Greetings, pilots!

Between working on a few different RPGs, a full time job, and a young family, I don’t always commit the time I should to marketing and community management. So I missed a few really exciting things After\\Burner-related over the last several months. I just wanted to highlight a couple here:

THE ORBITSONS CAMPAIGN SETTING

I was kicking myself when I discovered there was a “dogfight” themed game jam from RPG Talk. But as I glanced through the entries, I discovered there was some After\\Burner representation there! Author Dave Sanborn entered his campaign setting “The Orbitsons!” It was a blast to discover third party After\\Burner content was out there in the wild that I hadn’t seen!

The Orbitsons introduces a future where the ‘Haves’ live in glittering cities high above the clouds - while the ‘Have Nots’ scrape by on Earth’s pollution-ravaged surface. This grown-up reimagining of the classic Hannah Barbara futuristic family puts you in the cockpit of sky cars serving the mercenary Orbitson Agency as they take jobs from a colorful variety of factions. This is a kind of “first look” at where The Orbitsons could wind up, so while there aren’t Bandit stat blocks or new weapons and modules or anything, there’s plenty of inspirational material to get you in the skies!

You can download The Orbitsons for free.

MIDGARDIA RPG ACTUAL PLAY

I goofed hard in missing this one, because it’s great! The folks at Midgardia do actual plays of a ton of different games as well as interviewing rad designers and more. A few months back they took Operation Snowblind - the After\\Burner one-shot introductory adventure - for a shakedown run on stream. Having only experienced my home group playing and playtesting the game, it was so awesome to watch the stream! Both halves of the session are available on YouTube right now - I highly recommend you give it a watch - it’s a marvelous way to get a feel for how the game plays. Much, much appreciation to Pickles, Garm, and Tactile_Kinetcs for putting the game on stream with some stellar presentation.

You can find HOURS of great TTRPG actual plays over at:  Midgardia - YouTube

Watch the first episode here:  AFTER\\BURNER: Operation Snowblind, part 1. - YouTube

…and continue to part 2:  AFTER\\BURNER: Operation Snowblind, part 2 - YouTube

(…Which also reminds me I need to hop in and make some updates to Operation Snowblind to bring it current with the most recent After\\Burner version!)

Clearly, catching up with these months after their release is evidence of my miserable community management skills! So by all means - if you’ve been playing the game, have an actual play session coming up, third party content you’ve been working on, a game review, or anything else related - please feel welcome to let me know about it so I can shout-out your work.

HOW IS THAT LUMEN 2.0 PROGRESS COMING…

Uh, slow! I’d blame it on a newborn baby but…actually yeah, I will blame it on that. Anyway, notes are coming together and a fairly stripped-down playtest version is in the works. The plan as it is right now - is to post a kind of “skunkworks” playtest document (for free) and encourage folks to give it a go (my capacity to playtest these days is somewhat limited). I’ll make continual tweaks until it feels like 2.0 is ready to go. At the same time, I may make incremental updates to the “Legacy” After\\Burner as well, so both takes on the game will be supported even if 2.0 is going to be getting the lion’s share of the love.

For those who may not be following Spencer’s work on what a next generation of Lumen looks like, games are already in existence that more or less live under the Lumen 2.0 identity. The big changes are a move to a diceless system, using your three stats (Now envisioned as “approaches”) as a kind of token system. Any action you take succeeds - but the availability of your stat tokens and the suitability of the stat you choose determines if it is a full success, or success with minor or major complication. Expect After\\Burner 2.0 to drift from this to some degree but the core notions are there.

That’s what I have for now. As always, good hunting, pilots!