A Digest of Distractions: The First Three Months of Space Penguin Ink

Where we were, where we've come, and where we're going.

Part 1: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

Space Penguin Ink officially opened its webstore on July 6th, 2023, though the groundwork for that launch was laid much, much earlier. In fact, the earliest inklings of a plan coalesced in late 2022, and the backend work of securing funding, designing a website, setting up social media accounts, and wrangling collaborators was in place as of March. But we wanted to do it right, and we wanted to launch with a strong initial lineup, so we postponed our grand unveiling until we knew we could show off five independent games, by five different sets of creators, for four different systems.

Adrift & Distress Signals

As editor of the MOTHERSHIP core rules and longtime collaborator with Tuesday Knight Games, it was only natural that Jarrett Crader would choose to offer a few different options for the discerning sci-fi horror afficionado. Both Adrift and Distress SIgnals seek to offer something that the system hadn’t really had before: a pointcrawl and a collection of one-shots, respectively.

Owing to the popularity of the system (or their own design merits, we’d like to believe) they’re some of our best sellers.

Beyond the Silver Scream

You can’t talk about indie RPGs without talking about Goodman Game’s Dungeon Crawl Classics, one of the most successful systems to ever come out of the design space. DCC's a gnarly game, and its fans are a gnarly bunch—these are people that deal with dozens of PC deaths in the very first session.

Beyond the Silver Scream is just such a funnel, putting your players in charge of ‘80s teens on movie knight who discover a sinister cult sacrificing people right below the multiplex. It’s groovy, it’s gory, and it’s the perfect nontraditional start to a traditional fantasy campaign.

Dread Nights

Dread Nights is a standalone expansion to the 28mm wargame Forbidden Psalm, which itself is a kissing cousin twice-removed from Free League’s infamously brütal MÖRK BORG. Assemble your bastard motley of crooks, cutthroats and killers and take the fight to the devils of the night—if you survive, you might make enough to eat before the next battle.

Forbidden Psalm was a sleeper hit for the wargaming crowd, and Dread Nights has proved equally popular among the sort of people who have strong opinions about sprues.

The Garden of Corda

What MOTHERSHIP did for science-fiction, TROIKA! did for science-fantasy. It’s a delightful system that can be chopped and screwed to make just about whatever you want, as long as it’s weird. Example: The Garden of Corda, where players take on the role of scouts, medics, and myco-biologists exploring the flora that’s erupted around the heart of a dead giant floating in space. What other game could possibly give you that?

Part 2: Business Unusual

Things ticked along pretty well, but after the initial champagne was popped, imbibed, and expelled we knew it was time to get back to work. But work is hard, so we did some podcasts instead. Then we published five more books and made some tee shirts.

Prison of the Forsaken Bear God

DCC gets into your blood like few other games can. After Beyond The Silver Scream, we knew we wanted to put out something that was tailored for higher-level characters, something that would let us play with all the really wild stuff PCs can do once they have a few more hit points and magic spells.

Prison of the Forsaken Bear God is a hexcrawl and dungeon designed to make your players recognize the awesome potential of the ursine form. There’s no kind of bear we haven’t shoved into this book, and we made up half a dozen on top of that. If you’ve never gone camping in Appalachia or seen The Revenant, you might be wondering just how scary a bear can be to a party of level 6 professional adventurers. To that we can only recommend you run this adventure and find out.

Red Solstice 1, 2, & 3

If we had one problem with Troika!, it’s that other games rarely reach its level of weirdness. Red Solstice is the remedy for the routine RPG. It’s got dungeons, monsters, items, and events that can be slotted into damn near every system from AD&D to Warhammer Fantasy.

We’re realizing now that those are both fantasy games of a similar genre and playstyle and as such may not be the best examples of range, but you know what we mean. If you ever needed an elemental for the more obscure corners of the periodic table, a dozen or so magic moons, or a table for “what the hell did our wagon just run over?”, we’ve got you covered. Can’t hurt to pick up the whole set while you’re at it.

The Vulture

Honestly we were a little surprised nobody had done this one before. Come on, we know we all pretend MOTHERSHIP isn’t entirely about the A-word but it’s entirely about the A-word.

But you can’t just take a movie and turn it into a game, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars that might make you on Kickstarter. There are considerations to be made to respect the medium. And so The Vulture is more than just a Scooby-Doo haunted house chase, it’s a tense, terrifying journey into the heart of a derelict station currently home to a deadly monster that is definitely smarter than you and probably quite a bit angrier. If you’re playing MOTHERSHIP, you know it’s what your players want.

Part 3: How To Succeed in Publishing By Trying Really, Really Hard

There’s a saying in STEM that you need to “publish or perish.” That the only way to maintain relevancy and (therefore funding) is to consistently push out quality work, year after year. We think they’ve got the right idea, so here’s five more books on the horizon:

The Bloom

If you like X-Files, Twin Peaks, The Southern Reach Trilogy, or Gravity Falls, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not picking up Liminal Horror by Goblin Archives. And if you’ve already picked up the game and are looking for something suitably weird to run in it, you couldn’t do any better than The Bloom, which takes all of the influences above and brings them to a small town with big secrets and a lot of reasons to keep them.

A Dead Festival 3

The third time is the charm for unlucky crews desperate enough to risk everything to return Dr West's Experiment Fragments, unlock a mysterious Puzzle Box, or defend their forts from invading Space Penguins. A Dead Festival 3 is an expansion for the 28mm miniature skirmish games The Last War and Forbidden Psalm, and is fully compatible with the MÖRK BORG system as well.

Hodl Island

Do you like crypto, NFTs, and the blockchain? We really hope not, or this adventure might make you really mad! Hodl Island is the perfect resort destination for the nouveau rich and the rich-at-heart. It’s also a complete facade holding back a ruthless capitalist hellscape, one that’s poised to collapse at any moment. Truly an escapist fantasy beyond all imagination.

MÖRK BOLL

MÖRK BOLL is the world’s bloodiest and most beautiful game, the contest of kings and paupers alike. If you like what you got out of Forbidden Psalm and Dead Nights, but are looking for something a little dumber and a lot more destructive, look no further. Gather your 28mm miniatures, create a team, recruit your BOLLERS, hire an inappropriate mascot, and hit the pitch for gold, glory, and gore!

VR Dead

Like a flashbang grenade, VR DEAD aims to frighten and disorient. Unknowingly trapped for weeks in a virtual paradise, your players wake up to find their station on the verge of total collapse and entirely in the thrall of a possessive virtual overlord that’s hell-bent on returning them to its digital prison. They’ll have to move carefully between the two worlds in order to survive and escape with their lives and minds intact.

Part 4: The Future As We Expect It

If you think we’re resting on our laurels, we’re happy to prove you wrong. We’ve got big things in the works: systems, adventures, exclusive boxed sets, even a card game. And we’ll keep making them as long as you’ll keep buying them, playing them, and telling your friends about them.

Weird books by weird people. That’s the Space Penguin promise.