C.S.E. Cooney

Here’s the Eventbrite link! You don’t need tickets for this, but if you sign up for the “free” ticket, that means you’ll get email reminders about the event in your inbox. Since there’s SO MUCH going on all the time!

What it is:

Wilson, Cooney & Hernandez host writers & poets for an Infernal Salon: a literary event to support Arvan Eleron’s sub-a-thon!

What is an Infernal Salon, you ask?

C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez have made a roleplaying game! It’s called Negocios Infernales. Unlike other RPGs, however, Negocios Infernales uses a spooky deck of custom cards to determine success and failure, inspire improvisation, create characters, and create mayhem in the collaborative story you are telling.

For our Infernal Salon, we give every writer a prompt of one or more cards from our Negocios Infernales deck, la Baraja del Destino (“the Deck of Destiny“). Then we set a timer for 20 minutes.

Whilst our guests are inspired to write great and/or goofy works of fiction, poetry, memoir, or creative laundry lists, Greg and Carlos and Claire will introduce the writers, banter about all things nerdy under the sun, talk about the Arvan Eleron Stream, and gabble about Negocios Infernales’s forthcoming Kickstarter in October!

At the end of it all, the writers will share their infernally-inspired works with all of us! Much revelry will be had by all!

The Evening’s Entertainment:

Every time someone in the Chat subscribes to Arvan Eleron’s channel, we will either:

– draw another Destino card to help inspire our writers (the more cards, the merrier! or the more… macabre)

OR (the Chat decides!)

– add one more minute to the writers’ timer (thereby shaving a minute off their stress)

The chat is also welcome to use those extra card draws for their own prompts. Join in the fun! Write something wild and new–something you never would have written otherwise!

Join us for an evening of creative writing, reading, and supporting the wonderful Arvan Eleron Twitch stream: a place for games, speculative fiction, and a great community!

Who is Arvan Eleron?

Arvan Eleron (né Gregory Wilson) is a Twitch broadcaster, Dungeon Master, gamer, author, musician, podcaster, and professor. Every week he streams games, interviews, tabletop roleplaying sessions, and more, all with the best community on the Internet: the Arvanauts!

MEET OUR WRITERS!

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the ‘Beneath the Rising’ series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found at her website at www.premeemohamed.com. Join her Patreon at www.patreon.com/premee

Kate Maruyama is the author of Harrowgate, Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit, Bleak Houses and the upcoming The Collective from Writ Large Projects and Alterations from Running Wild Press. She is a writer of horror and the real horror: realism. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles where she lives. She serves on the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee of the Horror Writers of America and on the working board of Women Who Submit Lit a group for women identifying and nonbinary writers that works toward promoting gender parity in publishing.

Find her new novella Bleak House here and a triptych of Halloween novellas Halloween Beyond: Piercing the Vale here.

Marie Bilodeau is a French Canadian author and storyteller who writes mostly in English because, as her family would say, she’s contrary. Her speculative fiction has won several awards and been translated into Chinese and French (to her family’s delight, though they still believe her to be contrary). Marie is also a storyteller and has told stories (in both languages!) across Canada in theatres, tea shops, at festivals and under disco balls. Find out more at http://www.mariebilodeau.com. Find her at her website!

Valerie Valdes’s work has been featured in Uncanny Magazine, Fit for the Gods and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel Chilling Effect was published by Harper Voyager in September 2019 and Orbit UK in February 2020, with starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was also named one of Library Journal’s best SF/fantasy novels of 2019. The trilogy is now complete with Prime Deceptions and Fault Tolerance. Her space fantasy novel, Where Peace Is Lost, was released in August 2023

Valerie is co-editor of Escape Pod, and currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and the Viable Paradise workshop and has taught classes and given lectures for Writer’s Digest, Clarion West and Georgia State University. She has also served as a Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month since 2006. She lives in Georgia with her husband, children and cats. Find her at her website!

Deborah J. Brannon dedicates her nights and weekends to scribbling furiously and reading so much and so fondly that it’s certainly turned her brain. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Faerie Magazine (now Enchanted Living), Stone Telling, and Cabinet des Fées, while her original work can be found in Human Tales (ed. Jennifer Brozek), Scheherezade’s Bequest, and more.

