The new Sublight Games

Hello Voidfriends! Faith here.

I'm excited to present Stardust's new home on the Internet. A home completely independent from platforms like Patreon or Substack.

We'll now deliver all of our interstellar storytelling directly to you from a server in the European Union. No middlemen. No one else holding money bags. No convoluted second website for member rewards. Just a simple, straightforward web app where you can read, listen, and watch our stories and play our tabletop games.

For the curious and technical among us, our new website is built on Ghost, customized to our needs as a business. It's an open-source application that is content agnostic. It allows us to handle your membership data with care. And, important to me in these fraught times, it's self-hosted.

Why independence matters

Trans women are building their own publishing world, and it’s under threat

Online communities are stepping in where traditional publishing stops.

The VergeTalia Bhatt

As Talia Bhatt wrote for The Verge, there is currently a concerted pressure campaign by religious fundamentalists across the West to silence queer voices. They do this by hounding the subscription services, storefronts, and payment processors we rely on with takedown requests for "obscene content." Oftentimes, these services do not perform due diligence and, overwhelmed with angry letters from MAGA Moms, will simply choose to acquiesce to their unreasonable and easily refuted demands. Storefronts like itch.io and Steam have been caught shadowbanning works by trans authors, targeting "NSFW" content, and catching "SFW" content in the dragnet.

And in the United States, Section 230 is currently being targeted in Congress and at the Supreme Court by religious zealots who believe they should control what media and entertainment you enjoy.

Transgender people are frequently locked out of the traditional publishing world. We are told that our perspectives are dangerous, inappropriate, or inherently sexual by their mere existence. We're told we cannot exist, despite existing in the written record since written record began. In the best case scenario we may be told our stories don't have mass appeal and should be watered down. And even when we're presented with some measure of human empathy, we're not allowed to tell our stories ourselves.

One of the reasons we ran a Kickstarter and submitted our award-winning pitch to Minnesota WebFest was to prove publishers wrong: there is not just a place for queer stories in fandom, there is a demand. And there's a broader appetite for new worlds to explore, too.

Publishing independence has always been important to me, but only now have we truly been able to achieve it. Even though the main thread of Stardust is firmly an "R-rated" adventure, I hear from fellow transfeminine authors seemingly every week about how their sometimes far more innocuous stories are targeted. We needed to get ahead of the problem, even if we weren't yet facing untoward scrutiny or harassment. Because I know once we launch our products elsewhere — particularly places like Kindle and Audible — we almost certainly will.

The Voidfarer program

Our subscription service is our way of interacting with fans. It's reasonable to ask why we need a subscription service to do this. In short, it ensures our broad swath of talent from around the world is fairly compensated for their time and expertise.

Sublight Games is artist-owned and LGBTQ-led. We believe creativity — particularly that which is necessary to provide entertainment and tell fantastic stories — is labor just like any other. There is no AI slop machine. There is no pro bono work when it comes to an intellectual property examining the human condition. Upholding our principles means we must market our products for a reasonable fee.

For anyone new here — including our tabletop fans — I suggest the $5 Voidfarer tier. It offers the most for you at this moment, and you will receive our fully-cast and scored audiobook later this year, plus the exclusive lore primers (available as our web articles or in PDF format), wallpapers, and commenting and Discord privileges. It's the best bang for your buck in 2026.

To access your rewards, hit that Voidfarers dropdown that appears at the top of the site when you're logged in. Individual articles and posts themselves may also offer the relevant Voidfarer reward(s) at the bottom of the page.

You may cancel your subscription with us at any time — even if you only subscribe for a month to grab the latest goodies. Simply select Cancel Subscription on the Account page and you will not be charged on the next billing date.

What's to come

This was a big project for me, so I'm going to take a few days general rest. The next reward we have for Voidfarers will be our primer on Small Arms in The Bary, and if that doesn't hit in April it certainly will in May. Otherwise, we are firmly in post-production right now. We'll have teasers dropping periodically on YouTube. Voidfarers can see and hear our work-in-progress in the #voidfarers channel on Discord.

Speaking of which, there's a new way to access the channel as a subscriber. Enter the /link <[email protected]> bot command to attach your Voidfarer account email to your Discord account. Special thanks to a friend who will remain unnamed for helping me out with this.

All the best to you, Voidfriends. Fly safe out there.
— Faith K. Falkner