Anomaly play testers wanted, a new short story, and a very random newsletter

Play testers needed!

EOS10: Anomaly is coming this fall! We're almost ready for play testing, and need your help. If you're interest, fill out this form and we'll send you a PDF copy that you can start playing right away — either solo or with your own group. For helping us out and submitting feedback, we'll send you the final version (PDF only) along with the Chaos Compendium — a bonus set of play tables and game modes! — when the final book is ready later this year.

New to all this? You can still playlets! Anomaly is what's called a tabletop roleplaying game — the kind you play with a group of friends around a table, no screens, no board (though there are instructions for a color mode, too!). Each person creates a character who's part of the EOS10 crew, and one person runs the game, describing the station and everything happening on it while everyone else decides what their character does. You talk it out, roll dice to see how things go, and the story builds from there as you play.

Sessions center on an anomaly the crew has to deal with, and things tend to go wrong along the way — sometimes very wrong, all at once, for everyone. That's baked into the rules on purpose, so the chaos the show is known for actually happens at the table, not just on screen.

You, a short story by Justin McLachlan

This month, Planet M published You by Justin McLachlan, a short-story / one-act play about — get this — a doctor on a spaceship! It's available as an ebook for $0.99 on Amazon, or you can get it for free on Gumroad (including a PDF version).

Here's an excerpt:

Hey you, it's me.

It's been a while, huh? I don't know where to begin, I don't know how we got here. My memories, they're like a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting. But our memories aren't our experiences anyway. So we'll see what I say. I guess it all started long before I realized how much trouble we were in. And you'll have to just go with me here, I'm more of a big picture guy and bad at details, but I'll try to keep everything straight. Who knows what's going on in my head right now.

I already wasn't having the best of days. And I'd appreciate if you never tell anyone about this part but, I fell off the treadmill and broke my arm. It was 0400. I always get up too early. I can't seem to stay asleep, much as I want to. So I was the only one in the gym. I like to have the place to myself. Solitude isn't easy to come by, so I take it when I can get it.

So the gym, it's this big room, bigger than most on the ship, with soft lighting and high, open ceilings spread across the arc of the habitat ring, so if you're in there long enough you'll see most of the fuselage rotate by, the comm towers, the engines. It's beautiful. I was in for a 10k, not even through my warm up, when I fell. Distracted by this orange and green nebula out the windows. Such a rookie, mesmerized by glittering space dust.

And another:

I never saw an ending for us, you know? Sometimes I imagined us reconciling. I dreamed about what I'd say to you, about how we could fit into each other's lives again. That last day we had together, I don't know how it went from that to nothing in the span of just a few hours.

You hugged me goodbye and didn't let go. I know you didn't want to. I didn't want you to. The warmth of your chest pressed against mine. Your beard rubbing against my neck. Your arms wrapped around my shoulders. And then you kissed me. I remember that kiss every day of my life. I get lost in it. I didn't know that that would be the last time, neither of us did. You're still the last thing I think about before I fall asleep at night. And you're still the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.

I never saw that ending coming, but it came anyway.

Download You as an ebook for $0.99 on Amazon, or you can get it for free on Gumroad (including a PDF version).

GalaxyQ #005: Random

The newest issue of GalaxyQ digs into a question that sounds simple and isn't: what does "random" actually mean, and why does it feel so wrong when we get it?

It opens with the story of Spotify's shuffle button, which turned out to be genuinely random for years — and got flooded with complaints anyway, because true randomness clumps in ways that feel broken to human ears. From there it traces the same pattern showing up everywhere: the decades-long fight over whether basketball's "hot hand" is real, how a WWII actuary used a bomb map to prove the Germans weren't actually targeting specific London neighborhoods, and how a single arbitrary statistics threshold quietly fueled science's replication crisis. It closes on the strangest twist of all — the noise inside your own neurons that your brain can't function without.

There's also a fun detour into card math (why a well-shuffled deck might be a sequence that's never existed before, and never will again), a roundup of dice-making kits and probability toys worth owning, and two dice games to try tonight — one built for a pub table, one your GalaxyQ editors invented themselves. Worth a read next time the shuffle button lets you down.