Current projects include a poetry chapbook called The Beltane Verses written with her brother, a card game inspired by Hanahaki Disease, and even more mysterious and startling delights to be named soon.

Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer living in Hell’s Kitchen, NY and works as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Erewhon Books. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop of 2014 and a member of the NYC-based writing group, Altered Fluid.

You can find his fiction work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and forthcoming with Tor.com and Sunday Morning Transport. His short story, “Godmeat,” appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 anthology. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut from Realm Media. Martin also writes, and has written, book reviews, articles, and essays for Tor.com, Catapult, Ghostfire Gaming, Book Riot, Strange Horizons, and the Barnes and Noble Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog. You can find him online at @mcflycahill90.

Keep an eye out for his two forthcoming stories:

“We Will Witness,” coming on the Sunday Morning Transport on 10/22/23: A story of two young people, a millennia apart, meet. For one of them, it is an important moment of their life. For the other, it is the moment of their death.

&

“The Moment Before The Moment”, forthcoming from LightspeedNovember 2023: Azahn (Uhz-on) spent his entire life earning the role of Imperial Foresight, precognitive bodyguard to his divine ruler. But now, forcibly retired 3 weeks into the role, what will become of the life of a young man who can see a tomorrow for everyone but himself?

Find his fiction elsewhere, here!

Carlos Hernandez (he/him) is the author of The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (winner of the 2020 Pura Belpré Award), Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe, several Marvel comics—including the Strange Academy’s “Solve for X” trilogy—and numerous short stories, poems, plays, other speculative works.

Carlos earned his Ph. D. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from Binghamton University in 2000. He is currently Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches Composition, Creative Writing, Science Fiction, and other courses at BMCC. He has been on the faculty of Western Colorado University’s MFA Program, and a Writer in Residence and Guest of Honor at various schools and cons throughout the United States.

At the CUNY Graduate Center, Carlos teaches in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program, where his academic interests have centered around game-based learning in postsecondary environments, which has led him to work extensively game writing and game design.

He has served as lead writer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games. As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he’s contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial.

Together with his wife C. S. E. Cooney, he has co-designed the TTRPG Negocios Infernales, forthcoming from Outland Entertainment. Find him at https://hernandooney.com/

C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a World Fantasy Award-winning author, a Rhysling Award-winning poet, the singer-songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and an audiobook narrator of over 120 audiobooks.

Her books include Saint Death’s Daughter (on Kirkus Review’s list of Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022), The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, Desdemona and the Deep, and Bone Swans: Stories.

Her plays have been performed in several countries: most recently “Ballads from a Distant Star,” at Arts on Site in New York City in 2023. Her albums Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir are all available for purchase or streaming on Bandcamp. Her short fiction and poetry can be found in many speculative fiction magazines and anthologies.

Find out more at csecooney.com or https://linktr.ee/csecooney

Gregory A. Wilson is a speculative fiction author, podcaster, college professor, and TwitchTV channel host.

In the world of fantasy fiction, Greg’s first novel, an epic fantasy called The Third Sign, came out in 2009, and his first graphic novel, the 2021 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Medalist for Graphic Novel-winning Icarus, was published in 2020 as two graphic novels; his third novel, the 2023 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy Finalist Grayshade (Book One of The Gray Assassin Trilogy), was published in 2022.

Greg has short stories in a number of anthologies, is the lead writer for the video game Chosen Heart, and has written flavor text and character treatments for several other card and board games. He is also the co-host of the long-running and critically-acclaimed show Speculate!, now an actual play podcast which features tabletop role-playing games with professionals from the speculative fiction field. Finally, he hosts a successful TwitchTV channel under the moniker Arvan Eleron, focusing on story and narrative and featuring a number of tabletop role-playing campaigns, several of them sponsored.

This is an excerpt from ZigZag Claybourne’s BREATH, WARMTH, AND DREAM.

Recorded with permission by the author.

This novel will be Kickstarting next month, October 2023, at this link.

For more information about the amazing ZigZag Claybourne, follow his website!

This is a skein of NETTLE THREAD. Yes, NETTLE THREAD. (I bought it from Etsy.) I was researching it a lot for my book, because… well. You’ll see. It all makes sense, if you know your fairytales, or even if you don’t, I’ll MAKE it make sense!

