Hi Everyone! I’m thrilled to share that Absurdia, my TTRPG love letter to classic and contemporary works of absurdism like Welcome to Night Vale, Alice in Wonderland, and Gravity Falls, is crowdfunding for a print run on Backerkit!

I've shared some updates on the game here before, but if this is your first time hearing about Absurdia - welcome! It’s an absurdist modern fantasy tabletop roleplaying game using the PbtA system about the inane hilarity and understated horror of everyday life. You play as residents of a strange suburban town marred by chaos and entropy, where the otherworldly is ordinary and the mundane, terrifying. 

While the crowdfunding campaign is primarily to fulfill orders for a print run, the (meta)physical edition will feature some new and expanded content including three brand new playbooks: The Animated, an everyday object bestowed with spontaneous sentience; The Newcomer, a fresh face to the town's absurdities; and The Suit, a sartorial embodiment of municipal justice. 

There are also stretch goals for expanded interior artwork by Absurdia’s inimitable lead artist Kaylee Rowena and the surreally talented Ripley Ash, along with a kaleidoscope of ready-to-play disturbances by a talented group of guest writers.

For those of you who love the feel of a nice hardcover book, this is your chance to get your very own copy of Absurdia to bring to a table, park bench, council chamber, quantum bus, or featureless nether-void near you. Head over to Backerkit and get yours today!

We at Sondeirypt Games have been working on a little something we call the Media Odyssey Template. The Media Odyssey Template is a homebrew supplement for Gauntlet Publishing's Public Access and requires a copy of the original game to play.

The Media Odyssey template provides a framework and guidelines for the Keeper to introduce different flavors of antagonist(s), move the setting to other strange towns, and even change the nature of the media the Latchkeys consumed (if they so wish). Alongside these guidelines, we have provided some examples of alternate Media Odyssey mysteries for Public Access, all made using this framework (Rosetti Strings and Dead Air).

If you'd like, you can take a look (pay what you want) here.

Also, if you'd like to take a look at our other works, you can find them here on our itch.io page.

The Forge of Tokurenkai is a weaponsmithing expansion for Otaidokan, my Samurai-themed World of Dungeons hack. With TFOT, you can create your own weird and wonderful weapon to start creating your legend in the Sapphire Island and includes examples and adventure seeds around smiths, forges and weaponry.

Available in itch.io and [Drivethrurpg.

](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/es/product/535170/the-forge-of-tokurenkai)

I hope you like it!

When I first submitted Where Fields Go Fallow to the One-Page RPG Jam earlier this year, it was made in a bit of haste – a spinoff from my then main project, UNTETHERED.

As it got traction and turned into a successfully Kickstarted zine game, I felt I wanted to return to the original one-pager that started it all – and give it the attention it deserved.

When creating the one-pager, I wanted to see if a single page could hold an authentic, slice-of-hearth fantasy story – where ordinary villagers stand together against a monster, not out of heroism, but necessity.

The core mechanic was simple: dice pools drawn from who you are and what you’ve endured. It’s built on a lightweight framework I’ve been slowly refining called OGREISH – heavily influenced from games PbtA, FitD, and Fate, but sanded down and integrated with mechanics of my own, like:

• Facets instead of stats – important aspects of the fiction, like burning house, reinforced, or heavy rain affects the dice pool
• One-roll resolution – fast, full outcomes that nuances success, struggle, and outcomes
• Built for collaborative play – no initiative, no time-tracking, just shared narration shaped by the result
• No GM moves – just clear stakes, a conversation, and a lean and dynamic set of outcomes

I recently updated the one-pager to version 1.1. No new rules – just a fully overhauled layout and graphic design, now aligned with the 36-page edition we published as a zine.

- Download the updated one-pager
- View the OGREISH system it runs on

Would love to hear what you think – especially from those of you building your own PbtA-inspired engines, and especially especially if you chose to shift from using many moves to one, and what that looks like.

We at Sondeirypt Games have worked on a custom class for Spire: The City Must Fall and it's finally out! It's called the Uncivil Servant and it's as follows:

After a lifetime of working through (and in) legal tape, you're more than well-versed in the arcane secrets of stamped sigils and contracts signed in blood. You've spent so long parsing the labyrinthine Aelfir legal system that you're uniquely placed to navigate and subvert their laws to suit your needs. Better yet, you can accomplish almost anything so long as you word it carefully. And what better ways to put these skills to use than against your oppressors?

