Published: Mon 20 October 2025
By Adam
In Blog .
tags: events wargaming gallery
October 5th, 2025, the Strange Artifacts crew hosted our first Forbidden
Psalm event, the
Strange Artifacts Invitational . Held at Total Escape
Games in Broomfield, Colorado. As a
relatively new club, we've hosted game days and we've made our appearances at
local cons, this was our first attempt at an organized event.
When it comes to running an indy game event, we are fortunate to have plenty of
fantastic examples to learn from. We all greatly admire Ana from Gardens of
Hecate . Her own Forbidden Psalm events,
Turm 2023 and
Turm 2024
are massive standouts for the entire community. I am in no way ashamed to tell
you that I borrowed heavily from the Turm format when putting together the
event, down to the player packet and rules. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ana and
her willingness to share her experience.
Planning and Execution
We wanted our first event to be successful, and that meant making sure that
everyone who participated could play and have a great time. The first most
important lesson we learned from Turm was to limit the size of our first event -
we chose to follow suit and limit the event to eight players.
But how do you get invitations out for an invitational? After setting aside
seates for the Strange Artifact Crew ourselves, we extended personal invitations
to friends local friends, and a few more to members of the In Rust We
Trust community. While our more remote friends
were not ultimately able to attend, we did have enough folks locally to go ahead
with the event.
Expectations and Scenarios
Strange Artifacts is a good crew and we all came together with an ethos that
makes narrative games fun and safe to play. That being said, it felt important
to me that expectations were made explicitly clear. Taking another point from
Turm, I wrote up some basic rules and expectations. Each player would bring
their pre-rolled and fully painted warband, adhering to Forbidden Psalm: End
Times Edition rules. We decided on three rounds of play, and as a narrative
event, I wanted to be clear that this was not a competitive tournament.
Eight seats means four boards, and we wanted to have the full diorama
experience. One enthusiastic member took to the task right away and built two
excellent, thematic boards and even went so far as to write an original scenario
for one of them. Our own Kitbash Chaos
brought his beautiful red desert board, and I built the last, specifically
intended for Dashed Hope, a scenario from the Forbidden Psalm core book
campaign.
Some weeks before the event, a few of us got together and discussed the
scenarios we'd play. Since none of us had completed the original campaign, we
decided to pull scenarios from the book. This gave us time to paint monsters for
every scenario. In some cases, that was a lot of models! As for the narrative
hook, we deviated a bit from the original scenario, and tweaked each one to fit
our own story.
Even though we had plenty of time, naturally much of the narrative was written
the day before the event!
Our player packet with rules, narrative hook and scenarios can be found
here .
As I continue to write I realize just how incapable I am of describing the joy I
felt as I watched my friends, brilliant artists and upright folks to the last,
spend an entire day enjoying the game and each other.
Here are some more pictures.
End with Gratitude
We are forever grateful to Total Escape Games, who charged us absolutely nothing
to hold our humble event at the store. Not only that their Event Manager Kyle
asked many questions and gave helpful suggestions which helped guide us towards
smooth execution of our goal.
For my part I want to share my appreciation for the Strange Artifacts crew as a
whole. It's not easy to make friends as adults, let alone to find folks who
share our affinity for weird little critters. Also, thank you to the In Rust We
Trust community who keep the torch burning worldwide and whose Discord helped us
find the others. I even want to thank @noclearcoat, the Discord moderator whose
continued lack of recognition encouraged Strange Artifacts to form and to plant
our own flag in the 28 community.