But I was thinking, after the bracelets Francesca Forrest showed me that she made from milkweed fibers, that I might try my hand at braiding some bracelets/bookmarks over the next year or so. I could learn something interesting to do with my hands, and then have all these little nettle objects I could give away with ARCS of my book, or signed author copies or something.

MAYBE IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA! But it seems so ROMANTIC AND MAGICAL to have NETTLE BRAIDS. Ooh, maybe with little glass beads or something. Wouldn’t those be GREAT ENDOWED OBJECTS for all you awesome fantasy readers out there?

Also, I hope it doesn’t just sit around on my desk looking at me accusingly. That’s partly why I’m telling you this in the first place.

Today is September 13th! And that makes me a DAY LATE in posting this!

Here’s a fun play-through of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES (see below!) with some folks from Kaleidocast! It begins after our Pre-Game Trust and Affirmation exercises, after the Invocation (collaboratively telling the backstory of our game), after Character Creation (creating your wizards), and World-Building. We review the characters and the world, but in this playthrough, we jump right into Plot-Generation, Roleplay, and end with the infamous Alien Epilogue.

An especial thank you to the wonderful Rob Cameron, Mimi Mondal, and Liam Burke for permission to use this video!

Kaleidocast is the official podcast of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers (BSFW), a “group dedicated to getting writers producing content with a professional polish for publication,” that offers “critique groups and workshops to members with regular guest lectures from those working in the industry today.”

For Kaleidocast’s annual fundraising effort, game designers Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney offered to run their TTRPG “Negocios Infernales,” for the Kaleidocast backers, with the participation of some of the celebrated writers and gamers of BSFW.

ROB CAMERON: author of DAYDREAMER, his debut Middle Grade novel forthcoming from Labyrinth Road in 2024. Rob Cameron is a teacher, linguist, and writer. He has poetry, stories, and essays in Star*Line Poetry Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Foreign Policy Magazine, and Tor.com, among others. Rob is also lead organizer for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, a guest host and curator for the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series, and executive producer of Kaleidocast.nyc.

MIMI MONDAL: Mimi is a writer and editor of the fictitious. Her fiction has been nominated twice for the Nebula Award: in 2020 with her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light, and in 2022 for ancient-Bengal-inspired setting titled Shankhabhumi and the adventure “In the Mists of Manivarsha” in the Dungeons & Dragons anthology Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. In 2018 she received nominations for the Hugo, British Fantasy and Ditmar Awards, and was awarded the Locus Award for Non-fiction for co-editing the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler with Alexandra Pierce.

LIAM BURKE: an independent author with a penchant for a variety of speculative fiction. His main passion is for juxtaposing biting humor along with the sharp teeth of horror, razor code of cyberpunk, and back alley deals of urban fantasy.

With a background in theatre and the arts, he has brought his flair for the dramatically macabre to various works including his Moments series of short horror compilations, an illustrated fairy tale for his son, his Cyberpunk flash fiction featured on multiple podcasts, and a novelette about urban wizards set in his favorite tabletop RPG.

C. S. E. COONEY (co-designer of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES) is a World Fantasy Award-winning author. Her books include The Twice-Drowned Saint, Saint Death’s Daughter (nominated for the World Fantasy Award, on Kirkus Review’s list of Year’s Science Fiction and Best Fantasy 2022), Dark Breakers (nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Locus Award finalist), Desdemona and the Deep (nominated for the World Fantasy Award), and Bone Swans: Stories.

As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, as well as short fiction for podcasts such as Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Podcastle.

CARLOS HERNANDEZ (co-designer of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES): New York Times best-selling author Carlos Hernandez wrote the critically acclaimed short story collection The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium, 2016), the novel Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (Disney Hyperion, 2019), which won the 2020 Pura Belpré Award, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. For Marvel Comics, he’s written stories about America Chavez, Spiderman, Spiderpunk, Miles Morales, and the Strange Academy. He’s also written dozens of short stories, poems, and works of drama, usually in the SFF mode.

He has served as lead writer and a game designer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games. As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he’s contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial.

