Backwards: Regional American Gothic Horror

As Promised... New Game Announcement
11 months ago – Wed, Apr 02, 2025 at 07:08:00 AM

As I reach the final stages of this Kickstarter, I'm excited to announce the release of a game that I've been working on in my spare time, and that is Rust Never Sleeps: a grunge solo rpg about doomed mech pilots, set in the post-apocalyptic pacific northwest...

The Beta edition will be released on 5/01/25. You can claim your copy for free before its released! More information is below.

Rust Never Sleeps is a grunge solo ttrpg about doomed mecha pilots fighting a hopeless war against an authoritarian. 

What is Rust Never Sleeps?

In Rust Never Sleeps, you play as a grunge mecha pilot, and your mecha’s battery pack is represented by a deck of cards. Go on missions and follow journal prompts, while using blackjack mechanics to pilot your machine and punching the big red button for a boost. But don’t bust! You'll burn through energy, and your rustbucket explodes when your battery runs out! Complete your missions before you run out of cards.

If you survive long enough to upgrade your rustbucket, you can gain special abilities. Color in the upgrades on your character sheet, connect parts to your battery, and light up bulbs in your cockpit.

Claim your free copy at bit.ly/RNS-itch for a limited time.

What do you need to play?

This tabletop roleplaying game is played with a standard deck of cards, a printed character sheet, coloring utensils, and a music playlist.

THE DECK OF CARDS IS YOUR BATTERY PACK. 
Every time you use your mech, you expend energy and take one step closer to burning out. Don’t run out of cards!

PUSH YOUR MECH TO THE LIMITS.
PUNCH the big red button on your schematic sheet for a boost and an extra card. But don’t “bust” or you will burn through energy.

JAM OUT TO YOUR MIXTAPE. 
Your mech came with an ancient mixtape. It seems to have a mind of its own, playing thematically relevant songs at just the right moment.

UPGRADE YOUR MECH WITH LOOT.
Collect loot to upgrade your mech’s equipment. Connect the parts on your schematic sheet and color in your mech for each upgrade.

GROW WEARY WITH EXPERIENCE.
Every mission bestows experience and skill. It also wears you down. Remove a card of your choice from your battery pack after every mission.

What’s it like to play?

In Rust Never Sleeps, you progress through journal prompts as a doomed mech pilot. You use your pilot’s skills or your mech’s equipment to complete tasks, overcome obstacles, and complete challenges for your mission. 

You get to decide which skill checks or equipment checks to make, and you can make any type of check, so long as it is narratively congruent with the plot.

But every check that you make uses up your cards and draws on your battery pack. You must complete your mission before the deck runs out.

The Story

THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON...
A catastrophic event known as The End wiped out the world and most major cities in the United States. The southeastern region of Washington state was turned into arid wasteland after a series of explosions at one of the WPPSS nuclear power plants. The area is still recovering.

AN AUTHORITARIAN IS IN POWER...
After a century of conflict and infighting, a demagogue named Colin Martin-Guy rose to prominence, promising an escape from the disfigured northwest by terraforming Mars. He became the first unified leader of the Washington Territories. As The Commander, he instituted a birth tax, established draconian censorship measures, and outlawed minimum wage. Then, he canceled the election. He canceled the next one too.

YOU’RE IN THE RESISTANCE...
Everyone says that he has amassed too much power to be stopped. Some have risen against him anyway, and you have joined them. You dedicated the last several months of your life to training at a secret base in the southeastern wasteland of Washington. You’re going to pilot a rustbucket for the rebel cause.

YOU HAVE A RUSTBUCKET...
The rebels have stolen a small quantity of Old World mechs from the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Only the oldest models would do: Rustbuckets, which are primitive enough to be repaired with the modern technologies available to you.

YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE...
The rebels’ rustbuckets prolong the fight. In truth, they have little chance of defeating the Commander. He has numbers. He has the funds. He has the power. He has rustbuckets too.

BUT AS YOU LIKE TO REMIND YOURSELF: YOU CAN EITHER BURN OUT OR RUST.

Don't Take My Word For It...

April 2025 Update
11 months ago – Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 04:20:37 AM

April 2025 Update

This is our monthly crowdfunding update for April. If you’d like to hear more from us, you can check us out on bluesky, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on itch, or chat with us in our discord.

Hello, Backwards Backers!

