February Newsletter

Ephemeris updates, relaunching the print club, and new worlds on the horizon

Alchemists, maijisters, and adventurers one and all, welcome to the Library of Zosimos monthly newsletter! Here’s what the recent weeks have given us, and what the omens portend for the days ahead.

Project Updates – Ephemeris: Omens of the Blood Comet

Ephemeris is headed to print later this month! Our last few playtests went really well – the encounter in the Observatory is exactly as dynamic as I hoped it to be, and every session has been full of surprises. I have a few last illustrations to plug in and will make a few more passes over the text to fix any last errors, but it’s looking really good so far, and we’re well on track to having Ephemeris printed and shipped out to our Kickstarter backers in March – I really can’t wait to get printing these! 

(Re) Launching the Print Club

Last year, in the midst of prepping for Ephemeris and playing Dracula, I thought the thing I needed to stay focused with writing and printmaking was more structure, coming in the form of an external monthly deadline. It was overly ambitious – quite simply, I did not have the time I needed to make it what I wanted it to be. But with some major tasks behind me, I am re-launching the monthly print/zine club in earnest!

This month’s edition is the beginning of a yearlong project entitled The Tower of Dreams. Every month, I’ll be writing, illustrating, and riso-printing a short story or flash fiction piece, and sending it in the mail to my print club members, along with an art print and any print ephemera I’ve gathered from ongoing projects. You can read the first story from the collection, Trieste Janeiro/Beginning Dream here!

It’s a big goal of mine to grow this print club as a way to give me some consistent momentum between RPG projects and give myself some room to just write. If you’re inspired by the world of Retrograde, want to flammariontorily peak behind the cosmic curtain at the mechanisms powering the Zosimos Mythos, or otherwise just want to help make it possible for me to keep creating what I’m creating, you can join the print club here!

The Road Ahead

The Tower of Dreams is one big piece of the projects I have planned ahead: I’ll be continuing to develop Retrograde’s rules and fleshing out the Zosimos Mythos, with the bits and pieces working towards a new game, The Broken Seal, set on the lost world of Encaustic. 

I’ve been hinting about Encaustic for a while now – it’s mentioned in Overprint and The Summer of ‘64 in San Navarine, as well as on this blog – and I’m properly getting started realizing it.

Encaustic is a world that has been disconnected from the rest of humanity for centuries, and the planet is brimming with unstable magic left behind by shards of the Cosmos Unending millennia ago. The people of Encaustic have developed a culture focused around magic and creativity. In the language of Encaustic, there is no different word for “person” and “artist,” and every act of labor is conceived as an act of creation, every profession thought of as an artistic discipline.

Many artisans discover a subtle magic emerging from their labor, but this magic proves difficult to control – only the secretive maijisters and alchemists of the royal court experiment with raw magic, and only the legendary alchemist-kings could wield the planet’s full magical power. The line of the royal family has been thought extinct for three hundred years, but across the planet sages make prophecies of two lost heirs returning, each to claim the throne. Such a conflict would plague the people of Encaustic with civil strife, but worse yet, if the magic of throne is unleashed, it may tear the very world asunder.

The Broken Seal is still in the earliest stages of development, but I’m experimenting with a hybrid design combining Retrograde’s version of OSR-style adventuring with journaling and keepsake elements. Currently I’m working on a one-off story game set on Encaustic, The Prismatic Oracle, which will be a kind of proof-of-concept for the hybrid approach – players will collect or create visual and textual artifacts they gather into a small book of prophecy they bind by hand. I’m hoping to have The Prismatic Oracle ready to share later this spring, and I’m planning on writing more soon about how I envision those physical elements driving collaborative storytelling.

The print club and The Prismatic Oracle are part of my efforts to get deeper into risograph printing this year, and I’m looking to find new opportunities to explore and share the creative power of analog print. Commissioned printing is open, so if you or someone you know want a project brought to life with riso feel free to reach out. Elsewise, I’ll be continuing to write, draw, paint, print, and play, and I’ll be eager to share all my discoveries and creations with y’all. Cheers!

– Zosimos