March Update
2 months ago – Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 04:21:31 AM

Hey everyone, 

We’re making progress on the layout of the book, which is complicated and time intensive! All the manuscripts for everything have been submitted and either in editing or in the final stages of editing for some stragglers, and we’re progressing well with art. 

To be fully up front, we’re not going to be able to deliver all our digitals in March, and we’re estimating physical fulfilment in the summer at this current rate. We’ll keep you updated on this timeline, but I’d consider June/July a realistic physical fulfilment rate. 

We’ve added a lot of stretch goals, which has created strain on our core creative team, and we want everything we produce to be as good as possible, and from the outset we have refuse to compromise on quality to rush stuff out. 

BackerKit

Our long awaited Backerkit webstore is now LIVE. You should have all had an email to the address you backed this project on, inviting you to fill out a survey. You’ll be able to add new books and weird stuff. This will be your first opportunity to grab the PROP KIT we’re doing (as we added this stretch goal after the project finished!), as well as dice, which we forgot to add to the original Kickstarter because we’re idiots. 

Please share this pre-order link with your pals, so they can get in on this project of goodness and bookness. 

But let’s share some more good news and do some TEASERS. 

The Wanderer

Josh has been working on art for Orbital Blues: The Wanderer, written by Elliot Davis, and we can show you the work-in-progress cover. This book has a different art style to the rest of Josh’s Orbital Blues work, while keeping a lot of the same subject matter and themes. It’s sketchier, and more painterly and experimental, not aiming for something photorealistic or in-universe, like we do with the art for other OB projects. 

Music

We’ve got more music for you… BE/HOLD has been slowly drip-feeding the remaining pieces for GODSPEED on all good streaming services, with the full EP available on the 19th March. 

If you want to check it out early, you can grab a pay-what-you-want copy on bandcamp here. 

Meanwhile Chris’ jazz-inspired EP, Afterburn (by the Deltas) is also on bandcamp RIGHT NOW, with streaming services uploading soon and hopefully out by the end of the week. 

We’ll be distributing Bandcamp codes to backers who pledge for a physical cassette, but once we start charging cards via Backerkit. At this point, you’ll be able to get all of your WAV and MP3 files directly, but for now streaming services and Bandcamp are the best way to enjoy these new EPs! They’ll be available to everyone here (not dependant on pledge level), and those special downloadable files will be just available to those who buy the cassettes. 

We’ll be back soon with more info, hopefully showing off some fancy spreads from the Afterburn book, which is deep in the layout trenches as we speak! 

Thanks 

~ Zach

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.

Encyclopedias and Music - The Orbital Blues Experience
4 months ago – Wed, Jan 10, 2024 at 07:46:25 AM

We’ve been quiet because there’s not much sexy to talk about in Orbital Blues land. We’re working in the background, commissioning and briefing creatives, doing contracts, listening to music, editing manuscripts, giving feedback and generally being busy bees (in cowboy hats). 

We’re maybe a little bit behind schedule (we really did agree to a lot of stretch goals), but we’re confident we can deliver everything we set out to do in good time. We will host BackerKit pre-orders and pledge management soon! 

If you backed for the Orbital Blues: Core Book as part of the project, you should have had an email on DriveThruRPG over Christmas with a PDF coupon you should be able to claim while you wait for us to fulfil physicals. We normally fulfill these through our webstore, but it was closed over Christmas so we had to use DriveThru instead. 

Previews

We’ve got a few bits to show you in the meanwhile. 

Josh has been hard at work on some diegetic encyclopedia/lore pieces for the Red Shift Runners, detailing the planet-wide city of Ediston. This is such a dense and flavourful location in the adventure, we thought we’d try and make some in-world information about the city to round out what we managed to put in the rest of the manuscript. Orbital Blues adventures are all about imparting a sense of place and culture onto the GM and players, making filling in the gaps for the rest of the setting so much easier. These kinds of pieces are a great way to do just that. 

We also have some music teasers from Chris Bissette and Be/Hold. 

You can listen to The Rambler from Be/Hold’s album: GODSPEED. The Rambler is a country inspired piece, heavy on the banjo, that I can totally imagine on some dusty space highway somewhere.  

