Hay! Welcome to the Season of Bureaucracy update from Aldercone Studio! We've been pretty busy these last few months, and we think we've finally figured out our pace for newsletters: five times a year! Look for our next one in January for the Season of The Aftermath. Also happy Halloween, we hope you have a sufficiently scary and delightful October, which is our favorite month. ⛧
Aldercone Catkins!
We joined a 1-Page TTRPG Jam back in June! It was an exciting month and we made two really amazing 1-Page TTRPGs and had a lot of laughs along the way. Each one took about two weeks to make, and we had a lot of fun testing them, and playing with ideas. We even generated a bunch more ideas than we needed, so look forward to more 1-page and short TTRPGs.
Check them out!
Creature Feature the TTRPG
[image description: A black, white and red poster with various clip art of monster things; the main subject is a large bear menacing a couple of people yelling AHHHH; Text says "The TTRPG Creature Feature by Alercone Studio".]
Our first 1-Page TTRPG is Creature Feature, which puts the players into an 80s B-movie to survive, or not! Cas and Evel watch tons of old and/or bad movies, which was a big inspiration.
Links:
You can also get a cool movie poster of the game, including a version that has the rules.
The card pack version works as a cool portable rules card, and you can write on the back of it!
[image description: A photograph of the creature feature rules on a cardboard card, it is black text on green, with all the rules in a small font. At the top it says The TTRPG Creature Feature and below, By Aldercone Studio, and there are various pictures of monsters strewn throughout the columns of text]
AAA Transit - TTRPG Zine
[image description: An advertisement meant to look like a Yellow Pages listing. It has text that says: A.A.A. Transit, Fast and Safe* service to Alpha Centauri Delta-1. Alcubierre - Ultimate Comfort - Non-Inertial - Faster than Light! Luxury Human Accommodations. Leaving weekly from LEO Spaceport Sigma Book your transit, TODAY! Brought to you by Aldercone Studio]
Our second 1-Page TTRPG is AAA Transit, where players attempt to repair absurd problems with equally absurd solutions on a Luxury Human Transport, in space!
Link:
Music!!!
It's been a very musical few months, too!
We've thusfar mostly released music on BandCamp but winds are changing in that camp due to them being acquired, and [half of the staff being laid off](https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-team-was-laid-off/) and another relevant article. We don't know what will come of BandCamp but we've started putting our Musics on our Itch.io as an alternative! See them all at https://itch.io/c/3676667/music
We also put out two new releases this month, a single from our more technoey thing MotherEthernet and a full album from our droneambient thing K-23:
Heckin Technology!
[Image description: A picture of a chubby, fuchsia cartoon kobold with small horns holding an alder branch. Above, rainbow text reads Aldercone Studio. Below, text reads Heckin' Technology]
Turns out we make software now! We released our source-available things on our now Git thingy called Heckin' Technology. There are various more or less useful releases there, and its where we'll be putting all of our source-available things! Some exciting game tooling coming soon.
heckimp / P.I.K.A.
[image description: a circle containing the face and shoulders of a cartoon goat drawn as a stuffed animal; it has stitch details and button eyes; above it is an inverted pentagram, and the word Heckimp]
A major project we got some crowd funding for in August was our Heckimp project, which is a project to create a tool for doing sustainable renames of the GnuImp code base. GnuImp usually goes by a name which is an abusive slur in many English-speaking cultures, and it's been an ongoing issue to get them to rename it (they won't). Instead, we've made a tool which does the rename at the code level leaving you with a neat rebranded fork. It isn't 100% done, but does most of the work like magic. It is still a very advanced user tool (you'll need to be pretty good at compiling things to use it).
We've also created our own fork of GnuImp called P.I.K.A. (Photo and Image Kooker Application), which builds pretty well on Linux (still, for advanced users). We'll be working on getting Linux builds in the near future but could really use some help with Windows builds!
[image description: A cartoon picture of a Pika (small cute rodent) head in profile, white with a black outline and details, which serves as the icon for P.I.K.A.]
For micro updates, check us out on the fediverse!
We talk about our work constantly on Fediverse! We've merged our invdividual fedi accounts into our single @[email protected] account, so follow us there!