The Resurrection of Omnihedron Games (One Year On)
What has gone before…
I’m a big fan of Grant Morrison’s classic 2000AD series, Zenith, so back in 2007 when I needed a name for my gaming ‘company’, ‘omnihedron’ seemed like an obvious choice. Back then, we were indie designers where the person and the company were synonymous – we were the CEOs of everything. Those were good times – publishing Duty & Honour, Beat to Quarters and ERA, travelling around to events under the Collective Endeavour banner and basking in reaching the elusive 200 lifetime sales for some products.
Around 2013, Omnihedron Games went into mothballs. I had neither the time, the energy, nor the inclination to continue even pretending that it was an ongoing concern. I even had a couple of instances where I was offered real money for the rights to the games, but I never followed through on them. Over the years, there has always been a murmuring from the people who loved those games that I should rerelease them, but I never did. Why? There were a lot of things needed fixing in those games, and I no longer had the base files for them – and I wasn’t going to retype those books. No, they were lost.
And for years, that was it, until Paul Mitchener’s Liminal RPG kickstarter hit in 2018, and I was invited to participate as a supplement and casefile writer. This game unlocked my research and writing bug and reminded me how thrilling it was to see my name in print … again. My official writing for Liminal continues to this day, with two unpublished manuscripts in the pipeline and another on the block.
However, the big change for me was the unofficial writing I was doing for the game, in the form of my Patreon – The Case Files of Professor Cain Moore. This reintroduced me to writing discipline, turning out at least one article a month, which is a pace I have kept up for a couple of years now, and loved every minute.
2025 – the year everything changed
However, it was in 2025 that things would change, and Omnihedron Games would return. The first thing was my decision to reformat and publish my Patreon content in printed form as the Journal of Paranormal Research. Some of this was easy – I’ve done loads of work with printers and layout in my professional life over the years – and some, like running a Kickstarter, was new to me. However, the campaign was successful, and I made a profit.
Actually, let’s put this into perspective. The gaming world has changed a lot since 2007 in terms of scale. I made more profit on those Journals than I think I did overall on Duty & Honour. Suddenly, Omnihedron Games had a bank balance and options, which in turn meant I had to take the plunge and register as a sole trader, do the tax thing etc. Proper business stuff.
The second change was discovering that I could open the pdfs of Duty & Honour using Affinity Publisher. This was the watershed moment that changed everything for me. I could finally update, fix, and republish Duty & Honour! Since that day, I have spent my time editing, rewriting, drafting, and testing material for the game. It has become a labour of love – one which is reaching the end soon, as the game is almost ready for me to get stuck into production side of things. And, because of the success of the Journals, I have the elusive pot of money to use to make sure the crowdfunding for this looks great too.
2026 – turning plans into products
Well, all things being equal, these are the projects I should see happening this year.
- The crowdfunding campaign for Duty & Honour will happen. This isn’t going to be the swift turnaround I had for the Journals, as most of the funding will be for art and that takes time, but this is my priority.
- There will be a second batch of the Journal of Paranormal Research, covering coastal folklore, Cornish folklore, a seasonal almanac, and a miscellany of other occult articles. This will happen after the D&H crowdfunding when I have the time to do the layout and conversions.
- There is an outside chance that my Arthurian Liminal campaign, The Caliburn Chronicles, will also be made available in print. If not in 2026, then in early 2027
- I’ll be continuing my posts on my Liminal patreon too.
Of course, there might be more official Liminal material coming out too on 2026.
- Novocastria, my Liminal sourcebook for the North East of England, is next in the production queue, after Faeries and Folklore is completed.
- Ley Line of Duty is a P Division manual that I added to Dr Mitch’s production pile a while back. It currently sits outside of the crowdfunded batch of books from 2018, but you never know!
- Dr Mitch has also given me permission to write the vampire book for Liminal. This is going to take a while, but I have an exciting outline of new material for that side of the game.
And what about new Omnihedron material? Well, I have two other games on my desktop which are in what I would politely call developmental hell.
- A Boggart’s Life is a solo journaling RPG where you chronicle the rising and fall of one boggart’s reputation amongst the thieving fae of Hidden London as it climbs to the rank of Lord High Pilferer. Based on the Liminal lore I wrote in Pax Londinium, this just needs me to do the hard yards of hundreds of prompts.
- NETWORK is an idea that will not go away. I love shows like The Newsroom and The Morning Show, and I am convinced you can use the Carved from Brindlewood engine to recreate the messy pasts, febrile investigations, and tense broadcast drama of those shows at the gaming table. What I need to do here is look at some of the newer CfB games, like Beach Blanket Body Bag and see whether I can do something that scale first, as a test.
And breath…
That’s a lot of stuff going on, and not all of it will happen I’m sure, but I am so happy to be back in the game again after all these years. My reluctance has melted away and now I’m just buzzing with ideas and creativity. I don’t know whether you’ll be seeing an Omnihedron stall at Games Expo any time soon – I am too old for that shit now – but I reckon we’ll see a few more titles sooner rather than later.
I’ll see you in a year’s time to see where we have ended up!