The 7 Suits of Destino

🧜🏾‍♀️ Lágrimas: The Tears of Life
🐷 Carne: The Meat Of Life
❤️ Sangre: The Blood of Life
💀Hueso: The Bones of Life
🌬 Aire: The Breath of Life
⚡️Rayo: The Spark of Life
🛸 Espacio: The Spaces Between and Beyond

NEGOCIOS INFERNALES forthcoming from OUTLAND ENTERTAINMENT!

Follow our Kickstarter Upcoming Projects page at: negociosinfernales.com!

On making Negocios Infernales, failing forward for fun, and creating a “gateway game” for those of us who ACTIVELY RESISTED role-playing games for so so very long.

Okay, am writing. Obviously. To deadline. This won’t mean anything to you, but I’m in the Witch Queen’s City section of SAINT DEATH’S HERALD.

It’s getting weird. We’ve had a lot of character-depth moments and stranger-in-a-strange-land moments, and now we have come to a sort of ALTERCATION moment.

I have been writing and re-writing this chapter for weeks. I finally have the first part right, structurally and tonally. But when it came to the altercation, I… hand-waved, a bit.

COMBAT IS NOT EASY. I don’t have a very good internal aerial view of objects in space, and it’s easier for me to think poetically and emotionally than ACTIVELY.

The last book? That battle? With Duantri and Cracchen? Do you know how many Ip Man and Jackie Chan clips on YouTube I had to watch to even get a sense of bodies in motion??? ARG!

But the time has come for Duantri to fight again. And so, I asked Carlos to help me simulate a combat. He helped make me a map. We used meeples, and dice, and some D&D figurines my brother Jeremy Cooney made us.

The final written combat won’t really be a round-by-round D&D regurgitation. When that works, that really works (as in the case of most Ilona Andrews books. I suspect they are master gamers and their fight scenes are CHEF KISS, but definitely seem to lean on things like stats, by-the-book spells, hit points, lair actions, that sort of thing), but the point is, I’m not that good.

But creating this fun combat simulation really did help me not DREAD writing this scene. I have notes! I have OPTIONS! It gave me a starting point.

And, most importantly, Carlos and I had so much fun setting it up. And it was surprising.

So now… I just have to re-draft the chapter. Again.

But it will be better than the chapter it was.

Game design comes with its own bespoke vocabulary, and I love learning new terms! One of the terms that Carlos taught me is “skinning.”

SKINNING! Isn’t it delicious? So visceral!

According to IGI, “Skinning is a term that comes from the online video game genre, and it refers to changing the look and feel (which includes the game characters, artwork, background, theme and story etc.) but not the game play.”

For example, Carlos and I co-designed NEGOCIOS INFERNALES (oh, yes, I’ve talked about it MANY TIMES BEFORE, and I will do so again), a TTRPG about “Aliens and Inquisition.”

Our game takes place on a world called “Gloriana,” in the country of “Espada”–our fantasy proxy for 15th-century Spain. All our Worldbuilding cards and Plot-generating cards are geared specifically towards Espada.

But then, we have our friend Greg Wilson–professor, writer, gamer, and Twitchcaster–author of The Gray Assassin trilogy, published by Atthis Arts. We love Greg, and we love supporting indie publishers like Atthis Arts, and we love playing games on Twitch! So we decided to bring Negocios Infernales to the world of Grayshade.

During the Atthis Arts Kickstarter, in order to crowdfund for the Gray Assassin campaign, Carlos and I “skinned” Negocios Infernales, so that the game mechanics–specifically, our “Deck of Destiny”–would suit Greg’s setting, theme, ambiences, and characters.

I wrote about it here, where we posted a little video at the time to support the Kickstarter!

The game play of Negocios Infernales comes in 7 parts, not including the Trust and Affirmation pre-game. Some of those parts we had to tweak more than others to make this new skin.

We thought it might be useful for those of you who are DMs, GMs, fantasy writers, or just game-lovers with worlds of your own that you love to play in, to have an idea about how we skinned our game to fit into another world. Maybe you’ll want to do the same one day!

Much of this will make more sense when you have a copy of our rulebook and are familiar with all the mechanics of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES–especially our DECK OF DESTINY–so keep an eye out for our Kickstarter coming this October!

Here’s a run-down of what we did!

