Choose from 20+ distinct superpowers! Lead your team of superheroes to the moon and beyond, and stop the supervillains of PSION—unless, of course, you join them.

Decades ago, legendary hero Adam Atom created the Guardians: an elite force of posthumans to protect the world from those who use their powers for harm. In response, PSION—the Posthuman Supremacy International Organized Network—sprang up. The United Nations calls them terrorists; they call themselves a liberation army protecting posthumans from human persecution.

Now PSION is hatching their most ambitious plan yet—and it’s up to you and your fellow Guardians to stop them.

Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION is a 300,000-word interactive superhero novel by Evan J. Peterson, author of Drag Star!. I sat down with Evan to talk about his upcoming game, the world of Posthuman and his other endeavours. Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION releases next Thursday, April 23rd. You can play the demo today and wishlist it on Steam—even if you plan to purchase the game on another platform, it really helps!

This is your second game for us, and the source of this game derives from a world and characters you had been building for a long time prior. Tell me all about it.
Gladly! I started creating a super-people story many years ago. In high school, I’d draw characters and design their costumes (I thought I was going to be a clothes and costume designer, and that didn’t stick). Then I thought, “Well, what do they do? Who are they, and what’s their world look like?” I got about a third of the way through writing a novel with some of these characters; Vogue is one person I’ve never gotten tired of. But the novel wasn’t about her. It was about second-rate vigilantes discovering their powers and falling into a dysfunctional, even toxic love affair. In retrospect, I had been writing an MM romantasy, but I didn’t know that at the time. Maybe now I’ll revisit it. A lot of their world lived in my head, and now it lives in Posthuman. Come play with us.

What was the most challenging part of making the move from that sort of prior conception to a piece of actual interactive fiction?
I really had to restrain myself on the lore. I cut a chapter’s worth of worldbuilding out in the early chapters, then found places to break that backstory up and redistribute it. This huge world was so precious to me, and I was so invested that I lost focus on the PC occasionally and drifted into long backstory. I was too emotionally close to the material at first, but Jason and Mary redirected me. Later, when some beta testers responded about needing more history of this world, I dug in gleefully and wrote a bunch of in-world database files on the various teams and events. Players will find these linked on the stats page.

This is also my first time writing romance into a COG; there’s a little hanky panky in Drag Star!, but there are no real romanceable characters. Now, there are six or different romances possible. Even though I like a good romance scene, having to do it in six versions with different personalities and voices was challenging.

Who are your own personal comic book superhero idols?
The humans or the superhumans? I adore Keiron Gillen’s writing. Alan Moore has been very influential, too. The folks who founded Milestone (now the Dakota-verse, owned by DC for better or worse). I look up to the Milestone crew, who made a whole new world together, populated mostly by characters of color–and many of them were LGBTQ. They didn’t give a f*** . Readers in the 90s may not have been ready for a Black trans man on a team of superheroes who were also an inner city street gang, but the Milestone crew said, “That’s what you’re getting!”

As far as the fictional, I love love love the X-Men. Not all of them, because now there are hundreds. But Storm, Iceman, Magneto, Synch…who doesn’t love this super-messy, fashion-serving found family of freaks?

Why do you find yourself drawn to those kinds of stories and storytelling?
It’s everything. High-drama people with extraordinary abilities, many of whom are forced to live double lives, who know just the right thing to say at the right time? There’s the outsider/other perspective, there are monsters (good, evil, and nonbinary), and true goodness usually triumphs over true evil. AND THEY DO IT IN COSTUMES. What’s not to like about that?

What else have you been working on?
I got married, so I’ve been nesting. But my brain never stops pulsating. My first novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, came out in 2024, and it won an award for best small-press fantasy novel! I’m super effing proud of that. We also made a short film to serve as the book trailer. With Posthuman finally complete, I’m digging into writing a sequel novel to build the Alchemy series. And I doubt very much that the Posthuman universe is done. Lots more stories in there to tell. Other than turning looks and selling books? I’ve been learning how to garden, how to DM, and how to pole dance. The usual Evan J Peterson stuff.