Peeking Out Like a Little Mouse

After 4 weird years, I have finally fulfilled my For Small Creatures Such As We Kickstarter.

If you don’t know already, FSCSAW is my sci-fi journalling RPG heavily inspired by Becky Chamber’s Wayfarers series as well as Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and Farscape. It gives you a galaxy to explore and systems to generate alien crewmates. As you play, you’ll learn about your crewmates’ cultures, biologies, backstories, and lives as you explore and take on missions to make ends meet. You can mine asteroids, undertake research missions, explore uncharted worlds, become a diplomat, cargo hauler, space detective, get embroiled in various alien MLMs or do about a kajillion other things because I got excited and packed it full of all my favourite stuff. The result was my initial Kickstarter promise of a 60 page zine became a 256 page B5 tome that has been nominated for several awards and generally been well received by customers for the past two years.

The Kickstarter’s main sticking point was that I had, foolishly, promised 3 in-print expansions and as the game grew, so did they. In the end I am very, very proud of the work I’ve done on FSCSAW and these expansions which allow you to explore concepts of love and sexuality; take part in a galactic war or try to stay out of it as the galaxy changes arounds you; or dive deep into the field of xenozoology and help the animals on a dying planet.

But my god was it a lot more work than I ever thought it would be.

Apothecaria expansions are pretty straightforward as the mechanics are quite simple and each one is pretty self contained. That wasn’t the case with these as each one can interact with the others and the base game and theoretical future expansions. And as FSCSAW has a lot of moving parts, trying to incorporate the new systems from these expansions in took a lot of time. The War! expansion I near enough started from scratch after realising the combat system I had wasn’t fun and had been beating my head against it for a year. Thankfully tearing it out and starting again meant I could include something much better but then that meant there was a load of editing to be done to catch all the bits that referenced old mechanics.

Basically what I’m saying is, make simple games. Complex games are hard to make and the designers behind things like Traveller deserve a hug and a raise.

Fulfillment alone for these Kickstarter rewards has taken a month. Mostly padded out by a deep desire to not pack orders as it is mentally, physically, and financially exhausting. Thankfully - excluding a handful that we missed - we have now shipped everything! It took 5 car trips to the post office, the last two of which we piled so many books in that my rear bumper was practically scraping along the road but it’s done!

There are some damaged copies we need to get Royal Mail to sort out but that’s to be expected when you send out 650+ orders.

Since starting this project I’ve gone through so many major life changes that I hardly feel like the same person. I started making games properly in 2020 and did the FSCSAW Kickstarter in 2022 which means it was closer to the start of my career than it is to now! Since starting FSCSAW I’ve learned to drive; bought a house; took up circus, did a month long course, stopped for a while then did a year long circus course; been to Gibraltar, America and Brazil; lost my dad to cancer; made new friends and rekindled old friendships; made who knows how many other games AND finally wrote my novel.

Cost

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling like I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get outside, to breathe fresh air and to try fix this tightness in my chest. Nothing was working. I could barely think straight and my speech was slow and laboured. Each word. feeling. like. it. took. effort. to. think of. I took our carbon monoxide detector up to the room to see if I’d been poisoned but it calmly informed me that there was nothing there. I searched my symptoms online - always a good idea /s - and found that I could be having some sort of heart attack. My family has a history of it, so I phoned 111 - the UK’s non-emergency helpline - and after talking to the nurse, they got me to visit the doctor and get some tests. Thankfully everything was fine. My oxygen levels were fine, lungs sounded okay, heartbeat was as normal as mine gets as I’ve got ectopic beats that go ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum-dumdum . . . . ba-dum ba- you get the picture.

Once the doctor had done his checks, he asked if I had been stressed lately and I mentioned that I’d just had to pay £15,000 to print and ship a load of books and that my house has been taken over by boxes for weeks. That the worry of paying for all this had been keeping me up at night not just recently but as far back as 2024. He determined that I wasn’t having a heart attack or other Googleitis. It was just a good old fashioned panic attack. That was good news but it made me stop and assess myself. Since 2024, maybe even further back but definitely 2024, I’ve had difficulty sleeping. I grind my teeth in my sleep to the point of headaches. I jump at the slightest noise and picture fires, floods, burglars, financial ruin, murderers, and whatever else I need to not be able to settle down. Before I made Apothecaria, I used to be afraid of witches and would picture evil old women creeping into my room at night. I don’t know why I was so scared of witches but I used roleplaying to get comfortable around them and now I picture gentle older women pottering around magical gardens rather than malicious mages making me choke on insects.

In the last year or so, I’ve been picking up more and more injuries. It turns out stress inhibits your body’s ability to heal so that explains that. It apparently also uses up your body’s reserves of certain things which explains why I’m getting injured so easily in the first place. In the lead up to F-Day - Fulfillment day for those of you not deployed to Fort Boxington with the rest of us - I had two solid weeks of headaches. I’d been feeling sick since November with barely a week’s break between bouts of illness. And all the while, I was pushing on with the belief that I just needed to get the project done.

In hindsight, I could have done a million things differently and I’m lucky that I’ve got a health minded partner who has done her best to make me take breaks, eat healthy, and exercise at an appropriate rate. Without her, I imagine I might have pushed myself into something a lot worse.

Thankfully, FSCSAW is done. Barring some new border closure by Trump or something, the final orders should be arriving with US backers this week or next. UK, Europe, and everywhere else should have theirs by now or at least be getting them soon. So now I can take some time off to rest and relax and focus on my health without a deadline looming over me.

Hopefully by the time the next newsletter goes out, I will be completely stress free and back to the picture of health I was a few years ago. If not, eh, I’ll try not to stress about it.

Media Of The Week

I’ve got two this week! Both bought for me by my partner as a “congratulations now sit down and play some videogames to de-stress” XD

Beast Breaker — A sort of mixture between Breakout and Monster Hunter where you play as a heroic young mouse called Skipper who must ping around, hitting the cores of these crystalline monsters that threaten their world. It’s got great humour, fun characters, and a very satisfying central mechanic of bouncing off the monsters’ bits to damage them.

And the other, still animal themed, is Raccoin which answers the question of “what if Balatro was about penny falls machines?” It is just as addictive and seeing a good run come together feels borderline euphoric.

Until next time, why not check out the Blackwell Games Patreon where you can pick up the currently Patreon exclusive Apothecaria: Dragon’s Lair.

To Patreon!