Hello, and welcome to the second of my (hopefully) monthly newsletters! I hope you find it interesting, but if you would prefer not to see it there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

I have completed functional writing on Escape the Apocalypse, and I’m continuing with doing my sketches for the internal artwork and some additional descriptive writing. I’ve not decided if I’m completely happy with the example of play at the end of the book yet. It is based on an actual playtest, but I’m not sure whether it would be a better example of play if I was able to keep track of all the cards played and resources gathered and used, to show exactly how that works. At the moment the example focuses more on the narrative aspects of play rather than the mechanics of play.

Which do you find most helpful in a writeup of how to play a game?

I ran another playtest at the end of March (online, using a revised PCIO set of cards) which I’ll write up this month. My friends were happy for me to record it, so after a little light editing I’ll make it available as my first “actual play” of this game.

This is a picture of the PCIO layout at the moment

I will be running a kickstarter later this year, and I would love it if you would follow the kickstarter coming page in the link below. I’ll be adding more detail to that page in coming weeks, and it will really help a good launch if I have more people following the page!

I really enjoy the game Desperation by Bully Pulpit games. The mechanics are interesting, and it is great for creating intense cramped game situations. I learned last year that they have an SRD and encourage people to build their own games using the mechanics under the ‘Tales of Desperation’ logo. Their license and SRD can be found here: https://bullypulpitgames.com/pages/desperation-diy-license-srd

So I’ve decided that is something I’m going to do, and I want to outline what my process has been so far in getting a game based on Desperation to a playtestable state.

My inspiration is the original Alien film. A brilliant, claustrophobic film about blue-collar workers encountering both Corporate greed and unconcern and the titular alien. So how can I use the mechanics of Desperation to model that?

The first step of my thinking was this - can I map the film onto the three phases of Desperation (foreboding, escalating, hell) and it seemed that was quite a natural fit for alien. Everything up to the chestburster is foreboding. It represents tensions amongst the crew, suggestions that one or more people might have picked up some kind of infection, and so forth. “Chestburster” marks the transition to Act 2 where someone dies and suddenly they are hunting what they think is a little alien. Then the transition to Act 3 is “Oh no it's got big!” which is when someone gets killed by the full size alien. This is then the transition to ‘Hell”, where the alien is out to get them and lots of people will die before (potential) escape in the lifeboat.

So, the next step of my process was to set out the Dead House cards for act 1, act 2, and act 3 (Autumn, Winter, and Hell), and then see which ones could be used to inspire a scifi setting where the threat is an alien rather than the cold. I wrote down a little summary sentence for each of those existing cards where I could. I then filled out the correct number of cards by making up some other situations based on elements and scenes from the film.

Having got a set of these which I was happy with, I wrote down some locations which I want to have in the spaceship. I wanted 10 locations, but I also wanted a nest. I was discussing what I was trying to do with Jen Atkins and she brilliantly suggested that I could introduce the nest to an existing location in Act 3. Problem solved.

I also decided that I wanted to localise most of the events to relevant places, to encourage the movement of characters around on the ship. I’m still not entirely sold on this, but think it is worth playtesting.

Finally I had a look at the person cards in Desperation, and I could see that each has a name, a description, and then a pair of adjectives — one positive and one negative. So I then set up ten crew with names, description, adjectives, and then instructions for where to start them.

OK, I’ve got all this down in my notes, what is the best way of getting them onto cards for playtesting.  This is where I use a spreadsheet and Affinity. The spreadsheet is to create a CSV of tabular data with headings card-type, title, description, instructions, number, and image.

In the past I’ve not been able to work out how to do a double sided data merge, which has hampered my ability to create cards for playtesting. I’ve often ended up laboriously writing out each card by hand in a template and hoping that I get the page imposition correct for printing. However, this time I decided to really get to grips with whether it is possible to automate it, and found to my delight that I could. I wrote up a blog post about how to do it here:

I’ve spent four weeks participating in a playtest of For the Badge, a game by Colin Mancini of Sociable Turtle Games. It isn’t a mere football game simulator, but focusses on individual footballers in a club during a league season. I’m not a football fan, but I really enjoyed playing the game, both on the pitch and off the pitch.

We created our club (AS Obispo, The Bishops) and agreed what kind of archetype our club was following. As our players included Americans, Italians and Brits, we decided it would be a French club. We had the “Fallen Champs” archetype. We used to be great, but have fallen on hard times since our star player left. Our fans are disillusioned, and our hope for the season is to place above our great rivals, Loup-garous Var (the werewolves). They are sponsored by tech-bros and are rolling in money.

We then each picked a footballer archetype (I was “the controversial”, other players were “the dependable backup” (Jen), “the young upstart” (Camilla) and “the past is behind them” (Ariele). Each archetype gives us certain talents, milestones, and relationships with other people.  We then picked a position for our character which gives another skill that can be used in the game.

The basic flow of the game is alternating between matches and off-pitch relationships.

A match is played in six 15 minute periods, with a half time. Each player rolls 1d20 for their contribution during that period, with modifiers if special abilities come into play. The Bishops are a strength 3 club, so we have three people rolling for us.  Your total is matched against the opposing club who roll a number of d20 according to their strength (typically between 2 and 4).

Compare the totals, and that tells us how closely we are matched, and gives us another table to roll on that tells us whether goals are scored that period and by whom.

As the match continues, there is an ebb and flow, sometimes with dramatic turn arounds!

At the end of the match we use a simplified system to see how other matches in the league went that week, and update the overall league table.

Players can request scenes or other players can suggest scenes for them (you get xp for suggesting scenes for other people, which helps us spend time thinking about what would be fun for the other players and not just focussing on yourself).

Most of these off-pitch scenes will introduce stress or problems of one kind or another!

I’ve written up a full review of the game; although bear in mind that this is still a game under development and in active play testing. I understand that Colin is hoping to get an ashcan of the rules out by the end of April.

I was very pleased to be interviewed for the RPG Roots podcast, which is coming out later this year.

Camilla Zamboni (Faculty in Italian and Ed Studies at Wesleyan University) and Sen-Foong Lim (Ludology Podcast) are doing a series of interviews with various scholars and game designers to examine role-playing games through a variety of interpretive lenses. To quote from the introductory posts on bluesky:

We have recorded a session 0 featuring Evan Torner and Meguey Baker to frame the goals and terms of the discussion of games and culture. We will then do 6-8 episodes on the Season 1 theme of “narratives of oppression and resistance”. Each episode will be edited together from a number of the interviews which are taking place. They are committed to interviewing people from varied backgrounds who can share diverse perspectives on the cultures and communities.

Some of my historical games are very much about oppression and resistance, and I was delighted to talk with them about my ENNie-nominated game A Cool and Lonely Courage about the women spies of the SOE in WW2 France. It very directly covers issues of resistance and living under an oppressive regime, and doesn’t shy away from the costs that people have to be prepared to pay for that resistance. You can read more about that game here:

I also talked about a little one-page game called the White Rose Society which was inspired by the White Rose, a group of students within nazi Germany who could see that their country was in the wrong and started a leaflet and graffiti campaign to try to convince people to resist. Both Hans and Sophie Scholl were captured and executed after a show trial. The game is a reminder that no matter how horrible the regime it is possible to choose to stand up and take some action. It is available on itch here:

RPG Roots will be part of the ludology podcast network, and I think it is well worth looking out for.