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Blog

Art, Ethics & Drowning Moon Studios Games

In the past few weeks, there has been significant debate regarding the use of AI generated art and the software’s training methods. Because many of these applications are trained by scraping artists’ work on the internet and generating similar images without obtaining the artists’ permission…

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Joie Martin
Convention Season

For the last two years, Drowning Moon Studios has eschewed the regular convention season in favor of remaining safe from Covid 19. Now that we’re triple-vaccinated, and the amount of serious cases has been receding, we’ve decided it’s time to start traveling again…

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Joie Martin
Announcing Starkhollow Hall for Zine Month 2022!

Drowning Moon Studios will be participating in Zine Month 2022’s inaugural event this February! Zine Month (also known as Zimo) is a showcase for indie tabletop roleplaying game creators who are focused on creating smaller, more accessible products via crowdfunding. From February 17th - March 3rd, Drowning Moon Studios will be crowdfunding Starkhollow Hall, an investigative gothic fiction-inspired game set in a remote girls boarding school.

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Joie Martin
Where Did All the Larps Go?

You may have noticed that there seem to be fewer products available on the website, DTRPG and on itch. Well, don’t panic; this is all according to plan. Toward the end of this year, Drowning Moon Studios intends to release an omnibus edition of all of our larps in a single volume, so the individual games are no longer available for purchase. There were lots of reasons we chose to do this…

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Joie Martin
Conventions, Kickstarters and Current Projects

It has been a minute since we updated the Drowning Moon Studios blog, so let’s catch up while we take a moment to breathe.

After successfully funding Mage to Order on Kickstarter in February, we’re almost ready to send out softcover books to physical backers. We’ll be closing pre-orders for Mage to Order on July 15th, 2021, so make sure to order your copy while you can…

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Joie Martin
Announcing... Mage to Order!

On February 4th, 2021, Drowning Moon Studios will be launching its first crowdfunding project, Mage to Order, as part of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest 3 event! We know this is probably the first time you’re hearing of Mage to Order, and you might be curious about ZineQuest as well, so let us give you the details.

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Joie Martin
Drowning Moon Studios at Metatopia Online

This weekend, Drowning Moon Studios will be participating in Metatopia Online, where company founder Joie Martin will be co-hosting two panels on Neurodiversity in Analog Games at 3:30 - 4:30pm EST on Saturday, and How to Run Online Live Action Role Playing Games at 11:00AM - 12:00pm EST on Sunday. We’ll also be playtesting three very different games!

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Joie Martin
GenCon Online Events and Another Update

We are definitely living in a time where things change so quickly it’s difficult to keep up! Almost as soon as we made our last blog post, we pulled out of Origins Online before that show was suddenly cancelled, and rolled back a few deadlines to give us a bit of breathing room. So, we figured we should give you another update and let you know our upcoming plans for the rest of 2020.

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Joie Martin
Current Projects and 2020 Updates

It has definitely been a minute since the last time we wrote a blog for the website! Last fall was extremely busy, with playtesting Wayfaring Strange at GenCon, releasing Praedormitium in October, then playtesting Follow Me Down at Metatopia. There have also been a few larp releases since then, including individual releases Strong Female Character and Elsewhere, and mini-collection Distant Stations. Then, of course Covid-19 hit and well… the entire world has had to take a fairly large pause. So, what’s been happening with Drowning Moon Studios in the meantime?

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Joie Martin
Praedormitium Release!

As of yesterday, we decided to release our first tabletop roleplaying game, Praedormitium, here on our website, on DriveThruRPG and on Itch. Named for the transition of wakefulness to sleep, Praedormitium is a game inspired by lucid dreaming, where players portray Hypnopomps, characters with the natural ability to manipulate dreams while they adventure in the Realms of Dream. It uses tarot cards as the basis…

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Joie Martin
"Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels, Kid"

In the world of Wayfaring Strange, Wooden Nickels are what players use to perform most of their character’s actions. They are physical objects that exist simultaneously in the game world and the real world, and make up the backbone of both the in-game and out-of-game economy.

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Joie Martin
What Does it Mean to be a Wayfaring Stranger?

In our last blog entry, we talked about what it meant to be “Strange” in the world of Wayfaring Strange. This time, we’re going to discuss what it means to be a “Wayfarer.” On the surface, Wayfaring Strange is a diceless tabletop roleplaying game about hidden highways, folk magic, urban legends and all that is Strange and inexplicable about life in modern America. At its heart, however, Wayfaring Strange is also a game dedicated to exploring the concept of liminality in the American landscape. 

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Joie Martin
What do We Mean by "Strange?"

Especially if you’ve been following us on Twitter, you’ve heard us talking a lot about our in-development ttrpg Wayfaring Strange, particularly because we’ll be running 2-hour playtest sessions in the First Exposure Playtest Hall at GenCon in a couple of weeks. When we talk about Wayfaring Strange, we generally give the elevator pitch that it’s a “diceless tabletop roleplaying game that explores the concepts of hidden highways, urban legends and the necessity of survival in liminal America,” but that doesn’t necessarily get into the meat of what the game is really about. There are a lot of concepts we try to explore in Wayfaring Strange that are difficult to get into in a ten-second soundbite so, over the next few weeks, as GenCon approaches, we’re going to try to tackle a couple of those in-depth…

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Joie Martin
New Digs

It’s a little daunting, trying to come up with the subject for the inaugural blog post on a brand new website. Though Drowning Moon Studios has existed for more than a year now (at this point, even creeping up on two), this is the first time we’ve decided to consolidate our online presence…

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Joie Martin