Who am I? I'm Craig, a UK based gamer and hobbyist designer/publisher of #RPG, #TTRPG & #indieRPG. I enjoy playing games across a range of genres but I always come back to my first love of sci-fi. Outside of gaming my day job is as an academic researcher/lecturer, I'm an amateur baker (mostly bread) and an unashamed cat lover.

Where can you find me?
My own site/blog
Twitter
Mastodon
Facebook - LunarShadow Designs
Here on Cohost
Tiktok

You can find all of my releases on itch.io or drivethruRPG. Print editions are available through selected retailers including Rooks Press, IglooTree, Leisure Games, Peregrine Coast Press, Indie Press Revolution and my own Etsy store. The full list of my games is below the cut.



It's been a bit of a weird week for me sales wise. After being included in a tiktok highlighting "two player games that will fuck you up" I've seen a massive boost in sales of Signal to Noise. Right now, a little over a week later, I've had 18 sales of the game on itch and another 25 on drivethruRPG. I’ve also received 3 direct sales on Etsy for the game in print and I hope that Peregrine Coast Press and IPR, who stock the game, have also received orders for it. Some of those orders included other games but the vast majority didn’t.

43 digital sales in a week is, frankly, a bloody amazing boost. It’s the sort of numbers that I’d normally need six months to a year to make. If I’m lucky. Many of my releases reach only a fraction of that after their initial release. That’s why it’s also a little frustrating, because it just goes to show that my games will sell if I could get them in front of a wider audience.

I’ve seen the same with IPR - thanks to their network of partner stores and attendance at US conventions they’ve sold 70+ copies of Signal to Noise. That’s almost twice what I was able to achieve during the initial crowdfunding! I’ve posted before about trying to boost my online presence but honestly, at this point I just don’t know how, especially as I regularly hear from others with established audiences that the online engagement (especially twitter) has dropped off a cliff.



It's mid April which means that another tax year has come and gone. While it will probably be months before I file my taxes I've been looking over my gaming income from the year and it looks like I made a total profit of…

£177

which really isn't much, especially when you consider my profit last tax year (21/22) was £1139. I paid more in tax on it than I made in profit this year.



There are less than 24 hours to go on the campaign for Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound so I want to talk a little about why I'm writing a slice of life sci-fi game and not a more typical action orientated game. But first, the obligatory #ZineQuest link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lunarshadow-designs/hopes-and-dreams-of-the-orbital-bound

At the heart of it I want the Dyson Eclipse to feel lived in as a setting. It would be all too easy to write another sci-fi game that introduced a cool conceit that then largely ignored the world in order to focus on the action. RPGs tend to gloss over background elements in a scene - we set the scene initially and focus on the PCs and what they're doing. The background stops actively existing until it becomes relevant and is brought into focus. (this is partially why mysteries can be hard to run - clues literally do not exist until they are described at which point they come into blindingly sharp focus but that's a discussion for another thread)

Books get around this because we expect, and accept, large chunks of description where the protagonists are doing nothing but that is boring in an RPG. Visual media, such as movies, just have a constantly present and active background. It might not be the focus but its there. That not only allows clues to be present and telegraphed but provide constant visual context for the audience that reinforce genre and help build the world. Film set in a busy city? You've got dozens of extras providing the expected background that keeps you in the genre.

So what's that got to do with a slice of life sci-fi RPG? Well I want the Dyson Eclipse (the larger setting) to be fleshed out and feel grounded but building that world in the background is hard. The simple solution? Make it the focus and bring it to the front. My hope is that long term the game will ground the setting. A group that decide to engage with it via the collection of games can use Orbital Bound to set a baseline tone and genre that they can keep coming back to between sessions of more action focused games.

For example I have vague ideas for an investigation focused game trying to uncover the mysteries of the arrays. Build a team, catalogue strange events, discover the truth. But what if one player is running late? Well that's a perfect time to cut to Orbital Bound. You grab the character pool and for half an hour you cut back to the Habitat. Instead of trying to shut off a dangerous gravitational incursion the challenges you're facing are a shortage of O2 scrubbers and having to convince your sibling not to make a scene at a coming party.

Those are the small moment that will help bring the setting to life and help players be invested in the bigger mysteries. They'll know why they're out in the cold, investigating alien structures that shouldn't exist.