The Guac 015: Free Rival Party & Xenotech + Into the Tunaverse

Hi, all!

I hope its the start (or end) to a wonderful day! The last few weeks have been a blur. My family passed around sickness which largely took me out of commission. But we’re out of the thickets, and it feels great to be catching back up and being able to work on amazing projects with amazing collaborators again.

I wanted to separate this Guac out as a major update of what to expect from us, mostly about our Mothership releases, in the future. We’ve talked a little about some of this in the past, but a lot has developed and I’m excited to share plans.

Before the meat of the issue, I have one open call. Please feel free to comment on this post, message me on Twitter/Discord, or send an email to share what you like to read in The Guac and/or what freebies you have enjoyed, been able to use the most, or want to receive in the future from The Guac. I’m excited to hear back so we can keep upgrading the newsletter!!

Now the docket!

The Guac Docket

• Outsourced is Live! + Constant Downpour is Finishing Fulfilling!!

• Free Rival Party & Xenotech: STEEL ORDER INFANTRY 698

• The Guac Freebies Recap

• Into The Tunaverse

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Outsource is Live! +
Constant Downpour is Finishing Fulfillment

Outsourced went live on Tuesday!! We have funded and are already unlocking stretch goals! Here’s everything we are releasing with it!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marcoserrano/outsourced-the-luko-fin-deception-for-mothership-1e

Constant Downpour Remastered Fulfillment has been the largest struggle for us so far, but I am happy to announce that it is finally coming to an end. A combination of lack of offset printing experience, international shipping, and fulfillment delays. Thank heavens we’ll finally get these awesome books out into the world! We’ve taken a lot from this campaign and have amped up our internal requirements before launching. Mainly, that the project has to be 90% finished before Kickstarting, we need to be in communication with the printer, have files approved if it is a new printing partner (although we are very happy with the quality Livonia is providing and don’t foresee a change), and we’re baking in 60 extra days for setting expectations on fulfillments for any hiccups, roadblocks and delays to minimize the chance of miscommunication.

Free Rival Party & Xenotech:
STEEL ORDER INFANTRY 698

STEEL ORDER INFANTRY 698 is a dispatched trio from the Knights of Lazarus. Their mission is to locate and retrieve The Holy Summit Tablets, an ancient xenotech artifact based off of The Ten Commandments and some inspiration from faint memories of Agents of Shield.

The Knights stats were generated from the Knight Grunt Generator from the Knights of Lazarus. The unit includes 3 Knights that have moved there way through enough successful missions in the Steel Order to be trusted with some of the secrets of the Knights of Lazarus - the first step to being elevated into either The Knights Clarion or The Pelican Crested. They have something to prove and are not dissuaded from their new knowledge. 3 Random Tables complete the Rival Party that fits well as a complication during shore leave or a competition to rumors the crew has heard about potentially powerful relics they may benefit from. 

Here’s the Download
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16VhSs2qT8eU7btGhGslrH9xlwNIvalU9/view?usp=sharing

The Guac Freebies Recap

I wanted to post these for anyone who missed them. We’re also talking about how we’re evolving and investing in the idea of tie-ins in actual publications in Into The Tunaverse below.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1odEIDmU9DGK_BLzNWEkLFcNTiWjCRl44?usp=sharing

Into The Tunaverse

The Tunaverse is our interconnected campaign setting that includes every third-party Mothership zine and book we publish. We have two main goals with this universe:

1. Each Spicy Tuna book should be completely playable on its own without relying on other purchased books.

2. Each Spicy Tuna book should have at least one substantial connection to other Spicy Tuna books. Whether the connection is printed inside the book or if a future or past books provides connection(s).

3. Substantial connections should make it natural and easy for crews to move from one adventure and interactions in one book to another.

We started the Tunaversewhen publishing Familiar Faces Vol.1 and Knights of Lazarus. Familiar Faces Vol.1 had several tie-ins to Knights of Lazarus that would introduce the crew to KoL members and make it easy to use the rumor tables in KoL. Knights of Lazarus had fewer, more subtle callbacks to Familiar Faces. 

We’ve extended this ethos into our other books as well. 

Constant Downpour references the Jiri Clovis bunker and the mercenary camp that sent the crew on the mission is Potamo Major. Jiri Clovis being the main headquarters of Luko Fin Corp in Outsourced and Potamo Major being a well-known and publicly trusted alias of Luko Fin. Constant Downpour and Outsourced are the most symbiotic books we’ve ever written and can be played in either order or Constant Downpour can be played after experiencing portions of Outsourced, just to move back to Outsourced after finishing the survival hex crawl in CDR. 

Outsourced is tied heavily into Constant Downpour Remastered as stated. Plus the Mercenary Appendix in the back of the book will provide more substantial tie-ins to Knights of Lazarus, Familiar Faces Vol.1 and possibly more of our zines.

