Beyond the Weird Zine, Vol 1 by Christopher Mennell

Howdy everyone! I hope you’re all doing awesome and kicking ass!

My buddy, and delightful chap, Christopher Mennell has released volume 1 of his Beyond the Weird Zine!

I backed this as a kickstarter and really dig the PDF. The art is evocative and fun. It does the two most important things: 1) it gets my brain going with ideas and and 2) makes me want to play it.

Mr. Mennell has a keen eye on art, is a genuinely nice motherfucker, and I recommend taking a gander at the zine and supporting a cool indy DIY game developer!

You can see more of the exciting shit Christopher is doing on his blog, Beyond the Weird.

Zine Summary

Everything you hold precious and dear is gone. Earth is no more, just a nameless star system’s asteroid field. Humans proliferate across countless worlds and moons and artificial bodies.

Like rats.

Their Government is a mostly autonomous industrial machine buried in bureaucracy with disparate agencies operating in tandem towards similar goals, bogging down everyone in physical paperwork, outdated filing systems and grinding all social progress to a slow, barely perceptible crawl. War rages on the border against an assortment of difficult opponents— like the Tleilaxan Order and the psychosphere’s hordes, among others.

Meanwhile, the various Departments of Xeno Science and Xenological Study have “contracted” new conscripts through the government’s official mandatory employment office for exploratory missions of discovery in the Unknown Reaches: exploring new worlds, cataloging life forms and plant life, and assessing mineral composition for future colonization and government exploitation. In exchange, conscripted scientists permanent debt is partially erased and they earn credits for every novel discovery.

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Beyond the Weird: The Zine is a brand new science fiction role playing game setting with a built in set of simple rules so players can immediately start playing in the harsh setting of Beyond the Weird. Players are “field scientists” — explorers — sent to distant, exotic worlds and left to fend for themselves as they make various ‘discoveries’.

The experience can be very lethal, but new conscripts are easy to generate and drop into play.