Hello, HCs! I hope the Heliopause Near-Earth District has been treating you all well. TRUTHSEEKER's received a rough layout pass and I've been looking over some lovely sketches Ida did (Huevomigos!!) recently, so that's proceeding right along... but I'm actually here to tell you about a whole bunch of HARDCASE goodies that weren't penned by me!

#HCjam ran for all of May, inviting folks to play with some of the revised mechanics in HARDCASE Mini, and that got 3 lovely submissions:

• Binary Star Games came out with HARDFACE, a companion piece to their HARDPLACE that adds Faces, Origins, and Labels for each of the non-Basement ports of call in that module.
• the first bear astronaut gave us CONQUEROR: LANCERS & LOVERS, which bulks out the in-game MMORPG with a new Island to visit, along with mechanics for raiding, roleplaying, and player housing within its VR worlds.
• Glitched Tabletop sent in a placeholder for THE PHANTOM OF THE MARIA SERAPH, which appears from the previews to be a precarious little timed salvage gig aboard the titular derelict... my interest is piqued!

But that's nowhere near all! It turns out that HARDCASE fans are busy little bees (there's that Heliopause work ethic kicking in!), because even more third-party releases hit on either side of the game jam. 

• Charles Gillespie thought things weren't hard enough, so he made HARDSCRABBLE: a collection of mean little things like unpleasant new jobs (trash-picking, lengthy contracts aboard a freighter), bloodsport (both betting and getting in the ring yourself), new Labels and Origins, a new CONQUEROR Island, a new TRUTHSEEKER-style Mystery that paints a target on your back, and a haunted space station you'll struggle to escape!
• Rookery Games just released BACKSPACE, a suite of new Labels (with Perks!) and their associated Servers full of Online weirdos for you to chat/argue/flirt with and enjoy. 

For those keeping track at home, that's 9 total HARDCASE releases between my own and the community's! Thank you all so, so much for reading, for playing, for writing, for ever encouraging me - this has been such a delight. It's hard to believe that Itchfunding a 12-page text document a little over a year ago has led to this point: together, we're filling this solar system up with some of my favorite things <3

Keep an eye out for a finished TRUTHSEEKER pdf sometime soon-ish, and keep making cool HARDCASE expansions of your own! I've got a rapidly-growing Itch collection for everything here... and a handful of early drafts for what a backwards-compatible HC2e set aboard Spindle City might look like. Thanks again for all the love on HARDCASE!