First off: it's April 1st but there are no April Fool's Jokes here, rest assured. Just my regular update.

Where are we at? 

• Backchannels: Finished
• Backchannels Adventures: Finished
• Backwoods: Finished
• Backwoods Adventures: Finishing touches

That's right, all of the new books are done in layout, except for the finishing touches on Backwoods Adventures, which will be done this week! 

What's Next?

Print proofs through Mixam. But before that: I'm going to touch up the layout for our original books (Backwater and Backroads) as well, so that anyone getting those print version will have a consistent appearance and stat blocks.

I'm trying to go as quickly as I can while still doing quality work. I'd love to print before print prices get too wild here in the U.S...

What Else?

Last month, I mentioned that I'll be releasing a solo game that fits into the Backwards Universe. It will be a beta edition with art. I'll begin promoting it on April 2nd (tomorrow!), and folks can claim it for free, before it's officially released. I'll be sending a short announcement here, in case any of you are interested. 

I won't be kickstarting this game, but after it's release I plan to pull together a slow-funding campaign via itch and a special newsletter so that I can hire one or two guest writers and eventually make a print run.

Speaking of... I'll be changing up the Backwards Tabletop newsletter while I slow-fund the game. The game is about doomed mecha pilots in the post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest, and so, the BwT newsletter will feature mecha ttrpg content over the next year, at least.

You can subscribe to the newsletter or manage your subscription on the Backwards Tabletop website.

More on the game soon!

Previews

Remember, these proofs are through DTRPG. They do not represent the high-quality prints that you will receive for your pledge. That said, I'm much happier with how the Backchannels proof turned out, compared to the Backwoods proof (which had many printer errors).

You can see better how the page and section numbers are supposed to work (hovering dangerously close but quite neatly at  the edge of the page). You can also catch the map layout of the Gulf Ward region and some fun things that I'm doing with a bottom border on some of the pages.

March 2025 Update
12 months ago – Sat, Mar 01, 2025 at 07:01:24 AM

March 2025 Update

This is our monthly crowdfunding update for March. If you’d like to hear more from us, you can check us out on bluesky, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on itch, or chat with us in our discord.

Hello, Backwards Backers!

Where are we at? 

Layout for Backchannels is finished! A print proof through DTRPG has been ordered. After it arrives, I'll send some photos. Once again, we were pretty close to hitting our estimated page count for Backchannels at 230 pages total (plus front matter, etc.). I'm pretty happy with the layout of this book, and I just adore some stuff that I got to do with manatees on a couple of the pages. 

Here is the screenshot of all 230 pages:

What's Next?

We are not done quite yet, unfortunately. There is still layout for the two adventure books, although these are much smaller books. I'd love to finish them up this month, if possible... I've already started on Backwoods Adventures, which is about 25% complete. 

What Else?

Most of my attention remains on these games; however, as designers are wont to do, I have also started on a new, short, solo game (80 pgs) that fits into the Backwards universe --- in Washington state. Distant from the rest of the American Lands, this book will take the series in a very different direction. A shout out to Nick T for some inspiring ideas about the setting.

I have worked on this project only in my spare time (outside of the time that I have scheduled for my main project), and I've been able to pull together a beta edition with art. I'll begin promoting it in April. At that time, you all will be some of the first to know about it and you'll be able to grab it for free. I won't be kickstarting this game, but I do plan to pull together a slow-funding campaign via itch and a special newsletter so that I can hire one or two guest writers and eventually make a print run.

Other than that, there are plans for two final books in the series: cover previews below - art by Isabel Burke. Both of these are likely to be shorter and less OSR or trad and more bespoke to their setting and genres: the Southwest (left) and Appalachia (right). After fulfillment finally begins for this project, I am going to turn my focus to these games, which are currently only small but exciting seeds.

Thanks for reading Backwards Tabletop Updates!

February 2025 Update
about 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 02:35:09 PM

February 2025 Update

This is our monthly crowdfunding update for February. If you’d like to hear more from us, you can check us out on bluesky, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on itch, or chat with us in our discord.

Hello, Backwards Backers!

Sometimes the American Lands feel very real. Are these books fiction? Or have we accidentally prophesied the future of this nation? There is no way to know.

There is a lot going on in the world and a lot in my personal life (work-related transitions) as well, but progress continues on the Backwards books. In fact, I'm plugging right along. You can thank my partner who has been spending their evenings studying for a licensure exam, because it means I have an extra 1-2 hours per day to work on ttrpgs!