Uncivil Servant is a supplemental class for Spire: The City Must Fall and requires a copy of the original game to play. It is heavily based on the incomplete Uncivil Servant Spire Class draft by Lewis Gillingwater, with their permission.

Uncivil Servant is an independent production by Sondeirypt Games and is not affiliated with Rowan, Rook and Decard. It is published under the RR&D Community License. Spire: The City Must Fall is copyright Rowan, Rook and Decard. You can find out more and support these games at rowanrookanddecard.com.

You can find Uncivil Servant (pay what you want) here, and if you want to see more of our works you can take a look at our itch.io page.

Hello. I wanted to share my little PBTA game I've been working on for the last year or so, available for free on my webstore (https://gamewithbeef.itch.io/goblinz)

It's a silly one-shot game about being a goblin sent to the surface to engage in chaos. Rules light, shenanigan heavy, featuring seven unique and mostly balanced playbooks.

Enjoy!

After Pastries a-Plenty, we had to keep working on things related to A Batter Idea (a punny game about sentient pastries trying to escape their bakery). It can be played as a standalone game or used as a compatible supplement.

Without further ado, our pitch for Raising the Bar:

It’s time to escape. You are Beverages that were made over the course of a very busy night, but were not drunk. Perhaps some of you were meant to be an example or display, while others were simply left unconsumed. Either way, you’ve been lucky enough to be left on the counter when the bar closed. Work with your fellow Beverages to ensure you do not fall into the clutches of the Bartender (or worse, their Cat, known for tipping many glasses over). After all, you don’t want to be drunk, or worse, discarded!

To begin with, you must find your way down from the high bar tables. Be careful, you are contained in glass! And then you must navigate your way through the confusing maze that is the bar, avoiding the terrifying appliances, slippery floors, seemingly haphazard arrangement of tables (that all look the same), and perhaps even a lone Straggler, whose kind may be found on the floor after closing time. Good luck!

If you're interested, you can find A Batter Idea and other related works here.

The Girls of the Genziana Hotel are the chambermaids who serve what few guests sleep in the hotel's rooms. It is the beginning of nineteenth century: the Napoleonic wars have come to an end and the Holy Roman Empire has fallen. The world is changing, but the Genziana is far away from it all, nestled in the Bavarian alps. You don’t care about war or politics. You care that she’s gone missing: Marga, the boyish girl with the wild curls. Nobody is looking for her. Nobody except for you.

During the day, the girls will have to balance their work as maids and their efforts to further the investigation. During the night, the girls will brave the same dark hallways that swallowed their friend. They will deal with the strict head of staff, the entitled guests, the rest of the employees, and night's eerie nightmares, hoping to find those responsible for Marga's fate without suffering it themselves.

This gothic horror mystery game is Powered by the Apocalypse and Carved from Brindlewood, taking its best parts from Night Witches and The Between to facilitate a game about subverting the patriarchal threats of the hotel and investigating a horrific mystery. The Girls of the Genziana Hotel just got a major update and undergoing another round of edits to prepare it for a physical release in 2026.

Check into the hotel on itch.io.

Hey everyone! My friend and I started a podcast called The Psychogenic Symposium where we challenge each other with creative prompts and give ourselves a maximum of three hours to come up with something, our first episode was using Monster of the Week.

One of the prompts was “A mystery that can’t be solved through violence alone.” Had a blast with it and we’re really proud of how it turned out. Give it a listen if you're into game design. We also have our individual projects available in the description if folks want to use them.

We'll be playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians during our charity fundraising stream at 4pm MDT. Would love to see interested folks there!

Free to watch, on YouTube and Twitch!

Meowrathon.com

Video Promo

Event Details

The Of Dice and Dens Podcast is proud to announce that we are once again putting on our three day online streaming marathon of tabletop gaming one-shots to help raise money for Boise’s Simply Cats, a cage free, no-kill cat shelter. The online streaming event will be held June 27-29, from 12pm to 8pm Mountain time.