The Gray Assassins Skin of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES

Phase 0: Trust and Affirmation

In the Gray Assassins skin, this remains identical to any Negocios Infernales game. There is no change to the Trust or Affirmation cards, which all players take turns reading aloud.

This part of the game is basically setting up “lines and veils” to make gameplay safe and fun, and declaring our support for each other in the gaming circle.

Phase 1: Invocation

Here is the first big tweak for the new skin.

In this beginning phase, instead of using the short deck of narrative cards that sets up our Negocios Infernales world of “Gloriana” and the background about alien invasion, we took the text from the back copy of the first book of Greg’s trilogy, Grayshade.

Then we tweaked the text to decenter the protagonist, whose name is Grayshade. This opens up the Gray Assassins world for all the new characters whom the players collaboratively create.

The new text, which all of the players take turns reading, is thus:

CARD ONE: In the city of Cohrelle, the Acolytes of Argoth assassinate threats to their Order.

CARD TWO: They serve the Order of Argoth, and the Order serves The Just God.

CARD THREE: All the city of Cohrelle bows to the Order’s authority, even while city officials publicly distance themselves from its actions.

CARD FOUR: And those actions require the Acolytes of Argoth to dispatch targets: with protocol and with precision. 

CARD FIVE: But when an assignment goes sideways, what core values does an Acolyte of Argoth cling to?  

CARD SIX: We are all Acolytes who have served the Order without question. 

CARD SEVEN: Until now.

CARD EIGHT: Grayshade is a novel of violent faith and shifting loyalties, a story about whether we can rise above our pasts to craft new futures.

Phase 2: Character Creation

As per this same section in Negocios Infernales, we draw four cards from the Deck of Destiny to help inspire us and generate our Gray Assassin characters on the fly. Mechanically, these four cards need to be of four different suits on each player’s Character Sheet.

Here is the tweak!

Instead of the four attributes that make a Wizard’s character in Negocios Infernales (Motivation, Role in Court, Magic, Doom), we used the worldbuilding in Greg’s book to create a new set of four attributes for players to create their Assassin.

Motivation: What makes your character tick

Backstory: Where your character came from and how they came to serve the Order

Speciality: What they’re best at in the assassination game. (Greg sent us a short list of common specialities)

–Soundshifting
–Hand to hand (use of the cucuri in particular)
–Thrown weapons (the reshtar, kushuri darts)
–Aerial infiltration/acrobatics
–Information gathering

Fatal Flaw: What may one day bring your character down?

Phase 3: Relationships

This works exactly the way it does in Negocios Infernales.

Each player character has a relationship with at least one other player character.

We draw one card from the Deck of Destiny and match its suit to one card in the Relationships deck to help inspire this relationship.

Phase 4: Worldbuilding

Maps are very important. They help ground characters in place, and make the strange feel familiar and navigable. For Negocios Infernales, we have a glorious map of, well, Gloriana! It was designed for us by the magnificent Shannon Potratz.

But for our new Gray Assassins skin, Greg sent us his own bespoke map of the city of Cohrelle. It’s divided into four cardinal districts.

Map of Cohrelle

North: Church District; South: Mercantile District; West: Government District; East: Residential District. (Rich folk leave south/west, merchants who are closest to the government.) North District is overshadowed by the Order of Argoth, though there are many cathedrals to many gods.

Greg also sent us a list of known gods and their functions, so that we could tweak the cards in our Worldbuilding deck to feature Cohrelle much more prominently.

WORLDBUILDING QUESTIONS SPECIFIC TO GRAY ASSASSIN BOOKS

In Negocios Infernales, we have a Worldbuilding deck of 40 cards. In any given game, players only draw 4-8 of these cards, which means there is plenty of room for replayability and surprise.

But since we were only going to play one game of this Grayshade skin, made especially for the Atthis Arts Kickstarter, we created a total of just 6 new Worldbuilding cards.

Each player draws one Worldbuilding card, and one card from our Deck of Destiny to inspire their answer.

Phase 5: The Plot

In Negocios Infernales, we offer players 7 Adventure Plots to choose from, each with their own deck of six Story cards, and six Question cards. Each of the adventures are a slightly different genre: Romance, Gothic, Mystery, Monsters, War, SciFi, and Weird. This way, there is a great deal of replayability!

