Prepare for an existential dive into the psychological deep end. Blending early-1980s analog aesthetics, surreal psychological horror, and high-stakes espionage, this adventure challenges players to escape an astral prison where reality is broken, trust is a liability, and their memories are weaponized.

The agents of Rainbow intelligence Services wake up isolated in a strange, non-Euclidean cul-de-sac called Paradise Round. The interior of their bungalows defies geometry, unbranded food sits in the kitchens, and a radio plays unrecognizable smooth jazz on a continuous loop. Outside, a perpetual circle of road leads nowhere, and the surrounding woods pour down a torrential, impassable wall of rain.

A pamphlet on their nightstands promises “sunny days ahead,” but the reality is far more sinister: Paradise Round is an astral prison built for dangerous agents. The Rainbow agents were sentenced here for a reason. If they want to escape, they’d better figure out what it was.

Featuring:

• Hidden Agendas & Complications: Every player has something to hide. From a Double Agent secretly allied with a rogue faction, to a panicked operative hiding a past crime, to Investigators consuming literal pill capsules scattered through the map to digest their forgotten mission briefings.
• Surreal Sandbox Investigation: To escape, players must navigate a community populated by “dream puppets”—NPCs pulled directly from their own memories—who are currently embroiled in a forbidden, bizarre election between two lifeless marionettes known as the Professor and the General.
• The 8-Track Artifacts: Players will hunt for hidden, impossible 8-track cassettes (baked into bread, or grown into trees) that hold reality-warping properties and recordings of conversations the players literally just had.
• The Secret Master: One player character at the table is secretly the adversary. Having stolen reality-bending psychotronic technology, they have trapped their teammates to interrogate them. But they aren’t omnipotent—and they must play by the rules of the dreamspace to keep the illusion alive.
• Ready-to-Play NPC & Pre-Gens: Features fully statted Fate System characters, including the seven agents of Rainbow, Frank Dixon, an agent of the Entropy Collective who’s entire past is a complete fiction, and Noah Twain, the friendly, faceless entity who serves as the local handyman and watchman.

See the interior here:

The full document with full text, art, and layout is available for review upon request via PDF or POD through DriveThruRPG.

The pre-launch page is here:

And the project homepage is here: https://tonemilazzo.com/espionage/

This is Tone Milazzo’s second crowdfunding effort. The author is available for any interviews or actual plays. Thanks for your time and consideration. Any promotional support would be greatly appreciated.

The first adventure, The King in Giallo is available on these fine platforms:

Check out the interior here:

The general advice for crowdfunding has been, “Don’t bother unless you have a sizable following on social media.” My Twitter never broke 600, but I’ve just reached 3000 on Bluesky, so here I am. Even still, an audience in one place might not carry over to another, so scope is a consideration. Especially when it’s one’s first Kickstarter. It’s easier for people to take a gamble on a smaller project first. So instead of opening with the full game of ESPionage, I’m building a track record with three stand-alone adventures:

The King in Giallo – James Bond by way of Robert W Chambers with a touch of Italian horror.

Sunny Days and Rain – The Prisoner meets The Good Place, covered in late 1970s brown rainbows.

MindGuard – The X-Files in Twin Peaks for a very 90s domestic terrorist thriller.

One thing I’ve learned about Kickstarter, there are essential pieces of advice you must follow for success. And for each piece of advice, someone will tell you you don’t need to do that. With that spirit in mind, here’s the trailer I produced, which is both utterly essential to my success, or a waste of my time:

As I write this, the project is at $652 with 42 packers. I estimate the expenses, art, editing, and layout, will cost ~$1200. My goal wasn’t to make a mint, or break even. It was to mitigate some of the cost, and build the groundwork audience for future Kickstarters. My last project, the novel The Faith Machine cost $2100 in editing (a mistake on my part), resulted in a $200 advance, and only pre-sold 12 copies. Comparatively, this has been a raging success.

Backer levels start at $1 for a full PDF!