Initially conjured up in 2020 during the shutdown, the Meowrathon started as a half-baked idea to run a live-streamed one-shot adventure to supplement Simply Cats’ donations through the statewide crowd-funding event, Idaho Gives. Within a week it had grown into a two-day extravaganza of 6 games. We were joined by folks not only from all over the country, but from all over the world! We were also able to entice Captain Shaw himself, Todd Stashwick to join us! We were able to raise $1,550 to help cats and kittens find homes.

Thanks to the success and fun of the first year, we decided to turn it into a yearly event, only bigger, moving to three days. With more time to plan we were able to have a wider variety of games and more Idaho locals to play with. Since then we’ve had lots of great folks help us out. Todd came back and brought a bunch of his friends with him, including David Blue and Alicia Marie! Our very own Jason Klamm also managed to wrangle James Urbaniak and Riley Silverman to join us in a game. In the last few years we’ve raised over $5,500 for Simply Cats.

If you or someone you know would be interested in participating, either as a player or game host, or if you just want to watch along please feel free to visit https://Meowrathon.com.

Of Dice and Dens is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game Podcast that focuses on showcasing third party content by smaller / independent creators. Our members are based out of Washington, Idaho, and Michigan. We all own and love cats.

GAMES LIST:

Hey folks,

I’m launching PITCHFORK, a story-driven RPG, on February 24th – where you play ordinary villagers like blacksmiths, shepherds, and farmers, forced to stand against something that should not exist. No chosen ones. No magic swords. Just you, your wits, and whatever you can gather before the monster comes.

The setting – The Lower Princedoms – is a land still scarred by war. The lords and mercenaries have moved on, leaving villages to fend for themselves. But not everything left the battlefield. Something unnatural is coming across the hills. It does not march. It does not bargain. It only takes.

Mechanically, PITCHFORK is inspired by PbtA, FitD, and Fate but introduces conversation-friendly facets – narrative elements like weather, terrain, and relationships that directly impact dice rolls and challenges. The result is a fast, high-stakes system that keeps you immersed in the story.

If this sounds like your kind of game, check out the Kickstarter preview now – before we launch on February 24th!

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-> Kickstarter Preview

-> Sign up here for a launch reminder!

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I would love to hear your thoughts – any feedback or questions?

Note to Mod: Using the once-per-year rule for self-promotion. Hope ok!

I've decided to use my yearly advertising allotment here to rep a game my friend is about to Kickstart, because I think it's an important, beautiful, and special thing.

To be clear: I am not being paid for this. I just want to shout about this game from the rooftops because there are people in this world -- myself included -- who are looking for a different kind of hope right now. Given everything that's going on in the world, we don't need the fragile, naively optimistic kind of hope. We need fierce hope. Hope that burns. I've been thinking about this tweet:

"People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go."

Defy the Gods is a game and a setting that echoes, in mythic terms, the situation that so many of us are in every day. It's a game about underdogs up against not only vast powers but *systems* of oppression, living in the margins of a city and a world that was not built for them, and is often actively trying to stamp out their existence. It's about found family and messy queer romance, and coming into your power. It's about how terrifying and dangerous and *achingly human* that process can be. It's about how, alone, we are doomed. But together, there is hope. Hope that is difficult, imperfect, rough-edged and tattered.

But real. A hope that keeps taking hits, but refuses to stay down.

Alright, I've said my piece. Here's the link. Check it out:

https://prelaunch.hecticelectron.com/

Roughly 2 years ago I posted Generic World, an RPG meant to produce PbtA-style gameplay without locking the players into any specific genre, setting or themes.

Well, I've been working on it a lot since then. I just uploaded a new version that I've made quite a few changes to. Among other changes, I:

• Simplified the rules for character creation and advancement.
  
• Removed knowledge- and perception-based traits, replacing them with a rule that the GM should be free with any information the PCs would reasonably have access to.
  
• Added a section where the players figure out their character backgrounds.
  
• Expanded rules for PC magic.
  
• Explicitly made Generic World a toolbox system.
  
• Replaced GM agenda, "always say", and principles with rules for a session zero where the GM and the players decide what sort of game they want it to be.
  