But for the purpose of this skin, we created a unique Adventure plot deck, with six new Story cards, and six new Question cards. As in Phase 1, The Invocation, players take turns reading the Story cards aloud to immerse themselves in the game.

Adventure Name: “Tempered in the Forge of Faith”

CARD ONE: The Prelate has called all three of us to come before him.

CARD TWO: “The three of you,” he says, “have recently displayed a subtle yet notable lack of faith. This, of course, is unacceptable in the Order.”

CARD THREE: “Therefore,” the Prelate continues, “the three of you must earn back the Order’s trust. Argoth has granted me a vision of a special mission you must complete.” 

CARD FOUR: “Though usually Acolytes work alone, on this mission, you will work together to complete it.”

CARD FIVE: The Prelate throws three scrolls tied together. “All the details of the mission are included here. Do your research and reconnaissance, but move with haste. You have one week in which to complete this mission.”

CARD SIX: The moment you are excused from the Prelate’s presence, you unfurl the scrolls and begin to read about the assassination you must perform.

Thus, we set up the lot.

Each player then chooses a Question Card from a deck of 6 questions, and then draws a card from the Deck of Destiny to help answer it.

Once all questions are answered, each player turns their answer to that question into a direct Order that the Prelate wants us to accomplish.

Just like in a regular game of Negocios Infernales, accomplishing all the Orders before your token gets buried to the hilt of the Sword of Doom means you win the game!

The specialty Questions we created for this skin’s Adventure, which the assassin characters must answer for the Prelate of the Order, were thus:

1. Who is/are the target(s)?
2. Where is/are the target(s) located in Cohrelle? How well-defended will they be?
3. What is so difficult for you, personally, about assassinating this/these particular target(s)?
4. How does this assassination benefit the Order? 
5. What might be a political repercussion of this mission? 
6. Why did the Prelate doubt your faith?

Phase 6: Roleplay

This follows the same structure of Negocios Infernales. Every player has to take their turn being Protagonist, every player has to play an NPC, and every playing needs to use their Specialty at least once in a scene.

(In Negocios Infernales, the wizard characters have to use their Magic, but in this skin, it’s the assassin’s SPECIALITY!)

Each time an assassin uses their Speciality, they make a check to see if they succeed. They draw a card from the Deck of Destiny.

If that card’s suit matches one of the four suits on their Character Sheet, the check succeeds! If it doesn’t, the check fails–and the player uses the image and phrase on the Destiny card to narrate how awesomely and bodaciously epic their failure is!

Each failed check moves the token down the Sword of Doom. If the token is ever buried to the hilt, the game is lost. (And losing is equally hilarious, if not more so, as winning.)

Phase 7: The Prelate’s Epilogue

In Negocios Infernales, our final phase is called “the Alien Epilogue.”

It’s a time for the aliens (the players) to consult with each other and decide if giving the people of Espada phenomenal wizarding powers was a good decision and if humanity is ready to join the Cosmic Consciousness? Or if it was a really, really bad decision, and humanity needs to mature a bit more first? Say, for a few more millenia.

In the Gray Assassin skin, all surviving members of the mission come before the Prelate one more time and debrief.

---

We hope this is helpful. You can view the whole Grayshade game on Greg’s awesome Twitch channel Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/arvaneleron

As we are getting our “process diaries” together for our Negocios Infernales Kickstarter, and trying to imagine how best to do them—vlog with transcript? Written word and gifs?—we have been digging out the early prototypes.

When Carlos first conceived of an inspiration deck of words and images to power an RPG game through card pulls rather than dice, he used public domain art from Earth’s history. You can see some of the phrases that remain, even now, on our NI cards on this early art history deck—though the art by Rebecca Huston remains a core vitality of our Negocios Infernales game.

One of our prototypes had a hidden “alien agenda” that the players knew but the characters didn’t. I found the envelope! I can’t remember what we put INSIDE though.

Funny story about searching for prototypes…

Once upon a time, yesterday, as we were looking through our mountains of games, prototypes, components, card sleeves, and “empty boxes wot might someday be useful” (in order to find this very particular early prototype), Carlos kept looking under the bookshelves, certain it was under there.

Long after he gave up and went back to prioritizing writing, as I should have done, I kept looking. Because, well, looking is easier than writing!

