April Newsletter

Ephemeris Fulfillment Begins, Planning a Pilgrimage to Prismos, and Musings on Articulating Interdisciplinary Art

I must remark with awe and horror that we are already a quarter of the way through 2026. Time is moving in strange ways, as it has pretty consistently over the past few years of my life. You’d think I might be used to it by now, but here we are still, and somehow it’s been six months since Ephemeris launched on Kickstarter. But, most happily, it’s now on its way out into the world.

That’s the big news this month: Ephemeris is officially on its way out to Kickstarter backers this week! Getting this project finished up is giving me some good energy and driving me to hit some more print milestones – I’m planning on finishing reprints of Retrograde’s Player’s Manual and Librarian’s Index by the end of the month. If you’d like to pick them up, Retrograde’s core books are currently available on my webstore, with Ephemeris and some smaller riso zines going up in just a few weeks. 

I’ve also had some great markets in Madison recently, and I’m looking forward to vending my games and zines at Print and Resist later this month. It’s always a blast getting to share my work face-to-face with folks, and if you’re in and around Madison you should check it out and say hi!

On the Docket

Ephemeris rocketing away opens the door to my next project: The Prismatic Oracle.

The Prismatic Oracle is a Keepsake Game, inspired variously by the works of Shing Yin Khor (A Mending), Thorny Games (Dialect), Nick Gralewicz (A Perfect Rock), and Justin Vandermeer (Print it Yourelf) among others. The players embark on a pilgrimage to the island-temple of Prismos to seek a vision of the past or future, collecting textual, visual, and physical artifacts from the temple that they interpret and bind into a small tome, an apocrypha that remains as an artifact of the play experience.

The basic gameplay loop is similar to The Anarchitect, a story game I made around this time last year for the Bad Moon Game Jam. Anarchitect is essentially a loveletter to language, and I want to expand its found text mechanics and interpretation-as-gameplay to a wider appreciation of memory, cataloging, and personal archaeology. Oracle is, essentially, a junk journaling game, and as you compile your different artifacts into an apocrypha of the mythic past or prophesied future, you get to learn some bookbinding too!

I’m planning on running The Prismatic Oracle as a sprint campaign in late June or early July. It’ll be a crisp risograph-printed zine, and I’ll be spending the next few months making some print art to go along with it. Oracle will be an introduction of sorts to the world of Encaustic, a planet completely separated from the rest of humanity for centuries overflowing with wild magic with a unique culture focused around creative labor and a patchwork of legendary histories and supposed prophecies. I’m immensely curious to see what histories and prophecies playthroughs of The Prismatic Oracle yield, and they may go on to inform much of what Encaustic ultimately becomes.

Some Musings on my Brand of Interdisciplinary Art

Even with pre-production for The Prismatic Oracle well underway, closing out a project always brings a listless feeling, and with Ephemeris essentially complete, I’m left with a big-picture question: what’s next?

I’ve found myself circling the cognitive drain with some foundational questions that, while they have answers, are not answers I’m satisfied with. I’m not exactly sure what Studio Zosimos’ “brand” is beyond simply what aesthetics I’m interested in and how I present the work I create, and I find myself searching for some kind of silver bullet-panacea articulation of what it is I’m doing, not just with Studio Zosimos, but, well, my life. It gets a little heavy if I let it. This, me writing about it, is me trying to keep those questions focused on the actionable and the practical.

Alchemy and Analog are clearly at the heart of Studio Zosimos and, more generally, all of the creative work I do. But how do I present this? Is it enough to just show what I’m making, or can I be doing more to make that presentation a story in itself? I would like to, but what should that be? Should I lean into a court mage aesthetic? Should I refine the style of my visual art and keep to it consistently? I get so swamped in the questions that any answer feels like a distant shore.

Part of my trouble here is that everything I do is multifaceted; my work is intersectional and interdisciplinary. I am not just a writer or a game designer or a graphic designer or a visual artist or a printmaker, I am all of those things at the same time. This is not just about the different mediums I work in, it’s about the content, form, and genre of the work I do. Ephemeris is gothic horror and science-fiction and cosmic horror AND a family drama. Most things are more than one thing, but we humans love a clean category (you know what really loves categories? Capitalism). Things that can’t be categorized easily can make us uncomfortable. But that’s something that I embrace and pursue in the art I create; I can say that for myself, at least. 

The working answer I have here is that I want to embrace the contradictions of making itnerdisciplinary work and do my best to share all of the different pieces of the process. Insofar as Studio Zosimos has a real brand, it’s basically using alchemy and analog art as an aesthetic marker of my interdisciplinary work. It feels somewhat arbitrary to call it as such, fitting a category around something that emerged organically through what I did, but I suppose that’s how most things begin. Part of my work is telling stories about the stories I tell, communicating what they are in a nutshell so people can decide if they want to pursue it more deeply. It’s maybe not as fun as just the telling of the full story, but it’s important, and it’s still creative. It can be, at least. I want it to be.

This is what’s simmering: questions, sketches, frameworks, calendars and spreadsheets, scratch paper and lots and lots of ink. And, in a real, material, physical way, progress. I’m very grateful for that, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s helping make that possible.

– Zosimos