hi everyone! i'll be taking a break until the end of the year. expect this month's patreon essay (THE GAME OF THE BALL) to still come out for paying members, and underside playtest to continue development, but there won't be any paid cont...
2025-11-16 12:54:57 +0000 UTC View Post
wip playbook art for THE CHOSEN ONE, by HZZRD666a while ago i was having a chat with a friend about how different modes of play can bring you to dif...
2025-10-31 03:34:01 +0000 UTC View PostOn a summer’s day an alien lands in Buenos Aires. He steps out of his spaceship, conical and rough like a snail’s shell, and speaks through a glistening translation bubble. He says, to the bewildered boy in front of him, “I have heard of you...
2025-09-28 23:17:42 +0000 UTC View Posthi everyone! the first month of playtesting has been extremely fruitful, and i put out the playtest's first revision a few days ago--i posted about it in the playtest discord but not everyone keeping tabs on underside is there so i figure...
2025-08-30 11:32:52 +0000 UTC View Posthi everyone. thank you so so so much for your patience and support all this time. i'm beyond excited to announce that underside's first playtest release is finally here!
i have a lot of feelings but more than that i'm exhausted and ...
2025-08-01 04:50:22 +0000 UTC View Postso, with the underside beta playtest release on the horizon is less than 30 days, most of the work is going into tables and lists: stuff that you pick at character creation and advancement. one of these is the quirks, a set of ch...
2025-07-02 20:02:58 +0000 UTC View Postsorry, it's been a while. i think that weekly patreon posts, at least while it's not my primary form of income, aren't really feasible for me, and i burned myself out trying to do them. here's the new thing: there'll be a patreon post at least onc...
2025-06-03 22:38:32 +0000 UTC View Post
a poem, this week. it's the first of an as-yet unreleased collection with magnesium oxide. next week i think i'll be writing something up about underside's tone an...
2024-10-08 01:45:19 +0000 UTC View Postthose of you who have been keyed in to underside's development will know there's been some pretty notable schedule slip. i've got a lot of shit going on in my life! so instead of promising any specific date for the full underside 2024-09-30 17:22:25 +0000 UTC View Post
for the last couple months, as well as underside, i've been working on a lighter project i announced a while back, a tactical communist OSR-inspired thing called PRAXI: Protocol Against Xenoimperialism. it's like an antifascist united fro...
2024-09-22 01:59:29 +0000 UTC View Postif i made a HORIZON MACHINE discord server where i could share snippets from upcoming projects that aren't worth doing a whole patreon post for, and where people could talk about underside and praxi, would that be something peopl...
2024-09-15 14:28:05 +0000 UTC View Posti love worm. underside only exists because of worm -- it started life as capes in the dark, a hack of blades in the dark that made it about worm. most people on this patreon, i would wager, are here bec...
2024-09-14 18:02:13 +0000 UTC View Posthi everybody! thank you to everyone who has kept supporting me over the last few months. to make a long story short, my rent was suddenly raised, i was forced to move on very short notice, and then i spent a month visiting my girlfriends in the us...
2024-09-07 21:13:10 +0000 UTC View Post
so, off the bat, some bookkeeping: after a very busy march i am back in full force for april. i also have good news for people who bought commissions, which is that--and i apologize for the long turnaround--those are all very close to done and you...
2024-04-07 15:27:52 +0000 UTC View Posthi everyone -- happy to report that the busy period has passed and dev diaries + writing scraps should start being uploaded regularly again. thank you all for your patience :)
2024-03-12 20:40:25 +0000 UTC View Posti anticipate being very busy over the next couple of weeks: as such, this dev diary and the two following it will be very brief. this one's about the combat skills and the thought that went into picking them. these are the skills:
first of all, sorry for the lack of updates this last couple weeks! one of my girlfriends was visiting and it's surprisingly hard to write patreon posts with a puppygirl clinging to your leg. i'm back now, though, and ready to talk about the final...
2024-02-17 04:18:02 +0000 UTC View Postthere are a lot of ways you can conceptualize TTRPGS. usually i use the lens of 'collaborative storytelling' but for this post i am going to say that playing TTRPGs is just playing pretend. now if you imagine a big dragon, and a guy hitting him wi...
2024-01-30 21:22:32 +0000 UTC View Posti've got something that isn't an underside dev diary this week: the charming magnesium oxide and i are working on a new TTRPG to be released under the HORIZON M...
2024-01-27 05:28:50 +0000 UTC View PostTTRPGS ARE AN ABSTRACTION OF AN ABSTRACTION. A STORY IS ALREADY AN ABSTRACTION OF REALITY AND THE TOOLS AND RULES THAT A TTRPG GIVES YOU TO PLAY WITH ARE ABSTRACTIONS OF THAT STORY. EVERY WORD USED SHOULD COUNT. YOU DO NOT GET A HOCKEY STICK WITH ...
2024-01-23 00:50:03 +0000 UTC View Postso that's approaches sorted out. but approaches are only half the battle. in underside, when you do something dangerous and you're not sure you'll succeed, you make a conflict roll. this is the game's basic resolution too...
2024-01-20 16:46:17 +0000 UTC View Postthis one's actually for an upcoming project, another release with the lovely magnesium oxide. but becaues you're in the premium torture labyrinth you can look at it early :)
2024-01-16 01:52:17 +0000 UTC
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so when figuring out what approaches to put into underside, citizen abel and i talked for a while about what we actually wanted out of them. in the end, to help guide the choices, we split the eight approaches across four axes, creating m...
2024-01-13 06:47:34 +0000 UTC View Postin the HORIZON MACHINE development discord we have a commonplace channel where we drop move or design ideas that don't belong in any projects we're currently working on but that we want to revisit. here's a few of my ideas from there and from the ...
2024-01-09 02:29:27 +0000 UTC View Postthe first edition of underside, capes in the dark, had a stat system, mostly inherited from the 'official' (made by the creator) worm ttrpg weaverdice. ultimately, it didn't suit the game very well -- and i think D&D...
2024-01-06 02:49:42 +0000 UTC View Postdecember was the first month i started taking this patreon a bit more seriously. i took a two-week holiday break in the back half of the month but now that it's the new year it's back on the grind -- expect an underside dev diary this friday as us...
2024-01-02 02:05:22 +0000 UTC View Postnot, like, as people. i've been a GM for many games in my time. i don't like the role as it is widely understood--i especially don't like dungeons and dragons' 'DM', because i think it encapsulates what i don't like about the play role mo...
2023-12-18 23:48:30 +0000 UTC View Postacross basically all superhero media but especially the darker, grittier stuff that underside is based on, a crucial part of any hero or villain team is the violent fracturing over moral faultlines, over who gets to be in charge,...
2023-12-15 20:03:07 +0000 UTC View Post
