Scarecases and more…
Have you ever wanted to wander an endless staircase at the intersection of realities and populated by horrors?
Well, now you can!
Over at itch.io, I’ve posted a trifold brochure outlining this scarecase environment. It’s written for Old School Essentials but can be easily adapted for other games.
Link to itch.io. Or look for “Myxomycetes”.
And over on my Patreon, I’ve posted a game called Perils & Procedures and a bit from a WIP I’m currently calling Champion’s Mark.
Perils & Procedures is the journaling game of perilous procedures you play online! But really it’s me poking fun at a certain variety of TTRPG blog posts. On one hand, I love them. On the other hand, I hate them. Unfortunately, I can only navigate this tension with ironic detachment.
Champion’s Mark is a chivalric TTRPG supplement based on Orlando Furioso. It’ll be a mix of NPCs, Tables, and Adventure Seeds that I hope will let players embrace some of the weird hallucinatory wildness of chivalric romances. This is a real thing, not a gag like Perils & Procedures. I’ll likely share bits and pieces as I go along. Current deadline for that is January 2023. If you want to help make that happen, please consider supporting me on Patreon.
The Monk, An Irreverent Synopsis
My posts about Matthew Lewis’s The Monk remain some of the most popular I’ve written. I can only imagine people are using them to pass tests in classes instead of reading the book itself. Which I am fine with.
It’s a 400+ pages Gothic novel; my series of posts was only about 6000 words.
This past year for Christmas I collected all the posts, cleaned them up, and put them in a booklet that I gave to my patrons as a holiday gift.
“like a poisonous mulled wine, delightful” – a patron
Anyway, the same booklet is now available for everyone to download. It’s digest-sized and fits well on the back of the toilet. No longer will you have to read a set of blogposts on your phone! All you need to do is go here.
And if you want to become a patron, you can do that by going here. I only say you get nothing because I’m afraid of disappointing people by making promises I can’t keep. But, really? Every month you get something.
Support Me on Patreon and You Will Get Nothing*
I beg your forgiveness for this interruption, but this is the first of twelve pitch advertisements for my Patreon that I’ll post throughout the year. I am using Patreon to support my writing (and lifestyle, which involves a lot of pajamas, tea, and books.) And what will you get in return for your support?
Quite simply, you will get nothing.
You get nothing
Let me explain: While in the past I’ve offered patrons an exclusive monthly column about old weird books called Yesterweird, those posts are now here. As of this moment there will be no difference between supporting me and not supporting me. Oh yes, you’ll have my gratitude and thanks and emanations of good feelings in your direction, but materially? Materially, you will have nothing.
No rough drafts, no serial novels, no sneak peaks, no discords, no podcasts, no sub stack coupons, no forums, no vlogs, no postcards, etc.*
Nothing.
At least for now.
Are you sure you know how patreon works?
Right now, your support will go towards a blog anyone can read for free. Yes, it will also go towards works in progress, but there’s no guarantee anyone will ever see those. Would you like to hear about a novel that might never be published or have me promise a self-pubbed RPG that never materializes? Or would you like me not to tell you about those things, then possibly surprise you with them at some point in the future? I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. What I can guarantee is a blog post about an old book, once a month, and various other assorted book club like activities.
The Tiers of Nothing
- 1USD – Welcome Aboard! You get nothing and over the course of the year you buy me two coffee-shop beverages.
- 3USD – A Place of Repose: You get nothing and over the course of the year you buy me a dinner and a few beers.
- 5USD – In the Thick of It: You get nothing and over the course of the year you pay one of my bills. Why are you doing this?
- 10USD – A Fine Mess: You get nothing and over the course of the year you buy me a round-trip high-speed train ticket from Busan to Seoul. We can’t go on living like this. If we ever meet I am going to talk to you about lowering your pledge.
- All other pledge amounts: You get nothing and I leave it up to your imagination to fill in the details by multiplying your pledge amount by twelve and then thinking of something you buy with that amount.
And I know this all sounds very flippant, but I am not going to make promises I can’t keep.
* One thing you will get if you support me is a long PDF that’s a setting document for a current project I’m working on. You can expect more stuff like that to materialize.
So you will get something, but you should expect nothing.
Coming Soon: Yesterweird
Back when I read Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and did a chapter by chapter read through marveling at all its marvelous WTFry I thought it would be fun to do more of that. And if you liked that, then you’ll be happy because I’ve decided 2019 will be the year when that happens. Or maybe you won’t be happy, because it’s going to be on Patreon.
For a bit now my wife and I have been talking about using Patreon, she for her comics and me as a tool to keep me motivated and focused on my writing goals. And while I’m not at that brave stage where I’m comfortable sharing drafts of stories I’m working on and all that, I am certainly okay with louding off about old weird books. So that’s going to be the tent pole at first for my foray into Patreon. This blog’s going to remain the place where I post my favorite reads every month and whatever else I feel like.
So without further to do. . . announcing Yesterweird, a book club slash review site where I’ll make regular dips into works available for free online (mostly at Project Gutenberg). To start I’ll be looking at a trio of old science fiction novels, the first one being this radioactive pill of a 1950s YA novel, RIP Foster Rides the Gray Planet. After that my plan’s to write about some of Andre Norton’s space opera stuff and John Joseph Astor IV’s 1894 planetary romance novel A Journey in Other Worlds. Astor was like the Elon Musk of his day and supposedly the richest man to die on the RMS Titanic.
So support to follow along and read sentences like “he liked his war how he liked his equations. Cold.” Or just to find out why I thought that sentence was funny. And if you pledge at the 5-dollar level you can even decide what I’ll read next. If you’ve wanted to know more about some painful old tome, but never wanted to take the time to actually read it now’s your chance to make me do it!
Yes, launching a Patreon where I blog for loose change in January is our era’s version of the going to the gym more often New Years resolution, but so what? That’s what I’m doing. It could be worse. I could be writing this to announce that I’m launching a podcast.
Yesterweird 