fabulous new TTRPGs from fantastic new people.

Don’t waste a minute - go back it here

Stretch Goal 1 - Funded!
over 2 years ago – Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 09:44:42 AM

A quick and important update to celebrate the fact that we have funded the first Stretch Goal - The standalone Oops! table with an original Perplexing Ruins Illustration. That happened thanks to you all, I am super grateful for your support, and I can't wait to send you the card.

So as of now, we are $1000 away from Stretch Goal 2 - The Adventure Engine Pamphlet - I'll write about it in a few days.  Until then, stay well! Iko

Faceless God T-SHIRT!!!!!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 11:44:38 AM

We promised it, now it’s becoming reality!

The FACELESS GOD T-shirt is available as an add-on. You can access it at any pledge level.

FULFILLMENT & SHIPPING

Fulfilment of the T-shirts will be done separately to the other items to ensure a smoother process. As with the other rewards, shipping fees will be collected after the campaign. Bear in mind that shipping for the T-shirt will add around $3.99 for US destinations and $9.99 for non-US destinations. That said, we will do our best to pick the cheapest and safest shipping solutions, and we will absorb part of the shipping costs for you.

The T-shirt size required will be asked by a survey after the campaign finishes, so keep an eye out for that.

The T-shirts all come in black with this fabulous original art by Perplexing Ruins

They will be produced by Bonfire.

HOW TO

If you’ve already pledged but you want the power of THE FACELESS GOD, don’t worry! It’s easy to update your pledge. Just login to Kickstarter, go to the project page, and click Manage your pledge.

On the next page pick Change your pledge.

Pick again the desired pledge level. And from there simply choose the Add-on.

And you’re done! Soon you’ll receive a rad FACELESS GOD T-shirt that will protect you from the wandering entities of the cosmos (cosmic protection not guaranteed – but you will look beautiful).

Tarot
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 09:01:19 AM

BROKEN LUCK started out as a pamphlet based on the Tarot - then things went crazy and it became so much more than that. But the influence of the Tarot is still at its core – tarot cards, readings, fortune tellers... In just a sec I’ll explain what you can do with the tarot cards in the zine, but first, here’s how the Broken Arcana cards got into BROKEN LUCK.

Where I grew up, people used to use tarot cards as playing cards. It was a popular game in high school, everybody would play – we’d even play in class, under our desks (I know…).

Tarot cards are a very familiar thing for me. And so when some guy asked me if I wanted to do a tarot reading, I said yes! Of course. After all, they’re only playing cards. Where’s the harm?

That reading didn’t turn out well. Or perhaps it went too well. I read the cards. For 90 minutes I straight up spat things about this guy’s past and future. Scary stuff. A thick and sticky silence descended upon the room. We could barely breathe. Halfway through the reading I stopped. I was scared as shit. We looked at each other, and then we sprinted to the windows and sealed them shut just before Level 5 demons crossed our dimensional threshold. Or at least that’s what we said, as a joke. But maybe it wasn’t a joke. 

Friendly advice: never do tarot readings at night.

Then there was Lea. I only saw her on Saturdays. She would bring sugar and her cards. She had made her deck by drawing the figures of the tarot onto index cards in red ballpoint pen. The figures on the cards were super simple - just awkward red sketches, really - but somehow they felt alive. Lea would fall asleep at the table while we were all having coffee and biscuits, then wake up at some random point, angry and mad, yelling some incomprehensible truth that the cards in her pocket had revealed to her. And then she would fall asleep again.

So that’s it: Tarot = powerful, fun, and scary 

CUT TO: years later

When the Troika Fest Jam started in Spring 2021, I decided to do a simple tarot pamphlet. But as I wrote it up I found myself diving down into those memories, adding layer upon layer of ideas, and the BROKEN LUCK zine quickly began to grow around the tarot system at its core.

I’ve built the zine in a modular way, and you can totally ignore the tarot part if you want. Or, if you like, you can extract it and use it elsewhere.

Here’s how the Tarot works in BROKEN LUCK. There are the Major Arcana, magical and treacherous cards. With each card comes a spell, plus additional descriptive tables and mechanics tied to owning or using the cards. Because, like so much in the world of BROKEN LUCK, the cards themselves are broken. You can’t use them for readings anymore. They have become powerful magical objects - but at a price.

One of the backgrounds, The Roaming Fortune Teller, is a cursed individual trying to deal with magical tarot they can’t get rid of. They make a great playable character - very powerful but with a huge burden, a burden enforced by these new game mechanics. The Fortune Teller can also make a fun - and potentially tricky or annoying - NPC. There’s a conversion page in the zine to turn backgrounds into NPCs.

