jex

well golly gee i haven't posted here in forever but wanted to share some big news!

Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition is now LIVE on Backerkit!

Do you like spooky small town 90s vibes? Stories about community and chosen family? Beating the shit out of this week's bespoke monster that you helped breathe into existence? Well, now you can pre-order a cool deluxe hard cover with a ton of new material:

I don't use cohost much these days but I figured I should talk about this --

In June, I will be launching a crowdfunding campaign for a new, revised edition of Bump in the Dark featuring updated rules to streamline play and provide extra support for players and GMs, a ton of newly commissioned original art (over twenty pieces!), a new take on the downtime system, expanded guidance on more than 25 factions, oracles and updated reference materials, and more, all in a gorgeous premium hardcover with offset printing and a bookmark ribbon. I'm really excited (and nervous!) about this as it's my first ever crowdfunding campaign and I really want it to be successful.

Please consider following along here and maybe even pledging when the campaign goes live!

I think this is going to be the last major update to Bump in the Dark as I focus on raising funds for copy editing, looking into print publishing, and going out of "early access." Also maybe actually working on the other game, and putting together some fun supplement ideas for this one.

I've been working on some stuff for an eventual supplement for my game that I think will be called Iron Country Almanac. I was making up oracles containing business names as well as cities/towns, and for the latter, I went back and forth on whether Ontonogan, my fictionalized version of Upper Michigan and Northern Wisconsin, should have real-world locations or not, and I ended up mostly making up a bunch of names. That got me thinking a lot about the lore of the world, and how you really could play the game more or less set in the "real world," or you could deviate quite a bit -- and I mean, why not? It's a world where angels and demons are real, not to mention monsters of many varieties. I feel like having a fictional state name (Ontonagon) and fictional (but plausible) town names gives you permission to deviate as much as you want.

There are other bits of lore that I'm not sure where or how they fit in. For example, somewhere along the way it became the case that the predominant religion in the unnamed country Ontonagon is a part of (some version of the U.S., presumably still named that) is not Christianity, or at least not Christianity as we would recognize it. The thinking is that this is a world that has been touched by the void -- an unknowable, encroaching darkness that corrupts all it touches -- and that would change religious and mythological cosmology/ontology.

But does any of it matter? Does this bit of lore actually add to the game?