Announcing: Twisted Image Publishing
Hi everyone, it has been a long road getting here, but I am excited to finally share with you a few things that I’ve been working on for a very, very long time.
About five years ago I took the step from merely consuming RPG content to writing it. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working on nearly a dozen different projects. A few of these have been scrapped, one came out, and the rest are in varying states of completion.
Today I am announcing two of these projects officially:
The launch of Twisted Image Publishing. TIP will serve as my publishing imprint: a brand that unifies my work, and potentially the work of others with similar goals and artistic visions.
The formal announcement of the imprint’s first book: The Bleakness. The Bleakness will be published through my good friends at Exalted Funeral. This book has been a labor of love. I started the first draft four years ago, and after many many revisions, delays, and complete restarts the book is ready. I couldn’t have imagined how great it has turned out, and I am so excited for you all to experience it with me. The Bleakness is written and is in art and layout as of March 2021. The Kickstarter is scheduled to launch on April 7th. Click here to learn more about the book, and to be notified when the Kickstarter launches.
Who is Twisted Image Publishing?
Twisted Image is based in Seattle Washington. Currently, it is an imprint brand to unify the published works of myself, S. Kelty.
However, TIP is much bigger than just me and there are several people who are equally important. After some details are ironed out we should have some big announcements in the coming months.
Role-Playing Games as Functional Art
Twisted Image’s creative goal is to make tabletop games that are functional art.
To us, this means unifying content and presentation to create something that is beautiful, impactful, and useful. Games are meant to be played. Not just looked at. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be art.
Many think of art as something that is created by an artist and set free into the world. A fixed object, unchanging. However, this is an incomplete picture. Art is made when an idea is given form and explored. The true art is not the creation, but the reaction to it.
Games (and tabletop RPGs in particular) offer entirely unique ways to interact in the theatre of the mind. We believe that these experiences can be deeply meaningful, letting players interact in ways that other art forms can only dream of.
By creating tabletop games from an artistic and functional perspective, we seek to capture and engage with ideas, emotions, or states of mind without losing sight of the fact that games are meant to be fun and approachable.
TIP Design Philosophy
In concrete terms, our goal is to:
Create harmony between content, mechanics, and visuals.
Keep content visceral by focusing on sensory input and emotional impact.
Avoid overly dense and wordy language that obscures important information.
Focus on playability and ease of use above all else.
Draw on symbolism, metaphor, and other literary tools, treating writing a tabletop RPG with the same care and attention to detail as a novel.
I look forward to sharing more soon. Please subscribe for updates, and stay tuned for the launch of The Bleakness.