Where are we at? 

Layout for Backchannels is almost finished! My guess is that it will be done by the end of next week, including finishing touches. And at that point, I'll order a print proof to review. After that: layout for the two new adventure books, which should go rather quickly.

The Backwoods print proof also came in. And boy am I glad that I did a print proof! 

First, let me note that we'll be using a company (Mixam) that doesn't require or provide actual printed proofs with their orders, just professional digital proofs. You can catch a lot with those, but I find an actual proof to be much more useful. Unfortunately, for books like Backwoods and Backchannels (8.5x11 at 250 pages), printing and ordering a proof on its own can be a little extra spendy. So, I start with the print-on-demand version through DriveThruRPG, which is cheaper, lower quality, and lower-stakes. 

The goal is to order a print proof that is as close to the final draft as possible when I order it from Mixam. If there are only a couple of small edits that I need to make before placing the order for a couple hundred books, I'll feel much more confident in the quality.

Bad Print Job!

Unfortunately, the DTRPG print job was one of the worst that I have seen. There were a couple of weird things, but the weirdest thing is that the pages were trimmed at a 20 degree angle or so. I even saw space beyond the bleed!!! I could identify these things pretty easily, because somehow I put a border on one of the layers in the InDesign document (which is one error that I needed to catch with a print proof)! 

I should note that DTRPG was kind enough to refund me for the proof because it obscured some things that I need to check around the bleed margins. And the employees at DTRPG are always friendly and patient, which I appreciate.

Examples of the wild trimming on the margins: The black lines in the first image show how off-kilter the trim was, and the white space in the second image is beyond the bleed margins. The illustration was commissioned with those margins in mind, and it goes up to the end of that margin. The final image shows what I was trying to track but couldn't do so reliably, due to the screwy trim job. I wanted to see how close the page numbers can get to the edge of the page.

Better Pictures!

Below are some other pictures from the proof. Remember, this is the proof for a POD version and not the high-quality version that you will receive. The color is duller, the paper is grainy and thin, there is no hardcover here, etc. Two things that I am looking for in these images: the opacity of some art (such as the maple leaf or cityscape), the proximity of chapter titles and page numbers to the edge of the page.

Other things that I caught: the InDesign file kept running into an export error, so I found a solution online and followed it. That solution impacted a few items in the book, which I have since caught. There were two places where the wrap text went wild, and there were numerous places were some cross-references (links) were updated and reset (lost some minor edits, such as removing a period from the link). 

And that's all that I have for this update! Hopefully next month I'll have photos of the proof for Backchannels as well!

Thanks for reading Backwards Tabletop Updates!

January 2025 Update
about 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 03, 2025 at 07:02:54 AM

This is our monthly crowdfunding update for January. If you’d like to hear more from us, you can check us out on bluesky or twitter, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on itch, or chat with us in our discord.

Hello, Backwards Backers!

Happy new year!

This will sound like deja vu but... the big news is that I'm migrating the Backwards Tabletop newsletter from substack to our new website!

That's right. After joining substack last month, I have already left. Why? As one Backwards Backer pointed out, they refused to moderate pro-Nazi content last year. And then last month, they announced a major partnership with Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, which has been described as "a publication that has spread misinformation on transgender youth and amplified harmful anti-trans rhetoric" among other things.

And so... Ta-da! This is our new website and newsletter all-in-one.

Crowdfunding Updates

What's new? I have finished layout on Backwoods. We estimated it would be about 250 pages. It is 256 pages. That's a pretty darn good estimate... I have ordered a print proof to see how the color comes out, check for errors, etc. You'll see it next month! 

What's next? I am beginning layout on Backchannels, which should move along fairly quickly. It is already going more quickly than Backwoods, which is to be expected. There is much less problem-solving to do. I have finished around 60 pages or so.

Updated Timeline. We're still looking at Q1 of 2025 for completion, sometime between Feb and March.

Previews

Of course, I don't have any new art previews to share, although I'm sure there are more than a few that I didn't preview for you all! Instead, I'm sharing the page-by-page overview of Backwoods in InDesign.

Oh boy. It's a big book! It doesn't even fit in one screenshot:

And that's all that I have for this update! Photos of the print proof will be coming next month, as well as an update on layout for Backchannels!

Thanks for reading Backwards Tabletop Updates!