Yucatan Tech Co is the main weapons manufacturer in the Tunaverse and has a 3000 word entry in the Incorporated including a storyline to follow, NPCs, and everything you need to integrate the corporation into games. We’re currently releasing the 3rd YTC Retro Weapons Catalog in the Outsourced campaign.

Stims From the Dark Web 1 + 2 are stims created by Luko Fin Corp (Outsourced)  with alien, plant, and horror DNA that they gather on their deadly Lock Planets (Trace Atko, Celsio-X, and Venus 3).

Spicy Tuna Stories No.34 (one of our inworld artifact zines made last fall and released this January) contains LiDar maps of burrows on Celsio-X in Outsourced and 1-page comics about xenotech found by The Laughing Sphinx Co, the space debris removal company in Familiar Faces Vol.1.

Reviews.Books.Ads (the other of our inworld artifact zines made last fall and released this January). is a series of posters and book covers with commentary discussing several modules - Knights of Lazarus, Familiar Faces Vol.1, YTC Retro Catalog 2 as well as non-Spicy Tuna zines like The Oceans Are Endless on Meridian by Mystery Spice and Jet McFin, and 5th Quinquennial Interstellar Interdisciplinary Conference (QuIIC) by ChrisAir.

Professional Rebels, one of our zines in the upcoming Outer Rim Uprising bundle, presents a few professional rebel groups. One of these rebel groups, Knob Adjustment works with a number of corps on Gilgamesh Red in Familiar Faces Vol.1. Plus they work with Iron Tiger, the vigilante hacker group in Familiar Faces Vol.1. 

Some of our zines won’t have direct tie-ins to existing or future zines, or at least minimal ones. Currently, this list only includes Knuckles Co (the other 8-page zine in Outer Rim Uprising bundle). But, these will later be tied into the Tunaverse through future publications. The Slice News from Incorporated regularly hires Knuckles Co for instance. I really enjoy Knuckles Co and have some future plans for them as well.

Now that the recap is finished, here are the future plans.

1. Distill all book-to-book connections into easily referenced zine(s) that act as a campaign handbook. These will always be free digitally and more than likely will be available in physical format made available for people who want them. We want to make it as easy as possible to run campaigns in the Tunaverse.

2. Begin publishing adventure zines that utilize several organizations or core NPCs from existing Spicy Tuna modules. At this point we have a great catalog of corporations, organizations, and NPCs we’d love to explore more and give fantastic use cases for.
   [ Note: these adventure zines will be written to work perfectly without the Spicy Tuna modules they reference with enough information on the organizations and people involved to run without a worry. But owning the other books will allow wardens to use the information from those books to enhance the adventure, create more natural story hooks from what their crew has experienced, and offer story hook options for after the crew finishes the adventure….if they survive.

3. Publish dedicated zines that provide dozens of new connections between previously published Spicy Tuna books, complete with storylines, settings/maps, random tables, and other details to use and run missions. These zines will be the only products of ours that do not act well alone. But they will be incredible for people who have multiple of our books. I think we need a better name than Spicy Tie-Ins though. The Tuna Files maybe? Or Mission Logs? Gotta think on it.

4. Continue printing great modules that introduce reusable corps and organizations.

The Pillars of the Tunaverse

Currently, the two main pillars of the Tunaverse are Familiar Faces Vol.1 and Outsourced.

Familiar Faces Vol.1 presents the Julip IV system, the Shore Leave Sandbox location of the Tunaverse, and the dozens of NPCs, organizations/corporations that have their home their.

Outsourced presents the three Major Mercenary Camp - Chisel & Mallet, Potamo Major, and Gunfire & Rescue - (all aliases of Luko Fin Corp) in the Tunaverse.

The entities in the Julip IV system and the three mercenary camps will be most of the glue that holds the Tunaverse together. The mercenary camps being the most wide spread entities, easily interacted with on shore leave and on mission, and Julip IV as the most giving and ripe with opportunities shore leave location.

The next pillar in the Tunaverse is going to be Incorporated Vol.1.

Incorporated will introduce eight new useful corporations. It’s our largest project yet and our writing team has been working on it for the past year. On top of the new corps, there are two adventures in the book. Each adventure has four of the eight corporations on site, working against or with the crew.

These 8 corporations are written in a way that they are easy to plug-n-play into settings, are huge and far reaching, and behemoths that are tough to take out for long lasting back and forth interactions if preferred.

I’m looking forward to how packed this book will be and how much it will integrate with Outsourced, Familiar Faces Vol.1, and the rest of our books.

But more on that as we get closer to launch in April 2024.

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Thank you for reading today!! I hope it’s a fantastic day ahead!

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