Anyway, after scrounging around various shelves and drawers for a long time, I returned to the dusty shadow realm under our bookshelves. I found a prototype-sized box! I opened it excitedly!

It was full of life-like rubber cockroaches! AAAUGHHHH!!!

They were a gift to Carlos from my brother Declan sometime in 2020. He presented them in the hopes that one day Carlos might find them useful.

We did use them—once—to prank a friend who liked to BEG us to prank her. She liked when we left her chocolate in strange places…

Well. You can imagine.

Little did we know that roaches were not… as funny as we’d hoped. Much apologies and chocolate bars later, and a lot of nervous laughter, she forgave us, like a darling.

Anyway! I GOT MY OWN BACK!

I yelped! I laughed! I told Carlos!

And then? Behind the box of fake roaches, I found…

The prototype.

And we all lived happily ever after that Monday, until midnight came, and it was Tuesday.

I’ve released my September newsletter into the wild! This is a hodgepodge of delights. I was sort of thinking, October’s gonna be ALL NEGOCIOS INFERNALES ALL THE TIME, so I thought I’d do things like, I don’t know, books and shows and games I’ve been liking, and thoughts about my hair, and fundraisers that are awesome and worthy, that sort of thing.

If you’re interested, hop on over to my Substack!

I love the work being done by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. Ah, I knew them when they were young poetesses of Goblin Fruit Magazine and Mythic Delirium.

And now, behold them!

They’re still poets. But now they’re also DOCTORS OF FOLKLORE! They have an incredible Patreon (with monthly book clubs and fairy tale salons!), a great Facebook community, and lively presences elsewhere on social media.

Right now, the Doctors of Carterhaugh (that’s what I always call them in my head, because it’s so FANCY, and I think Janet from Tam Lin would get a kick out of it)) are ramping up for a course called ENCHANT, which they’ve been preparing for about 4 years.

And one of the lovely, community-driven things they are doing this week, for those who cannot afford the course fees for Enchant, is running a 3-day “Everyday Magic Challenge” on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I SIGNED UP! I’m on a writing retreat this week, so I thought, why not?

And I not only signed up, I’ve been participating. I’ve done the first two so far, showing up on Crowdcast at the appointed hour and hurling myself into the chat–and I’m looking forward to Friday, which I’m promised will be “whimsical.”

I wanted to share a few of my responses to the “Everyday Magic Challenge” so far, with a likely follow-up on Friday, but first I wanted to tell you about the “Enchant” course coming up, because Carterhaugh School’s early-bird pricing ends Friday, and I didn’t want you to miss it.

If the course sounds like something you’d like, but you’re feeling shy, I just want to tell you: the community I’ve seen this week is so stellar, so generous, so hungry to share and participate, to be helpful, and so willing to be vulnerable for the sake of beauty and renewal.

My husband and I look with admiration and awe upon the deep work with fairy tales the Doctors of Carterhaugh are constantly doing, the many ways in which they do outreach, and the fact that, a few years out of grad school (or “PhD college,” as I called it the other day, much to Carlos’s amusement), they have a thriving small business doing exactly what they love, working hard to add petals to the flower of a life worth living.

Quickly, I’ll tell you the bullet points about their “Enchant” course. But you can read more about it at their website! All the lectures will be pre-recorded, so you can take them at your own pace, but once a week, they’ll have a community chat in person, so you’ll be able to share your experience and ask questions.

If you can’t do the course now, a great way to find out all about their new projects–and free things, like this “Everyday Magic Challenge” is to sign up for their awesome newsletter!

Man, I love newsletters. They’re the LiveJournal of our Roaring Twenties.

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About “Enchant”

• An empowering five-week course that uses fairy tales, folklore, and a dash of science to help you unlock the magic that can exist in your everyday life.
• A reminder that enchantment is always at your fingertips through small actions and habits.
• A powerful way to counter burnout.

Brittany Warman and Sara Cleto, the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic

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EVERYDAY MAGIC CHALLENGE – DAY 1 THREAD

Challenge #1: What is the fairy tale of your life? Journal on this prompt for a few minutes. What fairy tale calls to you? What tale motifs seem to pop up in your life? Which character do you most identify with?

Tell us a bit about your journaling on this thread!

