#drivethru comics

[santapau]

My comic Lydia Ray is the deal of the day on Drivethru Comics.

This is a 40 pages PDF comic book, that includes 3 wacky adventures of store windows' decorator Lydia Ray, in various surreal mysteries. It also includes additional texts about the inspiration for these stories, reference pics and process sketches. I put a lot of love into it. I hope you like it!

It’s on sale today, for just $1 here.

[youtwitinmyface]

Alice: New Adventures In Wonderland

The two Lewis Carroll classics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass are two of my all-time favorite novels, so I was quite surprised and intrigued when I saw this comic. I had to look up the history online to find out where it came from, and there’s not much info, other than back in 1951, some year the original classic animated Disney film was released, a publisher…

[thegreatshono]

This weekend through November 28th you can get all of Shono's comics for 99¢ at Drive Thru Comics. So go save yourself 80%   https://www.drivethrucomics.com/browse/pub/10553/Shadows-of-Oblivion

[townytowncomics]

Tbh the ultimate pay-it-forward would be someone stepping up to pay off the U.S. national debt. 💰

[absentlyabbie]

#people are WILD #IF YOU TRAVEL OR HAVE OTHERWISE BEEN EXPOSED TO HUGE CROWDS GET FUCKING TESTED #BEFORE YOU GO ANYWHERE ELSE #Now do we KNOW not everyone is doing this? Sure #but to have this happen and then blast your dumbassery all over the internet like lawls #I saw someone on xitter say well maybe he couldn't afford a test beforehand! #blessed little moron he was almost ready to drop $800 to stay in Vegas (via @boxingcleverrr)

did yall know someone on twitter made a 10 page comic about knowingly bringing covid to fanfest

[undergroundoracle]

New Occult and Paranormal Adventures For Your Superhero Games!

Cypher Shorts: Dark Supers Shorts Vol. 1 is live! 

I'm not going to lie, this is the volume I've been waiting to get out in front of you for more than a hot minute. We're big, big fans of the supers genre in general here at UO headquarters, but the occult/paranormal corners of comics are flush with storytelling potential. Plus, it's full-on fall and we're getting in that appropriately spooky mood. 

If you were a reader of 90s Vertigo comics, you'll undoubtedly see a lot of their influence in this volume, although Kayla went with a more modern/Zach Snyder approach to 'Doom is the Cost of Power' that you're also going to love. 

This was an incredibly fun and refreshing volume to write and I would love to hear how these scenarios play out at your tables in the comments below or on the socials. 

If you're a member of the Sage or higher tier, use promo code 'SAVIOUR_MACHINE' to grab your free copy from the UO store below. (This code will expire when the next volume of shorts drops.)

Read more about what's inside below and then head over and grab your copy at the links.

UO Store | Drivethru

Enjoy and happy gaming!

~ Jess

This Volume of Cypher Shorts Includes:

A Darkening Light: The characters are each a part of the occult and supernatural underworld who have been brought together to stop a fallen angel from opening a gate to a dark dimension. Can they outmaneuver the sinister powereds protecting her before she cracks the door to the end of days?

Doom is the Cost of Power: Years ago, the characters each made a deal that made them the most powerful heroes on Earth. All that was required in exchange for their power was a favor that would be called due sometime in the future. Now, it's time to pay their tab, and it could spell the end of the world they traded their souls to protect.

The Far Side Of Town:  The characters are a team of outsiders who have been called in to deal with Reverie, a powered who has trapped a psychiatric hospital in her dreamscape. Can they get her to release her psychic hold or will they find themselves lost in the psychedelic recesses of her subconscious?

[fantasyfantasygames]

Timebreakers

Timebreakers, Uwe Jones, 2017

A lot of time travel games involve you effectively playing the time cops. You're putting things back "the way they should be". Timebreakers is not that kind of game. Timebreakers is a time-travel heist game where you seek to disrupt very specific events in very specific ways.

See, you can't just go around murdering people. That's going to cause too much change. All sorts of unrelated things go out of wack when big important people, events, or objects ("keystones") go missing. You have goals that involve keeping the good parts of the world in place. You need to be in just the right place, at just the right time, to make the small change that snowballs into the perfect effect. Well, maybe not perfect, but better anyway.

The mechanics for the game are fairly typical for a modern-day expert-level game. You have seven mental / physical / social stats, some skills, and advantages. (No disadvantages in this one.) They're rated 1-20. The system is roll-under, blackjack style. Failures on Stress Rolls (rolls made in combat or under life-or-death situations) cause Stress conditions, which penalize your attributes in specific ways. For instance, the moderate-level Sprained Leg condition penalizes all your attributes in the short term, and your Speed in the long term. There's a bit of a death spiral. There are also Juncture points, which let you do dramatic editing. You build those up by making changes to the timeline.

The mechanics of time travel involve an "operator" in the future pulling you back and forth. It's very Matrix-feeling. The GM always plays the operator, which kind of feels like a missed opportunity. There's often static on the line, and your communications device has to be either in your ear (which means people can spot it) or built into your clothing (which means someone might damage it or take it away), so you can't always jump. It's mostly a mercy-of-the-dice thing. You don't track things as carefully as Continuum does, but it's not as anything-goes as Time Liner.

The art is thin-line drawings of time travelers doing things in the past, sometimes with a chain of them all doing the same thing or reversing it back and forth. Part modern comics, part art nouveau. I think it might be a very-well-employed vector graphics bundle, but I'm not 100% sure. It's very sparse - there are only six pieces throughout the book. The layout is not great. It uses a single column across a full-sized page, which is hard to read.

The book has an antagonist section, with 19th-century stats and directions for how to alter them for previous eras. There are, naturally, time cops to deal with, but one of the potential paths you can take is to neuter them first. The GMs section gives about a dozen different "chains of coincidence" you can meddle with and that's one of them. Meddle with it wrong and you end up having to time-cop yourselves!

Timebreakers is hidden away on DriveThru. There's a typo in the name that makes it unsearchable due to a non-ASCII character.

[r-rook-studio]

Writing and Rewriting Bracknell Horror

So here's a terrible secret: in 2019, hot on the heels of the original Moonlight on Roseville Beach zine, I put some notes for a little adventure called "The Bracknell Horror." I had no illusions that it was a great investigation scenario. Still, it showed off a few things about Roseville Beach, including places and people in the town as well as the queer people who lived/visited there. It went to a location inside the setting without requiring deep lore, added some jokey Easter Egg references to Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness, and included some comically easy to use alien tech.

The problem was, I didn't really like it.

People at con sessions had fun, but there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the scenario itself, and any scenario would have been great in its place. Also, while I like to say Roseville Beach is a game of "horror comedy," there wasn't much actual horror here other than some Lovecraft references. That's also true of my other Roseville Beach scenario "The Haunting of Flora Bly," though the book has four more scenarios that are richer in horror potential.

But this summer, just before running it at A Weekend with Good Friends, I rewrote it. I talked about some of those rewrites on my blog just after the first run-through, but more have come up as I've continued to playtest this.

First, while the initial scenario centered around a wealthy occultist-adventurer named Simon Mathers, the revision has greatly warped him from that initial vision. In the early drafts, he was an occultist willing to give Dreamlands entities the bodies of Roseville Beach residents in return for access to the Dreamlands. In the new one, he's returning to our reality after 20+ years in the Dreamlands, hoping to find a body for himself (the temporary one he constructed is collapsing) and his two Dreamlands familiars.

In the original, the cult-like group of followers worked for Mathers and planned to keep doing so. In the new, none of them like each other, and each of them have their own reasons for working with him (and one might even try to kill him).

Third, I let some of my OSR influences show. Beyond making each of the named NPCs a faction of one, I've also added some NPC rivals (all of whom might end up becoming collaborators) who also all have their own motivations and agendas for finding out what Mathers' cult is up to.

Finally, while the original notes told GMs to pull from the PCs troubles and connections to determine who Mathers' cultists have captured, the new one includes a chance to target the PCs themselves, giving at least some of them a chance to sneak in and explore the Bracknell while the cult is setting up the ritual, adds some specific NPCs the cult targets, asking instead how the PCs and their contacts/troubles connect them with those people, giving their troubles and connections a motivation to insist on coming along whether they'll be helpful or not.

Dai Shugars, Roseville Beach's art director and visual designer, has put together some incredible maps that allowed me to spend less wordcount describing the space and more giving info on NPCs, creating news stories and book snippets that can serve as physical clues, and creating a better sense of how the Doom Clock progresses.

The text will come to Itch for slowfunding next Tuesday, and the final zine will include the adventure, pregens, new strange events that tie to this mystery, and the basic rules of play, so you can try it out even if you don't already own Moonlight on Roseville Beach. Think of it like a horror-comedy investigation version of a Fighting Fantasy Game Book, but maybe gayer.

This is my chance to draft and preview some of what's coming. You can pick up Moonlight on Roseville Beach (Itch | DriveThru | Spear Witch | IPR) and the current two-issue zine bundle (Itch | DriveThru), or just follow-along with the zine project that will get bundled up in Dim All the Lights. Or you can back our upcoming reprint and hardbacks Kickstarter!

[acesincomics]

Ace Characters in Comics: Shen

Shen, a main character of the comic book series The Last Session, is aromantic and asexual.

The Last Session (2021-2022) is a DnD adventure comic about friends learning to cope with all the changes that come from growing up, created by Jasmine Walls @mythjae-blog, Dozerdraws @littledozerdraws, Micah Myers, and published by Mad Cave Studios @madcavestudios.

The Last Session was nominated for YALSA's 2023 Great Graphic Novels for Teens and was named one of NYPL's 2022 Best Books for Teens.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE Jay, Lana, Drew, Walter, and Shen began playing Dice & Deathtraps in high school. Now dealing with college and all the twists and turns of their lives, their weekly game has been a wonderful constant. But, as college graduation looms and it feels like their lives are all moving down very different paths, Lana’s thrilled to finally finally complete the party’s unfinished original campaign. But when Jay’s partner Cassandra joins the game, Lana refuses to let her inexperience ruin the best part of her week! But in the end, that may be Lana and the party’s undoing…

Read The Last Session: Mad Cave Studios | Amazon | Drivethru | Global Comix | Bookshop | IndieBound [Available from Libby and Hoopla]

Created by

Jasmine Walls: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr | Ko-fi

Dozerdraws: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr | Patreon | Ko-fi

Micah Myers: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Shop

[More ace characters in comics]

[indierpgnewsletter]

New Games on Itch.io - January!

This is a post from the Indie RPG Newsletter! Before we get to the games themselves, let me talk about itch.io for a minute. The website was designed for selling videogames but the indie RPG scene adopted it like a hermit-crab chancing upon a toy truck on the beach. This has led to some strange problems. The RPG category is called “physical games”, for example. More generally, it’s a bit confusing to navigate for the average customer.

So why has this eccentric site become the host of this glorious explosion of indie game design and creativity? I can’t say for sure. Maybe its because it was designed as a protest against Steam and turns out that DriveThru has a lot of the same problems. Maybe it’s because the site makes it incredibly easy to publish games. Maybe it’s just a coincidence - a quirk of luck, just network effects compounding into something greater.

But regardless, there’s cool stuff everyday on that site - a LOT of cool stuff. So here’s my attempt at curating the games that came out in January. I found these games either by browsing the site or through people notifying me with this form. Now the important disclaimer is that I haven’t read or played most of these games. This list is me excitedly pointing out things in the shop window, take it in that spirit. My taste is idiosyncratic, so please publish your own lists! And maybe send me a link, I’d love to see them!

Itch.io January Roundup

blasé monotony by Apri describes itself as “a duet game about having conversations while bored at work” but that description hides this dramatic second act. An astronaut and someone in the control room start talking and then things start going wrong… (Free/PWYW)

Lost & Shelved by Donogh McCarthy is a solo game about a librarian finding strange and ephemeral things in the pages of returned books. I’m a sucker for anything about librarians and Donogh McCarthy is a real indie darling as far as I’m concerned.

Undisturbed by GGoldmen is a solo journalling game about dissecting human cadavers. Seems like a very thoughtful game on a grotesque subject! (Free/PWYW)

A Sage’s Salary by krushna is a solo game about a student and their sage. From an Indian designer, sages aren’t neutral figures - they’re a caste. Which makes this more interesting! I started playing but haven’t finished my playthrough of this.

Apocalypse Roadtrip by Mynar Lenahan is a forged in the dark game where you dodge “roaming Kaiju, military bombings, otherworldly cryptids, UFO fleets, and other survivors (friendly and not)”. That sounds like a good time!

5 Act Play by K-Ramstack is a solo roleplaying game where you create a 5 Act Shakespearean play based around prompts.

Dice of War by Torsten Kaltenecker is a comic game about “battles, historians and intellectual disagreements”. Um, yes! Also bonus points for “sulking in a dignified way is recommended”. (Free/PWYW)

The Belles of the Ball is an adventure by boyproblems for Heroes of Myth and Mettle. “A masquerade ball, an ancient mysterious city, a wealthy man playing at vigilante, and the Zool Chamber of Commerce. It's a party you won't want to miss.” (Free/PWYW)

Conflictus Ad Astra by Gabriel Ciprés is an expansion for the very cool (and free) game Space Knights, which is a kind of PbtA Warhammer where each player controls their own legion. (Free/PWYW)

Cold Decisions: The Cult of Namenlos by Mundos Infinitos is a “cult simulator” and honestly, enough said.

Honourable mentions: A complete, final version of Apocalypse Frame, the fast and tactical mecha game, came out this month. Also, D12 and Delve is a dungeon-delving RPG in 12 words by WH Arthur where your character is a business card.

[gunkfactory128kbps]

every cartoons nerd that dubs some lame fan comic has the exact vocal intonation of the type of person who complains about every experience they have in the starbucks drivethru

[santapau]

My comic Lydia Ray is the deal of the day on Drivethru Comics.

This is a 40 pages PDF comic book that includes 3 wacky adventures of store windows’ decorator Lydia Ray, in various surreal mysteries. It also includes additional texts about the inspiration for these stories, reference pics and process sketches. I hope you like it!

Reviews are also much appreciated! Thanks.

It’s on sale today June 5, for just $2 here.

[dataverse-comics]

🌌🚀Armed with superpowers and an array of unique weapons, Datacell battles evil aliens, mutants, and cyborgs threatening our world.🚀🌌

💥Read #0 FREE: https://datacellhq.cfw.me/

💥Buy PDF Comic Links: ✨AMAZON: http://tinyurl.com/Datacell1 ✨DRIVETHRU COMICS: http://tinyurl.com/Datacell1alt

[professionallydeadinside]

my dad's side of the family pretty much all died before i was born (except my dad of course but he only waited about 16 more years to follow suit :/) but it was my mom's side of the family that sucks anyway (mostly my maternal grandfather's side. jesus christ those people were more toxic than a waste dump) but anyway now THEY'RE all dead so its just me, my mom, and my maternal grandmother for thanksgiving. usually i'm a little sad that i have basically no extended family but around thanksgiving its more like HAHA YES... MORE FOOD FOR ME!! NO ARGUMENTS!!!! also sorry if this is WAYYY too much oversharing so to make up for it i will also inform you that today while getting ready to start cooking, i dropped a piece of cabbage and found out that the cat we got earlier this year LOVES cabbage and will eat it with much enthusiasm despite any and all attempts to miette him out of the way. god himself could come down and try to move this cat but he will not budge until he has devoured all cabbage in the immediate vicinity. feel free to respond with the mcdonalds drivethru comic. also i love your art btw

Thanks!! This sure was an ask! Imagine the McDonald’s comic I don’t have it on hand wajndjdnnd

[townytowncomics]

Remember to pay it forward. No matter the cost. Just pay it forward. Stop asking questions.

[night-dark-woods]

ID. the reaction image that is a comic of an anon saying something to a drivethru employee who stares at them in shock while holding a drink tray. in this version the dunkin' donuts Ds have been drawn on the cups. End ID.

Hello from Cambridge, where I almost just ran over Elizabeth Warren at the Porter Square Star Market with my shopping cart full of Dunkin brand coffee grounds. Seemed like the kind of thing worth sending to you