Missive 17 - now, new, next

Greetings Horizoners,

Welcome back to Missives. My daily life has taken a wild trip recently, with a cross-country move and various other palavers leaving me without much time to write for FHC. I’ve missed sharing my ttRPG thoughts with you all, but you know what? I’m back now.

We’ve moved to Beehiiv as a platform, because we can’t countenance using Substack anymore (‘cause of all the right wing extremists funding that platform, and ‘cause they think that forcing that kind of slop on people is in the interests of freezepeach).

Beehiiv is free up to a pretty high number of subscribers, which makes it a good platform for us, for now. If we do hit that upper limit then I’ll have to see where else we can go. It might be that we need to do some self-hosting on something like ghost. In the meantime, this platform suits our (modest) needs.

Hopefully you haven’t noticed a difference, and hopefully you’ll still get the Missives straight to your inbox. I really hope you’ll stick with us.

Kyle Tam’s game of fashion in the face of fascism is out now on digital platforms (itch.io link; DTRPG link) and in limited physical edition numbers (Indie Press Revolution link; Beyond Cataclysm UK link).

Players are put in the role of Trailblazers in opposition to THE MAN, an all-encompassing council with an iron hold on the world. Their goal? To cause change, wreak havoc, and upend the authoritarian status quo! To do this they will equip different Pieces of clothing, each of which lets them use three of the fifteen available skills and comes with a Bare Truth – an ability only activated when those clothes are torn to pieces. It’s a game about fighting THE MAN, sharing your truth, and looking damn good while you do it.

BYS features art by the honestly inimitable Sinta Posadas, editing by the wonderful Alison Cybe and CoOp newcomer Nemo, and layout by indie veteran Aven McConnaughey. Check it out today, we’re pretty sure you’ll love it.

Kamala Kara Arroyo’s tribute to Mega XLR, the beer-and-pretzels TTRPG We Dig Giant Robots, is now fully published (DTRPG link) thanks to a successful FHC crowdfunding campaign earlier in the year.

We Dig Giant Robots is a collaborative story game for 3 to 6 players in a single session. WDGR resembles a tabletop roleplaying game, but its focus is on a single session of unhinged robo carnage. Make your own Hooligan and Giant Robot™, and get ready to face down the jerk who's come to wreck your fun! Not that and of these teens know what they're doing. Smash, blast, and wrestle your way through using a simple d6 resolution system and quick characters that can fit on a notecard. You'll get into the action quickly and easily! WDGR even supports long-term play for those who want the hits to keep on coming!

We Dig Giant Robots features amazing art in the style of its touchstones by V Lib Vidal, so if you liked the battle shounen game Friendship Effort Victory, or if you just want to stomp some baddies with a giant freakin’ robot, then this game is probably just right for you.

I bet you’ve heard about itch.io and Steam being censored by proxy (link to Rascal News article on this, but you can find factual and thinkpiece articles about this basically anywhere).

Payment processors suck, y’all, ‘cause ya can’t get around them — if you want to receive money on the internet, you basically have to deal with Stripe and PayPal, and they’re just as much in the evil clutches of Visa and MasterCard too. So when a tiny SWERF/TERF-adjacent pressure group make a handful of complaints against Steam and itch.io, it sucks that they’ve got the power to basically censor the internet.

I have some slightly mixed feelings about this, because whilst I am very very angry that Collective Shout, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, and PayPal can steamroller (excuse the pun) over indie creators, I also sympathise with itch.io’s position: if they didn’t react in some way to the threat, they could have had all payment processing support terminated, leaving everybody without access to receiving funds. I acknowledge that we probably shouldn’t rely on this kind of argument — the lesser of two evils, as it were — it would also be decidedly Not Great™️ for itch.io to suddenly have to stop processing payments for all creators, whether they’re producing adult content or not.

Another issue for me is that in signing up to a war against payment processors and Collective Shout, we’re joining forces with the kind of capital-g Gamers who I really don’t like to be associated with — the kind who make the most deplorable kinds of threats against real human beings when their enjoyment of something is curtailed. They’re big and loud and angry, and they give our opponents ammunition to say “look at these big nasty manbabies we’ve upset.” It doesn’t help our cause to send death threats to people, however horrible those people might be. So I feel really uneasy about signing up in the War On Money with gamergate supporters.

On the other hand, it’s absolutely essential that we fight back, and the ammunition that we have available is that each and every one of us uses MasterCard or Visa or Stripe or PayPal basically every day. If you feel like you can safely complain: complain loudly, complain often, and complain indignantly (although please also remember to be polite and courteous to the call centre and chatroom staff, who are real human beings trying to make ends meet).

The history of censorship shows that censoring adult content is the thin end of a wedge that involves redefining fringe ideas as adult content in the interests of protecting children or public decency. It starts as a campaign against pornographic or sexual content, that then moves against queer content, and ultimately ends up censoring any non-hegemonic idea, including leftist and even moderate oppositional ideas. We cannot let it get that far, y’all.

Falco has been putting together an absolute belter of a new book for FHC — the Far Horizons Guide to Mysterious Locations (link to Kickstarter launch page). It’s a collection of weird, spooky, haunted, odd, supernatural locations within a city, including a commerce district where a god is trapped, a river full of ghosts and disease, and a banquet hall that may or may not be the actual f***ing afterlife.

As usual, it features a huge variety of diverse words and pictures from FHC’s talented stable of creators, so check out the launch page, spread the word, and back the campaign when it goes live. We promise you won’t be disappointed.

That’s all there is. Remember: make cool games. wage class war.

Marx // F.H.C.