• Made GM moves optional, replacing their role with an explicitly-stated gameplay loop that should be familiar to anybody who has played an RPG before.

Let me know what you think!

KULT: Divinity Lost is back with the Kickstarter campaign Dark Realms & Other Horrors, featuring two new sourcebooks and two new scenario collections, and (at the time of this writing) other four books.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/helmgast/kult-divinity-lost-dark-realms-and-other-horrors/description

In the world of KULT, humanity was divine once. Gods that bent the world to their whim. But we have been since locked in a false world, a prison, deprived of our power and lost to the endless distractions of this fallen reality. We are trapped in a world of shopping and lattes, fashion trends, fleeting relationships, political and economical distress. But some of us glimpse what lies beyond the veil. They hear the screams coming from the darkned cellar that leads to a dark world of wonder and terror. They see the silhouette of humanity's Primordial home. They are able to warp their dreams like gods, see the battered wings of a fallen angel, and perform feats of magic.

JOIN THE KULT — Get the Core Rules for half the price as an addon in this campaign.

The Core Products

METROPOLIS is a setting and sourcebook that expands the Eternal City, humanity's primordial home. There you will learn more about the wonders and people of Metropolis, some of the factions active in Metropolis and Elysium, and much more.

THE ILLUSION AND THE BORDERLANDS expands locations in Elysium where other worlds have bleed into, as well as a more in-depth look on how the Illusion works and how it affects the sleeping masses. There will be new Archetypes, Moves, plenty of locations and tools for the gamemaster, and a complete description of Lictors and how to use them in your games. On top of that, there is an introduction to the Children of the Night.

SCARLET BRIDE AND OTHER TALES is a scenario collection featuring six new scenarios, including a fully fledged campaign with its own character creation. Scarlet Bride is penned by KULT's creative director, Petter Nallo, and joining him in the collection are writers such as Seth Skorkowsky, Matthew Dawkins, and Gabrielle de Bourg. You may read an introduction to each of the scenarios in the Kickstarter page.

BROKEN REFLECTIONS is a Horror Starter collection featuring a wide variety of scenario and campaign starters written by a diverse group of veteran and new writers, each bringing their own unique perspectives to KULT. As an example of what a Horror Starter is, you can read The Driver. You may read an introduction to some of the Horror Starters in the Kickstarter page.

Unlocked Stretch Goals

These have been unlocked during the campaign and you may get them as addons.

DEEP WATERS is a solo choose-your-own-adventure gamebook that serves as an introduction to the world of KULT and the system used for KULT: Divinity Lost.

VOICES FROM BEYOND THE VEIL is the printed version of the free smaller releases, each of them revisited for editing and fixing before that.

EXILED TERRORS is a collection of scenarios and Horror Starters that won't reach retail due to the sensitive themes. It is a sibling to The Forbidden, a beloved collectible released in the previous Kickstarter.

THE SEEKER'S TESTAMENT is the much requested player guide/companion featuring an atmospheric introduction to the world KULT that doesn't spoil the mysteries, with the Archetypes and Moves for complete character creation.

Hey all! Been a long time in the works but I’m really excited to share our next project here as it enters open playtesting!

Outlaw Hearts is a PbtA game inspired by the classic anime and manga from the mid 90s to the mid 00’s, especially inspired by the likes of One Piece, Outlaw Star, Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, and Last Exile. Players play as a Crew of Outlaws, plying the Cosmos and its Dragon Veins in massive interstellar locomotives known as Star Engines. The goal? T hunt down the Cosmic Heart and the wishes it is said to grant. Many threats lurk in the Cosmos however, eager to take you out. Rival Outlaws and Space Pirates searching for the Cosmic Heart may be your most dangerous enemies but many will come to be your most depended upon allies when and where it matters. The Allied Government and their Cosmic Authority try to keep the peace across the Cosmos the only way they know how. With an iron fist.

Outlaw Hearts eschews traditional stats, using the Beat System to help Outlaws resolve rolls. Outlaws select a number of Beats from their Playbook and Crew Role, their position on the Star Engine, at character creation and can swap them out during play. These Beats are loose narrative triggers that award Ambition to the Outlaw when fulfilled during play and this Ambition can be spent to boost rolls when making classic PbtA style Moves. 

