#tppappop

Happy Silksong day!

🐛 Guess whose TTRPG anthropomorphic bug adventure is DIY Crowdfunding right now?!

🪳 Shrink to insectoid size and adventure into the uncanny world that exists inside a sapient pear tree in this weird fantasy pointcrawl.

🐜 52 page full-colour, fully illustrated adventure for TROIKA! written and illustrated by me, Josh Blincow. This book owes much inspiration to HOLLOW KNIGHT | BUG FABLES | THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE MINISH CAP | HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS | A BUGS LIFE.

🕷️ That's right, I've been the reason Silksong was delayed all these years because this book has been in development literally as long as Silksong has and I wanted to be sure I didn't steal its thunder!

🪲 Unlike Team Cherry, we're a tiny indie team who would rather not keep up with the ruckus of kickstarter, so Melsonia are running a DIY crowfund/preorder through their Shopify store!

🪱 We are going to print the book either way (the benefit of the DIY crowdfunding experiment is you can drop all the kayfabe) but if we hit the funding goal I wanted to pay back to the community that helped me be able to do this at all:

🐌 We'll commission some drop-in NPC cards for everyone who supported in those first 30 days (picture on one side, description on the other) from some of the wonderful folks from TTRPG Tumblr that we know & love who have inspired and supported me on my journey!

🦋 Please go buy a copy, I wrote & illustrated the entire thing (there are 36 colour illustrations) and layout is being done by Shuyi Zhang, who is the reason that everything Melsonia publishes reads like magic.

🪰 It has been a labour of love and I put so much care and attention into prioritising both reference use at the table and playful reading (as well as making it really easy to pick up and run with your game of preference) and I guarantee you'll know it was worth it when you feel the quality of the paper in your hands.

P.S. If somebody gets this project to pop off on the Silksong reddit I'll owe you a life debt & post you a copy with a custom bug drawing! Dead serious.

🐞 Preorder by Oct 7, 18:00 GMT (or wait until Spring and hope you don't forget).

🦋 Shrink to size & explore a labyrinthine world of bug factions inside a sapient pear tree, racing against the clock to shape the future of a dungeon that was never yours to delve & escape before you grow to full size!

Silksong costs less than The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick (£18 + shipping at preorder).

I think that's fun to think about.

Both are games (one analog, one digital) about carefully crafted hand illustrated bug worlds made by a tiny team of artists (in my case just me) in which players dive into the politics of colourful insect kingdoms and encounter their threats on a perilous labyrinthine adventure.

They both have deep world building & lore to unravel and balance tones from cute & comedic to horrifying & melancholy.

Silksong was in development a couple years longer, but the seeds for both games grew from Hollow Knight and both were delayed again and again for many years.

In the end, after many years predicting Silksong's release, they were somehow both made available to buy on the same day and cost almost the same amount.

I think the part of Silksong's audience that plays D&D or is interested in tabletop roleplaying games would really enjoy The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, we all know they're ravenous for exactly this type of story & world.

The quality is there, but getting them to discover it is another matter.

Over the next year or so I hope TPAPPOP gets the attention it deserves from that crowd, I know there are people who would love it and I know those people are either playing Silksong right now or will be as soon as they find the opportunity.

My book has 22 days left to hit its funding goal of selling 1000 preorder copies (weve sold 400 so far!!!) for bonus bug NPCs to flesh out the world with voices from other artists & writers, but the print run will be produced either way.

It costs £18 plus shipping from the UK, making it prohibitively expensive outside of the UK, but I believe a chunk of those 400 orders has already come from distributors: you should be able to buy it from anywhere that stocks Melsonia books in Spring 2026 either way.

In the mean time, I think I've earned the right to play Silksong, and if my book finds its audience I will be grateful and hope to hear they enjoy it.

It was worth the work either way.

So I just heard about CATS courtesy of the good folks in the PlusOneExp discord server. CATS was written by Patrick O'Leary for the 2016 200 Word RPG Challenge.

