Get The High Ground With Star Crossed Love Letters!
You might know that Love Letters comes with a brand new way to play Star Crossed online.
You probably know that I Have the High Ground is Jess Levine's heart-pounding two-playe...
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Alex Roberts
1 day ago
TONIGHT 6PM PST - Livestreamed Interview on Nerdsmith!
Hello, dear backers! I hope you had a lovely weekend. It was nice to tune in this morning to Star Crossed: Love Letters tip-toeing over the $14k mark. I’m so proud of all the su...
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Alex Roberts
5 days ago
James Mendez Hodes and Bloomer!
FYI: Alex will be on Discovery RPG, hosted on the Nerdsmith twitch channel, Monday November 20th at 6pm PST / 9pm EST! Don’t miss it!)
Today it is my pleasure to introduce you t...
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Alex Roberts
5 days ago
Introducing: Banana Chan and Milsae Kim!
Hello, Backers!
One week in and you’ve pledged over twice our funding goal. You’re great. <3
Today I’d like to introduce an incredible duo:
Banana Chan
You probably know the ...
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Bully Pulpit Games
7 days ago
Bonus Content! Psikhushka - A 3-Player Pairing from Jason Morningstar
Three-player Star Crossed has been one of the most requested features since I first started playtesting the game. I’m very pleased to offer some solid (and relatively simple!) r...
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Alex Roberts
8 days ago
Introducing: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, and Sovanny Vorn!
First things first: thank you, sweet backers, for pledging over ten thousand dollars(!) to our humble project. Thank you!! We’re not even a week in and I’m already running out o...
You might know that Love Letters comes with a brand new way to play Star Crossed online.
You probably know that I Have the High Ground is Jess Levine's heart-pounding two-player game of loaded banter and posturing before a climactic duel.
And so you must think: those two games would go together really well, right?
Well, Jess and I did play the two games on the Party of Onepodcast, mashed up as one continuous story about alien diplomats who ended up in a chili cook-off for planet Earth...
Click to listen to our high-stakes sci-fi romance at the county fair!
If you've backed Love Letters, you can add the PDF and/or printed zine to your order...
Jess and I used the PDF to play online together!
OR... you can get the limited edition premium version that includes dice, tokens, and everything else you need to play:
Thanks so much to Jess Levine for suggesting this mashup, and to Jeff Stormer for letting us take over his podcast for a week. We had SO much fun playing these games together, and it's pretty clear that Jess and I share a lot of values when it comes to designing games - player collaboration, tension, emotions first, mechanics that draw from life (in her case, from real-life fencing!) and you know... being hot.
Hello, dear backers! I hope you had a lovely weekend. It was nice to tune in this morning to Star Crossed: Love Letters tip-toeing over the $14k mark. I’m so proud of all the support and love this project is getting!
DRPG is a really cool talk show on the Nerdsmith network (who also host friends of Star Crossed Roleplay Retcon) exploring all kinds of different RPG systems and ways of playing. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know I’m a huge advocate of trying as many different games as you can. It’s enriching as a designer and as a player! And it’s fun!
Anyway, you can catch me nerding out about Love Letters, tonight at 6pm PST, on twitch.tv/wearenerdsmith
FYI: Alex will be on Discovery RPG, hosted on the Nerdsmith twitch channel, Monday November 20th at 6pm PST / 9pm EST! Don’t miss it!)
Today it is my pleasure to introduce you to two of our contributors, James Mendez Hodes and Bloomer!
James Mendez Hodes is probably best known for his game of samurai action and drama, Thousand Arrows - described by a friend of mine as “the best time I’ve ever had at a con.” I hope so, anyway, because it’s a good game and he’s a talented designer.
There’s a chance though, that you know Mendez more as a cultural consultant, and from his writing about everything from Orcs to fortune cookies to thoughtful representation of fictional religions. Mendez plays many roles, but one of them is The Guy Who Carefully and Insightfully Explains to the TTRPG Industry If and How Certain Things Are or Aren’t Racist. I'm not making a joke about that - Mendez has contributed more than anyone can really measure to the state of TTRPGs today.
I’ve worked with Mendez before in that capacity, and I’ve always found it an enriching experience. But I also decided after our last consulting gig that I wanted to work with him just, like, as a fellow designer and writer. So of course I invited him to pitch a pairing.
Mendez wrote a piece called Taxi Dance, about a Filipino labourer and a white nightclub dancer falling in love in 1934 California. It opens like this:
I would describe this as not fucking around. Mendez carefully establishes the stakes of a very real historical context - including anti-miscegenation laws and the continuing threat of racialized violence - and then gives us two loveable, interesting people whose connection feels like a single note of grace in the midst of it all.