I had an interesting and introspective time journaling/poem-ing to the prompt. My life didn’t pop out as one single fairy tale to me, but the scattered iconography and archetypes across a dozen random ones kept blitzing through my mind.

I kept thinking about one of us saying, she’s left the form of Cinderella behind, and taken on the form of Cinderella’s godmother. And thinking… we need more middle-aged heroes of folklore. All those beginnings, just going into the woods. All the elders are witches or queens.

The poem’s in no shape to share, but maybe these lines:

“I take the gown of nettle cloth I wove myself
and feel its luster
Oh, to bind me to my shape
Oh, to keep me in my skin
Oh, a nettle cloth to keep my pigeon wings in.”

And:

“I have spat my ring in his soup.
I have worn the skins of my dead.
I have danced in my day. I have danced.
And yes, when the sun is red,
I still wear ribbons.”

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EVERYDAY MAGIC CHALLENGE – DAY 2 THREAD

Challenge #2: What is your soul outfit? What favorite pieces of clothing do you put on when you want to feel most like yourself? What accessory lights you up? Today (or tomorrow!), dress so that your childhood self would think you’re the coolest person they ever saw.

Tell us a bit about your outfit in this thread (we’d love to see pictures!)

I am currently cat-sitting in Western Massachusetts, and have a very slim wardrobe to pick from. That said, I remember thinking, as I was packing, what would be both comfortable and feel the most like me, as I take this time as a writing retreat. I brought along a few “normal“ clothes, specifically for traveling and/or hiking. The rest are chemises, short bodices, or simple dresses that, for one reason or another, make me feel lovely and at ease in myself.

Similarly, I only packed one small bag of jewelry. Why? I almost didn’t. I usually pack my jewelry in a travel bag, but I found the black velvet bag appealing this time. I chose just a few pieces that would go with most of whatever I brought. I didn’t know we would be taking this challenge. Very few people will be seeing me in person at all over the next week.

I was just in pajamas today, my hair in a side braid, uncombed. And I thought, I will put off this challenge until tomorrow, when I feel less weary and sore. But then, I thought… that’s the point of the challenge. To do the enchantment FIRST, and THEN let it work its magic on the weary soreness. 

To that end, I actually unpacked all my clothes (I hadn’t yet; I was digging them out grumpily from the suitcase. It’s funny; in a hotel, I ALWAYS unpack all my clothes immediately), and hung them up, and looked at them. And then thought about what felt right today, when I don’t really want any, ahem, you know, undergarments, or things tugging or lolloping or catching. 

So I came up with this outfit I’m calling “Verde que te quiero verde” after the Lorca poem, which is a green chemise (from Holy Clothing, I think, but this one is no longer in stock. There are others though), and a new short bodice in recycled sari silk I got from a vendor called Oh,Jessa! at GenCon. 

When I was choosing jewelry, I found a pair of golden tree earrings from my lovely friend Jess, a piece of amber from my friend Stephanie, and an amber choker recently given to me by my sister in law.

I wrote a fairy tale poem once called “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden” with this line in it: “piece of amber / copper pot / the north wind tucked up in a knot.“ Wearing amber always puts me in mind of it.

Rapunzel-like, I let down my hair. But I’m fighting a headache today, so I didn’t want to do anything fancy. A black bandana seemed to pick up the interesting pattern on the bodice.

That, with my meteorite-metal wedding band (my husband & I write SFF, so of course we needed outer space wedding rings), and the ouroboros ring that came in a set of two by artist Crystal Hartman, of which I wear the silver and my husband the bronze, my outfit is complete. For you all. And for me. 

I have to say, this exercise gave me a strong memory of the year in Chicago when I put all my stuff in storage and lived with different friends for a whole year, trying to save to move. I lived out of a suitcase, wearing the same clothes for months.

And then I started dreaming of the apocalypse, where everyone in the world died, and I could go into any store I wanted and take whatever clothes I wanted. I told this to my friend, and she said it was time to go to my storage unite and swap out for new clothes.

So we did. And the dreams stopped.

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You can see, dear readers, this has been a fruitful week already. I wish the same for you. And I am so happy to introduce you to the Doctors of Carterhaugh and their thoughtful and moving work.

Yours truly,

C. S. E. Cooney