To keep myself on track with the various projects I’d like to see finished someday, I’m going to be sending out these dispatches to a very small group of folks. Doing so should, in theory, encourage (if not force) me to keep putting one foot in front of the other and do bits of pieces on these projects until they are complete.
If you’re receiving this, just know that you don’t have to read these. The simple fact that these are being sent out is enough to fulfill the strange mental bargain I am making with myself. That being said, if you are reading, thank you — that’s cool.
Project rundown
The Great Green Room
Given that I both like Mausritter and it is a very popular game right now, I feel like I should really finish my half conceived dungeon inspired by the children’s book Goodnight Moon.
Thus far I have a cover and a project laid out in Publisher using the mini zine template by the excellent Speak The Sky.
Next step on that is brainstorming all the various points of interest (bowl of mush, two young kittens, etc).
Of Sand and Stars
This is my Cairn hack. It’s Desert Cairn, but with a focus on survival and travel. I want to make a lightweight game that uses scarcity to drive players forwards and makes it necessary to take risks.
I’m creating a system of tracking time, which I’m calling ‘moons’. The idea being that on this desert planet you track time using the eight moons that are seen in the sky at various points in the day, each for around four hours. There are 8 moons per 24 hours, 4 during night and 4 during the day.
This means you can look at your point crawl map (and this game is made for epic and complex point crawls) and see that Town A is six moon’s away from Town B. So then the Warden (I might call them Umpire in this game, though) can say: “Ok, the Child’s Moon has risen (all the moon’s have names), what is the party doing? If you spend this entire moon travelling you can make it to this point in the map… Alternatively you can spend it resting, exploring or triggering the landmark here.”
I’m also beefing up the conditions in Cairn (inspired by Mausritter somewhat) to make thirst, hunger and exposure real. So as players you need to plot journeys carefully, always mindful of where you can get shelter and water.
Here’s a draft point crawl. I really want point crawls to feel like areas in a video game where various points have items and story points needed to fulfill a challenge at other points.
For the hacking process, I am basically reproducing Cairn in my own notebook, editing as I go. ‘C+P’ here signals that I am just copying and pasting the creative commons text in Cairn for those various sections.
Guardians of the Radiant Forest
My Forged in the Dark game which is ‘oops all rangers’. Goal is to make a game that celebrates the tones and tropes that come with rangers, harvested mostly from Lord of the Rings and Warhammer’s Forest Elves armies of the late 1990s.
I have a Scrivener project file where I painstakingly recreated the FitD text. Now I need to overwrite it with my game; which seeks to take a lot of the bookkeeping out of the game and also replace vice with more positive/wholesome activities.
Enemies in this are mechs, drones and other things an evil corp has made to try and conquer the forest (and its mystical powers).
Steam Thieves and the Soaring City
This is my Steampunk FitD game. You zip around in steam packs looking to siphon steam out of massive brass pipes across a Cloudminster, a flying metropolis. Your enemies are Bobbies in balloon gondolas looking to shoot you out the sky.
To Whom It May Concern
This is a solo/writing prompt ‘game’ which is designed to facilitate folks writing letters to their elected representatives. Have some notes, but not much else.
Railz
I want to incorporate engine building mechanics from board games like Wingspan and Earth. Railz is about martian miners who have converted their drills into railguns. You build and upgrade your gun as you go and roll bucket loads of dice when you squeeze the trigger.
Z
This is my zombie Cairn hack. Have some good stuff in here, but it’s been on the back burner for a while.
Trinakum
Speaking of back burner. My most ambitious project is Trinkaum, a strategic combat simulator and setting which uses a dice pool of three D6s. I really love this one, but it’s kind of like I love it too much. And thus I’m afraid to progress and ‘screw it up’ somehow. Need to get over that and push on.
Misc.
10 Blocks of Pain: Side scrolling beat ‘em up for LUMEN, inspired by Streets of Rage.
Liupa: Solo map making game where you control and chronicle the life of a pack of wolves.
Cool Mom and Speed Demons: The follow up to my two stat game RIPPED WIZARDS.