Hey, welcome.
If you're reading this, you've either just joined, or you're deciding whether joining is worth it. Either way, fair question, so let's start with what this actually is, and what you're actually signing up for.
Porchirren: Crucible of Cards is a tactical, solo-first tabletop RPG. You play alone. No dice, no Game Master sitting across from you. Everything, every fight, every conversation, every close call, gets resolved with a standard pack of playing cards. That's it. That's the whole toolkit.
It's tactical, in the real sense of the word. There's genuine positioning, genuine opponent behaviour, genuine decisions that matter, not just narration dressed up as gameplay. And here's the part that actually separates it from most things you've probably played: there's no such thing as a wasted roll. No miss, no fail, no card that just does nothing. Every single draw, whatever comes up, produces something real. A number. A colour. A condition that actually changes what happens next. You're never sitting there wondering why you bothered drawing at all.
Now, about the name.
You are a Porchirren. That word isn't just what we called the game. It's who your character is, inside the fiction itself. It's a portmanteau, portal plus the Bajan word for children, chirren. It's what the people native to this world call folks like you: someone pulled through a naturally occurring rift into a place that was never meant to be yours. You don't know why you were taken. The natives don't know why the rifts even opened in the first place. Nobody's handing you a tidy answer.
That's deliberate. Your place in this world sits somewhere real, somewhere between displacement and diaspora. It's not a mystery waiting to be solved and closed off. It's something you actually live with, the way real people do. The portals themselves aren't even a one-way door. They can open again. Nobody's promising they'll take you home, or even to the same version of home you left. Fifty-two different realities on the other side of that gamble, and no guarantee which one you land in twice.
So that's the setting, in short: a grounded, near-future science-fiction story about people torn from their own world into this one, told through a game where nothing you do at the table is ever wasted.
Why a newsletter, and why bother joining it?
Honestly, because I'd rather show you this thing getting built than just tell you it's finished one day. Here's what that looks like in your inbox:
Real, text-first updates on where the project actually stands, not polished announcements months after the fact.
Actual playtest logs, the kind with real mistakes in them, the kind that have already, genuinely made this game better more than once.
Early word the moment a new Ashcan, a short, focused piece of the full game, goes up for sale.
Eventually, an audio-first podcast walking through how all of this actually comes together.
Text-first updates land on Mondays. In-depth, audio-first podcast episodes land on Wednesdays. That's the rhythm, nothing more piled on top of it.
If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, glad to have you here. Reply and tell me what pulled you in, or what you're hoping this game does that others haven't, I read every one. More soon.