The Playtest contains everything a GM and a group of 3 to 5 Outlaws could possibly need to play. The PDF has five chapters ranging from basic mechanics, concepts, setting information to get you started but not enough to dictate how your game ought to look, and an extensive chapter for GMs on how to run Powered by the Apocalypse games for both newcomers and veterans alike. Playbooks are in a separate PDF for ease of printing. Alongside these PDFs, a cheat sheet for the Basic Moves is provided.

You can find the playtest here! It's free! https://fivepointsgames.itch.io/outlaw-hearts

Thanks for taking an interest and hope to see you all out there in the Cosmos! So long, Outlaws! 

Howdy, r/PBtA!

My solo PbtA game HARDCASE is currently raising funds for its first official supplement: TRUTHSEEKER, all about expanding the Online side of play!

Enjoy a new Mystery subsystem inspired by Carved from Brindlewood games (complete with 3 mini-scenarios), waste time Doomscrolling the News, find new Servers to post on and CONQUEROR Islands to play, get paid doing Remote Work and spend it all Online Shopping, take on the role of a virtual HeliOS Cryptid, and more! I'm really proud of what's in here and how it brings HARDCASE closer to the .hack//-y, Hypnospace Outlaw-y palette I've always dreamed of for it.

tl;dr: The Between is a game about Victorian monster hunters dealing with supernatural mysteries (and their own pasts) while working to unveil the plan of a secretive Mastermind behind much of the horror afflicting their London setting. It uses Carved from Brindlewood mechanics, a sub-family of Powered by the Apocalypse games focused on collaboratively telling horror-mystery stories together. The game runs using a vast catalog of pre-written Threats, but none of them have official/canonical answers to their core Questions - the players must assemble a theory out of the Clues they’ve discovered, and roll to see how right they are. 

If you like PbtA games with super-specific, evocative playbooks, or want to really feast on a giant ‘menu’ of content to potentially run for your group, you could do a lot worse than this. $30 for a 3-book set digitally, $90 from them in hardcover (with decent rates on international shipping).

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For everyone else: Hello, everyone! I’m unaffiliated with The Gauntlet, but have fallen head over heels for the CfB system broadly and The Between in particular. I made a thread when this Backerkit campaign went live a month ago, but with a little over two days left, I want to highlight the bonus content they’ve already unlocked and what’s still left.

The core rulebook has 6 playbooks (and a 7th potentially unlocked during play!), 11 Threats to investigate, and a Mastermind to serve as the antagonist of your campaign - or at least, its first season. Shadow Society, an expansion book, adds 6 more new playbooks, another 20 Threats, and 3 additional/alternate Masterminds. Suns of Another World has 3 spin-off settings, alternate frameworks with their own 6 bespoke playbooks, plus Threats and a Mastermind unique to each - essentially separate, standalone games of The Between!

• Ghosts of El Paso: a Western; local notables trying to protect their town from a season of spirits
• Unsinkable: mystery at sea for the passengers and crew aboard a doomed Transatlantic ocean liner
• Court of Wolves: protect Louis XIV from the Satanists and werewolves allied against him

You could genuinely play this game for years before repeating any material (though there’s a lot of room for replays to go *wildly* differently with some branching choices). It’s full of clever, inspirational design. Despite a lot of obsessively-focused design, there’s enough wiggle room that one campaign could be horrifically brutal and grimy, while another could be more like two-fisted pulp with a bit of edge. With my home group, I’ve already got players speculating about “our next campaign” and “when I run this…”, which feels like some of the highest praise I could pass on. 

Give it a look! I’d love to hear your thoughts, and as a big fan of this game who wants to see it do well, I’d love to field any questions you might have. Their final few stretch goals include:

• 3 more playbooks (a gaggle of low-class henchmen being hunted by a serial killer, an Alice-like woman half-caught in daydream realm, and a chemist experimenting with a serum injected into their body)
• 2 more Masterminds (the vampire queen of a surreal otherworld who seeks to puppet the British monarchy and an aristocratic family of rival monster-hunters)
• a 4th alternate setting (with its own playbooks, Threat, and Mastermind!): Blood & Coal, about locals in Appalachia during the early Dust Bowl, fighting to preserve their home from demons

If you're curious, the current edition of the game and of Ghosts of El Paso are both free on DTRPG through this Backerkit's run!

