Season of the Snail for Troika!

 My Troika scenario Season of the Snail is out, illustrated by the magnificent Shui Zhang! It has the characters surreptitiously protecting cofly merchant Mungis Bohn on behalf of his family while he enjoys the mirth, debauchery and exhilaration of the festival of the snail. The scenario is inspired by the great novels City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar, adding a layer of cheerful Troika! gonzoness. Want to get a snail massage, get mixed up in a snailball game or watch the snail of a thousand shells parade? Treat yourself, just be sure no never menton slugs, these vile, shameless, naked creatures ...

Print edition at the Melsonian Arts Council webshop.

 PDF at drivethrurpg.

Lover's Gaze for Cloud Empress published

 I did it - I set up a drivethru publisher's account, and just like that, Acephalous Creations is born - and its first rpg scenario published!

Lover's Gaze is a 3rd party scenario for the ecological science Fantasy RPG Cloud Empress by watt. Cloud Empress is a Nausicaä-tinged vision of continual ecological and social injustice and continual hope. It also features weird bugs, fungi, maddened cryosleepers, dimensional rifts and mutations.

Reading Cloud Empress made Lover's Gaze finally come together. It has existed as a novella idea in my head for about 15 years and both a Numenera and Troika! scenario in the years after that, but the world of Cloud Empress came with exactly the elements I needed to make this adventure tie into the setting on a more fundamental level.

Featuring some heavy themes - failing to communicate your troubles to someone you love, letting go, hope in the face of terminal illness -, it is probably the closest to my heart of all the adventures I've ever written. That's why I strove to keep the writing style matter-of-factly and concentrate on finding a structure that will help you to run the scenario as open-ended as it demands to be. Basically, it consists of a backstory, a mission, a good dozen NPCs and three major locations.

Lover's Gaze features the amazing art of Juri Wende. Apart from that, it's visually simple: I did the layout with LibreOffice, so it will not impress anyone - but it prints well. Basically, I know how to write and I know people who know how to draw, and that's where it ends, and it has to be enough.

I would be honored if you decide to check Lover's Gaze out and leave some feedback here or on drivethru! 

Here's the link to it on drivethru.

Ashen Stars: Hidden Depths is out!

So, there it is: my first published RPG scenario in about 20 years, and the first I have ever published in English. It is for Pelgrane Press's investigative science fiction game Ashen Stars and published as part of it's brand-new Gumshoe Community Content Program. Hidden Depths is my take on hard-ish high concept science fiction within the framework of a setting inspired by TV shows like Firefly, Farscape and nuBSG.

The Long Journey of the Good Needle

Of all the scenarios I have written, "The Good Needle" is the one I have played most often and with the greatest number of different systems.
It startet out as a scenario idea for cubicle 7's excellent Middle-Earth rpg The One Ring. I wanted to capture the more whimsical elements of The Hobbit and especially, of Tolkien's beautiful and funny novella "Farmer Giles of Ham", and ended up with an adventure that featured man-eating fairy-tale giants, mean and surprisingly clever goblins, dead fish and a whole lot of sewing. Overall, it became a little more macabre than I had planned, but still felt like a well-behaved, kids-friendly scenario for do-gooder heroes. I went on to use it as my go-to scenario to introduce new players to The One Ring at our bookshop's open gaming nights, used it with Fate Accelerated to introduce my two nieces to rpgs and later expanded it and played it several times with Fantasy AGE. For the latter, I did a completely written and statted version (in my native German) with an eye to publication. However, for several reasons, nothing came of that.
Still, I wanted to see "The Good Needle" published. Badly. I have spent so much time with it, and it just seems to work remarkably well - GMing it, I got all kinds of things out of it, from "We'll talk our way through the whole adventure without ever baring a blade" to a fun dungeon romp (and, in one case, a would-be dungeon romp that ended with the group in goblin captivity).
Easy, most of you will say - just stat it out for some old version of D&D and put it on drivethru, at least three peoble will buy it, and you might even get a review. And that would be quite enough for me ... only, I totally don't speak D&D.