rose quarter-drifting

VACATION

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 content on here in december so i'll be pausing billing until january 6th. have a nice w...

ULTRADAMNATION: INDEBTED TO THE GODS OF THE DARK -- a first look

wip playbook art for THE CHOSEN ONE, by HZZRD666

a while ago i was having a chat with a friend about how different modes of play can bring you to different times on your life. this touched on something i've thought about a few times, that the OSR is...

THE GAME OF THE BALL, PT. I

On 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 your great game, fútbol, and I want to see it.”  

So the boy nods, because he is an ...

UNDERSIDE PLAYEST: Update 1.1

hi 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 i should post the changelog here too:

GENERAL

• Clarified a few...

  2025-08-30 11:32:52 +0000 UTC View Post

UNDERSIDE PLAYTEST

hi 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 need to pass out and sleep for like, 72 hours. i'll do a better, cooler, more thought out announceme...

UNDERSIDE PREVIEW: LIFE QUIRKS (MAJOR ARCANA)

so, 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 character traits based on tarot cards that make huge deicsions about who your character is on your beh...

BIG UNDERSIDE UPDATE

sorry, 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 once a month, either a dev diary or another piece of writing by me. if there's more than that, there'll...

NO-HEADED GIANT

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 and narratorial voice, so stay tuned

underside dev diary #14: comprehensive progress update

those 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 release or the combat-ready playtest, here's a comprehensive overview of everything that's done and...

PRAXI preview #1: backgrounds

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 front XCOM, set in an alternate world where an alien invasion prevented the sino-soviet split and resul...

MAMMONGRAY

poem about a rich guy climbing a famous mountain

DISCORD? YES/NO

if 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 people are interested in? just curious. it would probably only be friends and patrons to start with to ma...

underside dev diary #13: deworming

i 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 because they love worm! but the longer i and citizen abel work on the game, the more we're con...

underside dev diary #12: home moves (+ apology)

hi 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 usa. i should have posted about that here, of course, and i'm genuinely sorry to everyone supporting t...

underside dev diary #11: statless in seattle, pt. 6

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 should expect to see them sent out over the next week or two. if you commissioned one of the five g...

new stuff coming soon!

hi 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 :)

underside dev diary #10: statless in seattle, pt.5

i 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: 

the #1 pr...

underside dev diary #9: statless in seattle pt.4

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 part of underside's tripartite attribute system, skills. 

inte...

RULEBOOK AS NORTH STAR

there 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 with a sword, that's all well and good. you can picture it in your head however you want to. maybe the...

PRAXI: Protocol Against Xenoimperialism

i'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 MACHINE name. it's going to be a short, taut little project, a fraction of the size of the already be...

I DONT CARE HOW MANY ROCKS YOUR TTRPG CHARACTER CAN CARRY UNLESS WE'RE PLAYING SISYPHUS 2E

TTRPGS 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 YOUR CHESS SET.  WHAT KIND OF STORIES ARE WE TELLING THAT THE 'STRENGTH' OF MY CHARACTER IS ONE...

underside dev diary #8: statless in seattle pt.3

so 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 tool, and your relevant attributes decide how many dice you roll. your approach will always be part of ...

monday scrap: another poem

this 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 :) 

underside dev diary #7: statless in seattle pt. 2

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 matching opposite pairs that offered an interesting range of characterisations. these axes don't have...

design scraps #1

in 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 google doc i kept such ideas in before we made it: 

• PBtA game where the 'main' soci...
  2024-01-09 02:29:27 +0000 UTC View Post

underside dev diary #6: statless in seattle pt. 1

the 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-style stat systems (strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc) rarely do, honestly. i'm a strong belie...

december update

december 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 usual. 

i've also started doing a little comic on my blog called PERMISSION & COMPENSAT...

i don't like GMs

not, 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 most of all, but in general i don't like GMs. & the reason i don't like them is that there is in t...

underside dev diary #5: pvp enabled zones

across 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, over whose plan to follow. but player-on-player conflict is always a tough thing to handle, and esp...

monday writing scrap

a small poem