Hey, it’s Jess! It’s a promotional newsletter! I have a lot to pack in this one:

I can’t in good conscience write a post here about anything else to any sort of audience without first reconfirming my sincerely held belief that we must abolish ICE, abolish the police state, and abolish borders. I won’t spend much more time on it because there’s not much more there I can say that I haven’t already said and that someone else hasn’t said better. Please consider donating to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights or the Minnesota Immigrant Respond Response fund. If you want your dollar to have an even more local impact supporting those likely to be targeted by federal immigration enforcement and you live in Chicago, I would personally recommend Increase the Peace, an organization on the Southwest Side who I have worked with and whose volunteers I have seen regularly helping people in the neighborhood where I teach.

For the first time ever, I will actually have a zine-sized projected for a zine-sized quest. Aqua Tofana is a solo journaling game inspired by real history. It’s set in the 1630s, where you are an aggrieved wife seeking to escape your marriage by poisoning your husband. It’s played with a deck of tarot cards and will help you interpret your own tarot readings more intuitively. Obviously it’s a very inspired by our current political situation.

You might be wondering what my husband Alex has to say about this.

Anyway, you can find the campaign here!

In other news, Arkham Horrors: Kingsport Mysteries is coming out on February 13th! I’m stoked to have been able to write for a franchise that I’ve been a fan of since college. I used to play the board game all the time with my friends. Writing “Leap of Faith” for this book was so much fun. I got to pitch my own mystery and everything!

My adventure is about a dangerous jumping game some of the children of Kingsport play. By all rights, anyone who plays it should be dead, but the kids are… alright?

You need the corebook to play, but Arkham Horror is a very nice pulpy alternative to other eldritch horror RPGs out there. I really enjoy the dice pool: it really helps balance the pace of a mystery.

Did you know I have a podcast? Me and Craig Campbell from Nerdburger Games have been doing this thing since December 2020. We just recorded episodes 163 and 164 this past weekend with Spencer Campbell (no relation) of Gila RPGs and Derek Kamal of Shoreless Skies.

Episode 163 is out now on all your podcatchers or here. Listen to us yap about designing your own system with someone who designs all of his own systems.

Earlier this month I spent some time playtesting a game called The Ratline by Owlskip Games. I’ve been a fan of Owlskip for a while, and this is the second game I’ve playtested for them. Ratline is a game in the tradition of Return of the Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, and the Roottrees are Dead (it even makes several references to the latter!) In it, you play a private investigator putting his skills to the test against Nazis who have escaped to the Americas under new identities.

I’m working on a blog post about the lessons I learned from playtesting a mystery game, and what I’ll be taking away both as a player, a playtester, and a game designer. And by working on I mean… well I would just type it all up and put it here, but there’s already so much.

You can check out The Ratline demo for yourself. I don’t know if either public demos have been updated at all (there’s one on Steam, too)

Play it: I’m excited to dig into To Honor and Obey by Laurie O’Connel. It’s a solo RPG about being a pregnant Arthurian wife stuck at home while your husband goes off galavanting. Seeing as the themes are very similar to Aqua Tofana, I want to see what O’Connel does with it! You can check it out for yourself here.

Read it: I haven’t had too much time to do any long-form reading this month thanks to all of my other projects. The main novel I’m reading is a beta read for a friend… BUT! I’ve read a lot of manga this month, and my favorite was The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy At All! It’s a cute sapphic romance about a popular girl and a cool guy who works at a record store. Except, as the title says, it’s not a guy. It’s actually a girl she goes to school with. The only criticism I have is that every once in a while, the many references to real-life rock groups can make you cringe. Beautiful art and story, though! Volume 3 in English is out now! I got my copy at Goblin Market in Chicago.

Watch it: Finally, I want to recommend this brilliant video that I watched recently from More Perfect Union about how billionaires are ripping us off (what’s new) at sports games and what it has to do with the price of hot dogs. May we all strive to be exactly like Ron Gordon: fight relentlessly.

Ok, I have to feed my Neopets now, byeeee!