Alien buildings. Ordinary people. Meet ULTRADELVE.

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Stillfleet Studio

Alien buildings. Ordinary people. Meet ULTRADELVE.

A little background: I created the Grit System for Stillfleet with science fiction and workers in mind. Many of us have boring day jobs and play TTRPGs to imagine ourselves in more interesting roles, heroic or anti-heroic. But what if we were knights or space marines? We’d have all sorts of labor, political, and economic struggles to deal with. I quickly found that players get the dark humor and the stakes right away.

Stillfleet is set millions of years in the future, however. While working on Danse Macabre: Medieval Horror Roleplaying, guest writer Konstantine Paradias pitched us on a near-future sci-fi game using the Grit System: a highly topical gig-economy Stillfleet prequel focused on exploring alien Structures (capital S) in a contemporary world. Less than a year later, our buddies at Plus One Experience have written, edited, illustrated, and picked up the game. Today, I’m introducing the resulting mayhem—ULTRADELVE—for Analog Union.

Set after a mysterious alien visitation event called the Haze, ULTRADELVE is about ordinary people becoming Delvers: urban explorers, fameshark streamers, amateur scientists, and conspiracy theorists diving up into the titanic living Structures—created and then abandoned moments later by the Makers—that now pollute every city on Earth. Why did the Makers come? Why did they leave? Why did they leave behind dangerous technoruins full of wondrous Doodads? That’s for your table to try to find out!

Inspired by Roadside Picnic/Stalker/Annihilation and BLAME!, ULTRADELVE was written by Konstantine Paradias, who has worked as a senior narrative designer on a ton of awesome video games including Lords of the Fallen 2, Scrap Mechanic: Drilling Thunder, Raft: The Final Chapter, Wolcen 2, TankRat, and others. I edited the book. Studio artist Anthony Grasso has created all the visuals, delivering a fantastic, graphic-novel-worthy world of gig workers fused with alien Doodads, trespassing beyond the caution tape of the thin-stretched Structure Containment Initiative… (Seriously, go look at Tony’s art!)

It’s a beautiful short book, and we’re thrilled that Plus One Exp is bringing it to BackerKit this November.

Curious? Watch an interview with the designer about sci-fi games

A new member joins the AU!
Welcome, Duck and Crow Press!

Duck and Crow Press has slid into the Analog Union. Now the RUCKUS will come from inside the house as we expand our particular brand of troublemaking and share it with this, a more perfect union.

I’m Duck (aka Dale Houston), and I founded Duck and Crow Press because I wanted to make more games and get them out there in the world. I have been writing my own stuff for decades and decided to finally go for it. In 2025, I took a challenge, turned it into an opportunity, and jumped in feet first. Now we publish our own stuff and others'! 

I’m all about creating stuff that is entirely human-made (no AI in anything in any capacity), supports small business (my printer is a local small business near me), and helps grow the community (which is why most of our stuff is system agnostic). 

I make games with plenty of blood and guts (especially the Bloodbath Dungeon tournament adventures), but have also been trying new things with the works of 2084 and games like Little Stinkers and Factory Kids. The newest is a solo journaling game The Last Shoppe. It is a card-driven game about reminiscing about the past and building a community through interaction, all while running your quirky shoppe in a small village on the edge of the wilderness. The Backerkit goes live on October 15^th (just in time for ArcaneCon)!

Some of my other projects in the works:

• Rise Up: the 3^rd in our tri-fold games series about working together against oppression.
• Bloodbath Dungeon 03: The Caliginous Cenotaph of Cemlyn (launching Feb 2027).
• BDA: Bloodbath Dungeon Adventures (our house system, replacing “BXDH”).
• Desert Cheese Adventure: created from an improv session with kids.
• Dungeon of the Weeping Queen: an adventure built around art from Better Legends.
• Children of the Goaled Dragon: a new adventure in the Undying Expanse campaign.
• PROPAGATION: an anti-AI art project, currently with 25 artists!

Be the RUCKUS you’d like to see in the world,

Support the Arts, local small businesses, and your local library. 

–Duck

Friends of the Union
Josh Yoder, Crimson Adder Games

Josh (Crimson Adder) is an RPG, monster movie, comic book, and music fiend. With a strong love of midnight movies and monstrous games, his games tend to bring a slime-soaked good time. 

Next, this zine fiend is publishing his own system. 

