The Electrum Archive
The Electrum Archive Issue 02 has been released on itch in PDF! It’s a thick 80-page zine filled with new adventures, optional rules, and interesting locations for you to explore!
Ava and I spent the last month getting rid of all the typos we could find, and I got to pick up the proofs for the print version. They are looking great and I’m very excited for when I get to send out all the physical copies to the campaign backers once the print run is done in early July.
Games I’ve played this month
As I talked about in the March newsletter, I ran a two-session game of Mothership this month using the module Bloom by Daniel Hallinan. It ended with one player, who didn’t get infected because they were the only one wearing their vacsuit, escaping the planet with a sample for their client. I had a lot of fun creeping my players out by describing some of the symptoms they were developing and eventually having them drop dead one after the other.
On the video game end I’ve been playing a lot of Quester and Fallout: New Vegas.
Quester is an interesting one; I really dislike the art style for the character portraits and some of the UI elements, but the gameplay was so neat that I played it for hours. It scratches an OSR-like dungeon crawling itch with its management of a resource called purification fuel. In world, this fuel is used to clean the air so the party can explore safely, but what this means gameplay-wise is that each step you take in the underground uses up some amount of fuel. Effectively putting a cap on how much you can explore before you need to return to base camp. Add to this rock tiles you need to clear and combat encounters which all use up fuel and you have a simple resource-management loop reminiscent of managing torchlight in an old school dungeon crawl. Combine this with your party needing to gather a certain amount of food every few days to survive, and exploration becomes filled with interesting micro decisions, instead of just slowly filling out the blank spaces on your map.
Odds and Ends
I’ve been re-reading some of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. I’m still a big fan of the vague wizard shit happening in these, and I think it will be a big inspiration for when I’ll start writing some new adventures for DURF.
The courgettes in my little vegetable garden have been completely consumed by snails, but the other vegetables I planted are growing nice and strong.
That’s it for now, thank you for reading and stay safe!
Talk soon!
- Emiel
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