Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan and joining me today is Greg Horton of Electi
Studio. How you doing this morning,
Greg? I'm doing great.
My name is Greg and this is Cat Chats.
You know, we got to get you on for like a monthly thing if if
we're going to keep talking about as much as you do at
Electi Studio. But it's not cat chats, by the
way, 'cause. But yeah, Greg, it's a pleasure
to meet you. Great to have you here on the
show. Obviously big fan.
We'd recently just talked about Blaster Magazine on an episode
with CJ from over at Hot Head. And so then have you Come on, is
is fantastic. But for those who don't know
who, who who you are? What Electi Studio is like who,
who, Who the heck is? Who the heck is Greg Horton?
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm really excited.
I love the scroll. So who is Greg and what is
Electi? Yeah.
So I was a graphic designer for a couple of decades now, and I
was working at an agency, kind of keeping my head low, working
on client work, websites and magazines and all this and, you
know, marketing stuff, conventions, all the things.
And my friend Sean Sutter, who I met at Kubla Con, was talking to
me about this magazine that he was starting with some friends.
And then he described the friends which were like the
author of Frost Grave and the author and Ash from Gorilla
Miniature Games, and then the author of Gaslands, all these
games that I'd played and loved and were indie.
I was like, man, must be nice dude.
And realized, oh, this guy, no, he's inviting me to participate
as the graphic designer. Got it.
Sean is a very just one of my favorite people, but super coy.
So he I just couldn't pick up that he was inviting me to join
the magazine. And I started working on Blaster
and after years of doing graphic design and work with Blaster, I
thought, man, this has got some pretty good momentum.
I could be doing this full time instead of like, you know,
working on postcards and business cards and websites and
stuff. I could start working on
something that I was passionate about, so I started Electi
Studio and we've been publishing Blaster, and our first big game
was Mike Hutchinson's Hobgoblin. And yeah, I've been running
Kickstarters and working with artists and authors and
sculptors and it's just been a wild ride.
Yeah, yeah. I think my first interaction
with you guys was I saw Eternal, which is just insanely gorgeous
little Zine. And then I was like, who the
fuck makes us? Because this is incredible.
And then I got to Electi and then a Hobgoblin was the very
next thing. And then I saw Blaster magazine
and was like, fuck, these are going to be expensive to
collect, but I need all of them. But yeah, what you guys do is is
awesome at Electi Studio. I know you specifically said
like, you know, it's indie. You know, Mike Hutchinson too is
just, I mean, I'm newer to the space, but even I'm like, oh
God, it's, you know, it's Mike Hutchinson and the stuff he
makes is incredible. But how did you know?
You said basically how did Blaster magazine and working on
the magazine get to Electi Studio?
So I don't know the answer to that actually let me let me try
to walk it back a little bit. So I was working with the
authors. The authors were talking about
publishing life and like some of the hurdles and, and how they
felt about working as an author. And a common strain is like this
pressure that authors have to do everything.
Like they have to do the photography, the like they have
to provide illustrations and paint the miniatures and take
the pictures and do all the things.
And for many of them that's totally cool because they just
happen to be fantastic and everything, which is how I feel
about the people in Blaster. But it also just means like
writers can't just focus on the writing, they have to do all the
things. And I wanted to create a place
that was a collaborative environment where the publisher
didn't just take the manuscript, put it into printing, take the
pictures, drop it in the layout with like some cheap layout and
just get it out it. I wanted to create something
where the publisher was on the same page as the the author,
artist, sculptor, that this is like a special game and that all
the components kind of matter at the same time.
So if you look at our old, you know, videos of us chatting
between me, Mike and all the team we're, we're talking about,
you know, what makes a game and what makes a board game a board
game versus a tabletop game. And we're exploring some ideas
that are more thoroughly understood now.
But at the time, I was realizing that story game rules
presentation and like what's in your hands when you're at the
table and what's in your hands when you're in bed preparing for
your game and what kind of imagining what it's going to be
like. All of those things are so
integral. That or interconnected actually,
that that's the game, the whole thing.
Like that's what it is. And I think Warhammer infamously
takes it too far and like took the game, took the company and
the all the things and it's now an IP and it's not a, you know,
like all these things, but a game is all of those, some of
all those parts. So I wanted to create a place
where the author could collaborate with the publisher
who's on the same page with that.
And Hobgoblin's kind of my shining star of how that would
work. Yeah, and you so you said
hobgoblin was the first thing that was Electi Studio like post
blaster? Publicly, no.
Behind the scenes, yes. So I started working with Mike
on it. Pretty much out the gate for
Electi. The first thing we did was
something called like Miniatures for Blaster.
I think it was called Brutal Tank Arena by Joey Joseph
McCullough and Joey McGuire. So Joey McGuire and I did that
and Joey had this kind of like absurd tank arena game that he
came up with. And we put that in the in the
the pages of Blaster volume 4. So it's coming off the last
blaster. And then we were talking about
big chunky tanks and how there's a deficit of them in miniatures
right at the explosion of 3D printing as well.