And then Bloomer captures that moment:
Backers can see the full image below!
Naturally I wanted a Filipine artist to work on this, but I also needed someone who could capture expression, realistic texture (as you’ll learn, fashion is surprisingly important in this setting), and the tension of a stolen moment. Bloomer fit the bill.
Take a look at their instagram and you’ll instantly know what I mean.
I am delighted to have Bloomer on what is their first TTRPG commission. Bloomer handled it with sensitivity and style, giving a gorgeous romantic vision to the painful context in which our characters meet.
I love this pairing for some of the same reasons I love Jason’s Psikusha - reminders that love doesn’t need any particular conditions to bloom; it grows like roses in a garden or like dandelions in the sidewalk, and it’s beautiful every time.
One week in and you’ve pledged over twice our funding goal. You’re great. <3
Today I’d like to introduce an incredible duo:
Banana Chan
You probably know the 2022 Dicebreaker Designer of the Year, the multiple-ENnie-winning game designer behind An Exquisite Crime, Suburban Consumption of the Monstrous, and Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, whose name graces books of Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, and (most exciting to me) the Dune RPG.
I associate her work with an unsettling sense of dread, perhaps epitomized in the frantic paranoia of the video-pervasive larp They’re Onto Me. However, my favourite of her games is a small (unpublished?) freeform larp called Welcome to New Jersey, about a seemingly endless road trip to a game convention. You sit in a car with people you barely know, passing the Welcome sign over and over and over again. The game ends when someone finally screams.
I invited Banana to contribute because I wanted some of that surreal strangeness, the horror, and perhaps some of the mundane-meets-fantastic that makes Jiangshi such a resonant game for so many people.
But no.
Banana has exceeded all expectations, and given us a pairing that is based on the John Woo masterpiece(?) Face/Off. Yes, the one where John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play an FBI agent and the criminal who killed his son. For complicated reasons, Travolta gets Cage’s face transplanted onto his own, and then Cage gets Travolta’s face, and there are a lot of explosions.
This scenario was actually played out at Big Bad Con 2018, to the horror and amusement of all who laid eyes on it.
Hm. Actually, maybe I did get the Lynchian skin-crawling horror I was expecting.
Milsae Kim
What I love about Milsae’s work could be summed up in one word: lesbians. She has a talent for drawing cool girls in suits doing cool stuff and also kissing. All of her characters seem to leap off the page with energy and distinct personalities. So, knowing the source material for this pairing, I knew Milsae had the only way to both reference and improve upon it:
Backers can see the full illustration below!
You can find more of Milsae’s work here, and my favourite of her own pairings here.
Three-player Star Crossed has been one of the most requested features since I first started playtesting the game. I’m very pleased to offer some solid (and relatively simple!) rules for 3PSC in Love Letters.
But maybe you’d like a trio of characters to play? And a romantic setting for them to swoon in? Well, ask Jason Morningstar and you get this:
I’m a big fan of Night Witches, Jason’s Powered by the Apocalypse game about women at war. More specifically, it’s about the real-history 588th Night Bomber Regiment, a group of Soviet women pilots who bombed the German military in outdated wood-and-canvas biplanes from 1942-1945.
In this scenario, a trio of characters meet at a Soviet psychiatric hospital (known as a "psikhushka") in the mid-forties. Given that homosexuality was one of the “illnesses” that could get you locked up there in the first place, there’s a lot on the line for our would-be lovers.
I love this setting, and these characters. Star Crossed can be fanciful, silly, adorable - but stories of forbidden love can be truly heartbreaking, too. Jason gets the full range of the game, and really delivered on the more tragic side of SC. I mean just look at this:
We promised some very special content just for Backers, and here it is! Backers can see the download link below!
If you play these miserable characters fighting for a scrap of joy in a cold and heartless world, please be sure to tell us all about it.
First things first: thank you, sweet backers, for pledging over ten thousand dollars(!) to our humble project. Thank you!! We’re not even a week in and I’m already running out of ways to say thanks. Gratitude overload. It feels kinda nice.
Anyway, on to the main focus of today’s update. I get to introduce you to Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, co-authors of the contemporary Star Crossed story par excellence - This is How You Lose the Time War. It’s a story told in correspondence across pasts and futures, two people intertwined by a conflict that seems not just endless but beginning-less(?), falling for each other. You probably already know this because it is a famous and beloved book that won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Aurora and British Science Fiction and Fantasy awards. (And then earned the love of perhaps the last great Twitter Main Character, bigolas dickolas, but that’s a story for another time.)