You can also listen to Land Of The Dead from Chris Bisette’s album: AFTERBURN. Land Of The Dead is a chilled piano-driven track that builds into the soundtrack to an epic flight across the stars. It features samples from Flash Gordon, and transatlantic accents talking about space technobabble is a trusted Orbital Blues vibe. It's from season 1 episode 7 of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, which is also called Land Of The Dead.

You’ll hear more from us soon over the next few months, with more news and updates for you, as well as digital releases when we have them. 

Thanks 

~ Zach

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.

PROJECT FUNDED!! Thank you and what's next ...
6 months ago – Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 04:31:04 AM

A massive thank you to everyone who backed, supported and shared our project over the last month. Here at SoulMuppet we are over the moon(s) at the success of Orbital Blues: Afterburn, and simply cannot wait to make this exciting wave of products a reality, and get as many space-sad-cowboy vibes into your hands as soon as we can manage.

The next step involves a lot of work for us, and a lot of patience from you all. We’ll distribute PDFs of the stuff that has already been released in the next few weeks, and work on setting up a Backerkit to collect information about pre-orders, add-ons and shipping.

But what should you do?

First, head over to soulmuppet-store.co.uk and join our mailing list! You’ll hear from us every month with updates about new books, new conventions and anything else we think is newsworthy. There’s also a free Orbital Blues adventure in it for you: 160 Acres, where a mining company tries to relocate a frontier town, and you’re caught in the middle of the struggle.

Second, get yourself on the SoulMuppet discord where there are a whole bunch of Orbital Blues specific channels for music, inspirations, stories from your games and much more, as well as all kinds of info and chat about other the dozens of other SoulMuppet titles. https://discord.gg/UEWrXG5B

Third, stay keen and excited but give us time to get these darn books out.

But what about that 100k stretch goal???

THIS IS THE FINAL FRONTIER

We teased a secret final stretch goal, but didn’t manage to announce it before the project finished!

Here it is…

We all know you Orbital Blues fans love your in universe art, and so does Josh, so we’re making a prop kit for running the Tennessee-Five adventure from Afterburn. It’ll be a (branded) envelope filled with business cards, posters, maps and other little bits of paper that we’ll be adding as a (relatively cheap) add-on during the BackerKit, so you can pledge for it there. You can use this to give info to your players, act as a map, and maybe a few of them will be useful for solving mysteries…

We haven’t got final assets yet, since the adventure is still being edited and we’re working on some new bits of art for this piece specifically, but here is a sample of some of the kinds of bits and bobs you might find in this prop kit, using placeholder assets:

Once more, thanks again for the support. We’ll be back soon with more RPGs and more sadness and more space and a LOT more cowboy.

Thanks

~ Zach

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.

2 Days To Go! More Stretch Goals!
6 months ago – Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 04:49:57 AM

Hey everyone,

Woke up this morning and took at a look at the project, and this is now SoulMuppet highest ever funding Kickstarter! Thank you all for your support and success. We've just about 60 hours left on the project, and there's room left to grow!

We're going to throw down a couple of new stretch goals, but first off, it's time to let you know about what we've been up to!

The Wanderer

We've got one last potential stretch goal. You've all been asking for solo rules for Orbital Blues, so we're making em!

At £85k, we're happy to announce Orbital Blues: The Wanderer:

Your Final Days in the Frontier Galaxy These are your final days as an interstellar outlaw. Your crew? Long gone. Your ship? Sold for the scraps that once held it together. You’ve seen death, abandonment, and betrayal. You’ve lied, cheated, and killed. You’ve made enemies, friends, lovers, and left more than one person holding the bag.

This is a game about reflection—about your final showdown with the troubles you’ve been running from.The Wanderer is a solo-play supplement for the famed game of sad space cowboys. With the addition of a deck of playing cards and a handful of poker chips, players will reflect on the life of an outlaw and reckon with their Trouble as they attempt to build the best poker hand possible.

Written by Elliot Davis, who played Ward Jackson on the My First Dungeon season, The Wanderer is One-part journaling game, one-part playlist builder, and 100% the Orbital Blues you know and love, The Wanderer brings a new tune to the frontier galaxy. The deck is stacked against you and you’ve only got one hand left. Make it count.

This will be a free PDF for every backer, and we'll add the zine as an add-on on both Kickstarter and Backerkit. You don't want to miss this one.