So we were like, what if people, what if we did a Kickstarter for
STLS, which was in 2020. So it was pretty early for not
super early, but you know, like we were getting, we were picking
up on the trends of what was happening.
And we made that Kickstarter and it did OK and then started to
release other things. And then Hobgoblin finally came
out after years of working on it together there and it's.
Crazy. First of all, it's gorgeous.
So you did so do you do all the graphic design for for
everything that I like to puts out or for like just the OR
blaster plus some specific projects?
So I do graphic design for all of it.
Sometimes I use graphic designers.
I like get some help when I'm freaking out mentally.
And, and what I'll do is I'll like prepare the designs as a
concept and then start the process with with them of
merging it into an Indesign document.
And without getting too much in the weeds, then I come back and
finish it off. That's not the rule.
That's the exception. And pretty much the person
that's most, you know, like trusted to me in that area was
Will. So Will Will I reached out to
because I liked the designs and forbidden Psalms and Psalm.
And I could tell that he was, you know, understands visual
language and was like, here's the concepts.
Can you help me get this process started while I work on
something else? And he's helped me with a few
projects. And your game that you were
drawn to, Eternal was as a notable exception for my graphic
design. So that design I tried to do
over and over again. And one of the things that I
wanted was to start integrating illustration with graphic design
in a way that I hadn't really seen sense.
Essentially like Mork Pork, not a clone of Mork Pork, but like,
how does illustration and graphic design get totally tied
together? And my theory was that has to be
the same person. The illustrator has to know
graphic design and then they plan out the layout and
illustrate the the book and tie it to the graphic design.
And so I worked with Till Forster on that, and he did the
graphic design and the illustration, and he has a
contract so that I'm actually paying him royalties on the book
because I wanted to have the artist elevated.
So Eternal was like a real different approach for me.
I was trying to weave in more, you know, how do I, how do I
give more ownership to a graphic designer?
Yeah. I mean, and it's a absolutely
gorgeous book. It's very different than, you
know, blaster and hobgoblin stuff like that, obviously
because you have a different graphic designer working on it.
But man, it's you guys did a really good job at that one.
And then the minis on our on the website is too.
I mean, it's cool that you guys do STLS, at least for pretty
much everything you put out, right?
It's gotten to that point it we started with almost no STLS and
then started just slowly adding stuff.
Last year I did a Patreon for like dead by lead and, and other
things to like kind of build up some eternal and dead by lead
and trying to build up more of a volume of, of miniatures to
support. And, and we just went into
physical production on the Kickstarter for the first time.
So now we'll have like actual boxes of minis, which is
exciting. But all of that is possible
because of a relationship I built with Skullforge.
So Jordan Coffey is the sculptor for 90% of our miniatures.
And if it could be 100%, I would have it be 100%.
But he, he's incredible. He's one of the the best artists
I know. He takes like he takes in a
conceptual approach to making miniatures that he knows the he
knows that they're game pieces. So when they're printed or
physical and whatever way that they become physical, the pieces
done all just shatter and break off.
They're playable, they're highly detailed.
They're they, they have a concept and a perspective on
each one. If you look carefully at the
like, you know, group of minis in a, in a squad, you can see
this character that he's playing out and adding details to make
each one different. That I think is really cool and
just so prolific. Like if you go to Skullforge
Studios and look at his catalog, it's like mostly him just
churning out minis of whatever the status or whatever the
current sci-fi series is of the time.
He's like riffing off of that. And then we started the
relationship because he he wanted an outlet for non sci-fi
ideas essentially. And I provided him lots of
opportunities for Cowboys and monsters and and all that stuff.
Yeah, I so obviously I, I back blaster right away.
I've been waiting for for, you know, I've been following the
page for a long time, but man, those dead by LED minis are
absolutely stunning. I had to grab those immediately.
Dude, the dead by LED minis are also spec kind of a special
case. That one I collaborated with Sam
Lotfy, who's a who's a comic book illustrator and we had
worked on Bloody Hollow together, which was anyway, it
is a very cool American gothic horror game.
And I really loved his illustrations and was like, I'm
what he's a I'm like, he's a concept artist, right?
Like this guy makes characters and comic books.
Let's see if how this works and I write them a little
description and then he come back with concepts that were
just absolutely crushing it the character that's put in there.
And then of course Jordan just nails the interpretation of that
character in the sculpted form. Yeah, I think there's some of
the my favorite minis. I think they're very unique
against Western minis During during the design of those
miniatures, I was looking up period specific weapons and
costuming and I was hoping the concept artist and Jordan kind
of like tuned back in towards real life things.
And there's things in there that don't look right because we base
our cowboy stuff on movies, right?
