YoreTerry Pratchett’s final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown (paid link), came in the mail today, a bittersweet arrival to say the least.
I almost never buy fiction in print anymore, but I’ve got every Discworld book in print; it felt right that I should read this one in print as well.
Out now: The Unlucky Isles
I commissioned some artwork for Bleakstone from one of my favorite old-school artists, Steve Zieser. Steve brought Bleakstone’s dominant intelligent species — humans, skurliths, uzbardim, null slimes, and gharrudaemons — to life, and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. (Thanks, Steve!)
If you’d like to read more about any of these species, check out the anchor post for the Bleakstone campaign setting.
December 21, 2015 update: I’ve just learned that Steve Zieser has died after a long battle with cancer.
I had the privilege of working with him just once, on this project, but had chatted with him several times since then. He was a great guy, warm and funny and generous — not to mention a fantastic old school artist.
You’ll be missed, Steve.
With Focal Point in wide release, I’m slowly turning my attention to other projects. I’ve been poking at Bleakstone for the past year, since I first posted about it here, and my plan is to invest additional time and money into the setting to get it ready for publication.
I love Bleakstone. It fires my imagination, and I want to see it in print. I’ve got specific ideas about how a setting like this should be published, and I’m looking at the best ways to implement them.
With an impending move to Seattle, the next couple months are going to be pretty patchy in terms of project time, but Bleakstone will continue to progress, slowly, in the background.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesCormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (paid link):
All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
I started this about three years ago, the same day I finished inhaling The Road (paid link) in under 24 hours, and it didn’t strike me right. This time, it’s striking me right.
I’ve read the quoted sentence at least 10 times, and I’m still finding new things to like about it.
So far, I’ve looked up an average of a word per page in this book. I love that, too!
Out now: The Unlucky IslesIf you know me well, this might be surprising — I don’t think of myself as a musical person, and I’m partly tone deaf. Prior to this, the only time I’ve ever done something musical by choice was in my sophomore year of high school, roughly 20 years ago, when I was in a Renaissance choir for a few months. And that was barely by choice, as I was doing it to spend more time with my then-girlfriend.
But the didge? The didge is neat. (This one was made by Tyler Spencer.)
So far, the only thing I’m good at is scaring the dog. But I’m making progress! I can get a drone pretty consistently, and it’s occasionally not terrible.
Playing it feels right to me. It seems to require the same relaxed-but-focused state as target shooting and, in delicate situations, hiking on mountains. I like that state, and achieving it helps me feel balanced.
It’s also a good stress reliever, which is welcome right now. I can’t always make time to spend a whole day on a mountain, but I can scare the dog for a few minutes and feel something pretty similar.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesSame-sex marriage: now legal in all 50 states!
What an amazing day!
When my daughter asks me where I was when I heard the news, “in a McDonald’s drive-thru” is maybe not the most dramatic answer.
Holy shit, what a fucking fantastic thing. It’s electric. My whole body feels like it’s vibrating.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesAfter posting The Thief, the fourth game I designed, I started thinking about the third, Storylike. I designed Storylike for my daughter, Lark, for New Game Day 2014, and we played it with my wife, Alysia, and our friend Jaben.
I came away thinking it probably needed some work, but a year later I haven’t done that work. So why not put it out there?
I’d probably design it differently now, but in cleaning it up to publish I realized that that’s not a bad thing — Storylike reflects what I wanted out if it in 2014. It’s a snapshot, and a playable one; we had fun playing it. I might tweak it someday, I might not.
My design goals for Storylike were:
The odds of success also tell you quite a bit about the game:
These odds incentivize players to help each other (which increases your roll to the next die type) and to try to use their abilities (d4 is the “I don’t have that” default, and gives the worst odds), but the odds are always tilted in the players’ favor thanks to players winning ties. The possibility of failure exists, but it’s not rampant; that felt about right for my kiddo.
My favorite things about Storylike are Problems, Hidden Talents, and the visual character sheet. You can tell that the latter wasn’t designed by an artist, and that I created it in Word. Anyone with a drop of design talent could sexy it up in just a few minutes.
I like Problems because they’re so flexible. They can be injuries, sure, but they can also be conditions like Afraid, Embarrassed, or Dazed. Problems were inspired by stress and consequences in Fate, but they distill that combination of tracks and aspects down to a single mechanic for the sake of simplicity. Hidden Talents are similarly flexible, and they also signal that characters should develop during play.
If you try out Storylike, I’d love hear what you think of it. Enjoy!
Out now: The Unlucky IslesI hadn’t planned to enter the 200 Word RPG Challenge, but then an idea popped into my head, followed closely by another, and one spilled out of me.
The Thief is a solitaire RPG that takes a few minutes to play. You need a handful of coins and possibly something to write on.
The Thief was inspired by the TV series The Wire and the video game Papers, Please; the Prince Valiant RPG, which uses coin-tossing; and current events. It’s not what the title makes it sound like it might be, but it’s not subtle about what it actually is.
I love nanogames, roleplaying poems, whatever you want to call them — short-form games, as a form, are fascinating. To date, my favorite is Stoke-Birmingham 0-0, in which you play the most boring people possible with the most boring lives possible and, over the course of (if memory serves) fifteen minutes, attempt to say absolutely nothing of interest. It’s hilarious.
200 words is a brutal constraint. I struggled to strike a balance between brevity, clarity, and the tone I was after. It required multiple drafts to get it down to 200 words, which was a surprisingly enjoyable process — I dig creativity with constraints. (And I played it conservative and counted the title, byline, and copyright language against my 200.)
The Thief took me about five hours to produce: one hour for the first draft, another to find the woodcut and header font, and three hours to rewrite, redesign, playtest, and proofread. The mechanics went through several iterations, three of which I playtested, until I found the mix I wanted. For about five minutes, the game took an abrupt dogleg and was about time travel, but it didn’t take me long to see that that wasn’t right for it.
I played the final version before submitting it to the challenge, and it did what I wanted it to. If you try it, I hope you get something out of it.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesLulu’s Law for tabletop RPGs:
“Within 24 of hours of placing a Lulu order, you’ll find out about a gaming book you should have ordered.”
Here’s how that usually breaks down for me, step by step:
(If you’re looking for Lulu recommendations, here’s my list.)
Out now: The Unlucky IslesOne of the fun things about having blogged for a long time is that I sometimes remember writing something years ago and, when I do, I can just go read it again. And man has this article from my Treasure Tables days back in 2005 come full fucking circle 10 years later: I’d rather rake leaves than do prep.
I’ve reached the point with prep where I’m entirely unwilling to do more than a few minutes of it, if that. Games that require prep are basically off my radar as a GM. I’ll read a book, I’ll noodle about a couple of things, but that’s my limit.
Game prep, you’re pretty much dead to me.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesI picked up 188 RPG products in 2014 (plus a few more than arent in RPGGeek’s database yet), 43 of which were published in 2014. Of those 43, I’ve spent enough time with enough of them to tease out a partial list of 12 favorites — partial because there are books I expect to love which aren’t included here simply because I haven’t had a chance to read them.
Despite trying to be thorough I’ve probably forgotten something, and I’m confident more favorites will emerge as I make my way through my to-read pile mountain. Happy gaming!
Out now: The Unlucky Isles