Welcome home.
It’s December 6th, and the episode title is “Momentum and spaceships”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #311]
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GearGames won the RPG Publisher Spotlight, and I’m yet to get in touch, but I should have a contact email address from a few years back, as well as the launch of their fantasy steampunk game, Vulcania.
It’s the start of the month and the end of the year, so patrons are getting to vote on who will be the first publisher in the spotlight in 2026. Once again, we’ve got five names for me to try and pronounce.
Here goes! The candidates for January 2026 are:
I’ve started to add half-baked RPG essays to the Geek Native news, announcing these votes just so there’s more to read, as skimpy posts feel wrong to me.
This month, I was thinking about that famous moment in the Great War when British and German soldiers stopped fighting to celebrate Christmas together. It’s a nice and horrible story at the same time and I don’t think we see it in TTRPG plots very often. Baddies tend to stay baddies. You don’t often, for example, discover that the bandits you’ve been sent to wipe out are the very same friendly people who celebrated with the PCs a couple of inns ago.
I’m going to stay with lists of publishers and talk about Dragonmeet for a bit. Dragonmeet is the popular TTRPG convention in London, which, this year, moved to the ExCel. That’s where big comic cons go. Geek Native wasn’t there.
Dragonmeet has awards and bronze, silver and gold winners. Let’s do gold here.
- Best RPG goes to Mappa Mundi by Three Sails.
- Best Expansion goes to The One Ring by Free League.
- Best Accessory goes to Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests by Loke.
- Best Adventure goes to One Shot Wonders by Roll and Play.
I’m pleased for Three Sails, and I’ll note that Mappa Mundi is a rare thing: a pacifist RPG. It’s full of monsters, but you do not fight them.
The timing was also great, as at Dragonmeet, Three Sails announced the Kickstarter date for their next game, Gallows Corner. Geek Native has blogged about this alternative history hexcrawl before, and unlike Mappa Mundi, this one is going to be full of brutal fights.
There’s a pre-release up at DriveThruRPG, and now we know the Kickstarter will launch in the first week of February.
If February feels like a long way off, let me tell you about something you should do right away. If you’ve paid for a Fantasy Grounds license in the past then you might be wondering what the virtual tabletop’s pivot means to you right now.
Well, yes, it means you’ve paid for a thing that you didn’t need to have paid for. To soften that blow, SmiteWorks has been speaking to their publishing partners and have put together some compensation rewards to claim. You have until the end of the year to do that.
I’ve claimed them all, and while I appreciate the offer, I also recognise that some customers are still disgruntled. There’s not much in the way of map or dice assets, and not much to get you started in a new TTRPG.
What the move to free to play does, and offering lots of users the same collection of freebies, is to get more people on board with the system. Virtual tabletops live or die by momentum. The more people who have them, the easier it is to get a game on the virtual tabletop. The easier it is to get a game on a virtual tabletop, the more likely people are to use it.
There’s been lots of progress in VTT technology over the years but I think there’s been a struggle in Looking For Group. I spoke to Holger of the Estonian-based Groupfinder website about that this week.
Groupfinder is a free-to-use website and Android app. It’s expanded into English-language markets. I wanted to know what the business model was because without clear answers on that, I’d be suspicious. Holger and team at Groupfinder have an answer; they’re about to launch a paid-for feature which lets groups and players highlight their own posts on the board. In other words, you can pay a bit to be more noticeable.
I think that’s a good approach because it keeps Groupfinder free to use, but, like any Looking For Group solution, it relies on there being enough interest to make the highlight feel like a worthwhile spend.
I’m excited by Arc Dream Publishing’s news this week. It’s also one that involves the recruitment of players. The Delta Green publisher has announced that the playtesting for The Black Company TTRPG has opened.
Glen Cook’s fantasy novel is about a mercenary group caught in a gruelling war against an evil wizard called the Lady, who has escaped from a magical prison and now well on her way to retaking the known world.
