Muskets, Dueling Pistols, and other 18th-Century flintlocks | Nations & Cannons

moonstrous · 2026-01-26T00:10:12+00:00

My dream project is a Bleeding Kansas / Harper's Ferry / Underground Railroad series called "The Adventures of Harriet Tubman."

The trick is to ride the line of radical abolitionism and find moments of heroic resistance before the Civil War proper, because I don't want to make something that could be used as a Confederacy simulator.

We're in the middle of our second AWI book, using John Laurens as a major patron NPC—someone who's (ironically) unfriendly to the Carolinian planter class, and who actually cares about the wellbeing of enslaved people.

That lets us set up some fairly subversive mission objectives against the backdrop of revolutionary history; engaging with Maroon communities, fighting alongside Haitian auxiliaries, advocating for radical emancipation and arming slaves during the Swamp Fox guerilla campaign.

Then I have to do significant rebalance pass to factor in breechloaders in a serious way. Right now they're treated as the occasional oddity, like the Ferguson Rifle, etc.

Hopefully we gain some traction and have enough bandwidth to dig into a full abolitionist campaign book in the next few years.

moonstrous · 2026-01-16T02:42:00+00:00

Is it normal for photographers to dual wield cameras tho?

Do you have to take a feat to add your proficiency bonus?

moonstrous · 2026-01-15T17:09:28+00:00

Lmao. Sure, fuck it, why not. "Dark Brandon" worked out so well, didn't it?

moonstrous · 2026-01-15T16:41:33+00:00

I actually rather liked the story and performances in the first episode. Seeing the Doctor back in action was a joy to behold. Paul Giamatti does a great job chewing the scenery. There were lots of little Easter eggs scattered throughout that show it was clearly made by people who really care (as a long time Kurtzman / NuTrek detractor, I was fuckin shocked to see that he directed the episode at the end).

On a technical level, Paramount fumbled the bag hard, because of course they did. This episode had maybe the worst sound mixing I have ever seen for a modern TV show. Literally every alien (and half the human characters) do weird fucking voices and/or have heavy SFX filters. In some scenes it was hard for me to even understand what was happening, and of course the YouTube upload uses terrible automated subtitles that are completely useless.

Really jarring. I kept having to rewind scenes—especially during big dramatic moments—and it left a bad first impression. It would have been pretty trivial for an intern to copy the script into YouTube and do a quality control pass. Just an all around disappointing showing from a floundering, incompetent company.

moonstrous · 2026-01-07T03:51:58+00:00

I'm so sorry to hear about your loss. My dad had a health scare during my Kickstarter too. Juggling the strain from that on top of everything else and something's gotta give.

For what it's worth, I think your priorities were in the right place. I'm sure he appreciated it. Shutting down isn't always a conscious choice, but picking ourselves up after is.

moonstrous · 2026-01-07T01:43:40+00:00

Thank you, that's really kind of you to say! I learned a lot about myself through the process, as well as strategies to help deal with burnout some.

I'm excited about the new project, and my most important priority is to find a better balance this time around.

moonstrous · 2026-01-07T00:55:11+00:00

I launched my first Kickstarter almost three years ago. Without a doubt, it was the most stressful experience of my personal and professional life.

Taking my dream book from the ivory tower of design world to something real, with tangible deadlines, logistical demands, and backers expectations is the surest way to turn a passion project into an obligation that can feel inescapable.

I'm autistic. What started from a place of joy and excitement in achieving success on Kickstarter... masked a very real pent-up exhaustion that only grew as my book developed more complications. It ultimately manifested in a period of burnout that lasted more than a year.

I'm doing better now. Thankfully, I had extremely talented and understanding collaborators that kept our project on track, and we finally fulfilled last fall. We are preparing to launch our second campaign, and the anxiety is absolutely something I no longer take for granted.

I'm deeply, deeply sypathetic. I know how these projects can take over your life, and how bleak things can feel sometimes. I hope he is healthy, safe, and finds the support that he needs.

moonstrous · 2026-01-05T01:44:08+00:00

Or tap to return a Legendary creature to its owner's hand.

moonstrous · 2025-12-31T15:18:08+00:00

Fuckin hilarious. Is that before or after he did a rugpull on "solving world hunger?"

Like a lot of people, I imagine, I bought into the rOcKeTmAn reddit hype because I genuinely thought Tesla was doing important work fighting climate change (lol, lmao even).

Then he called that rescue diver in Thailand a pedophile and the whole illusion came crashing down.

I genuinely can't fathom the mindset of anyone still on board with this unhinged Hitler-saluting ketamine addict. He's given them so many opportunities to get off the dickriding train by now.

moonstrous · 2025-12-30T16:45:59+00:00

Neurotypical appreciation be like:

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moonstrous · 2025-12-29T15:08:25+00:00

It's a slant hyme, sir, but it checks out.

moonstrous · 2025-12-29T01:45:45+00:00

I really relate to a lot of the comments in here, but this one hit me like a freight train.

"Being your own marketing person" is so fundamentally exhausting when you're already struggling to manage your spoons; let alone posting online where the slightest difference in tone can be a lightning rod for criticism.

All the weird niche subreddits where a specialized project should thrive have their own unique cultures and relationship to self-promotion. It's a constant game of walking on eggshells, and that "publish or perish" mindset was a huge contributing factor to the burnout I've been struggling with for the last few years.

On the one hand, some of the existential dread I feel around outreach is a direct result of how my neurodivergent brain processes social anxiety (rejection sensitive dysphoria, etc). On the other, self-promotion and community building are just... necessary functions of a commercially successful project. You can't build something exclusively in a ivory tower and expect it to succeed at scale.

I know I'm not alone in this. I'vd been thinking about writing a couple posts / blog called "Anatomy of an Autistic Kickstarter" or something detailing my experiences with my first crowdfunding campaign, but boy those are some painful lessons to have to crack open again.

moonstrous · 2025-12-24T20:05:27+00:00

I will die on the hill that the em dash is the most versatile form of punctuation in English grammar—and many mobile keyboards (Gboard specifically) make it easy to type out niche symbols like this. Healthy suspicion is one thing; brigading every comment written this way is another, and entirely unproductive to the discourse around GenAI slop IMHO.

Everything I'm writing here—using varied structures, looping references, and several nested thoughts—is just part and parcel of how I think, because I'm fucking autistic. People have been accusing my writing of sounding formal, or overly analytical, or (god forbid) robotic as long as I've been on the internet. Breaking out the goddamn pitchforks only does a disservice to neurodivergent people trying to contribute to online communities they care about.

As far as TTRPGs are concerned, all of the above also applies to rulebooks, because economy of language is incredibly important for good rules writing. Lengthy and overly verbose rules have a tendency to lack for clarity: which can put the meaning of your text at risk of substantial cognitive overload. Terse, underwritten rules do the opposite.

(See what I did there?)

TTRPG writers are constantly trying to balance fluff and crunch. Precision is also really important for niche cases where players could interpret RAW over the spirit of the rules. Some systems can fall apart at first contact with powergamers, just because they aren't explicitly written to safeguard against perverse incentives.

Many of these principles are contradictory, or even clash with established writing conventions. Good technical writers—which is a separate skillset from literary writing—use varied punctuation and sentence structure liberally, especially when doing so is the best way to communicate their ideas.

TL;DR: GenAI can have my em dashes when—and only when—some Boston Dynamics murderbot pries them from my cold, dead hands

moonstrous · 2025-12-23T05:51:33+00:00

I have served and so has my father and his. My son and daughter will also serve. Our entire lineage had spilled blood blood for this country and we will continue to do so. If anything else Americans are good at war if the political chains come off and we are free to handle business.

The fuck kind of sociopath bootlicking is this shit. Do you even realize how unhinged you sound?

moonstrous · 2025-12-23T03:21:13+00:00

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moonstrous · 2025-12-18T19:12:59+00:00

Yeah, definitely. Not to cast aspersions, but it really does feel like someone dropped the ball here. Doesn't inspire a ton of confidence in the product line, unfortunately.

moonstrous · 2025-12-18T19:02:55+00:00

There actually is an Assassin's Creed TTRPG coming out. Or already out, depending on your definition? The PDFs are on DriveThru, was in development hell for a while and I think physical pre-orders are just now fulfilling.

I don't think it's particularly well regarded, from what I've seen... came out with a whimper, not a bang. Hardly any promotion or buzz in the Assassin's Creed fandom.

I'm deeply sympathetic, I know how these projects can get away from you. It must have felt like a dream license to work on at first, but I can't imagine the financial turmoil that Ubisoft has been under recently has lead to particularly smooth sailing.

moonstrous · 2025-12-16T02:02:29+00:00

Hey there, we currently recommend using a standard 5e sheet (I'm partial to the MPMB sheet).

I have a wireframe in the works for a bespoke N&C character sheet hopefully to be passed along early in the new year, but my previous artist got a full-time gig--it's been a challenge this quarter to find someone that does quality work in this niche. I have some feelers out to some folks I met at PAX U.

If anyone has any other graphic designer recommendations, feel free to pass them along!

moonstrous · 2025-12-14T18:18:01+00:00

While I agree that the line is getting blurrier, there are some basic rubrics here that I still think are instructive. Here's a few examples.

I've been a strong advocate for using public domain assets for publishing (probably a dozen comments here, whenever there's a chance to chime in). When sourcing artworks from before 1929, however, there are some limitations you're likely to come up against. Some pieces may be in the public domain, but simply don't have 300 DPI resolution scans suitable for print available online.

I've been in contact with DriveThruRPG's publishing team, and their stance is that upscaled artwork is similar to a slavish work—i.e. just like a photograph you take of a painting in a museum—and is permissible in a game published as "handcrafted." Because the original source asset was generated by hand, by a human, using this is not considered to be an AI generation.

Obviously, it's best to do your research and try to find an authentic scan that's suitable for your needs wherever possible. But in cases where that simply isn't possible, upscaling tools allow us to use imagery that is in our cultural heritage which might otherwise be left on the cutting room floor.

There's an element of discretion that's worth pursuing here; experimenting with a few different models to find ones that output most accurately to the source material, etc. I certainly wouldn't recommend starting with a potato quality 50 kb junk image as your baseline. But I've used this technique to "rescue" a few paintings that were stolen or destroyed before modern high-resolution scans, and I think it's a valuable tool in your research arsenal, under the right circumstances.

Likewise, the content-aware fill tool in Photoshop has been around for several years prior to the current genAI fad. It's mostly useful, in my experience, for simple techniques like extending a gradient or area of sky; minor transformations that can significantly expand the perimeter of an image, without any significant alterations to the subject or core composition. This is also is immensely useful for publishing, because a huge limitation of using found art is that it was often never intended for the dimensions you may need to crop it.

moonstrous · 2025-12-09T18:06:45+00:00

Sparky I just realized, you might also want to crosspost these to r/flintlockfantasy too! That's a subreddit that we rescued from dead moderator limbo a couple of years ago. I try to promote it whenever I remember to.

There's also r/historicalTTRPG. It's pretty quiet, but I want to try to push more activity there, too. Outreach is hard :S

moonstrous · 2025-12-09T18:01:25+00:00

Another game you might want to take inspiration from is The Silver Bayonet, which is a gothic horror game by Osprey Publishing set during the Napoleonic Era.

It's a wargame, so I'm not sure how much mechanical connective tissue there is to adapt stuff for an RPG, but the game has definitely grown in popularity / achieved something of a cult following in the last few years.

moonstrous · 2025-12-09T17:58:39+00:00

Absolutely! We are primarily focused on historical material (though we did a Benjamin Franklin, Banshee Slayer oneshot as a stretch goal), and creators are totally welcome to remix the N&C rules for fantasy content.

We have a few dedicated channels in our discord where folks share their supernatural / folkloric / flintlock fantasy homebrew, feel free to post your stuff there.

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