Other Stretch Goals

Another thing we wanted to do as a stretch goal, but we passed the number before I could properly announce it, is a proper Orbital Blues character keeper. People are always asking for VTT support, but Orbital Blues isn't a game that thrives on fog of war or grid based combat. Instead, we're working with Ben Bond on an official OB character keeper. Ben worked on sheets for such amazing games as Brindlewood Bay and Public Access. They're so good, we wanted one too.

We've also got something secret schemed should we hit 100k... God forbid we manage such madness in this last 48 hours.

Streams

Last week our friends at Transplanarran Zach's adventure VOIDLOCK TOMBSTONE. This cagey affair of corporate black ops and ship scrapping was a real fun adventure, and we encourage you to check it out.

Tomorrow, the season finale of the My First Dungeon goes live! In Episode 4 Elevator to the Gallows, the various criminal parties of the Sutler System descended on the Undercarraige Car to watch a brawl between Jesse 'Red' Rhodes and Casey Parazzo, but little did they all know that our cowboys had plans of their own for the fight and had already thrown a spanner in the work.

Tune in to listen to You’re Gonna Carry That Weight when it releases tomorrow! It's all gonna come tumbling down, and it's going to be very very sad. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, and make sure to follow the team at My First Dungeon to get it directly on your device.

There’s not long left, please share widely, scream from the rooftops and we can shatter those final stretch goals and begin a new rebel era.

Speak soon,

~ Zach

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.

7 days to go! Sad Cowboys all over the shop!
6 months ago – Wed, Nov 08, 2023 at 03:29:27 AM

We’re heading into the last week of the project and flying closer to our next stretch goal every day!

At £70k Jess Levine (Jumpgate Games) is adding an adventure to our VHS-inspired box set of adventures.

The Mathersons kept a wealth of heirlooms and hard currency constantly moving in an unmarked, nigh-impenetrable mobile fortress, its location thought lost with the Mathersons.
Luckily for you, a client of yours has located the fabled star-train, for a split of the gig of course.
Only you'll need a living, breathing Matherson to get inside… or at least someone with enough overlap to fool the detector. Pick your partner, board the barge, and bring back the bounty.

At £80K Chris Bissette (LootTheRoom) is bringing The Deltas back, this time with an experimental-jazz fueled album of swansongs.

Chris wrote the initial Deltas ep and we're so excited to have them back! Listen to the first album over on Spotify. 

At £90K we’ll get even more goodies for the boxset with a pamphlet adventure from Alyssa Ridley from Biscuit Fund Games.

Eight years ago, sixty foundry workers from the fuel world Akhebra attacked the corporate grain-ship Tooth to Tail while it lay in dock, armed only with scavenged weaponry and a ludicrous, impossible dream – and, to even their own surprise, they succeeded. Stealing a corporate ship from right under their oppressor’s noses, the workers launched Tooth to Tail in a hasty, one-way jump to the lush planet of Gentiana, permanently converting it and its agricultural supplies into an agrarian cooperative dubbed 3T. And, for a time, Tooth to Tail’s erstwhile owners, embroiled in a war as they were, had bigger things than a single ship to worry about.

But now, prideful and vicious after their victory, they're cleaning house. Deep in the scuttled holds of Tooth to Tail lie wartime records – the kind of dirty laundry that could pose a nightmare for a PR department should they be leaked. Following the blinking beacon of the grain-ship’s black box, mercenary teams have been sent to ensure these lost assets are permanently destroyed. They assure you, should any of the ‘squatters’ living in stolen property get in the way of company procedure… the galaxy surely wouldn’t miss them.

This week on… (Orbital Blues actual play)

We’re treated to a new episode of My First Dungeon, “Elevator to the Gallows”, where the crew of the 21st Night of September begin to answer an important question:What is it you want?

Listen wherever you get your podcasts! (Spotify | Apple Podcasts)

On Wednesday 8th November (7pm ET) TransplanarRPG will be exploring Voidlock Tombstone, written by our very own Zach Cox. Join the wonderful GM Connie Chang and the rest of the Hounds as they don new (cowboy) hats in this special one shot streamed over on twitch! 

Plus, you can watch Zach and Sam talk all things Sad Space Cowboys in this week's episode of The Weekly Scroll.

We’re just under a week until the project is over, so please widely share the project, let your friends know about the project. Things are gonna start heating up soon, and we’re hoping to escape orbit and blast through those final stretch goals!

Speak soon,

~ Mol

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.