Hi there! I’ve uploaded the PDF compilation of all 4 season pass modules into one coherent book. Everything should be up to date with v1.1 (hence the title). Epub version coming soon. Until next time! (Read the original on itch here!)
Hi there! v1.1 is out. It’s nothing big: A few clarifications in a few spots. A few typo, bad reference, and bad copy/paste fixes. Some layout normalization on Frame spreads re: right-page spacing. I also made a chost about how I’d convert APOCALYPSE FRAME to diceless here. (At some point I’m going to clean that up and add other variant rule ideas I’ve been kicking around. Compiling The Infected World and updating Ballad of Industrial Gods come first though for APOCALYPSE FRAME work. ...
apocalypse frame front cover croppedSame idea, different game. I'd considered dicelessness for APOCALYPSE FRAME first, actually, but decided it wasn't worth putting it in the core game because I wanted it to come out ever. The big reason I'd do it is that rolling dice actually does slow things down quite a bit and for the most part players usually just reroll with Tension in combat so it's not like consequences come up that much unless folks are using low-die Armaments with low Tension or rolling low Attributes for some reason. ...
ANOINTED cover croppedI had been thinking about the topic of randomness when writing entries for Regions for ANOINTED23, but Spencer Campbell (GilaRPGs, creator of LUMEN/RUNE/etc) wrote two blog posts (with a third on the way) that got me thinking about it. Specifically, I'm wondering if I could/should just remove dice almost entirely from ANOINTED, my GMless or GM'd/group or solo soulslike game in development. The current situation In the interest of not assuming people have any idea what I'm talking about (and also to have it in one handy place for later) I'm going to list out the random/non-random parts of the game. ...
Liminal Void coverSo I'm thinking about what I'm doing with Professions in Liminal Void. A Profession is like...a class, kind of/sort of? It's got a starting skillset (basically a broad Skill category), a little passive ability that differentiates it, a few changes to being able to recover/reload/recharge in combat, and a starting equipment package (which includes an outfit, a capital-T Tool, and two consumables). Beyond the mechanical aspects, though, there's a few things I've been thinking about. ...
The Tower of Godfrey map (March)The Village of Plainswall map (April)Updating has been pretty spotty for reasons of "I wrote basically 150 pages of Game in these two months"! But as I had time to catch up on Month 4 and finalize it, here's my two. The Tower of Godfrey A prison that was originally built to house Godfrey, a rune sorcerer who did something egregious that was lost to time. ...
Hi there! I just released version 2 of NANO after a little testing and tweaking. My main takeaway is that it needed to be a little more play-to-lose. Surviving 7 days is framed closer to a partial victory (and can also be a loss). (This encourages people to go for Breakthroughs rather than only putting out fires.) All actions ding you on at least Fatigue on anything but Harmonize. (It was far too easy prior to lean on Prepare/Progress especially, but also I wanted to preserve the general flow of “you can do however many things you like as long as you think you can keep it up” to encourage people riding the razor’s edge of an Error. ...
Liminal Void coverAdvancement in a game is tough. Or rather, like all things in game design, you can kind of just do whatever with it but it'll have long-ranging implications as to player behavior. As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, numbers going up very frequently provide a throughline and driving force for campaign-length games, but how those numbers go up matters. If you give XP for gold, guess what, your game is now at least partially about making money. ...
Well, "week" because it's actually for just March 1st through 5th. You know what I mean. Wednesday, 3/1: This month I'm making The Tower of Godfrey, a prison that was originally built by the Academy to house Godfrey, a rune sorcerer who did something egregious that was lost to time. Over time, it was expanded outward to house other inhabitants. It's going to have two Region clocks: Time, a 12-segment clock that ticks with every action/point movement, and Alert, a 6-segment clock that ticks every time Time rolls over, every time a fight lasts 5+ rounds, or on specific events. ...
Thinking out loud about Liminal Void ship stuff because that's on my docket alongside Valiant Horizon and VH is mostly in the "the thing's constructed, just gotta tweak it around the edges" stage. (If you're not familiar from previous posts, basically it's a space game with an Expanse-ish level of hard-sci-fi-ness, give or take a bit, but more centered on survival in shit space capitalism than interplanetary politics as such. I have a free quickstart here! ...