Campaign Handbook + CY_Ber bundle

TLDR

I want to cyberpunk https://www.thelostbaystudio.com/products/cy_ber-bundle

Let’s join the rebellion http://outerrimuprising.com/

Whisper me a spooky Urban Legend https://itch.io/jam/urban-legend-jam

Do you CY_BER Punk?

Hey folks! Under the neverending blaze of the hottest summer, a crew of cyber renegades has been carving out of infested circuits a psychedelic bundle for your fave doomsday tabletop RPG CY_BORG: the CY_BER BUNDLE

13 nano infested items by Exeunt Press, Nyhur, Philip Jensen, Victor J Merino, Zach Hazard Vaupen, packaging cover art by Johan Nohr.

Access granted until September 13 - Physical + Digital items - 10% OFF

⚠ SECURE YOUR STASH ⚠ https://www.thelostbaystudio.com/products/cy_ber-bundle

WAIT! You a fan of all things doom, grim, and BORG? Want to grab a reprint of the Mörk Borg Wicked Wanderers Winter Bundle as well? You can, and you’ll get an additional 10% discount if you do.

1 0 0 0 FOLLOERS

Now that promo is out the way, we’re going to properly celebrate the 1000 followers for the Outer Rim: Uprising campaign! First of all, a massive kudos to all pirates and rebels who followed and supported the campaign pre launch. Your love allows us to grow, to publish even more awesome indie designers, to release more zines, and to keep the sap of our beautiful hobby flowing.

As promised I’m going to tell you (almost) everything about the Campaign Handbook, the pulsating renegade heart of the bundle.

The cover and inside art, are by Evangeline Gallagher, an artist delivering illustrations with a post-punk-eerie vibe and a returning collaborator of The Lost Bay Studio. Layout is by Jean Verne, one of the kick ass emerging layout designers of the international indie TTRPG scene.

To find the right tone of the handbook, we’ve been studying punk zines and gig posters, as well as activists’ flyers from the 90s and early 2000s. The Campaign Handbook borrows their rugged visual style, impactful layout, and lo-fi aesthetic. The underlying theme of the bundle is rebellion, and we wanted the Campaign Handbook to look like a booklet put together by rebels, in a faraway drifting station, using the rudimentary copying tools they can find. Yes, there are photocopying machines in deep space stations!

The raw black and white aesthetic of the zine has been crafted meticulously to evoke the themes of the bundle and to provide maximum readability. On the zine cover, bottom right, you can see the logos of three factions featured in the bundle. Two of those will be turned into patches for the campaign backers.

OK but what’s inside it?

All the zines/modules in the bundle can be used independently, to run one shots or mini-campaigns, but they share a common lore, or implied setting: NPCs, events, locations and factions.

The Campaign Handbook pushes this one step further: use it to build extensive campaigns in the Outer Rim, with the bundle items or third party zines.

In the Campaign Handbook you’ll find mostly two kinds of resources.

Setting building tools. Custom classes that fit the bundle theme, insurgent hideouts, corrupt corporations, rebellious factions, gear, trinkets, patches and mercs; a planet directory, and a faction relationship graph, plus heaps of tables to spice up your game. These tools are written collectively for you, by the whole crew of the bundle.

Campaign prep and management tools. Designed by Josh Domanski, the brain behind quite a few horror delicacies, like The Bureau and The Bloom (together with Goblin Archives) and many more.

Need to put quickly together a few zines of the bundle and launch a campaign? The Campaign Handbook comes with a series of thematic Frameworks to kickstart your games.

Need tips to start, run, grow and end your campaign? We got your covered with several step by step simple and concise guidelines.

You wonder how to play corps over the arc of a medium or long campaign? Because you’ve got plenty of cool modules to play Mothership one shots, but you’ve been asking yourself: what happens if the big bad corp becomes a returning character? What kind of conspiracies will it build over time? How the actions of the characters are going to impact the corp, and how the corp will respond to those? Well, we’ve put together the perfect tool to answer those questions, it’s:  ████████████.

Wouldn’t it be cool to receive a nice bundle filled of kick ass zines right after you got the Mothership 1E boxed set? That would be awesome! Got follow the Kickstarter page here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelostbay/outer-rim-uprising

Also, when we hit 1500 followers, I’ll share a surprise.

URBAN LEGEND JAM

In just a few weeks starts the first jam for The Lost Bay RPG, the Urban Legend jam. What’s best than Urban Legends to celebrate and synthesize the spirit of the 90s? VHS ghosts, cursed skate parks, doomed video games, serial-killers, mud abominations, evil Saints! Join us and craft the Urban Legends of The Lost Bay. 

The expected entries are in-game zines, items that could be found by the characters of the Bay themselves. You don’t need to have a past designing experience to participate, and you don’t even need to buy the game! The coolest part? Some zines will be selected to be printed/bought/distributed by The Lost Bay Studio. Pretty rad right?

Jump in https://itch.io/jam/urban-legend-jam

HIRIA

Before a couple more news and closing this issue of The Dispatch, I want to do a massive signal boosting to Jimmy Shelter and to their game Hiria. Hiria is not only a cool game, it’s punctuated by gorgeous art. 

Hiria: the Eternal City is a solo journaling game in which you play a character trying to track someone down through different versions of the same city. As the turns pass, based on your dice rolls, the city changes, and things happen around you. As the landscape of the chase shifts, the traces your quarry leaves behind determine how your character tracks down and, just maybe, catches up to them.

I’m a big fan of Jimmy’s games, they strike a unique slightly nostalgic but hopeful vibe, with lean and clean mechanics and layout. If you’re a reader of The Dispatch I’m sure you’ll like them.

Interviews

I had the amazing chance to be a guest on two cool media this week.

On the waves of the Undercommon Taste podcast I chat about The Lost Bay game influences, theme, and lore.

I spoke with Marco Serrano about Outer Rim: Uprising, and revealed a few things about it in the latest issue of The Guac.

Undercommon Taste and the Guac are two really cool media, and you should subscribe to them.

That’s all I got for today. I need to go back to my dice set and test the exploration procedure for The Lost Bay - First Look. Expect it at the end of next week. I’ve been gathering feedback, advice, and info about how best design it from a lot of wise folks in the scene and I’m going to talk about the design process here, in a next issue, so hey, you better subscribe

Thanks for reading, and until next time, stay well

Iko