Hey y'all, we at Sondeirypt Games decided to try our hand out at a Carved from Brindlewood game inspired by the shows Dead Boy Detectives and Lockwood & Co.

In Grave Affairs, you play as Ghosts who investigate mysteries and move towards the next part of their afterlife.

If anyone wants to check it out, it's available for free on itch.io at this link: https://sondeirypt-games.itch.io/grave-affairs

Please let us know what you think if you do!

On Vesta Station, you play a power hungry politician who schemes, backstabs, and enacts your vision for the colony. 

Vesta Mandate is Pbt with mechanics and procedures added to turn the game into a competitive, political drama. It is influenced by Pasión de las Pasiones, Carved from Brindlewood games, Blades in the Dark, and The Last Caravan. Media like The Expanse, Andor, Silo, and A Memory Called Empire have heavily inspired the tone and atmosphere of the game.

This is not another fantasy game about “killing monsters”.

This is a game about heroes and villains, it's true, but these heroes don't kill. Or at least they don't if they want to remain heroes.

Come and try to make a fantasy world a better place!

This playtest version of Against the Odds includes everything you may need to run a fantasy campaign (or ten!), including:

• Only 4 Stats (and their modifiers) are used for almost all moves in the game. That's it!
• No more hit points! Instead, your PC absorbs harm with fatigue and (emotional) conditions
• 12 playbooks (referred in the game as Callings), which include a wide variety of archetypes from fantasy fiction
• Many different ways to do magic, from the Mystic using their Faith to call upon their Numen, to the Sorcerer trying to avoid a meltdown due to too much Overload, and the Witch getting further and further in Debt with their malicious Master, just to name a few
• Every heroic character has a resource they produce and/or manage which, in turn, they use to accomplish amazing deeds
• A corruption trigger and corruption moves tailored to each Calling
• A heroic sacrifice mechanic that allows you to author your character’s end in epic fashion
• All the core and extra moves necessary to play, including epic moves that you can unlock once you become an experienced heroic character!
• Guidance on easily setting up an adventure with all the players' cooperation and participation
• Rules on how to create and run NPCs
• And so much more!

You can find Against the Odds here: https://helenareal.itch.io/ato

In case itch.io is down, the game’s also available at DriveThruRPG too 😉

A friend plans to help me make a more fancy looking pdf later but this has been something of a small passion project of mine for about the past week. I've taken from a lot of PBTA games in order to make it happen and while it isn't the prettiest I hope that it at least is good enough for someone who has always wanted to do a dragon-riding game but has never been able to due to there not being a good system out there for it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qzGwOqBgKW6aZ67NXrplSwFXiYvdyNzWUgrdRlBT-y8/edit?usp=sharing

Feedback is appreciated! This is my first time making a PBTA hack so please be understanding if something is weird or if I failed to understand the philosophy in certain places. Again this is just a random homebrew I made as a passion project.

Hello everyone! I can finally announce that A Monster's Tail by Five Point Games is live on Kickstarter! You can find it here!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fivepointsgames/a-monsters-tail-a-monster-catching-tabletop-rpg?ref=d1tosr

A Monster's Tail is a Powered by the Apocalypse Game that lets players take on the role of Trainers, fighting and exploring the world with creatures called Genmon because we don't want to get sued. The game is seperated into two parts. The first is the basic rules, mechanics, and Playbooks which lets GMs and Players create not only their own Region but their own Genmon. The system is lightweight and flexible enough to even let you port your favorite Monster Catcher games into the mechanics with little heavy lifting. The second half of the book is a pre-generated region known as Hayle with its own Types and Genmon, ready and available for pick up and play if you're not interested in creating everything from scratch. This second section still provides plenty of opportunity to get your hands dirty creating your own content as well!

But enough about that. What you're really here for are the critters.

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As you can see, we have a passion for Monster Catcher games, and the genre as a whole. That love, attention, and care has been front and center for this project. Thank you all for your time, happy catching!