 | Top Secret® Tradecraft Manual is going live on Kickstarter today! |  | Parallel Dimension Gaming |
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|  | Joey Royale’s Pizza Party THIS WEEK!
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|  | The Jerry Stefek Memorial Crawl for the Cure
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Solarian Games | Get Haunted Industries | Ham & Egg Publishing Arcane Sword Press |
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The Top Secret® Tradecraft Manual going live on Kickstarter tonight! |  | The Kickstarter goes live tonight at 7pm Eastern US time. There are 12 “Administrator tier” spots available to early backers who would like to have one of the authors run a Top Secret game for them online. | | | Thousands of gamers worldwide have made Top Secret® a success since its newest edition, New World Order, was released in 2018. Players take on the role of secret agents in the modern world, deploying to locales around the globe on covert missions.
At the heart of Top Secret are the skills that characters use to complete their missions, known in the language of spies as tradecraft.
The core rulebook for Top Secret describes the various tradecraft, or “specialized skills,” that agents can learn, devoting a paragraph or so to each skill.
In the Tradecraft Manual, every skill has been expanded upon and enhanced with detailed descriptions, explanations of the mechanics and rolls required, new tables to help the GM determine difficulty levels, methods player characters might employ when using the skill, and narrative in-game examples of agents using the tradecraft while on a mission.
New tradecraft skills are introduced, including intelligence evaluation, psychological profiling, melee, thrown, and projectile weapons, a new kind of first aid for faster healing under the right conditions, skills in disarming weapons of mass destruction, and a “makeshift engineering” skill for those MacGyver moments in your game.
You also get new rules for Top Secret, such as faster and easier car chases, foot chases, perception checks, attacking from a moving vehicle, simplified hacking rules, and streamlined options for initiative and actions.
Scott Kongable, the author of the Tradecraft Manual, is the foremost GM for Top Secret®: New World Order, having run multiple campaigns bi-weekly for over six years. The updates to Top Secret in this book are the culmination of literally hundreds of sessions in both campaign play and convention play.
Everything in the Tradecraft Manual is compatible with the existing corpus of published rules and missions for Top Secret. We hope you’ll get many, many hours of fun as you and your players use this book to take your spy game to the next level! | | | | |
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Joey Royale’s Pizza Party THIS WEEK! |
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 | Grab your napkins- it’s gonna be a mess! Join me, your host, Joey Royale, for an hour of weird creativity, role-play games, and a bunch of other weird stuff on Joey Royale’s pizza party, this Wednesday at 8 PM EST on the Sewer Rats YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/@sewerratsincrpgmegacorp?si=rCikEx35Peys3QfA
This week, we are freaking delighted to have fellow analog union member, and all around cool dude, Jayson Elliot of Solarian Games. Also joining us will be the techno madman James Poezenel, creator of Netcrawl. Learn about new projects they are working on, upcoming conventions, strange films, action figures and whatever else we can stuff into this calzone. |
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| | Ahoy Pals!
Hambone here with a few festiv-ish things to chat you up on this week.
First and foremost is a cause near and dear to my heart. The Jerry Stefek Memorial Crawl for the Cure. I have lost a lot of people I love to cancer. I am unfortunately not unique in this loss. It sucks and everytime I sit there wishing there was something I could do to change the outcome. So when my buddy Cory hit me up about the Crawl, I jumped at the chance to be a part of it. Here is how you can too. |  | From Cory:
Happy Holidays! December has come, and it’s time again for The Jerry Stefek Memorial Crawl for the Cure: Ethermeet 2025! Please join us to spread Good for those who need assistance from the American Cancer Society! Once again, we will run the event on second Saturday of December, the 14th, from 7 AM until Sunday, 2 AM CST! We would love to have more West Coast viewers to cheer in the early morning Central with some Horror Cinema Classics and Director Randy Miller! We hope to see you there; now is the time for heroes!
The memorial play-a-thon is in memory of Jerry Stefek: gamer, father, friend and altruist. We tragically lost Jerry to aggressive lymphoma in 2018. ALL proceeds will be given to cancer research and patient assistance through Tiltify to the American Cancer Society! We are just shy of $32,000 as we close out our 6 years of Crawls! We’re still striving to make that goal of $5,000 for Ethermeet 2025 and we challenge our heroes to perform Mighty Deeds for Good.
Please tell your friends about this awesome RPG entertainment event and join us on December 13th on the Twitch channel DCC Mayhem. Your donations, taken through Tiltify, will not only help the American Cancer Society but will also influence our games during this online event! Tell us what chaos or boon you would like our players to encounter, and we’ll put it in the game – donor’s choice!
Any donation of $5 or more will be entered in a drawing for great prizes every hour featuring our awesome sponsors! We’re still working out the details, so we’re not yet updated on our Sponsorship, but please visit our sponsor site as it is updated with our latest awesome sponsors!
AND. of course, late-night horror feature nostalgia will commence with your Judge and host Luau Lou as the uncanny host Insanti Clawz serving up his brand of Mutant Crawl Classics at the Final Admission Theater and Half-Price Oyster Bar! Finally, we finish the celebration with our LATE LATE Night show as Director Randy Miller closes us out with Horror Cinema Classics! It is going to be AWESOME!
