In this newsletter | Playtest Material | Orb Tyrants Venturing Outside the Game Store |
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Friend of the Union – Laurie O’Connel Read Playtest Material Issue 1 |  | The desire to do something that everyone wants is sometimes all-powerful.
After a while designing RPGs, it seemed like every convention I went to had an extremely interesting critical discussion of this or that topic in RPGs, followed by: “but if only there were somewhere to discuss this!”
The need for more critical infrastructure in our scene has long been deeply apparent.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t some excellent role-playing game magazines. It’s just that there aren’t enough, particularly for an industry full of writers and brimming with opinions, undergoing rapid expansion and change.
And so Playtest Material was born.
The idea of Playtest Material is actually relatively simple. Every quarter, the magazine brings on board a new guest editor to curate in-depth articles, reviews, essays, and experimental writing around a certain theme. There is no marketing (except what little might come just from a game being spoken about), and reviews are encouraged away from good/bad ratings and towards explorations of what may be interesting, innovative, or culturally relevant about a particular work. The magazine pays for itself (in theory) through a print subscription and is otherwise entirely open access.
Our first issue, released on October 1 and guest-edited by David Blandy, invited articles taking comparative approaches between RPGs and other forms of media. Issue One featured everything from long articles comparing different theatrical and film sensibilities with role-playing, to experimental pieces about collaged games. It’s quite difficult to summarise in a paragraph, so the best place to read these articles is online at playtestmaterial.org. You can read the editorial for the first issue here.
Before Issue One came out, we launched a subscription drive. This was a resounding success, taking us from ten subscribers to 89. Ideally, we'd like to grow our subscription base further, as it is an important factor in our sustainability. | | | | Super Savage SystemsOrb Tyrants on Kickstarter | It’s Orbin Time!
Create a hideous Orb Tyrant, command its minions, devour wandering heroes, and graft the stolen organs of your rivals onto your own ever-mutating body. |  | Orb Tyrants is a miniature-agnostic skirmish game for 1–4 players. Each player creates a randomly generated floating horror, gathers four minions, and enters the deepest level of an ancient dungeon to destroy their rivals. |  | Build, or randomly roll, your Tyrant from grotesque bodies, armored hides, slime-dripping mouths, unnatural central eyes, twitching eye stalks, horrible mutations, and crippling weaknesses. Devour wandering Heroes to steal their powers. Tear out the organs from injured rivals and graft the useful pieces onto your own ever-mutating body. No official miniatures are required. Build your own Orb Tyrant!
Miniature-agnostic battles on a 2′ × 2′ battlefield Random Tyrant creation Solo, one-off and campaign play Automated Heroes and roaming dungeon threats Minion hordes, organ harvesting, and permanent grafts
Roll through eight quick steps to create a completely unpredictable floating horror. Your Body Type establishes its BRUTE, DRIFT, GAZE, and GUTS, while its Mouth, Hide, Mutation, Central Eye, and five Eye Stalks determine what it can do on the battlefield. Finally, every Tyrant receives one Horrible Weakness.
Instead of building a perfectly optimized army, you are handed one grotesque Eye Tyrant with one goal: Dungeon Supremacy! Keep your Tyrant through a campaign and watch it become even stranger as it suffers injuries, devours Heroes, and grafts stolen organs onto its ever-mutating body. | |  |  |  | | Alewood Games
Venturing Outside the Game Store |  | Living every day as one of society’s freaky folk means I find much joy and comfort in the spooky season. It’s a time when quieter corners of the creative community reach out, gather after the sun goes down, and celebrate their general weirdness together. I recently attended one of those quiet corner events… it was brilliant and not for the reason you may think.
On October 1st, I strolled into the industrial-lit Peabody Heights Brewery backrooms surrounded by huge fermentors, cold concrete floors, and gaming tables covered in black cloth. The processing tanks were muffled by the cackling laughter of players and their GMs. It was a small but passionate gathering of the Baltimore gaming community.
Justin Sirois from Severed Books organized a casual meeting of me, John deCampos from Terrible Games, and Brandon Welch to GM our spooky games for anyone available to hang out for 3 hours on a Thursday night. Nothing to sell. Just good gaming and good vibes. About 11 other people showed up, eventually dividing into 3 tables and playing games for the evening. Most of my scheduled players canceled at the last minute, but I showed up anyway and was lucky enough to reel in 2 psychopomps for a macabre session of A Most Brilliant Spark. |  | The atmosphere was lively. Every once in a while, someone would get up, go to the bar, and ask the room if they could grab anyone else a drink. Most of the evening's soundscape was filled with character dialogue, dice rolling, and the hum of a half dozen fermenting vats. I’d strike up a random conversation with a non-gaming patron at the brewery on my way to the bar, often answering their questions about what we were doing in the back and what a roleplaying game is. It’s conversations like these that make organized gaming at a public venue so fascinating to me.
I’ve attended pretty much every game event Justin has organized at Peabody Heights Brewery since 2024. Some had explosive attendance while others were a little more cozy, but they were all hits with not a single miss. I say this because our little brewery game night reminded me that when it comes to building community, persistence matters more than results. Justin continues to host TTRPG events year-round, featuring local game designers at a venue that’s not a game store. As time rolls by, I notice more people picking up roleplaying games as a new hobby simply because they’ve stumbled upon one of these events. The momentum is slow but surely steady.
Justin said this kind of Halloween game night was a small test for a bigger version planned for next year. While he referred to that night as a single event with room for improvement, I couldn't help but see it as another community pillar in place to hold up a larger foundation he began building years earlier. At least four TTRPG events are now held annually at Peabody Heights Brewery, our community’s new 3rd space for gaming. If game store venues are our HQs, then everywhere else can be the front lines where we expand interest in our favorite hobby. |  | The persistent act of trying can make great impacts down the line, but those impacts can be hard to see while you’re in the thick of it. As a self-publisher who relies on crowdfunding to propel my business forward, I often fall into the anticipatory stress of concocting the “perfect event,” sometimes reluctant to move forward for fear of failure. Now, I see that persistence is the antithesis of failure. We are in a community-based industry, so the phrase “go big or go home” is absolute bullshit. We just need to keep going. Every organized game night, every funding event, every new release is another building block that connects people together. We are the quiet corner that reaches out so the weirdos can gather after the sun goes down.
If you’re in the Baltimore area, another free, unconventional game night is happening at Animal Boy sandwich shop and bar on October 12th, 6 pm- 9 pm: Horror RPG Nite, hosted by Brandon Welch and Mortua Manu. | | |
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ArcaneCon Northampton, MA – October 16th & 17th |
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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. |
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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 |
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