New video, Outliers, Quickstart update
New zine in store: Outliers by Samantha Leigh
https://www.thelostbaystudio.com/products/outliers
Outliers from Far Horizons CoOp is now available at The Lost Bay Studio!
In Outliers, a winner of The Awards 2023, you play a research assistant hired to manage strange and absurd lab experiments. Outliers is a 28pg wirebound solo journaling game written by Samantha Leigh, sporting interior art from Carly A-F and stylish 80s sci-manual layout design by James Hanna.
Playing card prompts and a tumbling block tower guide you through sustaining the research project as you try to keep your job. The pleasure of this game lives in the prompts Sam has written, influenced by their personal experience as an actual research assistant. From the personal to the weird, players can truly have a unique experience in this solo journaling game.
Get it here https://www.thelostbaystudio.com/products/outliers
Character Creation Demo Video
Did you know The Lost Bay Studio has a YouTube channel? The channel hosts interviews from the Lost Bay Podcast, game trailers, and unboxing videos. The newest video is a Character Creation walkthrough for The Lost Bay RPG, produced by Iko and hosted by Chris Airiau with guests Samantha Leigh and M. Allen Hall.
We had a good bit of fun recording this video to show y’all how to generate a character for the The Lost Bay RPG. The demo guides players through building out a Vibe’s Powers and Gear, the 3d66 How They Got the Weird prompt table, and point allocation process for Heart, Weird, and the three Attributes: Force, Flow & Focus. And each step explains how these character components work.
Together, we three players created PCs using the three Vibes available in The Lost Bay RPG Quickstart: Firestarter, Splinter and Seer. The process naturally encourages players to think up ways the PCs act and know each other, and by the end, we were ready to get into some trouble in the Bay, haha.
Give it a look and follow along and make your own characters! You can use the printable character sheets designed by Scragend, or use the Online TLB Character Keeper. No matter how you’ve supported The Lost Bay RPG, these character sheets are freely available for folks on The Lost Bay RPG itch page.
This Character Creation walkthrough is the first in a planned series of videos showcasing mechanics from The Lost Bay RPG. Hop on over to The Lost Bay Studio channel, and subscribe to keep up with the latest TLB mechanics demos.
Quickstart Update
The Lost Bay RPG Quickstart has a new update, live now! The Quickstart is an abridged, 40pg zine version of The Lost Bay RPG rulebook created to give gaming groups the tools they need to jumpstart sessions in The Lost Bay. So what's new in the update?
Iko and editor Samantha Leigh (yes from the video above!) are honing in on the writing to make it tighter and more evocative, which you can see in this update on the Seer Scars table and most expansively, on The Hollow Hitchhiker.
The Hollow Hitchhiker is the adventure built into the Quickstart, doing double service as a blueprint on how to create an exploration pointcrawl for The Lost Bay. Iko asked the Lost Bay community for feedback, and the revisions integrated many of the suggested improvements. Iko and Samantha punched up the manuscript so that each object and encounter drips with the themes of the adventure, helping players form a more cohesive emergent narrative.
But not everything makes it into the Quickstart. Last week on the Lost Bay discord server, Iko shared a new PC Backstories table, an optional series of misfortunes to give more depth to a PC's background. You'll find tables like these and more in the full 140pg rulebook:
Backstories
A close one disappeared. Sometimes at night you have visions of them, in a dark and humid place. Scared. Alone.
You owe a moral debt to the Rotten Tongue. Soon, they’ll come to you asking a favor you can’t refuse.
You won a beauty pageant years ago. But you cheated and badly hurt somebody in the process. Deep inside you know you don’t deserve that gold trophy. You’re a cheater.
You got a knife wound in a fight and needed stitches from ear to mouth. Your wound won’t cicatrize, and still opens when your body is under pressure.
One night, you shot someone who broke into your house. It was your flatmate coming back from work earlier than usual. Guilt haunts you.
They’re gone. The only thing that’s left of them is that tiny and fragile kitten. You’ll die to protect it.
You saved a kid from drowning and almost died doing it. You made the news. Everybody in the Lost Bay knows who you are.
You were abducted for three days and three nights. While you have no recollection of what happened, you remember a back alley and a rose bush. Those roses terrify you but you need to find them.
You survived a fall from several stories high.. You’re convinced you’re blessed with luck and are incapable of experiencing fear.
Your face looks average. Normal. But for some reason people are scared to death when they look at you for too long.
To get the latest update to the Quickstart, KS or pre-order backers can check their digital downloads, or at the-lost-bay.itch.io.
Tag yourself
Over the course of creating The Lost Bay RPG, Evangeline Gallagher's art has fueled people's intense connection to the Bay--strange yet close to the heart, vibrant and brimming with energy. This is especially true of her character for the Vibes, which is now finished for all ten starting Vibes for The Lost Bay rulebook.
Which one are you?
Many Vibes, like the Scanner and Screamer, have been around since the early days of TLB development. Classics in the Bay. What's exciting are the glimpses of the unreleased Vibes, like The Shifter and Sunken and how their Powers can affect the Bay. Iko put a special spotlight on their WIP drafts on these two new Vibes in the Discord last week, check it out:
What’s coming up next? Like this summer
What else will the Eternal Summer bring from The Lost Bay Studios? Keep an eye out for upcoming news on these releases:
Physical release Quickstart
Physical release modules
DH-UNIT 17, by Iko
Winter in the Bay, by Wren MacNeil
Diesel Service, by M. Allen Hall
Digital release contributor modules
Lost Barrios by Irvin Morales play new punk mutant vibe in a MX inspired setting available in ES and EN
Heterogony of Ends by watt, when Body horror meats community theatre, and you feel in your flesh than a better world is possible, while rehearsing Peter Pan
Decay Daughters by Alfred Valley, uncanny nuclear hexcrawl, where the concrete suburb feels like the last frontier on the edges of everything
Free web based ruleset
Visions of The Bay
by Iko
In Italia! This song is a banger! Even if rap is not your thing you might like it. The music video is set in a huge coastal Italian town, the video rips and has wild TLB vibes.
Egdelands is a book about the space that lays between the city and the countryside.
Recommended by Marx Shephard (thanks <3), I’ve just started reading and I love it! If like me you find that there is moving beauty in underpasses, vacant lots, and decaying industrial areas this might be for you.
Blue comet
You might remember the blue comet hitting the news and Portugal skies a few weeks ago. A mesmerising cosmic event that felt like a scene right out of the Bay.
I asked Evangeline to make it their own and to draw a spread for TLB, and here’s what they drew.
Zoom in the pic, you’ll find lotsa cool Lost Bay easter eggs
Fear and Hunger
I stumbled on this hardcore 2D video game from 2018, I’m sure many of you are already familiar with this dungeon crawler crpg. If not give it a look, it has strong horror vibes which you might like. Proceed with caution though, it’s NSFW and features some nudity.
Interzone
Shout out to Interzone, a digital magazine about scifi horror and the uncanny. Issue 299 cover is by British illustrator Carly A-F. It literally blew me away. It makes me want to feature Witches in TLB. Read it here
Hey btw, I’m Chris!
Haha, yes, I'm Chris Airiau, the cap-wearing fella in the Character Creation Demo above! I'm a game designer who's worked with TLB Studio on Outer Rim: Uprising, and as co-writer on The Swine with Iko. I've joined The Lost Bay Studio team to help out writing The Dispatch and host some TLB channel videos.
That’s all we got for you today folks!
Are you playing, running, or writing for The Lost Bay RPG? Come and meet us in the TLB server!
this section of visions of the bay was top notch! thx for the recommendations :))