And these like weapons are more advanced than that, like as
you're starting to veer out the Victorian era into the modern
era. So it was just an interesting
project and I'm glad you like those.
I really love the dead violent minis.
Yeah, I mean, for reasons, I've been looking for a lot of
Western stuff lately and there's a lot of.
There's a shit load of terrain, I'll tell you that.
People make western buildings all the time.
But for minis, there's like one company out there that does like
a shit ton of them. But beyond that there's not too
much. So I was.
So stoked. Who are you excited about for
their well, who are you hunting miniatures from?
Like who? Who did you find as a producer
at Miniatures? It is.
Is it Badger games? They do a western game called Oh
my God. Dead Man's Hand is the one that
I was able to find like a ton of western minis for.
I think that's knuckle duster. Is that right?
That sounds about right. I think it's knuckle duster.
And then there's, yeah, there's a lot of like European and
British brands as well that do cast metal stuff, artisan
designs. And what is Scorpion Miniatures?
That's a fun one. They're they're out of the UK
and they're starting to get into digital, which is kind of
exciting to me because it means longevity for that brand and
really, really character full. And they have that old school
sculpting style, even though it's going digital, which is
really cool. Oh, Dev instance, Great Escape
games. I don't know if they're also the
ones that sculpt, but they're the ones that put it out, Yeah.
Oh, I'm confusing it with Nope. Yeah, I I know what you're
talking about. The you're talking about the
blast the plastic box I got. Confused Yeah yeah they do.
They do like metal 5 packs and stuff too that are neat but but
but yeah you said the dev LED ones are are crazy.
Are they 32mm or 28? So that's a great question.
This is actually a huge thing that I need to get better at.
But they're kind of in the middle.
So Jordan sculpts very realistic, but he also is
sculpting details so that they don't break.
So they're not quite anything. It's like it's, I call it heroic
28. It's like on its way to 3032.
But then what I do is I scale them down to somewhere close to
both pure historical 28 and 32. I print them and test them at
different sizes and find something that works like as
closely as you can with all of them.
Because if you collect minis from multiple lines, it'd be
kind of nice if this kind of fit into the mix and it wasn't like
disruptive. So that's kind of how we went
about those miniatures is that we designed them to be a part of
your collection, even though it's using Jordan's signature
like very human proportions and very realistic looking weapons
and all that stuff. So if you go smaller, you have
to like ham up the the arms and the knives and the guns and the
mustaches and everything starts to skew more towards that kind
of character full, which is totally fine.
I have lots of minis like that. But yeah, we wanted something
that, you know, had that high level of detail and kind of you
had the fine detail without being too small or too big.
Yeah yeah, like I said, I'm getting I'm I'm newer ish to to
the scene, like a year a little bit more and man, the difference
between yeah, like a kind of smallish 28 and we're like the
30 twos in the detail like even like I don't know what it when I
was looking at warhammer, I mean he's like a space marines and I
was just like, oh, premieres just has a stomach now.
That's really what it is. They just have like a human
proportion where their chest isn't literally like sitting on
their belt and it gives them a little bit more of like the
realistic stuff, but it's definitely like AI mean.
I can understand what people like more old hammery stuff
because it's so. Like you said, character full
like everyone's got these like giant shoulders and giant hands
and and these cool designs across this like again, groin
that goes right into their chest.
So. Yeah, yeah.
In the early days of the Internet that I was like
following on, there's a website called DACA, DACA that's like
been a forum for a long time. And I remember guys on that
forum chopping the torsos off like here and then chopping at
the waist and then chopping each section of like, like hips and
legs and then feet. And I don't know what the lower
part of your leg is called, but just like literally breaking
them up into body parts and then sculpting in like human
proportions to it making like really good.
And like this is some of the origins of this really cool like
blur between, hey, I'm just using green stuff to kind of
emphasize something or tweak this mini so it's doing
something different than my friends minis.
And that evolution into complete full sculpting.
This one's somewhere in the middle.
But yeah that the the culture with that green stuff and keep
bashing is so sick. Yeah, it's with some I so I fuck
around with a little bit of green stuff and I've, I'm just,
I have no idea how these people make these tiny literally craft
whole people out of it. I'm like, I'm getting some
smeared stuff on and maybe putting a texture and, and
getting and I'm happy with it. But yeah, when I see people that
are literally making like entire like Savitar minis with like
every fucking detail and like you guys are crazy and you know,
with green stuff, I did buy like 6 tubes of it and throw it in
the freezer just in case. Like I start using it more since
now it's it's gone supposedly. But we'll see what goes on with
that. So many follow up questions to
that. Yeah, we could continue.
Did you know green stuff is like dead?
No. Yeah, there was one company.
There was apparently 1. I don't know.
