New year, new us

Welcome to 2024, and to the new-look RR&D website, and to three new members of the team!

Let’s start with that team, then

We’re incredibly excited to be welcoming three people to our growing team. Coming on board early this month, we have…

… producer Elaine Lithgow

Elaine Lithgow is a Scottish games designer. She worked previously at the licensed game powerhouse Cubicle 7 where she made a frankly staggering amount of books about Warhammer (both the old-fashioned kind with the elves and, latterly, the futuristic one with the skulls) as well as producing Broken Weave, C7’s post-apocalyptic fantasy heartbreaker. She’s also one third of DigiSprite, a board game developer based in Dundee, and she makes informative RPG video content as DigitalDryad.

… producer Chant Evans

You might already know Chant from his contributions to Spire (SIN, the Conspiracy Kit) and DIE (a few pages of the bestiary, including the elves. He bloody loves elves.). You might also know him through the words he’s written or developed for other RPGs, but he’s not telling you which in case you didn’t like them. Chant’s joining the crew as a producer, which means he’s going to spend a lot of time showing off nicely formatted spreadsheets and encouraging other team members to follow their dreams, as long as they do so within the previously defined project milestones and timelines. He’s a bit overwhelmed to be part of a team as brilliant as this one but he promises to try not to break anything. 

… and finance manager Max Hitchings

Max Hitchings has 20+ years of finance experience and a lifelong passion for games. They are a writer, musician, artist, and hiker – and almost certainly multiple beasties in a trenchcoat.

Also there was something about the website?

Yeah! Look at it – isn’t it fancy? We’ve done a lot of work on this place over the last few months, including:

• Carefully checking every page on the website and making sure they’d still work in the new world
• Writing 20 slogans you can reroll on the front page
• Caring very hard about information architecture for long enough to re-design our product categories
• Making Grant stand near a bunch of our books and vape so they’d look all cool and smoky

We’re enormously happy with the results, and very grateful to the folks at Happy Kite for making such a gorgeous and – crucially – functional place for us and our books on the internet. Coming soon, we hope: pre-orders, wholesale accounts, and probably a lot more blogging.

And 2024, eh?

We’ve got a lot on.

We’re hoping to do a few big things this year, and lots (and lots) of smaller ones. Here’s what you should know:

Hollows Quickstart: The Sins of Grisham Priory – cover art by Sam Lamont / Moonskinned

Eat The Reich will be making its way out into the world in the next few weeks and months. We’re hoping it’ll be in backers’ hands in March, and coming to your local FLGS sometime around May. Backers can keep updated through the Kickstarter, and we’ll obviously be making quite a lot of noise about it when it’s all done and dusted. Backers can also play it now in PDF form, and we’re working on the Havoc Engine to enable more people to create their own hacks of the system.

Hollows is our next big thing, and we’re gearing up now to release the Quickstart to project followers. It’s a game set in 1860s-ish thinly-veiled England-analogue, and it’s about descending into other people’s nightmares and messily murdering their personal demons with weapons that hate you. It’s a tactical RPG with crunchy, interesting, fast-paced combat, and it does boss fights better than anything else you’ve ever played. If you want first dibs, you can sign up to be notified here.

Dagger in the Heart is an upcoming, full-length adventure supplement for Heart: The City Beneath. It invites you to dive deeper into the Heart than ever before as you follow the path of the Delving Machine, the cursed Vermissian Project, multiple alternate futures and the terrible consequences of your actions that have not yet come to pass. It’s written by Gareth Hanrahan and fully illustrated by Sar Cousins and, friends, we are thrilled to be bringing it into the world.

Bizarre Love Triangles is the first of four (we hope) DIE scenarios books, with new ways to play the game and strange vignettes through its vagaries from Kieron Gillen, Laurie O’Connell and Nathan Blades, illustrated by Riot Bones and with a cover by DIE co-creator Stephanie Hans. Keep an eye out for pre-orders going live for this later this month!

If you want to be the first to know when new things launch, the best way is to join our Discord. But if you’d rather just be sedately notified on a monthly basis about what we’ve got going on, try our mailing list. We promise not to spam you, but Grant does get a bit sweary sometimes.

Happy new year, and welcome back.