Vexing Workshop

Strange Artifacts Invitational, 2025

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.

Forbidden Psalm

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.

Animal Cultists

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.

Fire Monks

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.

Fire Monks brave the depths Kitbash Chaos's brilliant board Sirens haunt the beach Warband glamor shot Boards of the Dying Lands

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.

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