Hello! We’re 4 weeks from launch (give or take), and that means there’s a lot going on behind the scenes (look out for announcements of an exciting cross-collab with another Pocketopia participant, and a write up of how our playtesting’s been going). It also means that Chant has sent off the last quote request, plugged the final number into the ultimate spreadsheet, and has finally nailed down exactly what we’re making for this crowdfunder.
(Really, the spreadsheet’s a thing of beauty. You wouldn’t believe.)
So, without further ado, is what we’re actually trying to make, here:
Minimum 100 A5 pages of full-colour gruesomeness, including:
Quick, easy character creation – for Meatbags, and the disposable Specialists players can pick up to keep playing if (when) their Meatbag dies
Rules (obviously it’s got the rules, but it’d be weird not to mention it, you know?)
Advice on safety tools and the expected social contract around horror games, and specifically this horror game
A collection of monster archetypes, with a buffet of rules and abilities you can swap out to keep players on their toes
Guidance on designing Meatbags scenarios.
Artist's rendering of a hardback copy of Meatbags next to its equally alluring digital sibling.
You might notice some stuff that’s not listed… like a setting. Keep reading…
A cosmic horror scenario, plus pregenerated characters, so you can try out Meatbags for yourself. It can be run over a single 3-hour session, but ideally it takes two.
The quickstart has art and cartography by the estimable Brian Yaksha who, by the way, is a dream to work with. I reckon there are plenty of other indie publishers reading this update and if so: hire Brian.
Everyone gets the PDF of the quickstart for free. If all goes to plan, it should be available a couple of weeks before the campaign launches. You’ll be able to buy a cheap physical copy too, though. And we’d really like it if you did.
Mockup of the quickstart softcover. Cover not final.
Putting the “disposable” in Disposable Bags of Meat! You’ll get through characters pretty quickly, so we’re making it easy to just scrap one and scribble down another one with this notepad of character sheets. There are 100 pages, so they should keep you busy for a while.
Mockup of the character sheet pad.
We just want to make this book, folks.
To make sure we can do that, we’ve started out with humble ambitions: good-quality, well-made, hardback books with some nice graphic design and clean text. Key pieces of art – the cover, the monsters – will be original work by our art director, Lore. The rest will be photobashed. Photobashed by Lore, who is an Actual Artist and can do something pretty sweet, but photobashed nonetheless.
Usually we don't leave massive gaping sprawls of empty space in sidebars - either yer man here will be holding a smaller sign in the finished product, or we'll have found a more appropriately sized block of text to go in it.
We can achieve that if we raise £500 (about US $600), as long as we don’t pay ourselves. Now, once we’ve got that £500 in our pocket, things get interesting:
GOAL 1: A setting. Maybe more than one setting. Maybe we’ll vote on a setting. There’s no canon setting for Meatbags, and there never will be. What I would love to do is provide micro-settings that work for different genres and eras of horror – a folk-horror village, a space station, a foggy Victorian metropolis. You see where I’m going with this.
GOAL 2: More original art, less photobashing. The more money we make, the more time Lore can afford to spend working on this book instead of, say, freelance editing contracts, which means they’ll be able to do more illustrations. Exactly how many depends on how much money, of course.
GOAL 3: New play modes. At present, Meatbags is intended for one-shot play. With a bit more cash in hand (which, again, means more time I can spend working on development instead of freelance gigs), I’ll actually write some advancement rules. And I’m not totally, 100% against writing a solo or GM-less mode, if things go really well.
GOAL 4: Vanity. I want spot UV, or red foil, or just… something fun, you know?
We’ll tackle these goals in bits: a micro-setting here, a couple of pages of art there, so it’s not all or nothing. If, somehow, we get to the point where we’ve got the funding to write everything we want to, we might… I dunno, pay ourselves? Sounds fake, I know.
Let’s end with something practical, eh? For the last few crowdfunders Ex Stasis has done, we’ve limited ourselves to digital rewards and print-on-demand, fulfilled through DrivethruRPG. This time, we’re breaking that habit! We’re going to do a proper print run, and fulfil orders ourselves. That means we have much more control over the production process, the materials used, and a lot of other things that mean we can make a nicer book.
We know global shipping and in some cases import regulations mean that sometimes print-on-demand is actually the best option, so we’ll offer that too. Hell, it may be the only way we can get physical books into Europe thanks to the new GPSR regulations.
So now you know what’s in store. Roughly. Like we said at the top, keep your eyes peeled for some more announcements, some thoughts on the playtesting process, and probably a detailed breakdown of timelines. Real edge of the seat stuff.
