What it takes to get a game like Moar Blood into production

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Solarian Games

What it takes to get a game like Moar Blood into production

Moar Blood is the miniatures skirmish game that we’re launching on Kickstarter in late October. We’ve been iterating and playtesting for a long time, and now it’s finally coming to life. I thought it would be fun to bring you along for the ride as we do all the nitty-gritty that comes after the game design and writing, when it’s time to actually make something people can buy.

This is the first time we’ve made a miniatures game. What I know best is print publishing. I started my career in print, and our first products as a game company were Gygax Magazine and Top Secret, a TTRPG. I know how to make a box set, source components, and put it all together, but miniatures games take it to another level, with terrain, little figures, and all that stuff.

I’ve learned through experience that it’s best to start small and keep things simple your first time out. There are lots of huge six- and seven-figure campaigns for minis games, but that’s also a big risk. So we decided to start by just focusing on the rules. You can play Moar Blood with nothing but a rulebook, if you want. Our earliest playtests were literally wood cubes for characters and a big sheet of paper with a maze drawn in Sharpie.

As we iterated on Moar Blood, it grew into a more visually rich experience. Peter designed walls and platforms in a CAD program and printed them on his resin 3D printer. He printed minis, made great-looking floor tiles and cards, and even designed a “two-sided” die for Moar Blood’s game engine, Razer.

We decided to make our Kickstarter campaign modular, like the game. The cheapest level will literally just be a PDF of the rules, and the basic physical reward level will be a hardcover copy of the rulebook. From there, we’ll let people add the parts they want, up to a deluxe level with everything.

Both Peter and I believe the best way to run a Kickstarter campaign is to have everything 100% complete before the campaign starts, so that all we have to do is pay the factory to get going. That means we have to have everything designed and sourced in advance. We’ll post updates on the pre-launch page so you can see exactly what goes into that.

For the book, we’re going with the same company that printed the Top Secret Tradecraft Manual. They’re in Minnesota. I love their quality, and they’re great people to deal with. Printing domestically saves time, money, and a lot of hassle with importers, time zones, communications, and all that. 

The arena floor will be a cloth mat, printed on both sides. I’m getting quotes from different manufacturers, including one who does cloth mats for souvenir shops and a company that normally makes bandanas.

We’re probably going to do the terrain as 3D-printed resin, but not print it ourselves. There would simply be too much to make, and the quality of a printer one person can afford at home is not the same as what you can get by going to a professional manufacturer who can print resin in large amounts that’s just as strong and detailed as what you could get with traditional molds.

The minis might be resin as well. When you’re making hundreds instead of thousands, mold costs for casting minis can drive the total price sky-high. But I’ve also been getting quotes from small businesses that do white metal casting, and we’ll see if that becomes possible!

We want a bloodthirsty audience for the arena. Our friend Ilya, a terrain creator, hooked us up with an artist who’s drawing some killer crowd scenes, and I’m planning the material to print them on. Right now, it looks like we’ll design the arena walls with slots on top where the crowd scenes can be inserted.

And finally there’s the dice! Razer lets you use any dice you want. It’s a die pool system where you count up successes and failures based on whether each roll is odd or even. As I mentioned, Peter has designed a cool new shape with four sides, two that are blank and two that have a pip, effectively a “d2” that can be considered odd/even.

To make the dice, we need a manufacturer who can cast a whole new shape. In my opinion, 3D printing doesn’t work for dice because they need the heft and balance you get from pouring into a mold. We’re sourcing those from several places, and it’s a learning curve. If we can make it work, we will; otherwise, we’ll do the campaign without custom dice, since they’re cool but not essential.

Once we have everything sourced, we’ll decide which item combinations to offer. Right now, we're thinking of making it as modular as possible and not trying to do a custom box, but packing it in standard mailer boxes so we don’t have to make it an all-or-nothing proposition. I think it’s good that you can choose which parts you want.

Sourcing is fun as heck, I think. I really dig working with different vendors, meeting new people, learning how it all works. But it is REALLY time-intensive, too. Designing games is incredibly fun and rewarding, but I think most people never think about how much goes into figuring out how to actually get it produced when the time comes. So here we go on our campaign of transparency to show you how the stew gets made! 