There's single point of failure. There's like 1 factory that
makes it, and the company that owns it decided to close that
one factory. So now like supposedly green
stuff is no more. There's another company that's
like, we're going to start making it now, but we have to
figure it out. But yeah, green stuff apparently
is what's out is out, and the factory's closed, so see what
happens. Man, yeah, times are changing,
that's how. How do corporations not
understand like Indy niche miniature kit bashing and and
why we need, you know, epoxy putties?
We need them, yeah. Blaster.
So Blaster going winding back a whole way.
So one of the things we talked about on the show with CJ was
Blaster Magazine and the and after about halfway now that
number 8, like after #4 it switched from anthologies of
games to one game per. What was the impetus for for
that change? Yeah, so it's really funny.
This is. So I'm going to tell you the
sidebar first and then I'll tell you the real story.
But the sidebar is that while we were doing blaster as a as a the
six of us, including me, it was constantly sad.
Like how come you don't just make one focused on that one
person and make it 1 author, one book.
So every release I was getting like drive through RPG comments,
Facebook comments, comments in the YouTube and I don't know,
that went sunk into the back of my mind.
And then in 2022, we had essentially we started as an
organization like the, the original founders created it as
a, as like it had a charter with rules about membership and it
was less of like a publishing contract and more of like an
indie collective. And that that's where we
started. And the charter was to be to
protect the author's rights. And the wording in there was
like if they left, the copy would cease to go into
production, or I don't even know if it was that explicit, but it
was essentially like if an artist wants to or an author
wants to leave, they get the creative rights back to their
book so that they can republish it, make it a put it,
incorporate that content into a hardcover or whatever they want
to do. And we, Sean and Sean and Mike
put a whole game into Volume 2. So the next volume up, we have
Mystic Skies and it has Yep. So there's a full game in that.
And my brain just glitched. So the bar gets raised on volume
to it's starting to like push people to do like crazier stuff.
We have by volume 4, I think we have about 5 games in four
volumes of Blaster. And that means painting minis
and finishing rules quickly. And we were trying to do them
quarterly and I was being insane on graphic design and like
trying to push the boundary there.
So it's like a very intense process.
And we were in the middle of COVID just kind of like working
all the time. We were having meetings every
week. It was becoming very heavy and
burdensome to continue the process.
And we didn't get any of really the rewards.
Like we couldn't go to conventions and interact with
each other or people. And it was just a lot of hard
work. And starting in 2022 are the
authors. A few of them were like, I'm I
need to take a break like this. Like, this is great.
We love you, but like, I am, I need to go.
And at that time we were like, yeah, of course.
But looking at the charter, it looks like we have to shut the
magazine down is like the at least the best option and less
we could have like kept the organization running and then
added new people in. But it was just starting to get
to the point where it looked like it wouldn't blaster would
never come out again. And it's I was running Electi
already at that point. I was like, I wish there was
something Electi could do. And it occurred to me that I
could like purchase the rights to produce blaster and get the
get blaster back on track with a single author, which would
eliminate that kind of concern of of like one guy's out.
So now we have to shut the magazine down again.
So I was trying to do trying to essentially save it.
And and that's where the one person, one book came from.
And it just went straight. The idea evolved into like in my
head, I'm imagining this, you know, store shelf in a game
store or a rack like the one behind you, the spinning racks,
you know, with miniature games that are independent, small,
some that are bigger names, some that are lesser names.
But you kind of develop a relationship with the concept of
blaster and who I am as a designer and a publisher.
And then who the, you know, the authors that I work with are
like, and then you start to build trust and go, I'll try
that one out. That's a cool cover.
What is this? And experience new things that
are maybe weird like slip runners is a non combat ship
with ship racer with Newtonian physics.
It's not like a full box miniature game, like it's weird.
And so having those all work together to be like, oh, you
want to try this cool blaster game?
It's kind of nuts. Was the was the momentum and
idea behind it now. And I always think back to now I
get comments, where's the four? Where's the, where's the
multiple author volumes? Where's volumes one through 4?
I want the ones where they're anthologies.
And I and it's now settled in my head.
I'm like, Oh yeah, you're not supposed to listen to comments.
And This is why, yeah. You can't win on the Internet.
Like that's just how it works. People always want what they
don't have it. It would be great too.
And I think about this all the time.
I would love to be able to like see that moment in time where
like 2 timelines split off and you say one thing one time, one
thing the other, and see how someone will react to both.
Because I feel like it'd be the same thing.
They're just unhappy no matter what you do.
But. And then even within ourselves,
like I'm sure that's, I'm sure that's true for everybody, you
know, like just with a little empathy towards the commenters,
you know, like I had, and I totally get it, like we had on
the Kickstarter, some people comment that, you know, hey,
where's one through 4 and like they're numbered.
It makes sense to ask where's the first four?
And maybe that was my bad. Maybe I should have like
restarted the numbering. But they that's totally
reasonable. And like sharing this story,
it's kind of, it's kind of complicated, you know, like to
communicate it well and make sure I'm representing it well,
but it's OK. Like I, I, the punchline of what
I answered on those comments and, and the Kickstarter was
like, this is, this is the work that I'm doing right now.