Book

The Witch’s Daughter

I discovered this autobiographical tale from Azure Ray’s own Orenda Fink’s appearance on The Dana Gould Hour. An interesting account from a high-drama family where the mentally ill and magical-thinking mother twisted the entire family unit around her will. And a daughter’s journey of understanding, the leads to escape. A lot of people are breaking from their parents these days. While this family fracture isn’t political in nature, the moves are all the same.

[Powell’s Books]

Blu-ray

Blake’s 7

In high-school my Sundays nights were spent watching imported BBC on KPBS. The space adventure, Blake’s 7 was my favorite of the offerings. My wife got me season 1 on Blu-Ray and I’m happy to say “The dirty half-dozen in space” still holds up, 45 years after production. An ensemble cast that lets everyone get some time in the spotlight (even the women), the disks provide updated effects, but the shoe-string visual effects of the time hold a spot in my heart.

[Blu-Ray]

RPG

Grimwild

Fantasy adventure remains the gateway into role-playing games. Even after Wizard’s of the Coast’s numerous missteps and attempts to sabotage the industry at large, D&D is still the fist and last RPG most people play. Hopefully, games like Grimwild, will chip away at this dominance, while providing an updated experience for new plays, rather than starting with the dated rule set descended from the 1970s. I’ll be running Grimwild to truly grok the rules, but from what I’ve read I see a lot of potential in this system. It might be the basis for the next two games I write.

[DriveThruRPG]

Hey hey hey, I got some big new regarding ESPionage, the Role-Playing Game of Psychics and Spies.

We finally have a cover illustration! Showcasing 5 NPCs from the game representing the five kinds of characters in the setting, and Drawn by San Diego’s own Joe Phillips

Music

I slept on Common when he was coming up. The Bling Era loomed so large in those days, I’d checked out of mainstream hip-hop and moved on to the LA Underground and Nerdcore. If I’d of know there was still one conscious rapper out there I’d of been all over this. Especially this album, Be. Say…

Who produced this?

Oh no…

Oh no.

Oh well. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t imprint on this at the time. Makes it easier to kill the author now.

RPG

Mothership is more of a traditional game than I usually play. I’ve been looking to mix it up a bit without going full 5E. This is a quick moving, simple game of freelancers trapped with the horrors of outer space on one side, and the economic dread of capitalism on the other.

Simultaneous turn orders, no social skills to roll, and NPC stat blocks that take a single line of text. This might be the basis for my next RPG, a dystopian super game called Torn Capes.

I just rant his last night with three players also new to the system and it went off without a hitch.

Comic

I just re-read Jonathan Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four. I’d picked it up in bit and pieces before, but driving straight though from beginning to end it’s amazing how cohesive the run is. Expanding on the idea of the FF as a family, Reed has taken a number of supersmart kids under his wing, while events unfold that demonstrate how dangerous Mister Fantastic is without his family to ground him.

Book

The stories in Interzone must have blown so many minds back in the 1950s, but by today’s standards it barely raises an eyebrow. Especially the last part, WORD, I assume a product of Burrough’s cutup technique. Transgressive in it’s time, today reads like scanning 4chan.

Podcast

The disaster at Pompeii fascinates me. To imagine what those people went through. No understanding of volcanoes, they must have thought the gods had abandoned them. But as we learn in this episode of Radiolab, the fish sauce survives.

Tech

I finally found a tablet for reading comics and RPG PDFs. The Starlite from the Starlabs on Earth Prime. I nice big screen, decent battery life, and none of Windows or Android’s spyware. That said, I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone, because of all the work I had to put into it before I could put it to use.

It came preinstalled with MXLinux, the XFCE desktop was an odd choice for a tablet. The system font’s were so small I had to use reading glasses and a magnifying glass to adjust the settings. And they were never good enough.

I wiped the drive and installed Debian 12 with the Gnome Desktop, and it was almost perfect. Even still, I had to apply a hotfix to make the display rotate correctly.

I do enjoy it, but I think a lot of users would have give up instead of fixing it.

“As of August 17, 2023 our submissions are currently closed. We don’t anticipate re-opening them until late 2025.”

