There is a new online store called RPG-Trader, and I’ve put PDFs of all my games on there, and if it does well I’ll include PoD (Print on Demand) for them too. It has a nice recommendation and review system, and if you’ve ever bought or kickstarted one of my games and enjoyed it, it would be really helpful if you popped over and gave a review or recommendation. It really helps with visibility!

I completed creating my new images for Xeno:Despair. I’ve drawn ten characters (four male, four female, two a little androgenous) for the unfortunate crew of the starship. Here are some of them:

I also had what I think was an inspiration about the locations on the ship. I remember that in Alien, Ron Cobb had designed his ‘semiotic standard’ set of icons which were used throughout the Nostromo as a combination of informational and warning signs. I didn’t want to copy those, but decided to make a series of icons to represent the locations in the ship. Do you think the icons match the locations well?

I sent the game in its current state to Jason Morningstar, the creator of Desperation, and he said in summary that the use of locations and sense of physicality was good, the timer was a nice touch, but the descriptions on my cards were a little terse - these things work better when they are a little short story of about 370 characters.

Given some clear next steps, I’ve been working on punching those up. Hopefully I’ll have something more concrete to announce next month.

Ever since I read this blogpost on Otherkind Dice by Vincent Baker I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to be able to use that mechanism in a game. I had a spark of inspiration on one Sunday night and spent some time on the following Monday with Kevin Kulp noodling together ideas about how it might work.

Picture the scene. You have been sent back from the future to fix a situation which is going to destroy everything. There are two problems though. Firstly, your knowledge from the future can’t come back with you, so you have been sent back with a handful of small items from the future, small clues that will lead you to make the changes that need to be made. Secondly, you have to try to do it without causing paradoxes which break the timeline even more. Did I say two problems? Sorry, there are actually three problems. Time itself is going to try to erase you from existence. Good luck!

Touchstones for the game include the British 70’s TV show Sapphire and Steel, the novellete and movie Paycheck, and Stephen King’s The Langoliers. I recognise that none of these were particularly mainstream, but if you know what they are, you’ll get an idea of people in a situation where time is hostile to them and they have limited resources to work out what to do.

Going to get an alpha playtest sorted out soon! Please let me know if you’d like to be involved in testing it!

Our characters attend an Assembly Ball, which is a serious opportunity for dancing. One of the benefits of playtesting a short campaign rather than a single one-shot is that it was possible to see relationships grow between the player characters and the non-player characters in the game. Emmeline interacted with the girl that she has decided is her nemesis, but in doing so learned some things about her that humanised here. Margaret starts developing a relationship with an artistic young baronet which will lead to our next session (a night at the opera), and Julia decides that the young man she has been investing time in probably has a reason for his reputation as a rake, and so changes the object of her affection to a gentleman from the country whom she met two sessions ago.

The characters have each unlocked some additional possibilities, and developed in their relationships as friends too.

It is a delightful system, and its lovely to play nice people being nice.

I will have a more detailed write up of the stories on my blog.

Some key learning points from the most recent play test:

I’ve been given some pointers to potential card printers in Europe which might make the production of this game as a card deck a more attractive proposition. Next steps will be looking into that, and making the tweaks about theme and paramours that I mentioned above.

One of the things about creating a convention scenario is that you learn about how well the rules support it. Some elements of creating the pregens was not as much fun as I’d hoped when doing it several times! I wonder if rather than the high concept it would be easier to have a series of looks, attitudes and related things for someone to circle, so they can quickly give a feel for their character (or choose their own).

The scenario that I’d prepared went very differently in the two adventures, which isn’t a complete surprise in a Forged in the Dark game since the players have so many choices and opportunities to decide what to do. I’m not terribly happy with my scenario creation advice as currently written, so I’m going to work on that too. This was specifically a scenario to allow for some intra-party conflict as they worked for different empires and had some competing agendas.

In a nutshell, the first party of ambassadors started the session with violence and ended with negotiations. The second party of ambassadors started with negotiations and used plenty of flashbacks to screw one another over secretly, and ended with violence!

The players had fun, and I came back with a big list of things I want to work on before its next public outing. Progress!

One of my favourite events of the year is a house con in the U.S. with about 55 people, 29 unique games in 25 different systems over three days. I ran three playtest games (two Born to the Purple, one Road to Romance), and I played in Brindlewood Bay and the Magnus Archives.

I’ve mentioned the playtests above, here are some notes about the other two games I played.

This is a delightful murder mystery and horror game which could be summarised as “murder she wrote plus Cthulhu”. It would probably be described as a PbtA game, but in a very stripped down form with a few wonderfully clever mechanics.

Firstly, there are a limited set of ‘moves’ available to everyone - you mostly use the ‘day’ move for dangerous things during the day, the ‘night’ move for dangerous things during the night, the ‘meddling’ move for finding clues and a few others.

Secondly there is a mechanic called ‘crowns’ - a limited resource that you can use to bump up the results on one of your dice checks to the next level. Some of them are revealing stories about the life and history of your older lady, some of them show her descent into occult mysteries.

Thirdly, the resolution of the mystery is up to you! Once you’ve collected sufficient clues that you can weave together into a likely story, you can make a ‘move’ to see whether your theory is correct (and if there are any consequences from your accusation).

I think we were on a published adventure to the Mucky Point lighthouse. We were investigating the death of a lighthouse keeper which had been reported as not suspicious, but it sure felt suspicious to us. Along the way we met diligent younger men, villagers with a peculiar look, strange cairns, fearsome mer-creatures, and chanting cultists.

Seeing everyone playing their older ladies, revealing more of their histories, having some cosy activities but being brave when they needed to be was a brilliant experience.

You can find it here:

This is an ‘escape room in a box’ rather than an RPG, but was great fun nonetheless. The person running the game is a huge fan of the Magnus Archives podcast which this is inspired by. One of the other players knows one of the podcasters, and the podcaster sent a custom greeting to all of us and wished us luck in character, which was delightful.

Each game is a box which contains police reports, emails, interviews, phone messaging records, receipts, QR codes to voice recordings, and other details pertaining to a mysterious case which might have supernatural elements. There is also a locked box and as you digest the information you discover clues which let you unlock the box for even more details.

I don’t want to spoil anything about the cases we did (I think it was ‘woman on fire’ and ‘blackout’) but in both cases it was fun piecing together what went on, generating hypotheses, checking for additional information that might support or contradict and so on.  When you think you know what is going on there is a website you visit where you answer multiple choice questions and then receive your evaluation on your investigation. We were obviously top-tier people, nailing all the details of both cases.

It takes about 1.5-2hrs to complete a case file, and some of them become quite creepy as you work out what the resolution is!

You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibcgames/magnus-archive-mysteries

Arranged by Sara Cole (patchwork Fez) in London on 20th June, it was a lovely opportunity to meet together with other game designers in London to discuss things of interest to us all.

I didn’t take a picture of all the things, but these are the ones I attended.

Slot 1 : printing for your first game

Slot 2: UKGE Post-Mortems

Slot 3: Patreon thoughts and learnings

Slot 4: RPG History and Culture

Slot 5: working with suppliers and distributors

I wrote it up here:

I was given the opportunity to review Terminus - an excellent system neutral horror adventure by patchwork fez games. Really nicely presented, with good investigative and horror elements well grounded in an unusual location.

You can read my whole review here”

Thank you for reading, see you next month!