Rings Of Reminder
It wasn’t an existential threat like it was for many—but 2025 was for me still quite a wrestle. The past two years have been.
I am still not over stuff that happened in 2023. Maintaining friendships is hard; I am often angry; I always feel like I am nothing at all.
But hey! I am finally getting the therapy I need; Sharon and I have been working more on our house; and my personal + political convictions took a hard, clarifying tack left.
Unalloyed goods.
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A practice I began as a countervailing force against the internal roar of:
“You have made nothing! You are too slow a writer! You don’t know how to design games! You are not worthy to make art! You are too naive and stupid to understand the way the world works!” etc
are these rings. They don’t fit me super well and scratch easy; none of them cost me more than RM50. I like how understated they are.
I get a ring whenever I finish a personal project and it is fully out in the world. I have five rings now:
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SHRINESHARE, an art folio made with Sharon Chin and David Blandy. Featuring 16 (and counting) artists from around the world; exhibited over a half dozen (and counting) times around Malaysia and the UK. Inspired by Amze Emmons’ Help Yourself, and explores ways we can shared ideas of the sacred without depending on the temples of the state (museums, institutions).
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A PERFECT WIFE, a contemporary horror adventure made with Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and David Blandy. (Physical copies here!) About a pontianak, a refugee community, and the impunity of patriarchal power. (This ring is also shared with A CROCODILE, EATING, a shrine and art installation about how pain is metabolised, for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES. That show is the reason we made A PERFECT WIFE—it was a fundraiser to get Amanda, Scrap and me to the UK. But the crocodile should really have their own ring!)
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TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, an adventure campaign for David Blandy and Daniel Locke’s ECO MOFOS!!. About dead mecha, and what to do what to do when the ruins of hypercapitalism still poison the garden you’re trying to plant, after its collapse. Pretty personal to me, as I live next to an aging petroleum refinery; it is the focus of our IRL environmental activism. (Sequel coming soon!)
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CHAPTER SERF, a full TTRPG fan game for Warhammer 40K. (It’s free, obvs.) You play peons serving the setting’s demigod supersoldier man-children. About toil under feudal lords who were never raised to mind your humanity. My most recent project, and one am unreasonably proud of; a lot of the design work in this is me test-running stuff that will be part of my big 2026 game project, Inshallah.
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THE TIDE RETURNING, an adventure campaign for Yochai Gal’s Cairn; it is part of the Cairn 2E Box Set. About mangroves as a landscape; conflict between a settler-colonial project and an indigenous resistance; cycles of repetition, of consequence, of justice. Colonialism that I return to often, given my homeland’s own history and the horror abroad in the world today. Every return comes with more clarity.
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Because these rings are loose, when I wriggle my fingers they turn around and around and rub against each other with a pleasing (annoying?) clinking sound, and they help remind me I matter.
I am working on a book now—the wayang puppet on our library shelf isn’t ornamentation; they are both patron and research informant!
Maybe I can add another ring, soon.
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In 2026 I will still be fidgeting my fingers, clinking my rings together—but it is a tic I hope to rely on less and less, as time passes.
In 2026 I hope I will be less angry.
In 2026 I hope I can be well enough to be a better friend to the many, many people who were friends to me, who I can never adequately thank.
I hope 2026 will be kind to us, all.
I wish you all bread, and I wish you all roses.
CHAPTER SERF
CHAPTER SERF is a tabletop roleplaying game and adventure, set in Warhammer 40K, where you play those hooded peasant weirdos you sometimes spot in the backgrounds of the art.
Full PDF downloadable >>>HERE<<<
Printer-friendly version >>>HERE<<<
A5-booklet format version >>>HERE<<< (thank you @tubilak!)
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Here’s the pitch:
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CHAPTER SERF is a game about candles.
As a fan of Warhammer 40K, I think about Space Marines a lot. Space Marines are:
- Feudal aristocrats, with all the uncaring impunities that affords;
- Literal grandsons of God, with monastic habits;
- Genetically engineered super soldiers;
- Children, kidnapped and brainwashed before puberty.
These are not well-adjusted, fully-developed persons. When do they ever get the opportunity?
What would it be like, to serve such persons? To run their supply chains? Keep their households? Satisfy their desires? Clean up their messes?
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In artwork and cinematics; on miniature bases and in bitz boxes; described in comics and novels, Space Marine architecture is replete with candles.
So many candles.
A Space Marine doesn’t think about where candles come from, or what candles cost. (They think about war and xenos and traitors, stuff like that.)
A Space Marine wants candles—so there should and must be candles.
CHAPTER SERF is a game about getting an emotionally-arrested, casually-genocidal bossman demigod—to whom it would be sacrilege to say no—the candles they want.
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I keep trying to write fan TTRPGs for 40K.
The first was Paper Route, also set on a giant flying cathedral of a spaceship. I never finished it. It was called “Paper Route” because the ship was cargo hauler, transporting a planet’s worth of office paper. There were orks with origami guns, and paper-wasp tyranids, and eldar scooped up alongside a whole forest.
Where my mind was at with Paper Route was: “40K should be funny.”
The second 40K TTRPG thing I made was for Kieron Gillen / Rowan Rook & Decard’s DIE RPG. It was an adventure called “POWERSWORD PURGATORY”—a bunch of 30-year-olds, former regulars at ye-olde-FLGS, get Jumanji-ed into POWERSWORD (ie: not-Warhammer 40K) for one last hurrah.
With “POWERSWORD” I was trying to work through how I felt about the fandom, and 40K’s place in culture now. Its drift from Thatcher-era DIY nihilism to corporate-IP neatness; its earnest embrace of “xenophobia is justified actually” power fantasies.
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CHAPTER SERF is my third attempt. And my strongest, maybe?
Because it isn’t a piss-take. There are jokes in it, of course. It wouldn’t be 40K without jokes. But I am taking the Warhammer 40K setting seriously. I’m not being meta, nor winking at the reader.
I finally have something genuine to say, through all that grimdark set-dressing—about the weight of inhuman institutions crushing ordinary humanity, and what we make of the scraps soul left us:
Forcing a mother to betray her own son;
Saving a labourer from lobotomising servitorhood;
Arranging the funeral of a Space Marine’s discarded lover;
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Design-wise, I am most pleased with CHAPTER SERF’s favour mechanic.
The Imperium of Man is an extremely feudal network of bickering fiefdoms, each with iron monopolies on different facets of far-future life.
It made sense to me, to link what stuff you can have with how much factions like you. Buddy with the Mechanicus and you get access to fancy bionics and lightning guns. Piss off the astropaths? No psychic powers for you.
This is essentially a gear list married to a faction / major NPC relationship map. I like it because it removes the need for players to worry about dollars and cents—a thing that makes no sense in most 40K TTRPG framings.
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I hope people find CHAPTER SERF a fun idea. I am pretty proud of it! I particularly enjoyed writing the various vocations / professions—thinking up what sort of servants Space Marines would want / need.
I started making some sketches for it, but I can’t really spare the time to make all the art that I need—so the PDF is text, only, I’m afraid.
I did the layout myself, in Google Slides, which I know is the least efficient way to do things—but hey! If that isn’t 40K I don’t know what is.
Full PDF downloadable >>>HERE<<<
Printer-friendly version >>>HERE<<<
A5-booklet format version >>>HERE<<< (thank you @tubilak!)
