August Update (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Thank you  so much for your support this month!

This is Inmn (they/them) writing to you this time. I’ll tell you a little bit about my role in the collective. I produce and host the Strangers monthly podcast, help with coordinating submissions, help with game design and playtesting for Penumbra City, and help produce the Live Like The World is Dying podcast doing a lot of behind the scenes work. I also will be the one mailing out merch and publications that we’ll have available soon! I live in the Sonoran desert, love dnd, make knives and am slowly dipping my toes back into writing.

It’s taken a lot of slow work from everyone in the collective to get momentum going on a lot of projects, but it’s all starting to pay off! So here’s some big updates!

Monthly features: we post a new feature here to you all every month, and mail out copies. Tell your friends who love zines about it! We’re also always looking for new submissions. Do you write things? Do you think your work would find a nice home with us? Check out the website for submission guidelines and compensation!

Stranger In A Tangled Wilderness Monthly podcast: if you haven’t checked it out then you should! And tell a bud! We hire a brilliant voice actor to narrate the monthly feature and then I do an interview with the contributor. It’s a lot of fun and comes out on the last day of ever month. It is simply titled “Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness.” Here’s a glimpse about what we’ve got coming up for the next few months for features:

August: We’ve got a lore zine for Penumbra City that Margaret created. For the interview, the two of us will talk about the lore of the game, the story behind the world and what we’ve got lined up the publication of Penumbra City.

September: We will be doing a special interview with Cindy Milstein about their up and coming book Try Anarchism For Life that will be coming out November 1st…right here at Strangers! The audio feature will be an excerpt from the book and the zine will be an excerpt from the book as well as an edited down version of the interview.

October: It’s still in the works, but probably it will be a comic of some sort from one of our new collective members, Io, who has been in the comics publishing world for a while with A.B.O. COMIX.

Live Like the World is Dying: Margaret hosts an individual- and community-preparedness podcast called Live Like the World is Dying. It now comes out every two weeks, and we're hoping to get it weekly by the end of the year but we'll see. Margaret talks to various experts in various fields about how we can be more prepared and make our communities more resilient. As always, if there’s a topic or skill you want to see explored on the show, send us a message and tell us about it! The next episode comes out August 12th!

This Month in the Apocalypse: We’re experimenting with a new format where we host more of a round table discussion about various current events with members of the Stranger collective. They have more general discussions around raising your preparedness level for this strange and slow apocalypse we’re all experiencing. We will probably have this format once a month, but we’re still figuring it out with the rest of the schedule for the show. The first segment is out now with Brooke, Margaret, and Casandra.

New New Segment: We are currently developing another new segment for LLWD. It’s very early in development, but we will be exploring the idea of round table discussions around deep analytical and fictional imaginings of possible and probable ways that various more apocalyptic  futures could emerge around different topics, and how to avoid them.

Books: We have some books lined up for publication! SO much work goes into publishing a book, and it’s been so delightful to see everyone in the collective pull out their amazing talents to help bring these works to print! Here’s a look at our line up and ‘hopeful’ schedule of release.

Try Anarchism for Life by Cindy Barukh Milstein: We are so excited to be partnering with Milstein on this project! It’s a wonderful exploration of nurturing social relationships that portend worlds soon to emerge. We’re getting the pre-order ready soon!

Escape From Incel Island by Margaret Killjoy. Patrons have already received this book in short segments, but it’s been compiled into a novella and had some incredible artwork done for it by Jonas Goonface. This should be released in February 2023!

Ship of Fools by Jonas Goonface. A wonderful series of beautifully illustrated graphic novels. It’s also really hot smut about a cursed circus train. We should be seeing it in May of 2023

Penumbra City: the ttrpg that we’ve been working on here at Strangers! There will be more about that below. We should be seeing it released by August of 2023!

Penumbra City: We’re about to start our beta testing for the game! Do you like to play TTRPGs with your friends? Do you like strange worlds filled with street urchins who eat fungus to commune with rats, squatting crust punks who ride motorcycles that could explode at any moment, Occultists who rip open the Ether to speak with the dead, and city ruled over by the mysterious god-king?  Would you like to be a playtest group? Please get in touch with us about it! And if you’ve already reached out to us, please reach out again now! To be clear, for this level of playtesting we won’t be running games for people, but looking for gaming groups that would like to test and run the game themselves. We’ll be sending out our current rule set and lore with a pre-written adventure and guidelines for creating your own adventures. So, get your nerd friends together and help us test this game out! We’re starting beta testing in September, so get back to us soon!

T-shirts! Webstore! We’ll be opening up our webstore this week! We will have Strangers and Live Like the World is Dying t-shirts available on August 6th! Both shirts feature amazing art work by our art director, Robin Savage. We will be offering a special promo code to Patrons for a really steep (close to at cost) discount on t-shirts! So look for an announcement on the 6th! We will also have a zine version of the FIrst Aid zine available for purchase on the webstore soon. We’re hoping for more zines in the skill series soon too!

Another New Podcast! Maybe we’ll just become a podcast network. Not going to say much about this one yet, but let’s just say our love of podcasting and nerdshit is probably going to overlap soon.

There’s probably more, but that’s where we’re gonna leave it for today. Next month you’ll be hearing from another one of us about everything that happens this month! I just want to really hammer down how much has been possible this year with all of your support! Thank you so much for the continued support. Y’all are also responsible for making all of these projects happen. So thank you. ^_^--Inmn and the rest of the Strangers Collective--