What you really need to know is that I read it because my friend Jenn read it, and loved it so much she immediately sent a copy to me. Not her copy - my own. Overnight delivery. A pretty strong recommendation.
Amal doesn’t just write time-twisting enemies-to-lovers award winners, though. She writes beautiful poetry, and thoughtful critique, and more. We somehow missed each other when we both lived in the same city (for years!) but had a lovely correspondence when she was using one of my games as a teaching tool in her creative writing class. I’ve been hoping for a chance for us to work together again, and I think we can all agree that Love Letters is the perfect fit.
I met Max at a house con many years ago, and I can say that besides being an acclaimed writer he is a delightful player to have at the table. You’ve probably heard of his many beloved fantasy novels, so please do me a favour and check out his games: Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: The City’s Thirst, because I know you want to play text-based necromantic legal thrillers.
I have a hunch one or both of these two will be making TTRPGs next. Just calling it now. Because wow they know how to make a compelling Pairing. In Tender is the Knight, a solitary dragon and the knight sent to confront them find a surprising connection. From the introduction:
^This is how you capture the player’s imagination in a way that catapults them into their own dreams.
Sovanny Vorn
Sovanny is also someone I’ve been itching to work with for a while. Her work glows with texture and feeling, and always gives me the sense there's more happening (physically and emotionally) than the viewer can immediately see.
She is also really good at drawing cool birds and handsome gentlemen of a certain age. So when I said, “bird dragon and silver fox knight, please!” she needed no further instruction.
Backers can see the full image below!
“Dragon and Knight” might sound like an action-focused pairing for some, but Sovanny went with a much more intimate and, well, tender image. I love it. It’s so quiet and subdued. Somehow, the word that comes to mind when I look at this is: cuddly. I just want them to have a nice little nap together!
Okay, that’s enough fangirling for one update. If you want to keep up with these talented folks, check out Max’s work here, Amal’s here, and Sovanny’s here.
And stay tuned for tomorrow’s update: we’re getting some bonus content from Jason Morningstar!
I'm SO excited to introduce you to another writer/illustrator set you'll find in the pages of Love Letters.
Cecilia Tan
Cecilia is kind of a badass. She doesn't just write sci-fi BDSM erotica (and lots of other erotic/romance fiction) she founded Circlet Press, a whole publishing house devoted to it. You might recognize some of her titles: Slow Surrender, The Prince’s Boy, Mind Games, The Hot Streak, White Flames, Edge Plays, Black Feathers, The Velderet, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords, as well as the Magic University series of paranormal erotic romances. My favourite accolade, though, is that Cecilia has the distinction of being perhaps the only writer to have erotic fiction published in both Penthouse and Ms. magazines.
Imagine my delight when this real-life erotic romance author expressed a fondness for Star Crossed??? I was flattered to say the least.
When I invited Cecilia to contribute to Love Letters, she immediately sent over some interesting pitches that unfortunately overlapped with some other contributors' pairings. When I asked for more, she very hesitantly pitched something... a little darker. A little too real, maybe. In a dystopian way.
If you like near-future sci-fi, intense power dynamics, and medical weirdness, you are going to love Fever. I certainly do. One thing I really like about it is that through carefully varied options, she really lets the players decide how kinky they want things to be. When I reached this part of the google doc we were working in:
I’m pretty sure I let out a full-on cartoonish villainous laugh. Is there any higher praise?
HamletMachine
I have been into HamletMachine's work for years, ever since the early days of their sexy m/m space drama STARFIGHTER. It's one of those rare works of art that feels like it was made for me. I mean, I'm a BIG fan. I played the visual novel the day it came out. (And then I played it again.)
HamletMachine's work contends with intense, complicated dynamics that are sometimes as unsettling as they are compelling. And it's always hot. I'm thrilled about her new ongoing project, MICKEY + JESSICA, a gritty butch/femme D/s romance that is sometimes about people reconciling with hidden and rejected parts of themselves - and is sometimes just about really hot sex.
Her piece for Fever really captures the heavy, claustrophobic desperation that pervades the pairing. So much is conveyed in this single image.
If you love this kinky intensity half as much as I do, please check out HM's work here and Cecilia Tan's here.
Also: We are so close to $10k in pledges? Will we hit that amount today???? An astounding sum for our little book. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart :)
This is the first post in a series of introductions, in which I excitedly gush about our handpicked team of talented writers and illustrators! So, first…
Kieron Gillen
Kieron and I met when he interviewed me for an issue of DIE, his angsty (positive connotation) meta-TTRPG comic about players trapped in their own co-created fantasy world. DIE has been a big hit with TTRPG players, but I was already compelled by his earlier The Wicked + The Divine, about gods incarnated as pop music stars. Kieron has also written for some pretty famous characters (Thor, Iron Man, Uncanny X-Men, Darth Vader(!)) so you can imagine I was a little starstruck when it turned out he (and his lovely wife!) had played and loved Star Crossed!
