The inspiration and process behind the creation of Retrograde’s introductory adventure, The Bone Record

Last February, I undertook the first steps in turning my interests for printmaking and RPGs from a passion to a vocation: I illustrated and bound Panoply Press’s Bad Trips, a cryptid-hunting RPG launched through Kickstarter’s Zine Quest promotion. The idea for Retrograde had been simmering in my head for a good half a year prior, but playing a part in the creation of Bad Trips proved that making my own games and creating beautiful physical expressions of them was not only an actionable goal, but an invigorating creative challenge that would allow me to tell stories that inspired me in a way that was accessible to others. I began laying the groundwork for Retrograde’s creation with an eye toward the next year’s Zine Quest, and now with February just around the corner, I’m immensely excited to share where that journey has taken me.

The Bone Record is Retrograde’s introductory scenario, a spine-chilling horror adventure of rogue transmissions, bitter frost, and an eldritch horror thawed from ancient slumber. The Bone Record’s inciting incident is the distribution of vinyl records which drives its listeners insane – the player characters are charged with investigating the cause of this insanity and putting a stop to the records’ distribution, putting them on a collision course with a cosmic horror at the heart of the records’ haunting frequencies.

You can play The Bone Record right now: an early-access digital version of the adventure is available here, as well as an early-access digitial version of the Player’s Manual, available here. All of Retrograde’s zines will have free digital versions released through the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license, and you can help make those zines as best as they can be by trying them out and letting me know what you think – I would love to use your feedback to make Retrograde exactly the kind of game you’d love to play.

I’m immensely eager to share The Bone Record with the world, and for you kind readers who have been supporting Retrograde’s development and energizing me with your excitement for many months, I want to share a behind-the-scenes look at what inspired me to create the adventure and how I’ll be crafting the zine.

Inspiration

The Bone Record takes its name and much of its inspiration from Samizdat, an underground literary movement in the Soviet Union. Along with hand-copied literature and dissident literary magazines, contraband audio was circulated through homemade phonograph records, often made from X-Ray film. The contraband records were known as “Roentgenizdat,” or Bone Records – this what gave the adventure its name. Here’s a great NPR article about the history of bone records.

The adventure takes place on a dismally lonely ice world, and my depiction of the planet, Tam, was influenced by Gulag literature, particularly One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I first read Ivan Denisovich when I was thirteen, and the book has stuck with me ever since. Tam’s industrial colony is essentially a prison camp, operated by Gutenberg, Ink., the galaxy’s corporate hegemon. While there is a cruel cosmic force buried beneath Tam, it is Gutenberg’s greed and disregard for humanity that unleashes it, and the player characters must contend with Gutenberg’s brutal authoritarianism if they wish to escape Tam alive.

I also drew much inspiration from the life and work of Leon Theremin, the inventor of the instrument of the same name and a pioneer in electronic music. Theremin was imprisoned in a sharashka, a laboratory operated as a part of the Gulags. There, he created The Thing, also known as the Great Seal Bug, a covert listening advice that operated in the American Embassy in Moscow for several years. Several locations and characters in The Bone Record borrow their names from Theremin’s work and history’s most virtuosic theremin musician, Clara Rockmore. Theremin music often has a haunting, ethereal quality to it, similar to how I imagine the haunting Winds of Tam to sound.

Creation

Like all of Retrograde’s zines, I’ll be printing The Bone Record with a letterpress cover and risograph interiors. I’m compelled by works whose physical expression is a key part of its storytelling, and using analog printing to tell a story about investigating analog music makes a lot of conceptual sense to me. I hope that the quality of riso ink and the physical impression left by letterpress printing helps convey the world the player characters inhabit, one where print mass media and analog audio are vital ways that humans communicate with each other and anchor themselves in reality when their society is increasingly driven by supernatural power.

As you read this, I am in the process of printing The Bone Record’s letterpress covers, and soon I’ll begin printing its risograph interiors. It’s incredible to see something that was only an idea six months ago take shape into a physical reality so swiftly, and its even more crazy to think it’ll be in your hands so soon!

The Bone Record’s zines feature a dozen illustrations and maps, capturing the ethereal powers stirring beneath Tam and the strange, bind-bending horror of discovering that we are not alone in the cosmos.

Zine Quest

I’ve been especially focused on The Bone Record leading up to Zine Quest, and after some amazing playtesting sessions and several iterations of layout and illustrations, its even better than I could’ve hoped. You can play The Bone Record right now and try out Retrograde’s rules, and if you want to experience the adventure in its beautifully rendered print form, you can get a physical copy of The Bone Record for only $12 in our Kickstarter campaign, with free shipping in the US!

Not only will you be getting some killer zines, but your support allows me to make Retrograde digitally available for free for everyone – follow our campaign right now and held us reach our goal as soon as we launch next Tuesday!

I’m also working on a soundtrack to accompany The Bone Record, influenced by the music of Clara Rockmore, and if we reach our stretch goals, every backer who pledges at the Investigator Kit level and above will receive an exclusive vinyl pressing of the soundtrack – I can’t tell you how much I would love to press an actual record for The Bone Record! It would be an amazing touchstone to an immersive creative experience, and with your support, we can make it happen.

I’ll have more Retrograde news for y’all real soon – I’m eager to hear how your playthroughs of The Bone Record go, and I’ll see y’all on Kickstarter next Tuesday!

– Nathaniel