And like it's on, you know, independent miniatures games
with a one person publisher is like that.
You have to buy it if you like it because it might not exist in
four years. Like I want to exist forever
doing this. However, like please, like
support the stuff you think is cool when you can because it
goes out of print. It goes out of print.
The relationships change and they're no longer available.
These things happen. So go some like whoever you're,
if you're sitting on the fence about that indie game and you're
like, I'll get it next year, like just go for it.
I mean within reason. If you can do that, you know, do
it. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge part
of Indy too. Like I, I, I love when there's
like a limited number of shit. I know some people don't, but
like if if there's like 100 out there and I have one of them,
I'm so happy if I get like the Alpha pre release, like just
printed in my backyard kind of stuff.
I love that stuff and I love that DIY in the aspect of of the
space, especially skirmish. And and I've been bit in the
past where I was like, oh, I'll grab that next week or I'll do
this or that and then it's gone. And like you said, it doesn't
exist. I have a list of like 10 bucks
and I'm like, man, if I ever see this, I know there were like 100
made, I'll I'll grab it. But but to your point, like,
yeah, like support the stuff you like now because not, it's not
fucking Amazon. Like when it's small indie
publishers, yeah, you're you can't keep it in in production
forever. You know, there's not the space
to to warehouse that there's not the, the, you know, even if
there is a demand, like a lot of times it's, it's a little bit
smaller than, you know, a worldwide distribution.
No one's like fucking Penguin Books every year.
So it's if you like, I'd grab it.
Blaster one through 4. There was 0 produced.
It was a print on demand. So there was 0 produced.
It was like 1 per person who ordered it.
So if you have them and you bought them aftermarket, you're
buying them from a somebody's garage, you know, from
somebody's like bookshelf. It's not.
And it was their personal copy that they, they paid the
manufacturer essentially. And and you know, like you're
lucky with independent miniatures games to get
something that's being produced and numbers that's like over
1002 thousand. Like I think that's common.
But you know, yeah, there's new ways of producing books and like
like for Sleeping Hollow, I sleepy for Bloody Hollow, our
game Bloody Hollow, we did a Kickstarter.
The hardcover was super expensive to produce and we
produced like 300. So that's another one where it's
like, you know, that is a one to one relationship.
Again, people who backed it to people who got it.
And I have some extras I'll be bringing bringing to Adepticon.
So if you're there, pick one up. I'll, I'll see you next week.
I have so much painting to do between now and then, but I'll
see you next week. But outside of outside of
Blaster, you've worked on some other stuff as well, so yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, when I was, when I
started electing again, like there's a long wind up before I
had a book produced. And so I started relationships
with different publishers, working with them on graphic
design. One of them was this, my friend,
the former art director of Privateer Press, Chris Ogden,
He, he's a friend of mine. And he directed me towards this
like kind of company that was doing rules that were super
simple and like streamlined versions of 40K on one page.
And they had this website that was like a terrible kind of like
blog and it's just like black and white most places.
And like there was no miniatures or very few miniatures and they
had a posting for graphic designer.
So I, I applied and then started working with Gaetano at one page
rules. And he's the like the lead of
this creative lead of this, this movement of making games that
are like, I don't know, fun to play for, you know, the masses.
And watching that Patreon go from like, you know, 8000
members, which at the time I thought was incredible.
And now to like, can you look up Opr's current?
It might be hidden. You might have to do like a.
You might have to do like a Google search to one of those
services that counts members but like 40. 5526.
Yeah, so a few. Just a couple.
Just one or two. Some of the most I've I've seen
on a Kickstarter outside like Shea and Pekku.
That's crazy. And so that is that is the thing
I worked on recently was last year I was working on their
broken Truth box set. I worked on the cover design and
some of the like the graphics for the Kickstarter.
And I guess they did game found. And yeah, it, it's been cool,
like working with people and seeing them come up the ranks.
And like, especially Guy Tano, watching that kind of explosive
growth and meeting the people that he's brought on the team
along the way has been really cool.
And that's a really, that's a really good company and you
should support them if you haven't.
They're very cool. And then I'm forgetting everyone
else. No, no.
I've also worked on some RPG stuff.
I've done art direction and graphic design for Goodman
Games. I did a bunch of work on The
Terror from the Under Deep with an art director named Matt
Hildebrand, who is just a little gem of a human being.
Really liked him. Yeah.
And it's been cool to work with these big brands and learn how
they do things, and it inspires me to do my stuff better.
But. How is it going from like
Blaster, where I know you said you, you, you work with some
people, especially on like Eternal and stuff like that, but
you're pretty much like the guy there deciding like how things
are going to look to then working with like OPR or like
especially DCC, because DCC has a very kind of like consistent
design language with a lot of the other way they do stuff.
