Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk
336 | Riverbank Cozy RPG, Solasta 2, WoD Creative Director, Shadowrun
Fri, 21 Feb 2025
There's no official D&D news this week--for the first time ever? But we have plenty of other tabletop RPG news to delve into! Plus some unrelated rants about James Bond and stuff, for reasons. And don't forget we record live every Friday at 2pm UK time/9am Eastern. Join us live or catch up later on YouTube! ‘Solasta 2’ Set To Bring Even More D&D Vibes To Your PC – Demo Around The Corner Kobold Press Announces 'Cosy' RPG Riverbank New Shadowrun Fiction Anthology, Looking for Submissions Creative Director – World of Darkness Patreon Survey of creators Tabletop Arts Fund Alice in Wonderland by Alippio Dungeon Scrawl Character Creation: The Tabletop Role-Players Oral History Project Planestrider’s Journal Now Available! What’s the Companions Compendium? Bleak Expectations: A Dickensian Adventure for 12th Level Characters
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests of this podcast episode?
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Morris' unofficial tabletop RPG talk. I am Russ, aka Morris, or Morris, aka Russ, and with me this week is... PJ Coffey from the Southampton Guild of Roleplayers.
Rest as ever, I am delighted to be here today. Also joining us, we have a truly amazing person who I have a lot of time for. She's so up to date, in fact, so in touch with the modern youth of today, that when she puts her phone into airplane mode, it starts flying around the room. And I hear that when she puts it into D&D mode, it asks her to roll for initiative.
It's me, Jessica from EM Publishing. Hello.
Hello, hello. How is everybody? How have your weeks been? That was superb. Thanks for asking.
It's been a good week. My hair turned purple, which is nice.
Just like overnight by itself.
Yeah, I just woke up in the morning and that's how it happens sometimes. And I've been doing stuff and things at work as well.
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Chapter 2: What new tabletop RPG products are being discussed?
Where do you work, Jess?
Just this role-playing company. I can show you what I've been doing if you want.
It's that age-old question when someone asks you what you do for a living and you work for a role-playing games company and you're like, okay, how do I answer this question? Because it's going to involve a lot of explanation.
And they go, I work in book publishing. I'm like, oh, what have you written? I was like, no, I don't write the books. I'm a publisher. I publish them. And they look at me confused for a minute.
Yeah.
Anyway.
I think they always ask anything that I'm familiar with.
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Chapter 3: What is the latest on the Planestrider's Journal and Companions Compendium?
And I usually say no, because if they're not cool and don't know about tabletop RPGs, then why would they know? Because if they're the type of person that listens to this podcast, like Nelson, who just said good morning to us. Good morning, Nelson. Nelson would know what tabletop RPG publishing is, so I wouldn't say that.
I'm sure Nelson does, yeah.
Absolutely.
Or they're super lost.
Yeah.
Oh, they're here to look.
Anyway, let me tell you what I've been doing about this week. So the Planestriders journal is now available. The offset print run is now available for general retail for the public. So we did our Kickstarter backers first at the end of last year, then we waited a few months for giving it to everyone else.
So it's now, it's been up on DriveThruRPG, the PDF for a little while, but the offset print run version is all available.
I should get the hardcover now. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What insights are shared about new RPG adventures like Bleak Expectations?
Yeah, this is the sketch. So when we give a brief to an artist, they do some sketches to get an idea of what we want. So they had a few ideas and they're like, which one of these do you want to go with? And we're like, this one, because look at him. You want to give him a name.
I know.
Perhaps Timothy. I don't know.
Oh, Timothy Dragon May. Okay, absolutely. What listeners at home, what I'm seeing, which may delight you as well, certainly I know if I see this on the cover, there's three things that I look for in a book cover nowadays. It's one, level of compatibility. Two, a picture of a dragon. And three, Paul Hughes has a name on the cover. And this has got all three.
It also has a black and white drawing, which will hopefully be in colour of what looks like a little tiny dragonling. And it's like looking at it with looking at us with big eyes and you just want to hug it, squeeze it and call it or possibly Timothy, because I understand that to be there now.
Yeah. Bandana or a collar on. Cause it's not just a wild, a wild companion. Somebody.
It's a companion. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's around all the stuff of the adventurers because it's part of the crew.
So we've got an article which basically outlines what the Companions compendium is. And someone did comment to me, you're missing an apostrophe. No, we are not missing an apostrophe. An apostrophe does not belong in that. It is a companion or companions, not a compendium that belongs to the Companions. Or the Companions.
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Chapter 5: What is the upcoming Riverbank RPG and its inspiration?
And it's going to be gorgeous. And that's April, I believe, is when we're starting with that. So it's as normal up until April. And then from April, we're switching to the once a month, sort of the same as Gatepass Gazette, same way we do that, for those familiar with that magazine. Yes. Yeah. Can't wait. Can't wait. It's going to be amazing.
But right now, you can grab Bleak Expectations, a short adventure for 12th level characters over on Insider.
Yeah, it was quite nice at Twelfth Level, because sometimes you don't get as many adventures up in the teens.
