Hello, Backers! 

One week in and you’ve pledged over twice our funding goal. You’re great. <3 

Today I’d like to introduce an incredible duo:

Banana Chan

You probably know the 2022 Dicebreaker Designer of the Year, the multiple-ENnie-winning game designer behind An Exquisite Crime, Suburban Consumption of the Monstrous, and Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, whose name graces books of Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, and (most exciting to me) the Dune RPG. 

I associate her work with an unsettling sense of dread, perhaps epitomized in the frantic paranoia of the video-pervasive larp They’re Onto Me. However, my favourite of her games is a small (unpublished?) freeform larp called Welcome to New Jersey, about a seemingly endless road trip to a game convention. You sit in a car with people you barely know, passing the Welcome sign over and over and over again. The game ends when someone finally screams. 

I invited Banana to contribute because I wanted some of that surreal strangeness, the horror, and perhaps some of the mundane-meets-fantastic that makes Jiangshi such a resonant game for so many people.

But no. 

Banana has exceeded all expectations, and given us a pairing that is based on the John Woo masterpiece(?) Face/Off. Yes, the one where John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play an FBI agent and the criminal who killed his son. For complicated reasons, Travolta gets Cage’s face transplanted onto his own, and then Cage gets Travolta’s face, and there are a lot of explosions. 

This scenario was actually played out at Big Bad Con 2018, to the horror and amusement of all who laid eyes on it.

Hm. Actually, maybe I did get the Lynchian skin-crawling horror I was expecting.

Milsae Kim

What I love about Milsae’s work could be summed up in one word: lesbians. She has a talent for drawing cool girls in suits doing cool stuff and also kissing. All of her characters seem to leap off the page with energy and distinct personalities. So, knowing the source material for this pairing, I knew Milsae had the only way to both reference and improve upon it: 

You can find more of Milsae’s work here, and my favourite of her own pairings here.