How is it going from like kind of having control of one thing
to kind of being told how to do another thing?
It's a challenge, but less because of attitude, just more
like workflow. Just like how I've developed
working through a blaster. Just doesn't work for like A2
column RPG layout like it just required learning new skills.
And that's partially why I like the prospect of working with
other people's is continue to level up and learn new things.
And yeah, it's it's totally different.
You're absolutely right. So but the biggest thing again,
kind of going back to the beginning of the conversation is
that I wanted to make a lefty a place about collaboration and
everybody has different perspectives on that in Indy, I
think because if you're independent, like how
independent are we talking? Are you one person who wants to
just do it all? Then interacting with me is
frustrating because I'm like, hey, what if we do this?
What if we tried this? You know, like that can be a
frustrating experience, but for people that want to come
together and like, take that thing to the next level and work
kind of in each other's strengths and trust each other
and build that. Again, with Mike Hutchinson's
Hobgoblin, that's what we did. Like Maya came to me with a Word
document and with some ideas on visual language and I helped,
you know, like inspire a little bit of like what how do we
combine that visual language with art and with text?
And then I did like 5 or 6 laid out styles for hobgoblin before
I settled on like this extremely, you know, Spartan in
the context of other miniature games or other games where
there's like literally white on the backgrounds of the pages of
the book. And you get to those, you get to
those things of these really cool heights of art when you can
work together to collaborate on something.
My old boss used to say the secret to good ideas is lots of
ideas and you move more brains in the room means more ideas,
you know? Yeah.
And you know, like you said, I guess when you're trying to
build something that is a collaborative thing, being the
person that kind of corrals it all together, being malleable
enough to be like, well, this person really likes to do their
thing and wants a little bit of help.
Versus this person who wants to like mesh minds and, and blend
it all together is something that I, I assume is what you've
kind of had to deal with for, for a while.
Yeah, One of my favorite experiences is working with Andy
Chambers, and he just turns in like, a perfect manuscript.
You know, I was reading the manuscript like, all right,
Like, how can I possibly collaborate with this?
This is just done. Like, there was some, you know,
some errors that I caught. And he was thankful, but it's
not like it wasn't. It was like, man, this is you.
You were done with this when you came to me.
And it was like, you know, maybe too short.
It was like 10 pages, 12 pages of rules or something, but just
elegant rule after rule after rule is really cool to see it in
just Word document form. But yeah, I mean, you're, you're
learning each person in a collaboration and kind of
getting a sense of where it's at.
And I'm definitely far from mastered it.
And every blaster I'm like, do I know what I'm doing?
I think I know what I'm doing. I don't know.
So yeah, we're, we're still learning exactly how this how
this all works. I'm stoked about the where we're
at now. And yeah, each Blasters author
is completely different. Yeah, I mean, and every game is
completely living too. And, and now going to Blaster 8
because that's what's actually on the Kickstarter right now.
And you were nice enough to to to let me see one and have one
and hold one already, which is great.
And that it's, it's crowdfunding now.
So, so what's up with Blaster 8? What's going on with with what?
What is the newest game that that is coming out with with
Blaster? All right, now that people are
starting to wake up, they're hanging me on Discord, so I got
to turn this off before. So Kickstarter, I need to turn
off. Oh, let's just hope it doesn't
happen again I guess. So and it did not come through,
you're good. OK, good.
I'm like, OK, Kickstarter Blaster 8 Kickstarter.
This is ask me the question again, apologies.
What the heck is is up with blast #8?
What? What's the game?
How has it been? Because I know the prepaid was
out for a long time. So what's up with Blaster 8?
What's the game? What?
Yeah. Yeah.
So I'll address both those questions.
Those are both good questions. So Blaster 8 is Dark Ages of
Anwin and the premise is really cool.
Will from Forbidden Song, most notably known for Forbidden
Psalm. And he's done, I feel like, 20
games. Yeah.
And that's it. Your section for his wall.
The entire shelf is just will, yeah.
Yeah, I love that. And, and it's awesome.
But early on in Blaster, Will reached out and was like, hey,
I'd love to like participate. So we've had this conversation
kind of going for years and he came to me with this new game
like, and and this isn't a knock against Will, but Will tends to
like kind of create like a round forbidden song, you know, and,
and when he creates something special and new, that's the
thing that kind of excites me about his work.
So when he created his RPG around in the dark or these
other things like or put or when he pushes forbidden Psalm really
far, like what it can do, That's what particularly excites me
about working with him. He came to me with a whole new
game system and this game design is awesome.
It's like small units from a village that aren't like Knights
or heroic warriors, but they're just like, you know, literally
villagers with Spears facing off against monsters.