Yeah, and again, for the art, it had a rather Miss Havisham-esque picture of what looked like a ghoul, some sort of spirit, wearing a very tattered wedding dress. So, yeah, that was pretty cool.
Just me getting ready in the mornings.
Look forward to finding out a bit more about that. Yeah. What else have we got in the news, Dan? Speaking of adventures, we've got a one-page encounter, which is in a Alice in Wonderland vibe, that's been done by Anthony Alipio on his webpage, VSR.inc. It's just an encounter, but it's all about slivy toads. What is a slivy toad? What is a slivy toad?
I know neither of those words.
Okay, but it's sort of like, I think, I was thinking of someone I learned, but by the way, it's probably, having said that, it's probably the Jabberwocky.
Oh, yeah.
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Chapter 6: What changes are happening with the James Bond franchise?
Late 19th century, early 20th century, sort of like pencil artwork in a sort of watercolor vibe. A robo with a toad, I guess. I mean, that is very on the nose for us. But the little duck has a bonnet and a shawl. And it is exceedingly cute.
Is that a bottle of wine in the basket there?
Probably not, of course, because that would obviously be alcohol and no one would have such a thing. Do ducks drink alcohol?
Do ducks wear bonnets and wear shawls? I don't know. They eat grapes.
This one does.
Yes, yeah. So that illustration was by Kathleen Jennings, a British artist. And the book is by Kidge Johnson. Okay. The game is by Keith Johnson. And the sort of things you do in this game are you attend tea parties, and you compete at the village fair, and you dance at fancy balls.
Well, that sounds all lovely.
It does sound all lovely. It's got a new game system, which uses all the regular dice you're familiar with, and it utilizes a balance between the animal and poetry side of your characters.
Okay. Okay. We've seen a lot of that elsewhere. Yeah. Famously, Honey Heist by Grant Howitt has bear versus criminal and seeing which one comes out on top. And in a similar vein, City of Mists has Mythos and Logos. That one has the magic and the more prosaic mundane aspects of your character comes with the form. So, yeah. Feels good. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What opportunities exist in the World of Darkness creative director role?
There's a lot of things happening in the world. It's been quite a week in the world.
Let me just bring the scope to tabletop RPGs.
Amazon bought James Bond, which annoyed me immensely, but I suppose that's not really relevant to our conversation here.
No.
There was no James Bond? Amazon have acquired completely... This is off topic, but up until recently, Amazon had the distribution rights to James Bond because they acquired MGM a few years back. But E.ON, which is the British company run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson...
had owned the ip and had all creative control so basically any film had to be a partnership between those two companies one would make it the other one would just basically um what's happened is they fell out in december majorly because amazon was kind of talking about bond and spin-offs and tv shows and everyone started thinking oh my god the wacky adventures of q branch and the origin of specter and all this sort of stuff that they're doing with other you know the big streamers do
And Barbara Broccoli has been always very, very precious in a good way. I don't mean that in a demeaning way, in a good way about the legacy of Bond and say, no, it's a special thing. It's cinematic outings only. We don't do all this other stuff. You know, a Bond film is a special occasion.
And she ended up falling out with Amazon over it to the point where she was saying naughty words about them, calling them naughty names.
Okay.
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Chapter 8: What updates are there on Solasta 2 and its features?
Well, as I recall, it's because it came out for PC some time before it came out on Mac. Right. And I was enjoying the technology as opposed to technology. I do remember they reached out to me.
sort of development thing and they're all about you know would you like um to this is this is during the before celestial one came out i said would you like to like see you know the sort of beta version of it and maybe you can talk about it and i'm like i literally can't i have a mac i literally do not there is not a pc in this house i do not have the ability to do so i kind of missed out on that
Yeah, well, I mean, Celeste 1, based on the article in Bell of Lost Souls by J.R. Zambrano, really good, to be fair, really good accurate description of it. Most crunchy and faithful adaptation of D&D 5e rule set to computer games. I was like, yeah, that is very good, part of its charm. It really got our attention when it first came out because it was all about the verticality
Which, to be fair, it does deliver in. Like, you know, there's going up, there's going down. See, when we played Baldur's Gate 3, though, we went up and down.
What's the difference? We went up ladders. You were a polar bear climbing ladders at one point.
That's right. There's less opponents climbing on the walls, for a start. Both Zorax, who are the villains of Celeste 1, and various spiders and so forth, do get a bit of a showing. And they are climbing along on the walls, and... it's a really good way to have things like slips of spider climbing. So, yeah.
And also, to be fair, Selassie did get there some significant time before, but it's different. It's like... We were in that village and there were goblins on the roofs.
There were goblins on the roofs. And then you climbed up again as a polar bear onto a roof. Yes. And I still refuse to believe that a wreath would support a polar bear, but still, that's another conversation entirely. Yeah.
A medieval-style roof. They're about 600, 800 kilograms, but they could definitely get up there. Whether the roof would keep them up there is a different story. But bears climb really quickly. It's terrifying. There's not a lot to climb in the Arctic.
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