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 winter :)
2025-11-16 12:54:57 +0000 UTC View Post
wip playbook art for THE CHOSEN ONE, by HZZRD666a 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 a revisionist artistic movement. not necessarily in that it tells lies about history (although many of its self-accountings do), but in an artistic s...
2025-10-31 03:34:01 +0000 UTC View PostOn 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 enterprising sort who has been taught to always be polite to strangers, and he leads the alien back to his home. He kicks off his shoes, sits on the c...
2025-09-28 23:17:42 +0000 UTC View Posthi 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 things that weren't stated in the rules (starting Leverage on Anchors, what happens if you roll two sixes on a 0d roll, how to change Leader Rep and ...
2025-08-30 11:32:52 +0000 UTC View Posthi 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 announcement post later. but right now, i just urge you to check out the underside playtest version 2025-08-01 04:50:22 +0000 UTC View Post
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 behalf before the game even starts. this was always something i was planning to shamelessly crib from weaverdice, because it's one of that game's best an...
2025-07-02 20:02:58 +0000 UTC View Postsorry, 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 be more than that: but that's the manageable baseline i'll commit to
now, onto the exciting thing. i've just finished writing out the rules for...
2025-06-03 22:38:32 +0000 UTC View Post
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
2024-10-08 01:45:19 +0000 UTC View Postthose 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 what still needs doing:
INTRODUCTION:
this entire chapter is more or less completely written -- it lays out ...
2024-09-30 17:22:25 +0000 UTC View Postfor 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 resulted in crack teams of covert socialist anti-extraterrestial operatives being deployed in a top secret cold war against alien overlords and an openly f...
2024-09-22 01:59:29 +0000 UTC View Postif 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 make sure i've got the hang of managing a discord server before eventually opening up to the public
2024-09-15 14:28:05 +0000 UTC View Posti 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 confident that this is good enough to print, good enough to sell--and because of that, we've spent this development cycle stepping away from making a 'wo...
2024-09-14 18:02:13 +0000 UTC View Posthi 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 this patreon for vanishing off the face of the earth for a couple months. that said, work on underside has continued: all of the 'cape phase stuff', as...
2024-09-07 21:13:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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 games, please drop me an email at ineedherarmageddon@gmail.com so i know where to send it to!
very grateful to everyone who has kept supporting t...
2024-04-07 15:27:52 +0000 UTC View Posthi 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 :)
2024-03-12 20:40:25 +0000 UTC View Posti 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 priority going into this (and all of the skills, and designing approaches) is to make sure that every character, no matter how they were built or what p...
2024-02-24 04:50:36 +0000 UTC View Postfirst 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.
internally, we've taken to calling the core dicepool resolution system that underside functions on the A/V system, for ADJECTIVE/VERB. you descri...
2024-02-17 04:18:02 +0000 UTC View Postthere 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 dragon is green, or red, or a dull grey. maybe it's a slithering wyrm or a classic fantasy four-legged affair. maybe the guy is grizzled and mi...
2024-01-30 21:22:32 +0000 UTC View Posti'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 behemoth underside, so should have a much quicker turnaround. instead of a short pitch, here's the intro to it:
---
When I fi...
2024-01-27 05:28:50 +0000 UTC View PostTTRPGS 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 OF THEIR MOST RELEVANT TRAITS. EVEN IN THE MOST TRAD OF TRAD SWORD AND SORCERY PULP NOVELS A HERO'S BRAVERY AND MOTIVATION MATTERED MORE. IF STRENGTH...
2024-01-23 00:50:03 +0000 UTC View Postso 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 that decision: it represents your personality, a core philosophy of how you approach problems. but if your approach represents how you're doi...
2024-01-20 16:46:17 +0000 UTC View Postthis 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 :)
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 any mechanical effect: they're just there as scaffolding, to indicate to you what decisions you're making about your character's personality when you...
2024-01-13 06:47:34 +0000 UTC View Postin 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:
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 believer in information economy -- the stuff on your character sheet should be the most important stuff about your character. sometimes this i...
2024-01-06 02:49:42 +0000 UTC View Postdecember 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 & COMPENSATION. it's hideous colour-clashing digital collage nonsense & i might start posting some exclusive strips here on mondays alongside / as part of my...
2024-01-02 02:05:22 +0000 UTC View Postnot, 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 the mind of a lot of game designers and players a hard line between 'GMing' and 'playing'.
i think that sucks. i think if you get five peop...
2023-12-18 23:48:30 +0000 UTC View Postacross 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 especially to encourage -- it can be hard for people to keep that stuff in-game, especially when they connect closely to their characters. something i've...
2023-12-15 20:03:07 +0000 UTC View Post
