Things we nearly made in 2024

That’s another one down, then. Another annual calendar that no longer has dominion over us. Another lap around an uncaring orbital body that doesn’t even try to chase us back. So long, 2024, eat our dust.

It’s not been a perfect year, on a macro level, but it’s been pretty good in our neck of the woods. We got to make a lot of games, and some books, and some people said some nice stuff about them (thanks Quinns Quest for making it impossible to buy Heart on the open market for most of this year). We got to go to cons and meet several of you! That was nice!

But look, you already know we released Dagger in the Heart, the first full-length sourcebook for the multiple-award-winning Heart RPG, a game which unashamedly uses the phrase “red, wet heaven” in its marketing. You know we made two (nearly three – watch this space) books of scenarios for the DIE RPG, some of which aren’t even about death (one is about having a running gunfight in an IKEA).

You know about Hollows, the game inspired by Silent Hill, Dark Souls, and chronic depression. You know, where you kick in the doors of other people’s personal hells and slay their inner demons?

And Royal Blood, a sophisticated, sexy tarot-based heist game for sophisticated, sexy people?

You definitely know about Eat the Reich, the game where you play kissable vampires on a mission to DRINK ALL HITLER’S BLOOD. We know you do, because enough people wanted to kiss the vamps/drink the blood that we had to print it again, in green. 

What you don’t know about are the slew of ideas we (primarily Chant and Jinn, the employees highest on the company Weird Little Gremlin index, but not exclusively them) tried to get past the directors, with varying degrees of success. So here, without further ado, is our rundown of:

THINGS WE WANTED TO MAKE THIS YEAR
(BUT WERE CRUELLY SHOUTED DOWN)

Scale model Vermissian Set

The engineers of Spire were never able to complete the great work, a revolutionary mass-transit system powered by the Heart itself, but you nearly could. The struggle was what this was actually going to look like, because you can put sections of plastic railway track in a box but it’s hard to bottle pure, warped desire that carves paths through a dimensional space made of need and meat.

BEAR / CRIMINAL Booty Shorts

We think these speak for themselves. We also think the point at which this left the possible production list is when we suggested they’d be a great convention uniform for booth staff.

Secret Map of Paris

Less conceptualised, more unearthed from the F.A.N.G. vaults.

What better way for a team of special ops vampires to carry an emergency map of occupied Paris than printed on a pair of bloomers? Edible ones, obviously, for ease of disposal.

This Good Doggo

In the Hollows quickstart, The Sins of Grisham Priory, there’s a beastie called The Guardian Hound. It’s a dog roughly the size of a horse that wants to inflict terrible suffering upon you. But he’s still a good boy! Who’s a good boy? HE IS!

Chant is still trying to justify commissioning a 10-foot-tall version of him to sit in a retail store/at the RRD booth at conventions, but it turns out it would be cheaper to start a breeding program and hope to evolve one.

Spireblack 

“It’s not gunpowder yet!”

A tarot deck entirely illustrated with pictures from Grant’s 1-page RPGs

Did you know he’s made nearly a hundred of them? Even if we made a whole tarot deck we couldn’t use them all.

Inflatable Tube Goblin

You know, those wavy boys you get outside car dealerships. But a goblin. The major problems here were a) you can’t have just one goblin, that’s not how they work and b) we haven’t really got a company headquarters to put one outside. Maz and Grant’s house, maybe?

Goblin Dice Bag

You open up his little mouth really, really wide, and you cram your entire fist inside it. Right past his teeth, down his gullet, and into his slimy innards. 

Rejected because we couldn’t make the innards slimy enough. And some other rubbish about “not suitable for children” and “not suitable for anyone, actually.”

Eat the Reich Body Pillows

Some of us just don’t think there’s enough Flint in the world. Or Cosgrave, come to that. Any of them, really.

DIE RPG Body Pillows

Founder Chris Taylor suggested we should stop making so much merch for the kissable vampires (sure, Chris, leave money on the table), so we briefly considered pivoting. Then we remembered there aren’t so many iconic images from the DIE RPG, because its setting only comes into existence within the social rituals of the game-space. It’s primarily defined by its creators – meaning you, the players, but also writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans.

What we’re saying is we’d have had to put Kieron on a body pillow, and we think Image Comics owns those rights. Maybe Marvel. We can’t go up against Marvel lawyers. 

Starch-heart Symphony

You could say Voidheart Symphony is about grassroots action. Really keeping an eye on the folk who want to abuse their power over you. About Rebels with a chip on their shoulder, you might say. 

Look, we found a box that said Voidheart Symphony on the side but turned out to contain 19 potatoes. In an effort to recoup some of the money (because the books we thought we had in that box are worth far more than a few pounds of Maris Pipers) we briefly considered stencilling on the Voidheart logo and selling them. But our lawyers were concerned that was basically inciting people to lob them through the windows of corporate HQs, which is difficult from a liability standpoint. 

The Hollows Netflix Series

Grant and CJ basically filmed the trailer already. If they’d had a couple of days longer in the stately home we used for a set, we’d be twelve episodes deep.

Unfortunately the house was full of fire service personnel trying to have some kind of conference. Plus, we don’t know anyone at Netflix.

The Seagulls

Inspired both by our successful but short Hollows actual play, and Chekov’s The Seagull (generally considered to be the first of his four plays, especially by Chant who has never read it and likely never will), our next theatrical endeavour was very nearly The Seagulls, an extended (minimum six month run, weekly episodes) actual play of Grant’s seminal work Everyone is Seagulls.

Some of these product ideas are NOT A LIE. We genuinely considered a couple of them and even got as far as production mockups. Feel free to hazard your own guesses as to which ones got closest, and whether we’ll end up revisiting any of them in 2025!