Welcome / new release / the winter sale continues!
The Lost Bay Studio December 2023 newsletter
Welcome new readers of The Dispatch, the newsletter of The Lost Bay Studio. I’m stoked to have you on board! Let me give you a quick intro. Our newsletters are usually divided in two sections: TLBS news first (including releases, behind the scenes, and more) and selected indie TTRPG news in the second part of the newsletter. Today we start with a new adventure release.
Help us restore the true spirit of Christmas!
We’ve just released Corpse Snatchers XMAS, a solo-first mall-survival adventure. It’s a 32p zine, with a gonzo-ish dark fantasy vibe.
Your best bro Pat helped you find the job. An easy gig: the two of you wear stupid Santa suits and distribute promo flyers to the brain numbed ghouls that haunt the Gallowsville Mall at the edge of Sleep Country.
With Pat there, it wasn’t so bad, but when they didn’t show this morning you had to pick up the slack. Exhausted, on your break you snuck into the storage room of the Delicatessen and passed out. You wake to your pager, buzzing out a short message: “I’m trapped in hell - it’s freezing - get me the fuck OUT! - PAT.” Then an inhuman scream splits the air on the other side of the storage room door.
The zine is only $2, that’s a pretty low price for so much mayhem, and all proceeds go to charity until the 8th of Jan! The art is by Evangeline Gallagher, the lead artist of The Lost Bay RPG. BTW that’s you on the cover, you look pretty rad. Turns out your Santa suit is a magical item, that grants you the power to travel back and forth to Cold Hell.
The adventure is packed with encounters, Stuff, and special tables for all the Zones of the mall. As you crawl your way out, you uncover secrets and you might even find a way to destroy the diabolical XMAS Talking Tree who’s devouring shoppers.
You can either play it solo, using the simplified solo procedure, or as a group adventure. Corpse Snatchers XMAS is written by myself and
, a designer who’s put out several remarkable Mothership adventures. We’ve designed CS-XMAS to have high replayability. The neat map, by Strega Wolf van den Berg, is player facing, and gives the adventure a slight boardgamish touch.
New reader of The Dispatch you might ask yourself: “but Iko, what is The Lost Bay RPG?”
It’s my passion project, a suburban dark fantasy game set in alternate 90s. I’ve been developing and playtesting it for a couple of years. In TLB you play characters who have been touched by the Weird, an ancient force that grants them extraordinary powers.
TLB will be released in print in 2024, but if you are curious you can check the early access, or First Look PDF version, or even better, get it bundled with 2 adventures, including CS XMAS.
There is already an active community playing and writing third party content for the game. We all meet at The Lost Bay Discord, come say hi!
The Christmas sale is live, 25% OFF on all the catalog.
We curate and find for you in the immense galaxy of indie RPG zines and books, a selection of rad games and adventures from international creators, with a slight preference for weird and horror-ish stuff.
Our full catalog is 25% OFF until the end of the year, we ship worldwide from the UK. And we just got a pack of new items, including Archol by Guy Pradel, Feathered Adventures and Broken Cities by Côme Martin, and a few horror zines: Combed clap of Thunder by Zach Hazard Vaupen, and Elevator Game by Allen Hall.
I did a little flip through/review of Archol on tiktok, it’s a unique zine, a catalog of weird locations, and an architectural guide, check it out.
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Outer Rim Uprising pre orders are a go
I know many of you have been waiting for this. The mega rebellious bundle-boxed set for Mothership pre-orders are live. You can snag the bundles or the individual items separately, as well as a few cool zines from the back catalog of ORU designers. Get them here https://outer-rim-uprising.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/
The house is full!
I might have already told you that I’ve partially switched to printing locally. I’m super happy with that choice, there’s nothing like seeing firsthand the papers, and talking to a human! I think it’s going to be super beneficial in terms of paper and print quality and production workflow: more advice given by the human printer, and therefore less errors, less guessing.
Right now the house is filled with The Fallen Bundle and the CY_BER bundle prints, and I am assembling them in their folders/boxes one at a time!
We’ll ship those to pre-order backers in January, and put them back on the store.
Cool indie stuff
Roque Romero has released an art pack of fantasy goodness - 28 black and white illustrations with a liminal vibe for your projects - cost $5 - saying it’s a good bargain is an understatement https://roque-romero.itch.io/old-school-revisited
Punkish RPG zines
At the end of the year it’s common for designers/publishers to share round-ups of their yearly activity.
and have both gathered their thoughts and given them the shape of free black and white zines, respectively Weirdo faves of 2023 and The 2023 Meaties.The two designers review the cool games or TTRPG adjacent things they’ve encountered this year. Both zines are rad and have a punkish-old-school vibe I really love. Check them out, you might discover in them little RPG gems you’ve missed out this year.
Other cool stuff
RPG theory, The cost of partial success by
, a blog post on “On moving the story forward with meaningful complications”, or how you can build fiction and character success/growth in meaningful ways. (again!) has been playing The Isle by Luke Gearing as a crowd-fueled play-by-blog adventure. You can vote each week(-ish) on what the character will do next, and Christian will roll dice, resolve the actions and write a new blog post with a new poll for the readers to decide what they want to do next. It’s super well written, mysteriously fun, and it’s been a cool experience to wait impatiently for the next issue of the PBP.
That’s all I got for today
I have hundreds of bundles to assemble, I’ll better get going.
I wish you a happy end of 2023 and a 2024 filled of cool playing moments.
Take care
Iko
Thanks for the Meaties and Play-By-Blog shoutouts!