I was hoping Kieron would bring some big super feelings to his pairing, and oh wow did he ever. Imagine a young mutant rebel and the robot built only to hunt and destroy them: A Love Most Uncanny.
Mye Bi
I had to pick someone to bring their artistic vision to this superpowered drama, and I gotta admit, it was fanart that got me. Mye Bi had been drawing some adorable Links, sexy Ganondorfs, and one of the cutest versions I’ve ever seen of my current fav ship, Hubert and Ferdinand from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
I actually looked at a lot of shipping fan art (more than I would in a normal day) when researching for Love Letters, because I wanted illustrators who could convey a complicated relationship in a single image. Mye nailed it - and turned out to be a delight to work with, too! Look at this!!!!
Thank you all for your support - the campaign is going wonderfully so far and I look forward to sharing more about our fabulous team.
Me right now:
image depicts sailor moon, stars in her eyes, looking absolutely delighted
THANK YOU, all you lovely backers!!! We're funded in less than 24 hours! You're making this adorable little book come to life!!!
It's wonderful to see so many folks get excited about a game centered around love and connection. It truly warms my heart and fills me with gratitude.
The whole team at Bully Pulpit Games is basking in gratitude too, but guess what? I’m grateful for them.
Steve Segedy has been putting a ridiculous amount of work into this project, especially in the last few weeks. He is the anchor of BPG, and without him the project would be totally adrift. Jason Morningstar has been wonderful to me throughout the development of Love Letters; I have sent him shoddy drafts and desperate “help me make this good!” messages and he is just the most gracious person to collaborate with.
Kristine Hassell and Lino Caputo are our marketing powerhouses; Lino has been churning out graphics like a machine while Kristine somehow wrangles the various social media channels (shifty things, in my experience). So happy to have them on our team <3
Working with Jess Fink is an absolute joy, agian. One of the highlights of putting Love Letters together was exchanging ideas and inspiration (see: pictures of figure skating outfits and girls with swords) back and forth as she turned my silliest dreams into beautiful artwork.
I also want to shout out my absolute champ of an editor, Meredith Katz! She and I worked together on ‘Til The Last Gasp last summer, and when we were done I knew I wanted to work with her again. They have a keen eye for consistency and flow, but as a writer of queer romance novels, they also brought a lot of cool ideas to the table. Pro Tip: an editor who can keep the instructions clear without losing its flavour (in Love Letters' case: sweet and spicy) is one you ought to keep.
Brennen Reece’s work speaks for itself; it is such a pleasure to know that I can deposit all that work into his capable hands and let him craft it (right now!) into a beautiful book. If you enjoyed the bright, cheerful, easy-to-navigate look of the original rulebook, you’ll appreciate Love Letters.
Thank you so, so much. If you’re half as delighted as I am about this, please consider sharing the project page with a friend! Word-of-mouth is more important than ever these days, when there is such a wealth of great TTRPG projects funding. Let’s keep this momentum going. 💖
Rap duo Epic Levels have this thing called Mad Dungeon, where they have different guests come on their podcast and make a single room in a megadungeon. Ours ended up looking like this:
I think a romantic cook-off for the heart of a slug god should appeal to everyone, yeah?
I also end up talking about Star Crossed: Love Letters a bit, and the hosts had some really interesting questions about romance and player safety! Give it a listen, and let me know what you think!
Like a ship upon the waves, we have LAUNCHED! Whew, that funding number’s giving more heart-pounding tension than any teetering tower. While we’re anxiously monitoring it, we have a ton of stuff to share with you, beloved backers. You can expect a few peeks behind the scenes, a taste of backer-only Star Crossed content, and other surprises along the way.
One thing I’m very excited for is to introduce you all to our wonderful contributors. Love Letters is full of fresh, compelling writing and illustration, and I’m immensely proud of the handpicked team that put it together.
A Request
As the landscape of online platforms keeps shifting, and gaming communities are plentiful but scattered, word-of-mouth is more important than ever to a game’s success. If you’re as excited as we are to see this project come to life, please consider sharing the crowdfunding page with a friend. Tell people about Star Crossed, and about why you’re interested in Love Letters.
This whole undertaking was inspired by the passion and care that fans had for our humble little romance game. If we can harness even a little of that passion to promote and share this campaign, I know it’ll be a success.
So: thanks for joining us! I hope it’ll be a fun journey, and I’m so grateful you’re on board.
