Welcome to Anathema
When I was but an egg I spent a lot of time at my local book shop. Borders was about half an hour away by bus. I spent hours browsing through the science fiction and fantasy sections. Picking out books by name or cover art. My shopping budget wasn't much, so I had to find one or two paperbacks that would stretch my dollar.
They started to carry a small selection of tabletop RPGs. One shelf, give or take. A scant twenty or so books from three or four systems. I remember seeing Vampire: The Masquerade books and Shadowrun. At the time one of these big core RPG books was running near $30, a king's ransom to young me.
Somehow I managed to save up enough money to buy one of these RPG books. I don't remember how. It could very well have been mowing lawns. Well, lawn. There was only one lawn, but the high school teacher who paid me to mow it paid way more than the job deserved.
I set out intending to buy Shadowrun. This would have been the early 2000s, and this egg, this sprout of a person who once was me loved cyberpunk. When I got to the usual and customary shelf, to my dismay, the copy of Shadowrun was gone. But there was something new, something different.
There was Exalted.
There's a lot I could say about Exalted. It was the start of a long, slow, simmering romance. The kind written about in a very different section of the book shop, where I dare not tread. Exalted was completely different from the kinds of TTRPG books I had seen before. It attempted to capture the feel of wuxia in a vaguely-though-not-precisely Asian-inspired setting. It was everything that I did not yet know that I wanted in a game.
Except.
Well, taking off the rose-colored glasses for a moment. Exalted isn't actually very much fun to play. At least not in the first edition. Don't let me sour you on the later versions that came, I can't speak to them. Exalted 1E boiled most interactions down to whoever could spend the most of a given resource. Its particular flavor of resource was usually essence, though sometimes willpower. Unblockable attacks against undefeatable defenses until somebody ran dry. It didn't work.
But that story. That evocative mythos. The decadent elite of a dying culture fighting for the chance to rule the scraps of a once-great society. The world fraying at the edges where reality no longer held sway. Shapeshifting beasts nipping at the heels of those who had betrayed them. Vengeful spirits of the betrayed given life again to exact their penance. A world filled with spirits grand and small; each assigned a place in a great spiritual bureaucracy.
I couldn't let any of these ideas go. How could I? They became the foundation of so many stories that I wanted to tell. Some I succeeded, many I didn't. Always trying to weave it together with other stories, other sources of inspiration. The various worlds mashing against each other to spawn crossbreed worlds and settings.
The original run of Exalted 1st edition produced 35 books. I know that because I just counted them. They're on a shelf above my writing desk, in the place of prominence closest to me. One of my pandemic projects was to collect them all again. I had owned most of these books when I was younger, I had to sell them in a time of struggle. They're not perfect unused copies: toys are meant to be played with. They're a reference document, and a source of inspiration.
You see, like many GMs, I've been working on a homebrew system since the dawn of time. It's filled with things I loved from other places, glued together in new and interesting ways. I'm unleashing it on players for the first time, which is scary. It's always scary watching your baby waddle out into the world for the first time, knowing others may not love it the way you do. But if it's ever to grow, waddle it must.
Now it's time to pull back the curtain a little bit and give a peek behind the scenes. How I've been inspired by a thing I loved, how I've attempted to carry its torch forward for a new generation. It's time to talk about Anathema.
Hey, Check This Out!
This week I'm focusing on TTRPG releases, most of which are through Zine Month. I don't know any of these people, they haven't paid me to mention them. They're cool products that I liked and thought other people should see.
TTRPGs & ZIMO
Death Metal Viking Cats. I sort of want to leave it there. You're either sold on the concept or not. Check it out: 9 Lives to Valhalla.
Legend Has It uses your own books as the source of legends and myths in the making. Build a timeline. Interpret sentences. Save the cheerleader, save the world? I can't wait to mash this thing up against my Warhammer Codexes and see what falls out.
The ocean is a truly horrifying place. I'm tempted to say end statement. Leave that there hanging like a corpse in the window. But no, there's a point. In Other Waters: Tidebreak harnesses the horrors of the depths on an alien world. It channels the horror, to feed it to you spoonful by spoonful. Like a flan made out of terror and oxygen deprivation.
Looking for horror that's a bit less moist? Orbital Debris moves the spooks to a moon made out of junk. Environments, factions, NPCs. Everything you'd need to populate 23 hexes of heavenly horror roleplay.
If horror isn't your bag, we can still be friends. I still like you. Don't worry about that car outside. It's not my mom, and I'm not going to get pizza without you. Here, read GODSEND Agenda. It's got superheroes, and draws its inspirations from comic books and ancient mythology. It's almost as good as pizza.
Every GM needs a good way to come up with characters. Your Life: Random Fantasy Character Backgrounds offers 64 pages of random generators to do just that.
How to Start Cults and Sacrifice People offers system-agnostic guidance to make a cult. Give heroic players a big bad worth challenging. Give morally grey characters something to work towards. Give evil characters a darkly comedic and bumbling reason to get out of bed. It's all good.
In Soviet Russia, Spy Are You! is a name so delightful I would have mentioned it on that strength alone. It's set in the 1970s. There's a press-your-luck dice rolling mechanic based on Russian Roulette. It's ready to ship as soon as the campaign ends.
Programming Notes
I'm going to move to a Tuesday publication date starting next week! If you don't see this newsletter next Monday, that's by design! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This should help me hit a Tuesday street date no matter what events are running over the weekend.
In Other News
Thank you to everyone who subscribes and reads. It means a lot to me. I hope this newsletter has proven entertaining and informative!