June & July 2024
Shipping zines, a new DURF adventure, Tower Dungeon, Balatro, and more
A bit of a longer newsletter this month, I was overwhelmed with shipping zines for TEA last month, so I skipped my usual newsletter. So this time I’ll be going over both June and July :)
The Electrum Archive
As mentioned above, I spent a lot of time getting the printed zines of the Electrum Archive Kickstarter ready for fulfillment. The first print run for TEA issue 01 was only 300 copies, so scaling that up to printing 3000+ zines wasn’t without its growing pains. But my partner and I worked hard to tuck all the maps in the zines and prepping them all for shipping.
By now, almost all zines have arrived at fulfillment partners in the different regions around the globe and will be sent out to individual backers in the next few weeks!
This whole project was a way bigger undertaking than I expected, but I learned an incredible amount of things and am very excited to use what I’ve learned on the next projects!
For those who would still like to get their hands on physical copies of The Electrum Archive: I’ll be updating you all through these newsletters once they become available at retailers around the world. For now, the only place they are available is at Indie Press Revolution in the US, but they will become available at more places once packages start to arrive in the next few weeks :)
DURF
I spend most of the time I had before the shipping chaos started writing a new dungeon for DURF: Expanded. It is called Prison of the Fire Tyrant and is available on my Patreon!
It was really fun to write a new dungeon for DURF again. I got to apply a lot of the things I learned while writing the adventures for The Electrum Archive in the last year and a half. I’m currently playing through the dungeon with my group and it has already resulted in some memorable interactions with some of the NPCs and traps.
One of my players has died when a meteor shower rained down from the ceiling in the orrery room and another has pledged themselves to the ancient boar-headed warrior god Borocos, a down-on-his-luck god who has lost his powers after fading into obscurity and desperately needs new followers to resurrect his cult of overly-muscular skull-cracking gym-bros.
I’ve also spent some time thinking over the new art style I’m going to use for the illustrations I’m making for the DURF: Expanded rule book. So far I’ve been using placeholder art pieces plucked from my old projects, but this month saw the first new art piece specifically made for DURF: Expanded.
DURF: Expanded, in contrast to the original version of DURF, will contain all color illustrations by me. It was really fun trying to figure out how to update the old style of the illustrations I made for the original 2021 DURF and see how far I’ve come artistically :)
If you’d like to support me while I continue work on DURF: Expanded, or would like to gain access to the drafts and the new adventure, consider supporting me directly on Patreon!
Things I Read
The most interesting thing I read this past weeks was the manga Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei (the creator of BLAME!). I’m a big fan of the looser line work with this one compared to BLAME!, and as a fan of stories about exploring impossibly large megastructures, this is right up my alley. It has some really evocative panels!
Things I Played
I played a lot of games in between work and my other responsibilities, both tabletop games and video games. I played some DURF: Expanded and continued with our Frosthaven campaign I talked about in a previous newsletter. But as for tabletop games my highlight was the one shot of Mythic Bastionland I played at a local games café here in Utrecht in the Netherlands. It was run by the wonderful Peter of Sirly Whirly and was a lot of fun! I got to meet some really nice new people to play with and the game itself was also just very good at setting the tone for playing an Arthurian knight.
As far as video games go, I picked up Balatro and Cassette Beasts in the Steam summer sales.
Balatro I heard a lot of good things about, but I was not prepared for the effect it would have on me. Its rogue-like game loop of picking upgrades, playing poker hands, and seeing numbers go up really tickled my brain in a good way. It completely got its hooks in me for a good few days, during which I didn’t get a lot of other things done.
Cassette Beasts was also a great time. It’s a monster collector in the same vein as Pokémon, in which you can record monsters onto cassette tapes and fuse them together into bigger monsters. What really made it fun for me was that it has cross-platform multiplayer, so my partner and I were able to run around in each other’s games and help each other in battles while I played on the Steamdeck and she played on the Switch. I also really enjoyed how instead of just dealing additional damage in certain type-matchups, you also get other mechanical benefits for choosing the right type to fight with. For example, fire-type attacks can melt ice and plastic-type monsters, turning them in water and poison types respectively, but a fire attack on an air-type monster would create an updraft which gives the air-type monster a wall of air to hide behind. This made the game a little more interesting than the usual rock-paper-scissors of games like Pokémon.
The only thing that soured the experience a bit was having the final fight of the story end with a kind of Deus Ex Machina instead of rewarding a well-built team with a challenging fight, which was a shame because I was enjoying the somewhat simple story that set it all up. But still, as a monster collecting and battling game, this was really fun!
Odds & Ends
My partner and I are now regularly dogsitting for a dog named Hector! He’s still quite young and is very enthusiastic, which can be a bit much sometimes when you’re tired, but overall it has been very nice to have a dog running around the house :)
A little vegetable garden update for those of you who are curious how things are going since I last posted about it: the first tomatoes have been spotted :)
That’s it for now, thank you for reading and stay safe!
Talk soon!
- Emiel
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