What I’ve been up to: Tarot, TTRPGs and Duskpunk on consoles!

Hey everyone! Someone asked me on the Discord (you should join if you haven’t yet) what I’ve been up to for the last few months. Good question!

Duskpunk is coming to PS5 and Switch!

I’m partnering with Austrian studio Rarebyte to port Duskpunk to PS5 and Switch! This will be my first console release, so I’m excited! We don’t have a firm release date in mind beyond “when it’s done”, but they’re making good progress.

Unfortunately it’s hard to fix bugs without stepping on each other’s toes, so I apologise if you report one and it’s not fixed quickly.

Mothership: Abomination

I took a break from digital games and got back into Mothership, a sci-fi horror RPG inspired by Alien, The Thing and other scifi horror classics. This excellent review explains why I love it!

I’ve always loved the Alien movies, so I created a module which recreates that kind of story: someone is infected, a weird little thing is “born”, but it’s fine because it’s small, right? And then it grows and becomes a Very Big Problem Indeed.

If you’d like to try it out, here’s the current version! You’ll need Mothership to run it, but there’s a free version here.

I’m hoping to do layouting etc. and get it into Mothership Month (an annual crowdfunding event) later this year.

Tarot resources

I was also hired to write for Sefirot: Gilded Legacy, a reprint of their beautiful Tarot deck. In particular, I’m writing the “Opus Aureum”: part tarot guidebook, part setting lore. I’ve worked with this deck before for Hidden Isle and it’s been a blast digging into each card’s imagery, and the symbolic connections I’ve found between them.

I’m also writing the “Seer’s Ledger”: a journal of tarot spreads, but also a manual for an entirely new form of divination. It takes the tarot archetypes as a starting point but uses coins instead, inspired by the I Ching, a Chinese divination system thousands of years old.

More Hidden Isle!

This was just announced today, so I can finally talk about it!

For those who don’t know, I wrote and designed a TTRPG called The Hidden Isle which uses Tarot cards instead of dice. The core book sets up lots of tension: the potential for magic to be used for oppression; the struggle of keeping Dioscoria (the hidden isle) secret; a city bursting at the seams from migration and logistical issues. But we couldn’t resolve those setups, because they needed playable scenarios to be explored.

But now I have the opportunity to tell a longer story centering on Dioscoria itself and exploring those tensions, as a campaign of a dozen linked adventures. The story is called Haven’s Heir.

And it won’t just be me! I can’t give you names yet, but there will be a number of writers on the project. I’m trying to get a spread of people experienced with tabletop narratives, digital interactive narrative and, ideally, non-Western cultures. We’ll see how it goes, but the lineup is already very interesting!

It’ll also come with The Dioscorian Library: an expansion for the game as a whole, with new classes, new rules, new setting content – basically a buffet of stuff to expand your own Hidden Isle games as you see fit! If you’d like to test these rules out, go to the Sefirot discord and ask to be a playtester.

Haven’s Heir isn’t live yet – crowdfunding will open in September – but you can follow it to get a reminder, or reserve your spot for €5 to get some goodies! Here’s the pre-launch page.

Game recs

I’ve also been playing and looking out for other cool games!

If you liked Duskpunk‘s dice-driven RPG gameplay, you might enjoy

• Joy Malignant: a surreal lumpy world where your inner character is expressed through how you look to others. Launching soon!
• Celestial Return: a cyber-noir thriller featuring cosmic horrors and megacorps. Launching right now!

Duskpunk is bundling with both on Steam, so you’ll get a discount!

What’s next?

I have a lot of work ahead, writing more Gilded Legacy and Haven’s Heir content, plus there’s a lot of Dioscorian Library and Opus Aureum work to do in the coming months, I’d like to finish Abomination, and getting everything lined up for Haven’s Heir and then actually leading a team of writers on that will keep me busy for the better part of a year. So unfortunately, I won’t be able to return to digital games anytime soon.

But to be honest, I got a bit burned out making Duskpunk: it was a very ambitious project, with a lot of writing and content production – so I’m happy to take a breather for a little while. I have some ideas for digital games but they’re not very fleshed out, so maybe it’s better to step back until an idea really inspires me again!

And let’s be honest, tabletop RPGs are awesome and I’m extremely lucky to be working in this space! 😀