The Drift system is rules-lite and narrative-first. There is no HP or AC; instead, Myco//Drift has you spend your own stat points for damage and to fuel your abilities, showing the toll battles take as they rage on. The first world he is unleashing that uses the Drift System is Myco//Drift!

Myco//Drift is an Existential horror action RPG you can play co-op or solo, putting you in the mind of a former child soldier in a lost war against Kaiju-sized mutated insects that can manifest a giant fungal bio-mech. The same spores that mutated the insect were used on you to let you wield your suit. You are connected to the bugs, the ghosts of your dead teammates, and otherworldly voices from beyond through the Myco//Drift.

Myco//Drift has the pilot going on one last mission. As you hexcrawl through the fungal wastes, uncovering mysteries, battling giant bugs, and fighting off mutated cultists. 

If you're interested in getting into the action, the already funded game is still accepting funding. The Quickstart, actual play, and character /solo aid generator are all posted on the Gamefound page.

Ham & Egg Publishing

Patreon Re-launch Coming October 1st!

Ahoy! 

Hambone here, stepping away from the grind of promoting our upcoming Kickstarter for What Dark Knocking Comes in the Still of the Night to make a pretty fun announcement.

Ham & Egg's Patreon is getting a refresh on October 1st!
We're pretty stoked about it. We put a lot of thought into what would make it worthwhile for our Patrons and for us to commit the time to, and I think we landed somewhere cool.

Firstly, it's still FREE (for the most part). The free tier gets you updates on and some BTS on the projects, plus Geo's monthly blog, weekly-ish chapters of my novella, The World's Worst Detective, game supplements, Etsy discounts, and more.

The "and more" for the launch is pretty cool. If you're already signed up, or sign up at the Free or paid ($3) tiers between now and November 1st, you'll also get a full-length PDF adventure for Zombie Braineaters! Night of the Ghouls for FREE. 

The $3 tier also gets you a PDF copy of The Devil in New Jersey. 

We'll have more info on Patreon, and to find out what that is, why not click the link below? It's FREE!

What Dark Knocking adventure 2 cover reveal! Art by Zack Giallongo

While we're on the subject of things you should totally sign up for, our get notified page for What Dark Knocking Comes in the Still of the Night has some cool stuff for you to check out. 

It also has a link to enter a giveaway for our Dual20 Little Green Rosetta: Galaxy Edition!

I've got the dice in hand from Bellum Creations, and they look superb and roll nicely, too. We're giving away 5 dice on September 29, so why not sign up?  

Solarian Games

Should we make custom dice for Moar Blood? (POLL)

Moar Blood is the miniatures skirmish game that we’re launching on Kickstarter in late October. Moar Blood has a simple combat system. You roll a handful of dice, and you need enough successes in the die pool to hit and do damage. The cool thing is, you can use any dice you want. Even numbers are successes, and odd numbers are failures. So you could literally grab a handful of different dice and roll them; all you care about is odds and evens.

To make it more fun, Peter designed a custom die with pips for success and a blank face for failures. 

We've been using these dice to play Moar Blood for a while now. They're 3D-printed resin, which is great for prototyping, but they don't really have the heft that "real" dice will need if we're going to sell them as an accessory for the game.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to get them made. Because they're not a standard shape, we can't just go to any dice maker and say, "Give us a couple thousand dice." They have to make a custom injection mold, which they'll use to cast the dice. 

The trouble is, unless you're making tens of thousands of dice, the mold cost can be prohibitive. We're talking about $2,500 just to make a mold for one shape. 

After getting quotes from multiple factories in the US and China, we've decided we're going to do an experiment and see if we can make them ourselves. 

On a smaller scale, many artisan dice makers design and cast their own dice in batches of a few hundred at a time. There are lots of tutorials to follow, and if we can do it, we can keep the dice cost low enough that we don't have to charge some crazy number like forty bucks for ten dice.

So that's our task next week. We're going to buy the equipment we need to make our own dice and do some tests. Will it work? Maybe! Will it fail? Also maybe!

It's entirely possible that we'll get to a point where we say that custom dice are just too ambitious for this first version of Moar Blood, and we keep the rules that say "use any dice; evens are good, and odds are bad." 

Or we might pull this off, learn how to make custom dice, and offer these sweet Razer dice as an optional campaign reward. 

What do you think? Should we offer custom dice if we can figure out how to cast them ourselves? Vote in the poll (button below) and let us know what you think.

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.

If you enjoy the Analog Union newsletter, please tell your friends to sign up at AnalogUnion.com.

Until next time!

—JHM