Follow us on Kickstarter for updates as we figure it all out!

Dark Guide Tony's Trash Can

Broadcast Interruption!

Broadcast interruption! 

Something different this time than yer regular trash programming. 

Fulfillment is nigh for the Mystic Punks Kickstarter, and the Core Rulebook, among the other KS-related goodies, looks beautiful. Everyone at Exalted Funeral waits for the final contents to hit their warehouse before shipping out to all you awesome, super-patient backers. 

For those of you who don’t know, Mystic Punks started as a solo RPG before branching off into the weirdness that it is today. Dark Guide Jay and I have updated those 1-player rules in the new book, and for a long while I wanted to play and share a solo campaign. Let’s (sorta) start that here!

I got my setup all ready. 

Working on completing one of many custom character sheets for my current Punk, Burbera Asheye. I’m sure she is gonna die, but that’s half the fun of MP. Risk/reward and all that stuff, right? 

Some crazy influences that I’ll try to weave into the campaign.

And last, but certainly not least, my temperamental companion Katsu, who very soon will drape themselves over the computer that I type this on. 

Burbera's first adventure? 

Friday Night Fish Fry!

The Red Snappers are a gang that usually stayed in their predictable lane of “normie” criminal activities, but recently started dabbling in the occult. One of their new members, Dirty Sergei, a Red Snappers majick-user, reached out to you via crystal ball, worried about his gang’s recent activities.  

Sergei explains that the Snappers are summoning, harvesting, and synthesizing Crimson Slimes into a potent, lethal narcotic called Cherry Crush. Burbera has no love for Crimson Slimes but understands how the Red Snappers have crossed into gravely dangerous territory with their unchecked majick. You are certain Cherry Crush alone could bring disaster to the city's innocents and, more importantly, irrevocably turn the urban landscape into a sinister, warped hole of demons and mutants. There’s no time to lose! Let’s go burn the Red Snappers’ operation down to smoldering rubble!

If ya want more, my Patreon will have the first post later this week. Let’s keep it free, but hey, I love coffee. If yer so inclined, throw some change my way to keep me caffeinated and keep the strangeness flowing. 

• Dark Guide Tony

Arcane Sword Press

The Highest Level of All

Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All , compiled and edited by Bruce Galloway

For those who know of this game, it's quickly written off as a curio of the RPG hobby. A book that came in hardback with a slipcase in digest size, designed to LOOK like a book you happen upon in the library. The design feels like an older grimoire that was republished in the 80s by an esoteric printing house. I mean, look at the cover!

I know that if I found this when I was younger, I would be obsessed with it. Nowhere on the cover does it say “roleplaying game”, “Fantasy Roleplay”,  or even “game”! So the obscured nature of this book potentially being found within the 000 range of the Dewey Decimal System, right next to the esoterica and occult books which I pored over as a kid, makes it easy to confuse what it is- an RPG that attempts to emulate the medieval experience and mindset that also attempts to educate you on history. Which is cool! Until you read it. But I think Fantasy Wargaming (FW) is an ambitious, if not confused, execution of a still novel idea that was ahead of its time in some regards, but also grossly missed the point of being a game.

FW feels like it was designed for someone like me, a medievalist who enjoys RPGs. But I'm also more focused on games that are, you know, playable. Going back to my theoretical younger self in the library, once I cracked this book open, I would be hit by 98 pages of history, then followed by pages with paragraphs describing charts and formulae, then tables about noble structures, followed by warfare (more math), then a massive chunk on the mechanics of magic. This section honestly reads almost like an incomprehensible (to my child’s mind) explanation of how magic works (not as a game mechanic), and that alone would be enough for me as a young reader to try to wrap my head around it. The last section has a bestiary of medieval creatures with a handful of fun but simple woodcuts. But, again- this book does not clearly state that it's a game, and how it's organized makes it read as such. The game refers to wargaming in the introduction and gives an overview of RPGs, but then BOOM: chapter one: medieval history. Game mechanics don’t appear until Chapter VI on page 99. Why??? I believe the aim of this book was to explain what medieval-centric roleplaying was, along with what the fantasy genre was (chapter V: Moorcock and more…) to a perceived general reader. I mean, the book seemed designed to educate the reader on what this newfound “fantasy wargaming” is exactly, but then it crammed in a medieval simulation in the back half of the book.

