It took a while to get this issue together, but as with many projects, it just finally fell into place like a weird chain of dominoes. The lead domino was Patrick Stuart, my interviewee for the issue: I interviewed Patrick in April and then again in August after Maze of the Blue Medusa was a big winner at the ENnies. Patrick was awesome, and shared a lot of really rich material for the zine; we explored where his interest in games comes from, how he makes what he makes, his motivations and more. Patrick shared so much that this issue has ended up at 36 pages including covers, instead of the 24 of Issues 1 and 2.
The next domino was getting two great artists onboard: Scrap Princess and Jeremy Duncan. Scrap has produced a great cover that follows the series theme of "show the interviewee having a random encounter in something they've made"; she also created a lot of really great original illustrations based on her collaborations with Patrick. I asked Jeremy to create some art based on my favourite False Machine blog posts - his Kamikaze Librarian and Lanthanum Chromate dwarf are awesome, and the Kamikaze Librarian also graces the back cover of the issue.
Another domino was time: finding time to pull everything together has been a real challenge in the last few months. But hitting crunch time has also shown me that this is what I want to do more and more of. There is a real thrill to making something and putting it out into the world (and also that slightly panicked moment when you pull out the credit card to pay for the print run, and wonder if people will buy it!) - and it's also a bit addictive, because you realise more and more that making stuff is not impossible.
The last domino for Issue 3 was the print extra. I really enjoyed making Escape The Undermaze, a one-page microgame, for Issue 2, and the feedback that I got for it was quite positive. I've made a decision to create a microgame for every issue from now on as a print extra - and I've also fallen in love with the format a little bit too. The microgame for Issue 3 is called Thursday Night, and is another short game with minimal rules but hopefully enough inspiration to drive a tense game of a bad situation.
So: the dominoes have fallen and Issue 3 is here. Please check it out in whatever format you like best. If that's pdf then you can get it from Payhip here and from DriveThruRPG here. And if you like print then order it from here and I'll get it in the post to you as soon as possible.
Thanks for reading this, hope you check out Issue 3 of A Random Encounter, featuring Patrick Stuart!
PS - if you've not got Issues 1 and 2, you can get them from the zines page too!