Some like maybe like a leader or hero that's like the, the, the
person that runs the, the village and, and the system is
like really elegant. He's brought in like push your
luck mechanics where you can activate your units more than
more than maybe you should, where you can start to exhaust
them. And it breaks down the dice
from, you know, they maybe they start at AD 8 for their dice
quality and then as they push themselves, they drop to AD 6 or
AD 3. So you're able to like push your
units to do multiple things and then exhaust them and they have
to like wait for the next round to to be back to their starting
dice area. That's all like all the
mechanics are cool. But then on top of it, he's got
this really cool foundation for culturally.
He's living in Wales, I believe he's Welsh and he's learning
Welsh. And, like, there's a big
movement in Wales for not losing the Welsh language, making it OK
to like, put it on signs so that people can functionally use it
in the country and culturally going back to things that were
culturally Welsh and taking ownership back over them.
And it's really, really cool. So the monsters in the game are
exactly part of that kind of movement.
They're like reclamations of Arthurian legends from not
England, but from Wales. And like, that's the origin of
it. So it's really, that's what's
going on with Blaster Volume 8. Yeah.
Yeah, and I mean the miniatures too.
We've already talked about miniatures a ton and the thing,
but my God, they're they're gorgeous.
And is it the same artist that you've been that you said was
that you've previously been working with?
Yeah. So in Skullforge, again, he got
very excited about doing monsters.
He So what makes again? What makes those miniatures from
Jordan shine when we're collaborating especially is the
illustrator is inspiring the design of what the miniature
looks like. And then Jordan's able to take
that kind of look and feel and make it work on the on the table
top in a really special way. And I think the, the forgetting
this, the horse's name, Dang it. I can see it in Welsh in my
head, but I can't say it. But the, the horse, the the
water horse. That's what where the settled,
where there we go or settled door and the settled door, that
malevolent. It's like a malevolent shape
shifting horse that stabs and crushes the villagers and pops
out of the water. It's a Celtic legend that's
present in a lot of places in that area.
But this is like the kind of Welsh version, like a scary,
scarier kind of perspective on it.
And the illustrator when she worked Saprophil Saprophile, I
think she did an incredible job concepting these ideas that are
pretty loose. And it was really fun working
with her. And I just posted about how one
of the things I really liked about her work is that she's
doing really highly detailed surreal things.
Like if you follow her Instagram, she's she's doing
stuff where you're like your brain kind of goes, oh, I think
I can see what's going on. But the more you look at it, the
realize, you know, like this is an alien thing that I'm looking
at. This isn't real.
Like, yeah, like weird forms that are combining bugs in
humans, but they're like, very, again, surreal, but done in a
very realistic presentation, almost like a a medical like
design journal. So yeah, she set the tone And
then it it was really cool to see them come to life.
Yeah, I mean, see an incredible illustrator.
I know you know, Will's worked with her.
I know that like, you know, Fleming Hand and Max Muna
working with her as well and seeing more of her work kind of
in this space is incredible. I wish, I wish more games would
reach out to like, I love teach RPG artists and I love, you
know, all the people in the space.
But like finding someone who like maybe doesn't do that as a
prime thing and bringing them in gives like this kind of new
creative kind of look to to a lot of games.
And I, you know, I have the, I have the, I'm not going to dare
try to pronounce the the creature's name, but the art up
for it right now. And my gosh, like the level of
detail in in what she does is absolutely incredible.
The the you mentioned Max moon games and flaming hand.
That's another person that I've worked with.
They're a group of people that I worked with.
I was working on their Black Ops kiss and that's How I Met Seth,
Seth profile. And that is a good example of of
what you're talking about. Those publisher that Janica and
Max do a really excellent job of reaching out to those different
artists. Like with a frastic beasts.
Yeah, I think that tabletop RPG can serve to inspire tabletop
miniature games big time with that kind of stuff.
And that's what I'm trying to do, is connect artist that makes
sense for the concept. Like in Dark Age of Anwen, you
have Spirit Realm crossing over into the physical that is SAP
Raphael's work to the Saprophiles work to the Max.
It's just, you know, this weird thing kind of crossing over a
little bit. Yeah, no, it's it's gorgeous and
the game looks incredible. I mean I Will's a friend and an
incredible and prolific the creator.
He will have an idea and have like a full game the next day,
which boggles my mind. It took me like 5 months to do 3
days worth of work that he does in like 20 minutes.
And I don't understand how he puts out so much stuff and it's
always still great. But like you said, seeing I love
all of forbidden stuff, dread nights and last war and
everything are incredible. But you know, run from the dark
is a completely different thing. That has been really cool to see
the the wings spread on that. And then getting this as well as
I'm, I'm, I'm going to be getting this to the table now
that I have it for, you know, so many people and I'm super
excited for it. But so the Kickstarter is still
running right now. It is going for let's see 22
more days when people go back this right now, like what can
they get? And we talked about Blaster 8,
we talked about some miniatures, but what else is available with
the Kickstarter? Yeah, so we launched March 3rd
and we're going. So it's almost 40 days, which is
just not the rule. You're not supposed to do this.