Fantasy Wargaming isn't the first to do it: I recall Chivalry & Sorcery, published in 1977, as the first RPG to lean heavily into a simulationist, medieval-realist roleplaying experience. C&S is another game that SHOULD appeal to me, but it feels less like fun and more like a math equation. At least FW is shorter and tries to inform the reader about what life in medieval England in the High Middle Ages was like. My copy of C&S has a 6-point font and pages upon pages of dense text for hundreds of pages, a design choice that seems hostile to the reader. So I appreciate FW's flawed attempt to make a more usable version of this concept. I find this disappointing because many older games from the period get lost in the weeds of accuracy/simulation vs. playability, only to release something that feels hostile to newcomers to the hobby while also being a mess for veteran hobbyists. This was a primary motivator for me to make Demesnes & Domination, a resource for incorporating feudal structure and high-level domain rules in your high-level OSR games informed by medieval research. Every other attempt I've seen is overwritten or too confusing for my obtuse brain.

That said, FW is cool, and I think it's an underappreciated footnote in gaming history. For decades it's been derided as this odd book, but I do appreciate what it's attempting to do. If anything, I'm shocked by the negative reviews from contemporary reviewers, who I think set the tone for this book’s legacy, when more overtly obtuse games out there at the time got better reviews. Yes, the formatting is flawed, but if the editor flipped the structure, with the history in the back of the book, to come off as more game-forward, I could imagine this book having a different legacy.

One aspect I like about this book is how it came about. FW was created by a university RPG group at Cambridge University in the UK. From my understanding, the group developed a set of rules, and then Bruce Galloway compiled them for release. This also makes sense to me, because there is an academic feel to this game- it is more of a lecture on the medieval milieu and then developing systems of interactions within this framework than, say, Warlock from Caltech. 

That said, this is part one of an ongoing Fantasy Wargaming series of posts. I plan on going deeper into the game because I honestly think it deserves it. There is a lot to unpack, and I plan to do so over the next few months. Recently, an academic press published a book on its history called The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming by Mike Monaco. Because it's an academic press release, the book is pricey. But dear reader, I bought this tome and plan to pour through it to better understand this misfit of a game. So stay tuned for more! Consider this entry an instruction of sorts, a Part I: Introduction to a multipart series that will be updated infrequently while I cover other games in the interim. 

On another note: I'm pretty deep into getting ready for ArcaneCon and getting Spacer ready for release, so I will do my best to stay on top of future submissions so bear with me if I miss a week!

• Bryan

ShireCon

North Canaan, CT – September 25th & 26th

ShireCon is celebrating its 8th year! Two days of role-playing and board games in the Berkshires! Come for a day and a half of OSR and modern gaming. Visit our vendors selling old and new games and enjoy the local fare in North Canaan, CT

Under The Dice Fest 

Enfield, CT – October 2nd, 3rd & 4th

Under The Dice Fest returns this October 2nd- 4th! 

UTDFest is focused on independent tabletop gaming, with a focus on miniatures and wargames! The New England Mordheim Open returns, along with roleplaying games, game tournaments, workshops, live music, and more! You don’t want to miss it!

ArcaneCon

Northampton, MA – October 16th & 17th

ArcaneCon is returning October 16th & 17th, 2026. Join us in a celebration of indie, old school, and old school-inspired RPGs, miniature games, board games, and more! ArcaneCon is Western Massachusetts's premiere tabletop hobby convention! Game submissions are open now!!! See more information at Tabletop Events.

Your editor this week has been John "Hambone" McGuire from Ham & Egg Publishing.  

Keep emailing us at hello@analogunion.com to tell us what you’d like to see more of/less of, and to share ideas.

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Until next time!

—JHM