Somehow the other characters of the zine all rotate in orbit around the Fortune Teller, with their broken cards and their broken fate.

I won’t tell you more, I don’t want to spoil the zine for you. But here is an early drawing Perplexing Ruins made of the fortune teller. We couldn’t fit it into the zine, so we thought we’d share it here for you - pretty cool, right?

And remember, never do tarot readings at night. The Gods might be tickled if you do.

-- -- 

I've just learned that our very own proofreader and editor is a tarot reader herself. Coincidence? Gods trickstering us? Fate? What do you think?

Oops!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Aug 15, 2021 at 11:18:21 AM

Sunday the 15th of August, 2021. The sun is high (at least from where I’m writing) and it’s excruciatingly hot (or maybe where you live it’s super cold)! Once again the Mad Gods are messing with the climate and with our brains!

The campaign has reached TWO THOUSAND euros, which is mindblowing! In just five days we have been overwhelmed by your loving comments and good vibes, and we can't thank you enough for your support.

This means that we’re closing in on our first stretch goal: The Oops! table A5 Card. This card will be inkjet printed on sturdy paper, with a background based on a brand new original illustration from Perplexing Ruins. We wanted to offer this new Oops! table in a standalone format, as opposed to putting it in the zine, so that you can slide it inside your favourite zine or notebook and use it anywhere, whether that’s BROKEN LUCK, another Troika! zine, or another system entirely! The Oops! table will bring a ton of (un)Godly flavour to your game, but it’s designed for free use and has no explicit reference to the Troika system or stats. These surprising and unsettling events will fit in whenever and wherever you want. It’s a fun tool for players and GMs alike that drives the fiction, builds the vibe of the setting, and makes for memorable moments of suspense and mystery. We really want to see how you use it in your games, and so we made it the first stretch goal goodie.

Here’s just a few examples of the brand new Oops! effects:

• The wizard is caught in a time loop. Duration of the loop, 3D6 minutes.
• All sentient beings in a 10 ft radius around the wizard die instantly. They are presented to the assembly of Gods to be examined and judged.
• The wizard can’t utter a single sound. When they try, golden beetles spill from their mouth. Lasts 1D3 days

We really want to share this resource with you, and you can help us to reach this stretch goal by spreading the word about BROKEN LUCK. There are regular updates on the campaign on Twitter at https://twitter.com/thelostbay - tell your gaming buddies, tell your friends, tell your cat!

-- -- --

In the last update I told you about my obsession with the FACELESS GOD. I’ve dreamed for a long time about having a T-shirt with the GOD printed on it. I know that if I had one I would feel both badass and protected by the GOD’s power. I asked the twittersphere if anyone else would like to wear such a garment and it turns out a lot of you do! We’re going to incorporate the T-shirt into the Kickstarter campaign so you too can carry the FACELESS GOD with you wherever you go. It would be an independent add-on, not bound to any particular pledge tier, so you could acquire it with whatever pledge tier you choose. We still need to figure a few things out, and we’ll get back to you soon, but in the meantime here is a mock-up of the T-shirt.

Pretty cool, right? I can’t wait to get mine. 

-- -- --

It’s great to see you enjoying our mysterious night tweets - automated 140 character messages, fired into the night while I sleep.

“Want to rove the wilderness as a chaos beast? Endless pursuit? Boundless hunger? Fully nude? Fund BROKEN LUCK on Kickstarter and you can!” Who comes up with something like that?

Well, we can tell you! These tweets are drafted by the intergalactic Cleo Madeleine. She’s our proofreader for the zine and all the campaign updates (yes, even this one you’re reading right now!). She brings grammatical and semantic order to the wild magic of BROKEN LUCK.

When she’s not playing RPGs, Cleo is working on her PhD. Her thesis is about new queer theoretical approaches to history, focusing on the sixteenth century. This is one of her answers to my nightly pesterings about her research:

“It is in the interests of capitalist history that time be singular and consist of definite events preceding in a definite order; the critic Elizabeth Freeman calls this chrononormativity. Basically if you have power over how time (and therefore history) is organised, you have power over a lot of things! And queerness destabilises that organisation.”  (This is Cleo! Normally I’m behind the scenes but hi! IKO has been very tolerant of me going on about my work, and it’s been so exciting to help support BROKEN LUCK!)

Awesome, right? I find this super exciting.

Cleo also co-hosts pronouns in bio, a very funny podcast for trans and non binary people and people who don't know they're trans and non binary yet (yes, that means you). You can listen to it here: https://rss.com/podcasts/pronounsinbio/. If you’d like to talk to her about proofreading, editing, writing or translating for your project, you can find her on Twitter @quidtumcicero.

Stay tuned for more info, and have a good Sunday, or Monday, or week!