MARTE CHIMICA- TABLETOP RPG









Lately I've been thinking an unreasonable amount about field manuals. Not real ones — the strange little books that used to come packed inside old games, the dense rulebooks buried in tabletop RPGs, the photocopied zines held together with a single staple. Objects that wear in specific, personal ways depending on who owned them: bent corners, coffee rings, margin notes, rules crossed out and rewritten by hand. Somewhere in the middle of all that thinking I realized I wasn't illustrating Marte Chimica anymore. I was building a game, or at least its skeleton.







Marte Chimica Operations is turning into a small solo dungeon crawler set inside the corporate ruins of Mars. You play a corporate-owned synthhuman operator dropped into sealed facilities, abandoned labs, and quarantined bunkers with one job: get in, complete the objective, get out, ideally before whatever's still down there notices you. The influences are exactly what you'd expect if you've spent time in this setting before — MÖRK BORG's grime, STALKER's dread, old SCP entries, extraction shooters, and the kind of retro-futuristic military manual that looks like it fell out of some adjacent timeline. The design idea is that every run gets more hostile the longer it goes: you make noise, security wakes up, drones start moving, room generation starts working against you instead of for you, and a routine op curdles into a scramble for extraction. Which tracks, honestly — that's more or less the whole ethos of Marte Chimica in miniature.

It's not a direct sequel to anything, but it's clearly kin to Rotten Kingdom, a project that started as a lorebook and has since sprawled into a weird little text adventure in HTML, a run of illustrations, and an almost-finished lorebook sitting on my Gumroad, soon to land on itch as well. Different setting, different rules, same underlying habit of building a world first and only later figuring out what shape the game around it should take.





Right now the system includes procedural room generation, mission objectives with extraction mechanics, weapons and augments and utilities, enemy encounters, loot tables, and a DEFCON-style escalation track, all wrapped around one playable mission called Buried Bunker. None of it is finished. Balance is probably broken somewhere, a few items are almost certainly overtuned, and I wouldn't be surprised if entire systems get gutted and rebuilt before this is done — half the actual pleasure of designing a tabletop game seems to be watching players find every possible way to break it. Eventually I want this to grow into a small library of printable manuals, mission packs, and odd little expansions inside the Marte Chimica universe, and it'll be free, the same way the rest of the setting is free — because I mostly wanted an excuse to hold the thing in my hands. A PDF was never really the point. I want it printed, folded, annotated with stupid notes, missing pages, stained, shoved in a drawer, and found again years later.

For now, it's a work in progress. Corporate duplication expected.




The Price of Cardboard - ode to physical media in a digital world - part 1

 



Lately I've developed an unhealthy obsession with making things that can survive a dead battery.

Paper. Ink. Staples. Fold marks. Bent corners. Objects that occupy space and slowly age with the people who own them.

For years I've made things that only ever existed as pixels. Motion graphics disappear the moment the timeline closes. Renders become compressed videos. PSDs become forgotten folders. Even the internet itself feels increasingly temporary—posts vanish into feeds, links rot, platforms collapse, algorithms decide what deserves to exist today and what quietly disappears tomorrow.

I don't think it's nostalgia.

I just miss weight.

Maybe that's why my old zine has started crawling back into existence. It's why I've been spending weeks designing a set of custom cards instead of doing something sensible. It's why I'm slowly assembling a printable tabletop RPG that I genuinely hope people won't just download. I hope they'll print it. Fold it. Spill coffee on it. Lose half the character sheet. Scribble rules in the margins until it barely resembles the original.

A PDF shouldn't be the destination.

It should be the blueprint.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think I'm the only one moving in this direction. Lately I've noticed more artists making zines, tapes, CDs, stickers, books, patches, cards and strange little editions that exist outside a screen. It feels less like a trend and more like a collective instinct. As if enough years of frictionless digital everything have made us crave friction again.

The internet has a strange relationship with physical things.

Everyone romanticises handmade work until there's a price attached to it.

After weeks of drawing, revising, colour correcting, adjusting bleed margins, nudging text by fractions of a millimetre and arguing with print proofs, I realised something wonderfully stupid: eighteen pieces of printed cardboard cost almost twenty pounds to manufacture before they've travelled a single mile.





That's the contradiction I can't stop thinking about.

The price tag is part of what gives these objects their value. Not because expensive automatically means better, but because physical things refuse to pretend they're free. They have weight. They occupy shelves. They require paper, ink, time, shipping, storage, mistakes and second attempts. Every copy is proof that somebody had to make a decision.