You're supposed to like make people freak out and be afraid,
right, To miss out on it. That's not the goal here.
I'm trying to, I like just looked at like pay periods and
was like, how can I make sure people feel comfortable and that
they're not pressured into like pulling the trigger And yeah, it
looks. Yeah, Anyway, so take your time
with it. It's going to be around for a
few weeks, but I really want everyone to have an opportunity
to come join us on it. You're able to, you're able to
get the new game, Blaster Volume 8, which is Dark Ages of Anwin,
but you're also able to go back three games on top of that.
So you can go get Blaster Volume 7 Arsenal, which is Jordan
Cuffy's game and that's the Sculptor from Skullforge.
So he had just this passion about these large Macs and we've
been working on that game to like support those Big Macs.
And it's like a Titanfall arcade shooter essentially for the
tabletop. Very cool ask.
And then there's Slip Runners, who was Andy Chambers stopped me
at Adepticon and was like, hey, what is that?
And he saw me holding blasters and, and one of our 3D printed
tanks. And we developed a relationship
and he had this really crazy Newtonian physics game where
your ship starts moving like the video game Asteroids and then it
keeps moving until you like put afterburners in the other
direction. And so it has basically X wing,
like, you know, Starship scale fighters that don't have guns
and you're trying to go from point to point on the map.
And then the last one is you're able to.
And that's done by Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe in collaboration
with indie publisher Best Hobby. The last game is Dead by Lead
volume is Blaster Volume 5, Dead by Lead.
And that's by Alex C Van Allen. He's up and coming game
designer. He's done a couple of things.
His games are extremely fun. They're lightweight and easy to
get into. You especially dead by lead
Bloody Hollows a little more dense, but dead by Lead is
really easy to get into. And we, we set out to say, like,
what if we treated Western games less campy and just said, Hey,
what's a skirmish like? What's the skirmish game like in
the Wild West? Like what's a gritty skirmish
game? Like?
How do you build a campaign system inside of the Wild West?
And we've created a fake town and county that you can explore
kind of like Mordheim or whatever, where you have like
this defined space that kind of inspires why people are fighting
without being like, you know, the same, you know, movie tropes
and all of that stuff. So those are what you get.
And then on top of that, we've produced physical miniatures for
each of those games that are finally going into boxes.
And now you can get the blaster magazine and the blaster
miniatures. All of our games are miniatures
agnostic slash friendly. Like we have miniatures for
them, but Dark Age is a van. When you're going to want to
produce your own village minis, you're going to want villager
minis. We have the monsters in the box
and then each one of the other ones.
There's there's miniatures that are core to the game that you
can use to play in. Yeah, I'm every day I look at it
and get him like so I obviously back the dead by lead
miniatures. I have to, but I keep being like
I should just get all of them. Wait, no, I shouldn't.
No, I should just get all of them.
No, like I need a. The fact that there's still
three more weeks means by the end I'm probably going to end up
getting all of them in the SDLS. But but we'll see.
With. With Adepticon coming up with
all the money I know I'm going to spend there, maybe I'll
convince myself to to hold off for now, but it's going to be
hard. Yeah, and I'll have some stuff
at Adepticon and I'll be sharing a booth next to Skull Forge.
So Skull Forge will have a ton of really cool like sci-fi stuff
and then kind of like I know he has a bunch of surprises planned
in terms of what's at his booth. And then next door I'll be there
with Blaster and you can, you can purchase Blaster there too,
so. Yeah, can't wait.
Like I said, we're like 6 days away.
So, so very excited for for Adeptagon coming up.
And and again, now that we've now that we've met, we can meet
in person, which, which, which is going to be cool.
I'm definitely going to snag whatever you guys have there.
But, but Greg, it's been a pleasure talking to you when
people go back all of your stuff when they find Electi Studio,
because you know, there you have a ton of STLS, all of your
games, everything. Where can people find you?
Where can people find Electi Studio?
Where can people find everything that we've kind of been talking
about for for the last hour? Yeah, so most of the stuff is on
our website, electi-studio.com. Blaster, the Blaster
Kickstarter. The Blaster Kickstarter has a
lot of the a lot of the stuff, so you can get 90% of the way
there. But then we have games like
Eternal, Hobgoblin and A Bloody Hollow on our main website.
Yeah. So go, go for those listening,
go grab all of those. Come say hi to to Greg at
Adepticon if you're going to be there.
I'll probably be floating around the booth a bunch.
So we'll see. We'll see what happens with
that. But seriously, Greg, love
Blasphemy Magazine. It's been a pleasure talking to
you. Love what you're doing with
Electi Studio and excited to see you again in a week.
But seriously, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure.
Nice talking to you, Ryan. Yeah, absolutely.
And I hopefully you'll come on again for blaster #9 whenever
that comes out again. But we'll see how it goes.
But again, thank you all for listening.
Appreciate it. Thank you so much and and have a
good day.