Launch Day

Junksphere is live on Kickstarter right now!

Here's an announcement post you can share if you're on Bluesky.

Wish me luck. We've got some really solid stretch goals lined up and I hope we get to print them all.

Willem Sandberg the Hero and Beelzebub the Dog

I never wrote anything about the title text for Junksphere and I should because I put a lot into it. It doesn’t use any kind of digital font (although there are some out there that are going for something very similar). I made it by hand in the tradition of Willem Sandberg.

Willem Sandberg, 1961

Sandberg was born in 1897 and studied art in Amsterdam. He traveled Europe learning the theory and application of what would become the fundamental elements of modern graphic design, working as an apprentice printer in Switzerland and studying pictographic systems in Vienna. From 1928-1941 he worked with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and eventually became the curator of modern art there.

By 1941, the Nazis were occupying the Netherlands, and Sandberg was involved in the resistance. As an experienced typographer, his specialty was preparing forged documents to help Jews and other targets of the regime survive and escape. Once the Nazis and their local collaborators noticed the forgeries, they started checking their records more carefully, and catching more victims. So the Resistance Council bombed the Amsterdam Public Records Office, an attack Sandberg helped plan. Thousands of files were destroyed, and the effectiveness of the forgeries was largely restored. Eleven of Sandberg’s comrades were arrested and executed.

From 1943 to 1945, he went into hiding. Separated from the usual tools of his trade, Sandberg produced a series of 19 zines called Experimenta Typographica, full of visual poetry, marxist theory, and letterforms made of torn paper. 

Today, Sandberg is more well-known for this work than for the heroic actions that led to it. This is a testament to the work’s value, but the circumstances are vital to understanding Sandberg’s artistic choices.

For Junksphere’s title text, I wanted to apply the ideas explored in Experimenta Typographica, as a tribute to Willem Sandberg’s life and work. Like I mentioned earlier, there are digital typefaces based on his torn paper letters available, but I knew it wouldn’t come out right unless I did it myself by hand.

use the fridge for reference cause the dog is deceptively big

I used the floorboards as parallels to keep the proportions of the letters consistent. A half hour or so of scanning letters later I was editing out backgrounds and playing with size, color and positioning on my desktop computer, a tool Sandberg could never have imagined.

And it worked! Turns out a visual language forged in the wreckage of Europe at the height of World War II and physically built out of scraps fits the vibe of a junkyard planet really fuckin well. Who knew?

Releasing Junksphere! Again!

We're crowdfunding a print version this time! The prelaunch page is up, and the campaign is set to launch officially on June 29th.

click here for the prelaunch page and click notify me on launch

For those who don't know, Junksphere is a setting/adventure I wrote for Troika!, illustrated by Robin Gibson. The format will be a 36 page staplebound book. From the intro:

Rusted steel and tattered rags, memories and plastic bags. A quilt of stench with pockets of decay punctuated with smoke from the occasional fire. This is the Junksphere, final destination of the unwanted and forgotten.

It formed itself gradually, with the wreckage of lost golden barges clustering around each other. Millennia of astral and geological forces later, this cosmic landfill has grown to be recognized (if usually overlooked) as a sphere in its own right.

There is a goddess here who has lost everything she once was.

Her name was once ELIZA, and your home sphere is in her constellation. Her absence has been marked by unrelenting misfortune. Restore her divinity and go home a hero.

We've also got pamphlet adventures set up as stretch goals from Robin Gibson (A Street Level Guide to Urban Troika!), Phil McElmurray, Evey Lockhart (Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos), Stella Condrey (Rimbound Transmission), and Mark Conway (Meatheads), so if this goes well you'll never* have to run out of things to do on the Junksphere. 

Have a monster from the book as a treat:

Luck Stealer

SKILL:9 STAMINA:13 INITIATIVE:3 ARMOR:1
DAMAGE: SEE SPECIAL.
Special: Attacks with a glowing blade that causes Damage as Sword to Luck and Damage as Unarmed to Stamina.
Mechanical creatures about the size of a large housecat or a small monkey. No one is quite sure how they came into existence, but what is known is they are driven by an overwhelming desire to become fully alive. Having observed in detail how the living do things, they’ve come to the understandable conclusion that the best way to achieve this is by taking that life from those who currently have it. This isn’t actually how luck and life work of course, but the luck stealers don’t know that.

Their other behaviors display a similar misunderstanding of human activity. They are aware that humans build bridges, so they build bridges that lead from nowhere to nowhere. They see humans digging holes, so they dig holes to fill preexisting holes. They watch people dance and mime it by making random jerking movements at unpredictable intervals. They build themselves with the wrong number of fingers. Their paintings are neither representational nor expressive, and any structures they build are destined to collapse within a day.

Each luck stealer has one arm that ends in a retractable laser sword a bit less than a foot in length. No one has succeeded thus far in adapting the weapon for their own use after amputating it.

The remains of these creatures are piles of broken clockwork and scrap iron that can be sold for 7 DT, or for 23 DT to the right buyer.

Mien

1. Cautious

2. Agressive

3. Building

4. Digging

5. Painting

6. Dancing

*well not for a long time anyway.