Well…crap…

If I hadn’t spent months developing all the ancillary material I could have submitted back in August. But I’m not going to wait ~18 months for a chance at acceptance. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to publish it myself, financed with crowdfunding.

Step one; get a new cover and temporary layout. The hostility to AI art has grown since I first did the Betawave edition. I’m going to purge all that imagery. I still feel I applied the technology as ethically and legally as anyone can, but that’s a hill I’m not willing to die on. Crowdfunding depends on goodwill, and I need as much as I can gather. I’ve contacted cover and layout artists. The text has already been through an editor, so a minimum viable product is close. Stretch goals will include interior art, and additional materials (most likely adventures) contributed by interested, professional game developers.

There will be four crowdfunding campaigns, three quickstart ESPionage adventures building momentum toward the full book. Two of the adventures are good to go. I ran The King in Giallo and Sunny Days and Rain a dozen times including at Gamex last month. I feel they’re both ready for publication. The third adventure, originally Petty Acts of Retribution, wasn’t nearly as strong and I’m re-purposing the NPCs from it into a new adventure, Operation 61, which is currently a page of notes.

The adventures should be crowdfunding through early next year, and the full game will this time next year. There’s a light at the end of this tunnel. Thanks for sticking with me so far.

Music: AD4PTION by woob

Looking like it was pulled from the Sam Goody bargain bin an sounding like the soundtrack to a lost John Carpenter movie. This album managed a horror movie narrative while remaining ambient enough to work to.

Role-Playing Games: Dogs in the Bark

If you know the legendary role-playing game, Blades in the Dark, this is exactly the same setting. The dirty, dark, crime ridden fantasy city of Duskvol. Except you’re a pack of dogs. I ran this at Gamex where the party found the victim of a murder and had to eat enough of the corpse before the rats showed up, the crows brought the Spirit Wardens, or the victim’s ghost manifested. With that premise, the characters spent most of their time rolling to eat corpse, so I need a better premise for next time.

Comics: Local Man

What if you’re legally bared from doing the one thing you’re good at, the one thing you’ve dedicated your life to? If you’re Crossjack, you move back to your hometown where everyone hates you and try to start over. Should strike a cord with everyone who did everything right and ended up failing.

Podcast: Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff

Consistently my favorite podcast. Not only are Robin D Laws and Ken Hite two of my favorite game developers, their interests in esoteric film, fiction, and history overlap my own.

Tech: Espanso

If you really need a typo fixing service on your PC, but you’re like me an don’t trust a key logger that sends every thing you type off to God knows where, get Espansso. You can use it to build text shortcuts, like today’s date or that email address you enter 20 times a day. I also use it to fix the fact that my finger can’t reach the apostrophe. Noe every time I end a word with “n;t” Espansso fixed it to “n’t.”

This post should start with a quote.

-Tone Milazzo

If you’re a subscriber wondering why you didn’t receive this post by email, my MailerLite account expired- use it or lose it terms of service. Just as well, the mailing list made posting twice the work. I’m falling back on the Jetpack mailer integrated into WordPress. One less login to keep track of, and I get a moment to fix typos after I hit ‘submit.’

Also gone is my Twitter presence. The account is still up to prevent some identity thief from poaching my persona, but I’ve been much happier of Mastodon for technology and table-top role-playing games, and Bluesky for everything else.

Mastodon is smarter, BlueSky more popular, the eternal dichotomy.

ESPionage the Role-Playing Game of Psychics and Spies

The editor finished with the document, but there’s been a couple of complications; Evil Hat closing their submissions and the backlash of anyone who touches an AI tool.

Crowdfunding is my most likely path to publication, but I won’t be able to use the assets I generated for the beta edition. The anti-AI hostility is so high I’ll have to scrub all the work I did or they’ll buy me a ticket on the express train to cancel town. I still feel these tools have their place in the prototyping and the results fall under fair use. But there’s no reasoning with the Internet.

Unless it’s on my ESPionage Discord, where I am a god.