At the same time, that price is what makes physical work so difficult to keep alive. We compare handmade objects to products manufactured by factories running around the clock. We expect independent artists to compete with industrial economies of scale while also somehow making everything affordable.

It's a strange expectation.

We celebrate DIY culture, but we've become accustomed to factory prices.

Even so...

Holding a prototype feels absurdly satisfying.

Not because it's perfect. It isn't. The latest version only exists because I found a handful of alignment issues that nobody but me would probably notice.

It feels satisfying because it escaped.

It stopped being a file.




It became something that can gather dust on a shelf, get left inside a backpack, passed to a friend, forgotten in a drawer and rediscovered years later.

Digital work spreads faster.

Physical work stays longer.

I don't think one is replacing the other. I'll still spend most of my days staring at timelines, layers and node graphs.

But lately, whenever I finish something, I keep asking myself the same question.

Could this exist in someone's hands instead?

More often than not, I hope the answer is yes.

Game Review - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

 




I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream started as a Harlan Ellison short story from 1967, about a supercomputer called AM that wipes out humanity, keeps five people alive underground, and tortures them for over a century because it was built for war and has nothing else to do with itself.

 In 1995, Cyberdreams turned it into a point-and-click adventure game, with Ellison himself co-writing it and voicing AM. That's the game I want to talk about.

What's wild is that Ellison didn't own a computer and had no real interest in games as a medium, and he still wrote his half of the script on a typewriter and insisted on being the voice of AM. His face is the in-game icon for the computer. That's not a studio doing a cute author cameo — that's a writer who didn't trust anyone else to be inside his own monster.

The game splits into five separate playable scenarios, one for each surviving character, each built around whatever specific flaw or wound AM has spent a hundred years digging into and turning into personalized torment. Because AM can conjure any reality it wants, each scenario looks completely different — one leans hard into German Expressionist angles, another sits in flat-out fantasy, another stays close to grim realism. It's not the game being visually inconsistent, it's AM being bored enough to keep redecorating hell.





The choices inside those scenarios are the part that actually gets under your skin — framed as moral dilemmas around things like insanity, rape, genocide — and it's genuinely unclear whether the game means for those choices to carry weight or whether it's just theater, since nothing you pick lets you win. Ellison said as much before release: this would be a game you cannot possibly win. Most games sell you the illusion that your choices matter. This one sells you the opposite and dares you to keep playing anyway.

It's rough — dead ends, puzzle logic that only makes sense inside AM's head, all the friction you'd expect from a studio inventing a genre nobody had tried before. But a smooth, well-signposted adventure about total helplessness would be a contradiction in terms. This one earns its incoherence honestly.



It came out in November 1995, sold poorly, and by most accounts nearly sank Cyberdreams along with it — a commercial failure on release. But it got real critical respect at the time: Computer Gaming World named it Adventure Game of the Year, and it picked up Best Game Adapted from Linear Media at that year's Computer Game Developers Conference. That split — acclaim without sales — is basically the whole story of how it became a cult title instead of a commercial one. Nobody bought it in 1995 and everybody found it afterward, on GOG, on Steam, through word of mouth about how disturbing it was.



The reception has stayed strangely consistent across thirty years. Adventure Gamers called it hard to review because it's genuinely unsettling rather than fun, and said as much outright — that whether it's actually entertaining is beside the point next to whether it's worth experiencing. Metacritic's user reviews still split the same way they must have in '95: people calling it monumentally messed up and hostile to the player, right next to people saying they enjoyed banging their heads against the puzzles because each chapter handed them a different protagonist and a different visual world to get lost in. Gamereactor, reviewing the recent Nightdive rerelease, put it plainly — the puzzles are mostly straightforward except for one chapter's MacGyver logic, but the game shows its age everywhere else, bugs and interface roughness included. Nobody who's written about this game in three decades has claimed it plays well. They just keep insisting it's worth playing anyway.



I played some of it, never finished it, and that tracks with basically everything I just described. It's punishing and clunky in a way that never quite lets up, and at some point I stopped caring whether I solved the next puzzle and started just sitting with what the game was doing to me. That might be the most honest way to engage with it, actually — this isn't a game you play for plot payoff, since the plot is mostly AM restaging the same cruelty in five different rooms. It's a game you care about as an experience, a specific unpleasant thing that happened to you, and the roughness isn't separate from that, it's load-bearing. A smoother game would let you finish it. This one just makes you carry it around unfinished, which is maybe the closest a videogame has come to actually doing to a player what AM does to Ted.

You can torture yourself here for peanuts