It's nice and short (200 words even) and it's a compelling formula for the classic What Is This TTRPG segment that warrants a page at the front of every good RPG book.

I find it particularly interesting that this is imagined as a micro-RPG in its own right, a table activity for the start of game night that sets out to address what I have always found to be the most painful aspect of playing any TTRPG (besides tedious and arcane character creation rituals – I'm looking at you 5e PHB 👀): the friction that arises from players having discordant, conflicting, contradictory or incompatible expectations during play.

We can formulate the basic strucure of CATS in a variety of ways: Concept/Aim/Tone/Subject Matter, What/Where/When/Who/Why/How, Premise/Overview/Goals/What You Need, etc. all of which can be applied in two immediate directions:

In a What Is This RPG section, these are just codified methods for teaching the player/reader (more of my thoughts on the player/reader here) how to read and communicate everything that comes next in a way that's both more focused than a blurb (which might basically constitute the Concept/Premise/Hook) and more comprehensive than an elevator pitch.

As a launchpad for table play, these structures guide the conversation to establish the pillars of the shared fiction, and I especially appreciate CATS for the fact that it ends on Subject Matter. It could be the consequence of a tortured acronym, but having set the stage in every other way it seems appropriate to hop into safety tools as the final as the final negotiation before play, once all context is provided but nothing is yet set in stone.

That's all he wrote on CATS.

In THE PERILOUS PEAR & PLUM PIES OF PUDWICK I wrote a conversation guide to the meat of the adventure on pg. 11, following an introductory segment of the game that functions as a session 1 prologue of sorts before delving into the hexflower "dungeon" microsetting, inciting incident et al. It's interesting for me to look back at the way I structured this from the perspective of CATS.

If you're curious about TPPAPPOP and want a sneak peak of what you can expect, here's that segment from pg. 11, Inside The Tree:

All Patreon newsletters are free and readable for everyone, I'm using it as a newsletter platform with scope for allowing people to see (and maybe even support???) future RPG work from me.

I was really cooking with this one. I've been stewing on this for a while and today was the lucky day I was finally compelled to write it.

If you want to know what it's like to try and get any work done as a person with unmedicated ADHD and autism, and why my TTRPG adventure The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick has been four years in the making, you should give this a read.

It's pretty candid, but what else should I do, pretend to be someone I'm not? Fuck that, this shit is hard as hell and my work is worth the effort.

It's a long read but a good one. It has good advice on thinking the relationship between self-worth and productivity (hint: you are not the problem), especially if you've got similar brain soup and circumstances to me.

Also if you want to sponsor a trial of ADHD meds for me you can like, consider assassinating and/or otherwise generally terrorising the government and corporate officials hellbent on destroying the National Health Service, I guess. Or I suppose you could just vote for the other team, who are also very vocally all in on genocide and the systematic destruction of the NHS? That would surely be as effective!

The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick | coming soon | read about it at http://tppappop.carrd.co

| 🐛 | 52 page full-colour, fully illustrated creepy-crawly micro-setting for Melsonia written and illustrated by Josh Blincow (@goblincow). Shrink to insectoid size and adventure into the uncanny world that exists inside a sapient pear tree in this system agnostic weird fantasy pointcrawl.

| 🐜 | INSPIRED BY | HOLLOW KNIGHT | BUG FABLES | THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE MINISH CAP | HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS | A BUGS LIFE

"During the [...]: Quickly deduces that [...] having seen [...]. Straggling spectators follow [...] to [...], sending for [...] two loyal sons Jason and Jonas (one a parish Constable, the other a parish Gong Farmer) while [...] provokes allies among the crowd [...]. Wants: To use the opportunity to [...]."

TPPAPPOP says ACAB

The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, pg. 36

release date: TBC

publisher: Melsonia (The Undercroft special full-colour 48 page fully-illustrated issue)

format: oldschool-style weird fantasy hexcrawl adventure compatible with all oldschool systems

genre: shrink to insectoid size and adventure into the uncanny world that exists inside a sapient, talking pear tree