Please join us Saturday, December 13th between 7 AM CST and Sunday, 2 AM CST on the Twitch channel DCC Mayhem, and cheer on our troupe. Let’s SLEIGH our goal! Thanks for your support! Visit the Crawl for the Cure: Ethermeet site for more details! |  | On a brighter less heart wrenchng note, some dear friends of mine (Casey, Jen, Edwin and Zack) who have been in the hobby since Gygax left Lake Geneva have launched a new publishing company Parallel Dimension Gaming. There first title has just recently launched on Kickstarter. Check it out.
Save the season… or let it sparkle and spiral into pastel oblivion. Once upon a frost-kissed winter, this place was called Yuletown—a snug retreat famous for handmade toys, caroling mice, and cider-sticky mittens. Now? It’s Bubbletown: a pastel-perfect utopia where lanterns glow pink, pastries are aggressively flawless, and every local hums in eerily synchronized harmony… like they’ve been focus-grouped by a fairy with a marketing degree.
They have been.
The Problem (It’s… a Big One) Blyssaline Bubblesong, a fae-touched enchantress has enchanted the entire town. Powered by corrupted glimmercoal and a disturbingly effective magical PR campaign, she has:
✨ rewritten the town’s traditions
✨ rewritten the town’s name
✨ and is creeping dangerously close to rewriting the townspeople themselves.
By day, Bubbletown beams.
By night, its people mine glimmercoal in a dreamlike daze—unknowingly fueling the spell that keeps them trapped in saccharine servitude.
But All Is Not Lost! A handful of holdouts remain “un-Bubblefied” with rebellious townsfolk, a few spirited sentient toys, and one crusty rat captain with trust issues and exactly three cheeses left in his ration pack. They can’t break the enchantment alone…
But your party just might. |  | Finally, if you wanted to catch up on some killer Ham & Egg Publishing titles we’re having a 25% off sale (except anthologies) on our site! | | | Arcane Sword Press |  | Hey, guess what- if you enjoyed my article last week, then you’re in for a treat! This week I’ll be talking about BOSSFIGHT, Tabletop & Wargames Digest, and Portcullis!! |  | Boss Fight: Boss fight is when you have someone who is so aggressively talented as a visual creator but also as a game designer releases a zine that captures a vibe so hard that I didn’t even realize my mouth was agape while browsing. Every page has a completely different layout that maintains a playful use of positive/negative space to make everything readable but makes you more engaged with its navigation. That’s not to say it’s hard to follow, I’m saying the contrary considering its initial impression of its presentation. Each page is literally bleeding off the edges with articles, opinions, additional content for games, and more! While it is available for a very reasonable donation for a PDF, the print version is of a very high quality that compliments its visual presentation. Great stuff! Available in PDF (possibly print if you email them!) from Big Boy Game Time |  | Tabletop & Wargame Digest: This is a brand new zine that is already dense at 124 pages! Insane! Created by Slade who kindly said was inspired by my releases to make a zine, he went about to make something that feels like an old gaming magazine with convention info, articles, minigames, artwork, supplemental rules and more! This is a zine built by a community and edited and published by one person for that community. Each submission also includes the page layout made by the submitter, which makes every few pages feel like a small, unique release in its own right. It almost makes sit more of a compilation than a coherent magazine, which I like! Its presentation walks a line between an old issue of The Dragon and an old gaming APA. Another strong point is the variety found within it, from magic deck builds, historical wargaming scenario reports, sculpting tutorials, an AD&D class class, a full blown game with components (shout-out Hodag!), and more! A true tabletop gaming smorgasbord! Available in print and PDF |  | Portcullis: Beyond Under The Dice, this the other local gaming zine I strongly recommend. It is a mix of game reviews, MTG talk, terrain tutorials, interviews with artists and game designers, articles and rules that support games (Issue 2 has a great article on mercenaries for One Page Rules: Regiments (Or the GW-official game.) There is a lot of personality in this zine and is reflective of the creator Ian who you can tell puts a lot of love into making a gaming zine. Extremely cool stuff, grab a copy!! Available in print and PDF
That’s it for now! This has jumpstarted my focus on doing deep dives into tabletop publications, so the next few newsletter will be focusing on older publications. Some known, some lesser known! Until then!
Oh! Before I forget, I want to tell everyone about Corporate Breakfast! A game created by David Torrey with art by Sam Mameli! |  | “Welcome to the Corporate Breakfast Corporation! We are happy to have you as the newest member of our breakfast cereal naming team, it’s a vacancy well overdue to be filled! Our naming techniques have gone stale so we are introducing a new method. We will give you a hand of random words and allow you to swap out some to come up with the best name and pitch! Once you present it to the board, they will decide on which name is the best one to move forward with. If they select yours, congratulations! It is a major honor that comes with huge bragging rights!”
Check it out here! | | |
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Your editor this week has been Jayson Elliot of Solarian Games. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, it’s getting cold out there, so cuddle up with someone you love whether they’re of the two-legged or the furry four-legged variety. Or just get a hot cup of cocoa and your favorite movie, but treat yourself!
Keep on emailing us at hello@analogunion.com to let us know what you’d like to see more of, less of, or just ideas you’ve got. If you like the Analog Union newsletter, please tell your friends to sign up at AnalogUnion.com. See you next week! -Jayson |
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