The Final 5

Since crowdfunding is on the horizon and that’s where comics live, I’m also writing a short comic series, The Final 5.

There are many tales of superheroes who save the world. This isn’t one of them. When the world’s greatest superhero is killed, his body begins a chain reaction that dooms planet Earth. In this story where Death of Superman meet On the Beach, The Final 5 follows his widow, the dilettante crime-fighter’s sidekick, the alien robot observer, the criminal turned influencer, and the young sorceress as they use their last day to settle business.

Music Plug

I’ve been listening to a lot of Synthwave lately. Music inspired by video game and movie soundtracks of the 80s. It’s a familiar soundtrack to write too. Yota’s Room 412 takes the full synthwave sound and combines it with lyrics, coming back around to New Wave again.

TTRPG Plug

In Band of Blades, you play a company of mercenaries escaping undead army, doing whatever they can to survive, crossing the territories of doomed cities and villages. You play at three levels- the Specialists who most resemble a player character group, the Rookies, who fill out the missions since there’s never enough Specialists, and the Command officers, who make the hard choices of strategy and logistics.

It’s the logistics and morale that make Band really feel like a military operation. We ran the whole campaign, barely making it to safety at the end and even when we succeeded it felt like we made it by the skin of our teeth.

Comic Plug

Finally finished this story I started reading in high school. The original Mage comic, subtitled The Hero Discovered, was a re-skinning of King Arthur as Kevin Matchstick, where Excalibur is a baseball bat and the Hero follows the Hero’s Journey, but keeps cycling back to Refusal of the Call.

The second story, The Hero Defined, pairs Kevin with Kirby, an avatar of Heracles and gets into the culture of these supernatural hunters. A re-skinning of Gilgamesh.

The third story, The Hero Denied. didn’t lift its plot from any myth that I could see. The opening scene hangs a point on the break from myth, with Kevin running into a hunter from the next generation who eschews any connection to myth. Allowing [author] to take Kevin and his family in a new direction, one where his witch-wife is just as potent and effective as the hero.

Book Plug

I read Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con and Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest back-to-back in that order. The Internet Con left me feeling a little better about the future, Survival of the Richest left me feeling a whole lot worse.

Depressing as it was, Survival gave me the final piece of world-building I needed for The Final 5.

Podcast Plug

52 Pickup is an issue-by-issue discussion of 52, “the greatest comic book series you never heard of.” 52, the weekly, year-long experiment written by four of the greatest writers in the comic’s space at the height of their game. It’s nice to see an appreciation for this title and DC comics from the era.

Tech Plug

I’m in the process of de-googling my life, removing my dependency on Big Tech and their services. When the service if free then the user is the product, and I’m tired of making money for the technocrats who are undermining our democracy.

I’ve been using Linux desktop for years, so it’s been easy to abandon Microsoft Windows outside of work. But the phone is a different story. Linux phones aren’t viable, especially since I need apps for the day job. Fortunately, there’s GraphineOS, a fork of the Android code base built without any of Google’s code.

It allows multiple, sequestered profiles so I can keep all my work apps hidden away on their own little world while my main profile is 95% open-source. Keeping Gary Google and Johnny Microsoft out of my business. And you can do the installation over the web.

This is a new blog format for me, with an emphasis on plugging media and technology I find interesting. Longer posts, but on a quarterly schedule. If this appeals to you and you don’t want to miss out on a single post from The Tone Report-

This morning’s agenda- submit ESPionage the RPG of Psychics and Spies for Fate to Evil Hat. Upon checking the requirements one last time (it had been awhile) I found this line in the middle of the page:

“Update: As of August 17, 2023 our submissions are currently closed. We don’t anticipate re-opening them until late 2025.”

Well…crap…

Looks like I have ~18 months to kill. More than enough time to run demos and a second playtest campaign. And I could take the one-shot adventures and repackage them as quickstart guides. Once those are done, I have to decide if I’m going to sit on this document for a year, of take a crack at self-publishing.

Anyway, the beta-test edition is available on Discord: