Yesterday, I launched my 2025 Zine Month project: Silver Age. It funded in the first three hours and has already hit two stretch goals!
It's a Liminal Horror-inspired Mark of the Odd game of small-town werewolves, their packs, the territories they protect, their anchors in the human world, and the ancient metal that fuels their frenzy, euphoria, and magic. It's my love letter to Jack Williamson's Darker than You Think, T.J. Klune's Wolfsong, Phillip Wessel's "Pack of Strays," and too many late nights spent playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse. But it has more of me in there than just my love of werewolves.
Hattie, TX, the built-in setting of Silver Age, is a tough place to love (and even tougher to like).
Inspired by the years I spent living in West Texas and the odd beauty of Coke County, it's named for Miss Hattie's Bordello Museum in San Angelo and deeply implicated in the problems of the 1990s and 2020s: American militarism, private prisons, the carceral state. It's a town whose fathers' sold its soul and got almost nothing in return. It still needs heroes, and in Silver Age, those heroes are the monsters Hattie's town fathers would never choose and could never deserve.
There's still life and beauty there: low peaks, rolling hills, dusty sunsets, and a few people who want to want to be good.
The first scenario takes place over one lunar month during the tail-end of winter 1991. America's latest round of military adventures is winding down while Hattie's demons stalk the night, turning this little town into their lab for dreadful and new research, with Hattie's pack as their first grand experiment.
I first played Into the Odd in 2015 and almost immediately fell in love: industrial Bastionland (followed by Electric Bastionland) and the forests of Cairn sold me on how glorious a Mark of the Odd game could be. Liminal Horror (and then Mythic Bastionland) pushed Into the Odd's core design to go in new directions, with Liminal Horror and Mythic Bastionland both quickly becoming two of my favorite games. Back in 2022, I began jotting notes on ways to make Liminal Horror work as a werewolf game, and those ultimately congealed into a set of rules I could take to Metatopia 2024 for playtesting. The playtest worked well, as have the playtests since.
While I'm still editing and refining the playtest version, you can pick up the quickstart and preview here on Itch. You (yes, You!) can even sign up for a one-shot playtest.
Please consider backing Silver Age. There's a hardship tier if you're interested while funds are tight, and options for some higher-end add-ons like art cards (or copies of some of my other games).
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