I’m a fan of the book, trust Arc Dream to get this right but know it won’t be easy. In the series, there was skirmish, siege and war action and we’ll need that in TTRPG but there was also the main character who had to make leadership decisions and who got caught up in big events. I’m not sure the same can happen to all the PCs.
The playtest rules have stress and trauma in them, which feels appropriate. I also think they’re going to make a twist to the novels’ plot so that we can play in the setting involved by the earlier books rather than the events that follow.
You can stream your Actual Play and be one of the first to do so, of The Black Company, too.
We’ve a bit to wait before The Black Company is finished, but there will be plenty of new games in the meantime, and I looked at three this week. All three get the thumbs up.
I reviewed Grimsbury, a folk horror of mud and magic with some nuclear power thrown in for good measure. Grimsbury is an English town that always makes me think of boring office jobs and paperwork, but take that and throw in some Stranger Things-meets-Wickerman vibe, and you have a great setting for horror.
I also took a good look at the hexcrawl Fly Me to the Moon. The game uses retro-clone rules to explore a quirky lunar landscape with a mix of danger and the surreal to discover. There’s reincarnation, but that does not mean dead characters return to life as the same race as they were when they died.
In quirky timing, I also took a look at the quick start to Old Oak Games’ Beyond the Woods. Old Oak Games is the publishing company that Emmet Byrne created after leaving Warhammer and Cubicle 7 behind. Beyond the Woods feels dangerous and different from other 5e high fantasy.
However, the news this week is that Beyond the Woods will be moving to Son of Oak Games’ Mist Engine. That’s a tag-based, language-first alternative to the stats and numbers of 5e. Let’s watch this space.
That Old Oak Games is doing well after leaving Cubicle 7 is good news. This week, we have headlines that Arc Games is leaving Embracer. Embracer seems to buy everyone, including Asmodee, but Arc Games has bought itself out of the family.
We care about Arc publishing the computer game version of Frosthaven, Star Trek Online and the Neverwinter Dungeons & Dragons MMO.
Arc Games also publishes the Remant games, but they’re staying with Embracer.
Embracer, like many publishers, is not having an easy time with it. And if giants like that are struggling, what about indie tabletop games publishers or those of us who write about publishing news? Rascal News announced this week that prices would go up. Not for everyone and not by much, but up. They’re running a special $1 joining deal from now to the new year called Yippee-Ki-Yay, Anklebiters.
How are we doing? Well, I’m still mucking around on random projects. I finally have my spaceship name generator. Now, these aren’t uncommon on the internet and probably redundant in the world of AI. Mine, though, was a labour of love and hopefully a bit quirky. It uses Iain M Banks’ The Culture series and John Scalzi’s tribute names as inspiration. Therefore, you get names like;
- The Friendly Threat
- Under the Weather
- It’s Complicated Possibly
- Healing the Guilt
- Cost an Arm and a Leg
I know, some The Culture expert is going to say that I messed it up, but hopefully GMs in a hurry can use the generator without their players making the same accusation against them.
I wrote up three Shadowrun 5e bundle tiers over at the Bundle of Holding, which is a great way to go from having no Shadowrun to having lots of it.
Lastly, I want to mention some tech we’re testing on Geek Native. It’s a new WordPress plugin from Automattic and the Internet Archive. The latter is a great charity that, for free, tries to preserve the internet like a library.
When Geek Native links to any page, the plugin alerts the Internet Archive and that helps their system find and consider the page. My hope is that this means more small indie publishers get their design notes, news announcements and other public content in the archive.
There’s also the benefit that if content is deleted, the plugin is supposed to link to the archive copy of the deleted content. In my years writing Geek Native, I’ve seen so many great gaming content vanish to link rot.
In early tests, the results a bit mixed. There’s been quite a few false positives and this is likely due to web servers telling the Internet Archive to go away and that’s not ideal because if a webpage is still live then I want people to reach it, not an archived copy or an empty archive. I’ll have to toggle the systems and see if it can work better.
On that note, take care, toggle well and see you next week.
