Hello!
Welcome to your mid November newsletter from the Far Horizons CoOp.
We're a global collective with an international audience, but I can't help noticing the slide into winter here in the northern hemisphere. We're deep into the cups of November now and it should be cold, but, it's not. Tonight is predicted to be the warmest November night on record, and I really feel it.
We're at a tipping point in history; not just about the climate itself, but about who gets to make decisions about the future. It feels as though the old guard are making those decisions right now, and that they're doing a bad job: as a species, as a planet-wide collective, had we worked together twenty years ago, we might have avoided this moment entirely, climatically and politically. But instead our leaders dithered and promoted short-term economic growth instead of the future.
Where am I going with this? I want to say two things. The future belongs to everyone; it's your legacy as much as everyone else's. The decisions we make today impact that future deeply, both on a planetary scale and on an individual one. Put shortly, you and your choices matter. It's like a less inane version of Roko's Basilisk: in one hundred years, do you want to be remembered for trying to make a difference? We do.
In TTRPGs we absolutely can make a difference. As consumers we can consider how we access books: is a paper book better, or a PDF? If paper, can we justify shipping it across oceans? If a PDF, can we justify storing it in the cloud? And as creators, we can make a difference by limiting those choices to the ones we feel are acceptable, and also by creating works that deal directly with important issues, or indirectly by showing the power of personal decisions and collective action.
News
Twitter's collapse
Speaking of collective action, we're seeing the real-time collapse of the Twitter waveform into something that's ultimately likely to resemble one of the much lampooned right-wing social media websites. There's been a mass exit of TTRPG folks from the platform, and we're at a moment where decisions matter.
To me, this feels like the moment when Google+ closed a few years ago. That platform, with its readily browsable collection of groups with variable levels of privacy, plus highly fluid and transparent conversation threads, was almost uniquely ideal to the TTRPG space, in terms of promotion and connectivity. It felt like a positive space where we could talk constructively about games in ways that other social media hasn't usefully conferred.
Twitter hasn't been perfect, but it was ubiquitous. To many of us, myself included, it's been how we've made connections and sold games for the last few years. We've made friends and got eyes on things when it mattered. Suddenly, that's going up in smoke. It's as if an independent national broadcaster suddenly got its funding pulled: whilst it seems small and even funny on the outside, the real-time failure of Twitter as a platform is going to hurt TTRPG creators and fans by fragmenting the community again.
There are no easy solutions here. All of the alternatives we've explored thus far are understandably different enough to Twitter, and ultimately it'll be a personal choice as to where people end up.
Discord will remain the place where many people hang out and work, but these are silos for which there's no overarching directory at the moment, so it'll be difficult to find spaces that match what people want
Mastodon looks good, but its distributed hosting means that mass migration will put pressure on admins and systems, and it's also very dependent on who your moderators are going to be
Cohost, run by a tiny cooperative, is very attractive to us, but it's had some controversy about its TOS, and again will struggle if tens of thousands of folks suddenly join up
Tumblr is back, like it's fifteen years ago, with a newly revised policy around nudity that might entice people back to the network, but I think people are unwilling to forgive their previous failings
Reddit is a potentially useful space, but its biggest TTRPG subreddits are notoriously hostile to self-promotion in a way that will be difficult for small creators
Facebook is another obvious choice, but has a format and aesthetic very different to Twitter, which will make it a hard transition for those used to a nanoblog format
There are other choices of course, but I think these are the ones I've seen discussed the most. For our part, we'll be sticking with this newsletter, our Discord server, and experimenting with Mastodon and/or Cohost. And our Twitter account will be active until further notice.
Project Updates
We’ve been hashing out our order of the A Thousand Burning Stars series for the next six months, and we’re super excited to share some of these with you.
First up is O Morningstar! by Jamie O’Duibhir and featuring the creative talents of editor Reilly Qyote, illustrator Carly A-F, and layout designer Aven McConnaughey. O Morningstar! is a storytelling game that takes players across time and spaces as the hosts of Hell reflecting on the rebellion against Heaven, casting Morningstar in a new light as a liberator and figure of rebellion against tyranny and oppression. It’s scheduled to be released in December 2022, and so far it’s looking absolutely boss.
In January 2023 we’ll be releasing Little Gods by Sam Z, a shared protagonist RPG of a recent migrant to a new city and the little spirits who live there. As the migrant’s previous way of living interacts with the city they’ve moved to, both will change and grow in unpredictable ways. Tonally inspired by Kiki’s Delivery Service, and mechanically derived from 6e GMless by Viditya Voleti. Working with Sam are illustrators Duamn Figueroa Rassol and Carly A-F, and editor Magnus T Hansen.
There are another four projects in the works after that, including one from our first creator-in-residence Sam Leigh, the creator of Anamnesis and famed TikTok TTRPG promoter. We’re really excited to be working with Sam and we’re very much looking forward to sharing their ideas with you, dear audience!
The other project in the pipeline is, of course, Far Horizons Guide to Cults. Nearly all of the cults and essays are now written, and most of them are going through editing at the moment. We’re hoping to preview another cult soon. One of our illustrators, the always-busy Carly A-F, has these illustrations to share with us, taken from the cult Heralds of the Void.
That’s all we’ve got for you this time. Until next month: make cool games. wage class war.
Best Wishes,
F.H.C.