My Fellow Murkans,
We’ve got a whole lot of returning backers, but also a lot of brand new folks who will be making their first journey into the world of Murka on this Backerkit campaign, so I wanted to take a second to formally introduce ourselves and talk a bit about who Action Fiction is and how Murka came to be!
So, without further ado…
*Record Scratch* Yep, That’s Us.
I bet you’re wondering how we got here. I know I sure am.
From left to right, that’s me (Jaron), my brother (CJ), and our best friend, Brad (Brad). This photo was taken at Origins Game Fair in June of this year.
And here we are on our way to a protest in our hometown of Columbus, Ohio, circa 2022. Unfortunately, this is one of the earliest photos I have of the three of us, because we’re notoriously bad at taking group photos, and have a tendency to take ... less serious photos.
Like this
very serious photo from one of our writing sessions during work on our original RPG,
Cthulhu Dreamt.
A Satirical Star is Born
Late one night in the summer of 2018, I awoke from a fitful sleep, plagued by the burden of what I was certain would be the greatest creative idea I might ever have. As is my habit, so that I don’t forget my greatest ideas, I reached for my phone and unlocked it. Bleary-eyed, I typed into my notes app all that I could stand to write before I collapsed back asleep, confident that when I awoke, I would be able to share this idea with my friends, and we would surely become brilliant game designers.
Of course, when I awoke and read this back, I had a lot of questions for sleep-drunk me. But, we committed to that particular bit, and we set to work on the very earliest versions of what would become Monsters of Murka. We had set a small goal for ourselves: a handful of monsters, maybe a subclass or two. And while it began as just a silly political satire project, the idea quickly blossomed into a complex combination of social commentary, tongue-in-cheek jokes, terrible puns, and creative game design challenges.
In 2019, we had our first crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to bring the world of Murka to life, which was a modest success, allowing us to make our game idea a reality. Perhaps more importantly, it showed us that we could really do this. We could be game designers. We could make games. And people wanted to play the games we wanted to make. Several months later, we had written 13 subclasses, around 20 monsters, a dozen spells, several backgrounds, and three fully-populated locations ready to be dropped into any D&D campaign and bring raucous, ridiculous laughter along with it. And the feedback we got was so positive, it blew us away.
We had so much fun designing it, and we had to cut a lot of content for length. The content that was cut was put into a “For Future Projects” document, and left to languish for almost a full year. Then, in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, we felt like it was time to open up the Book of Murka and add another chapter with
Monsters of Murka: Restaurants & Retail. Shortly thereafter, our team grew to include some INCREDIBLE designers, and with fresh blood at the helm, we made
Monsters of Murka: Chromatic Gamut in 2021 to end-cap the trilogy with a really magical queer-focused expansion.
Somewhere along the way, we formally decided to create a company “name” for ourselves, and Action Fiction was born (fun fact: the name came, in part, from sitting in traffic a few blocks from my apartment, stopped at a red light behind a lawncare truck with the word “Action” written on it. You stare too long at a word and you’ll start to get funny ideas, too). At the time, Action Fiction was mostly just a “cool” name—if you’re gonna make a book, you gotta have a “cool” studio name attached to it, of course! (a peek into the brains of some 25 year olds, lmao)
But, over time, our team expanded to include other incredible creatives, like Tim “Strato” Bailey and Manuel “Snails” Olonia (two designers from Restaurants & Retail that have helped us to create some of our best Murka content over the years), Adam Baffoni (my creative soulmate and designer of the Tether RPG), Bianca Papalardo (our incredibly brilliant art director), and Cheyenne Roller (our marketing & graphic design maestro). None of us have been able to quit our day jobs yet, but with each of these crowdfunding campaigns, we’ve been able to bring these games to life, and that’s everything to us.
In the ensuing years, we’ve been hard at work on a number of other projects:
Cthulhu Dreamt, which is an extremely radical sci-fi horror RPG with a heavy metal soundtrack (from Fable Factory, the same genius brain making the new Murka soundtrack) and a highly-emotional storytelling experience; and
Goblin Cave, an asymmetric team-based tactics/skirmish game that we just showcased at Origins.
During all of that, we started to really refine what “Action Fiction” meant, and what our design philosophy was. We loved breaking conventions of traditional game design. We loved blurring the lines between player and character, and creating these really fun above-the-table gameplay moments. Physical handouts, puzzles, subverted expectations—all of these became keystones in our design process. And during all those years, at every convention we did, in every panel and talk we gave, we kept coming back to Monsters of Murka.
People would stop us at conventions and tell us how much fun they were having, they would ask us questions about it, and we got to see the light on their faces and see how much they were enjoying playing in this silly little satire world we had made. And of course, with the
Creative Gap being what it is, the more time we spent designing other games, the better we got as game designers, and
the more we wanted to go back to the world of Murka and give it a newer, better life.
And that brings us to today! We’ve been hard at work for about 6 months now giving each of these three books a ground-up redesign. And it’s been humbling, and eye-opening, to look at our old work. Sometimes I feel sheepish about it, and sometimes I’m really impressed by the layers of a particular joke or by some mechanics we designed. It’s just a really wild experience to go back over some of our earliest work—even though it doesn’t feel like it was all that long ago that we wrote it.
We’re excited to bring you these brand new books, and we’re excited to see what else is in store for the world of Murka. And I know I speak for everyone else on the team when I tell you how honored we are, and how blown away we are, at all of your support. It’s been such an amazing experience to see the success of this campaign. This campaign alone has now raised more than all three of our previous Murka campaigns combined, and we’re only halfway done. For me, that’s just... it’s hard to comprehend, if I’m being honest. And I’m just so thankful.
Thank you all, so much. I hope to see you all in the Thursday live stream! Stop by, say hi, ask us some questions, and let us thank you to your (digital) face for your support.
Yours across the plains of Midwesteros,
Jaron R. M. Johnson
And the Action Fiction Faction
