New Year Update: Realis (Ashcan Edition) and Other Updates
I know, I know. It’s been nearly three weeks since New Years. But still, I hope the final days of 2024 treated you well, and that 2025 is beginning as well as it could be.
Apologies for the long silence over here. In the time since my last post, I went through an intense period on the video game I was working on at the time, for which my team and I were rewarded with layoffs and studio closure. It was tough going for a while—and it still breaks my heart that folks will never get to see what we were cooking up over the previous few years. But I’m doing okay now, and I’ve been so grateful for all the support y’all have continued to show me.
In the time since, I’ve been doing my best to stay busy. I’m not exactly sure what 2025 will hold for me—and, hey, I’m always open to chatting about opportunities—but I do have some current and upcoming things to draw your attention! Let’s start with the big one.
Realis is (Almost) Here
Back in the summer of 2022, during our stream raising funds for the National Network of Abortion Funds, I announced that I’d been working on a tabletop game called Realis. Today I’m here to tell you that, assuming everything goes as planned, an ashcan version of Realis, published by Possible Worlds Games, is going to be available to preorder right now and will release this Thursday.
You can also read a two part interview with me about the game’s influences, the process writing it, and some of its mechanics over on Rascal. Part one is up this morning. Part two will be up later today.
So: What is Realis? Well, here are the words I read that day (and which are still are the first words of the game itself:
- This universe prizes passivity except after wisdom gained.
- Recognizes friendship’s strength but rewards solitary achievement.
- Shifts in scope and scale according to the needs of the story or the whims of its tellers, demands honesty in consequences but care at the table
- …is an inverted Twilight Mirage, psychedelic space and sword & sorcery, mumbling mystics at the castle observatory, meteors cleaved clean with broadswords, a thousand moons in fatal orbit with an unreachable world called REALIS.
Not enough? Well here, here's how the book introduces the game:
I added that the chief inspiration for this game was Berserk, which I had finally read in the wake of Kentaro Miura’s death, and while I wasn’t surprised to find how influential it had been, I was surprised about what people had chosen to take from it:
Oh, everybody’s been stealing from this and they’ve been stealing the wrong thing. They’ve been stealing the grimdark violence, which is still in [Realis]. They’ve been stealing the big sword and the eclipse and the hypocritical church, and all of that’s [in Realis too]. But what they were missing is that [Berserk] is a story about a person who is a myth slowly becoming more material and real.
(I should add here, now, in the wake of his death, that while David Lynch isn't a direct influence on the game—beyond, maybe, some small slices his Dune adaptation—his fearlessness in creation has been a constant guiding star. We were so lucky to have him for the time we did.)
This Ashcan version has 20 Playable Classes and 40 NPC Classes (both of which are less than half of what will be available in the final edition), three Grand Factions, two Example Moons, art by Sam Beck and Oddesque, and layout by Tyler Crumrine of Possible Worlds Games. It has some additional design and writing by Friends at the Table’s own Jack de Quidt and Janine Hawkins.
Speaking of FatT: We’ll be debuting the game This Thursday in the main Friends at the Table feed, featuring a special intro episode where Jack and I talk through the basics of the game and show things off with a one-on-one session, and that will be followed up with the entire first Arc of the campaign releasing over the following month (with Patrons getting eps a week early, once it’s rolling). After that, Realis will become our Patreon-exclusive campaign while we switch over to Perpetua on the main feed—and we’ll be releasing it at a pretty rapid clip, since we owe y’all a bunch of eps!
And Also...
That's not all I have cooking up for y'all.
- Over on Shelved By Genre, the genre fiction podcast I do with Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz, we just kicked off our new William Gibson unit! We started with Burning Chrome, and we’ll beginning the Sprawl Trilogy in our next episode on Neuromancer! Gibson is incredibly influential to me, so this has been so rewarding to record. Check it out.
- On A More Civilized Age, Ali, Natalie, Rob, and I just finished reading Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, and we’re back to Rebels Season 3. We’re headed towards some really big episodes, and we’re prepping for April’s return to Andor. It’s a great time to hop back on the show if you’ve taken a break.
- As I said above: In about a month, our next main feed season for Friends at the Table will begin. It’s called Perpetua, and we’re playing Fabula Ultima, a game that takes heavy inspiration from JRPGs. We’re keeping the premise close to the chest, but it’s a new setting and it’ll be a great place for new listeners to hop on board!
Even More Soon
That’s not all I’ve been up to, either. I’ve also done some contract writing for video games (though you probably will not see that for a number of years yet.) I also plan to get back to streaming more on the FatT Twitch often in the coming weeks, and I’ll have another few announcements about that and related things soon too.
Thanks as always. And hey, lemme link it one more time:
