Orbital Blues: Afterburn

June 2024 Update - Wanderer + Rogue Anthems Art
6 months ago – Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:43:48 AM

Hello everyone,

The last update was a goof on my behalf. I wrote one for Inevitable and sent it to all Afterburn backers. This is not a genius work of marketing on my behalf, and I'm very sorry! 

We much prefer to come to you after a couple of months with a big update rather than just sort of saying “we’re working on it” every week. So here we go!

Afterburn

The book is in the depths of layout. The art is done, and we’re progressing incredibly well with layout. We’ve had a first draft for Afterburn done, but Orbital Blues layout is intensely iterative and requires a lot of work to get it to a point we’re happy with. We’re hoping to be done with the digital files by the end of June for an early July release after a big strong proof! 

I could show you some spreads, but very few of em are messed up, weathered and finalised, so I’m going to focus my preview powers elsewhere. 

Goals 

Everything is written and laid out! Final changes on the way, then for release in a few weeks. 

Wanna see some cool art pieces? Hell yeah. Most of these are maps or logos, since we’re trying to keep these super tight from a layout perspective. Some of my favourites Josh has done include a map of the DREAD INTERLOPER, a Void Cavalier from Voidlock Tombstone, a super stylish piece for Nameless, Aimless, and an advert for Articulated Spacetime who are the bad guys in Hard Vacuum, Cold Feet. 

The Wanderer

Once again, this is finalised and in the mid stages of layout. This should line up with the release of the Afterburn product. 

Wanna see some more art? We have so much of it! Josh has focused on a more modern, illustrative style that is less photo composite and a different style that has found its home in modern Orbital Blues. 

Everything Else

The music is out. Josh is blazing away at the prop kit. The slipcase is ready for the printers. The edits to the core book are happening. We're working on it. Don't give up, space cowboy! It's coming! Cowboy soon, I promise. Hold onto your horses and keep your thumb on the Van Keer Drive iniatiator. We're going to the moon! 

Thanks 

~ Zach

On behalf of Sleney, Clark and Cox.

Mistake Update: Correct update coming soon!
6 months ago – Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:10:09 AM

HELLO EVERYONE. I'VE WRITTEN AN UPDATE FOR THE WRONG PROJECT. 

This is not an Orbital Blues update. 

If you want to hear how Inevitable is doing, please read on. 

If not, wait half an hour and I'll get the correct one for you! 

Hey, so, fulfilment is are happening eh? (FOR INEVITABLE NOT ORBITAL BLUES) 

Fulfilment Update

Last mile fulfillment for this project took longer than we’d like. The book got to our warehouses in the UK 3 or 4 weeks ago and we’ve been working hard on getting them to the US and getting our spreadsheets ready to handle EU customs.

Here’s where we’re at on the project:  
If you haven’t filled in the Backerkit survey and paid for shipping with a functioning card, you need to go do that! 

• If you’re in the UK, your book should have been delivered last week or the week before. If you’re missing it, (and did the shipping+survey) drop us an email to [email protected] and we’ll look into it for you. 
• If you’re in the EU, your package should have been sent out by now. Your package has been shipped duty paid, so there should be no issues with taxes. You should already have it, or get it in the next few weeks. 
• If you’re not in the EU, UK or US (Rest of World), your package should have been sent out from our facility in the UK. You should already have it, or get it in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on your inbox for any customs clearance requests or fees, since we haven’t sorted perfect customs payments for every world country. 
• If you’re in the US, your package is being shipped out this or next week, following the successful arrival of our SHIPPING CONTAINER OF BOOKS at Floating Chair, our US fulfilment partner. 

Please be patient with us! 

PDF

If you haven’t got your PDF yet, please follow the following steps. 

Go to this link: https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/products/inevitable-an-arthurian-western-rpg

Make sure you use the special discount code EndOfTheWorld to reduce the payment to zero.

When you check out here, you'll also get a code that will add the game for free on your DriveThruRPG and itch.io library.

The Gun in the Stone (Fake Gun, Fake Stone) 

If you were at UK Games Expo at the start of June and passed by our stand you may have seen the craziest addition to a convention stand yet…

Inspired by the cover of Inevitable, we teamed up with CJ Shearwood who crafted this beautiful display for the IRONWOOD; the magical revolver found on the cover of Inevitable, to go alongside the brass bullet dice, gemstone dice and map of the Barren. 

Maybe I should stop letting Mol convince me to do insane things for our convention stands, but folks really enjoyed it and it became a real talking point.

Wizard Books 

Following the success of the incredibly unusual Grimoire Edition of Best Left Buried, I contacted our friends at Creative Quest and asked them to make a silly edition of Inevitable for me. 

We had two made in the moonhues of Constance and Ezra, featuring an unusual crinkly papercloth book cover, along with lil’ revolvers on the book ribbons and various metallic clasps to seal them. One of them has already been sold to a lucky punter at UKGE, but the remaining green one is up for grabs if you fancy buying a book with a lock. 

These are beautiful and bespoke handmade editions of Inevitable that we mainly intended to use as props to sell the game, but if people keep trying to buy one I’ll do a limited run for interested customers. The price point is around £300, but they’re handmade and customisable. A range of Inevitable themed colours are available. We could do them in Moonorange, Moongreen (as pictures), King’s Crimson, King’s Lilac or Barren Cream. 

If you’d like to buy one, drop an email to [email protected]. If we get enough interest, we can dance. 

See you soon! 

This will probably be the final update on this project (unless we do an Inevitable sequel). If you want to hear about more sad SoulMuppet games check out our sad gay vampire game PAINT THE TOWN RED which has a free quickstart now! https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/pages/paint-the-town-red

Good luck failing to save the world!  

Zach

March Update
9 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
11 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 ...
about 1 year 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.