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| Leo Fox, Prokaryote Season |
WELCOME BACK GHOULS!
It's been a hot minute. Where to begin? My life is radically different than it was last time I posted but that's not the reason we're here. We're here to upload our cosmic psychometry interiors to the arcanomainframe and jury-rig waterlogged mosses into our cranial uplinks by way of psuedomecha experimental expression systems. We're here for fucking computer games. Welcome to AZIMUTH.
Over the past few weeks the gals and I held our first few sessions of humid hardboiled hypergothic hijinks using the beloved MECHNOIR/TECHNOIR by Jeremy Keller. We have been scheming on it for a bit! We're all a little familiar with the system it from listening to counter/weight but we're all new to playing/running it. It's got a lot going for it I'm into.
Months and months ago I wrote a wild DOOM-ish pulpy action move pastiche power-armored werewolf chaingun infiltration one-shot scenario that I had originally chalked up for use with FIST, which is an extremely slick little world-of-dungeons-style OSR-inspired new-school jam, the new hotness in high-octane homoerotics. FIST has a ton going for it and I still wanna play it some day—the way it marries lightweight random chargen with evocative flavorful options hits a sweet spot for me design-wise, and I'm in love with the kitchen-sink pulp scifi vibe and its role assignment system in particular.
That said after our run of Errant I wanted a break from running a high-character-lethality game and I grew weary of having to do things like think about numbers and roll dice for damage. And the more cyberpunk and mecha the scenario became the more that using MECHNOIR just simply made the most sense. It's a game about coming up with sweet adjectives with your friends. What's not to love. I'm also really stoked on its plot mapping system and admire the way it acknowledges that playing out conflict between characters is the juice of storygaming and gives you permission to totally ignore things like trying to describe the shape of a room.
For this game we're returning to what I've been calling "a corner of MERIDIAN space." MERIDIAN was the setting for our beam saber campaign that ran from like 2021-2023 or something ridiculous like that that we built from the ground up using street magic. It's a place of anthropomorphized war machines, cyborgs and data ghosts, politicking duchesses, arcane ancient aliens, corporate sabotage, and grimy boots-on-the-ground autonomous communities. MERIDIAN was an icy far-flung planet dominated by an equatorial megacity and a range of offworld parties interested in its excavating the ancient technology beneath its surface.
One day I'll do an exhaustive lore recap for the archives. Look out for the tie-in feature film.
ENTER AZIMUTH
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| Guy Warley |
If MERIDIAN was our system's Pluto or Uranus, I've been thinking of AZIMUTH as its Venus, in like, the '80s pulp scifi sense, a massive overgrown carboniferous jungle planet teeming with love and danger. So many seeds of influence have been planted it's hard to name them at this point. In the earliest stage I watched a heap of grotty 80s scifi and horror OVAs like Wicked City, Oedo 808, and Gunnm. I played one spectacular game of MAGNAGOTHICA: MALEGHAST and found myself returning to its illustrations a lot. I'm also really indebted to the imagination behind two spectacular comics, Daria Tessler's Cult of the Ibis and Leo Fox's Prokaryote Season, both of which are playing in an occult-y noir-inflected genre-space in unique ways that have been really influential to my daydreaming of AZIMUTH. More recently I'm into Ergo Proxy and like, listening to a lot of Evanescence. It's been a busy season over here at GHOUL HQ.
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| Cult of the Ibis |
AZIMUTH has emerged as a grotty, built-up cyberpunk city nestled in a teeming jungle along the mouth of a river. It's got crumbling hyperspecific advanced late stage austerity capitalism and 80s anime retrofuturistic crunchy terminal aesthetics, searing green text on a black terminal background, and a whole mess of factions and ideologies. I want to make the environment play a distinct role, like the glacial wastes did for Meridian—it's oppressive, yawning, humid, waterlogged, teeming, crepuscular, never quite cut back enough to get the vines from growing back over your harbored mech's thrusters, who knows what lurking in its shadows.
It's also goth as shit and packed with mechs.
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| Bernard Chan |
Geographically it's a mess of overgrown old districts, things stacked up against each other, rivulets running down apartment staircases and back doors that open into cantinas that open into holodiscos that open into crypts. Architecturally it's dominated by The Godjamb, a mile-high circuitous gate behind which looms The Silver Citaddel, the once-proud seat of the city's absent president. More on that in a bit.
With lethal quantities of daydreaming and a breezy session or two of street magic under our belt, all that remained was hashing out the ever-expanding Azimuth Transmission Master Table (which they recommend keeping to 36 entries… ha… ha ha… ), jury-rigging some vibed-out roll20 backgrounds, and chalking up some characters… and away we are! I likely won't keep session logs in as fine detail as I did for our Errant games but who knows. I'm nothing if not obsessive. Thus far we've just kicked off the initial mystery--a job concerning a lost prototype requested by the crew's shadowy handler, Three Pisces--which I'll chalk up the notes for as I prep for next session.
That's all for now--til next time ghouls!
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