This week: Rethinking fantasy religions, adventure writing tips from Mystic Dan (@throneofsalt), a cache of new paper minis- Mere Anarchy!? And a couple more things for this week’s roundup.
In the Enûma Eliš the Babylonian goddess Tiamat creates eleven monsters to take revenge for the death of her husband, Apsû. My advice? Channel that righteous anger and bring it with you whenever you are wronged, on behalf of everyone that has been wronged, whenever you can.
Speaking of ancient gods and goddesses:
Rethinking Clerics and Religion
Forgive the title- this is an extremely interesting post about religion, colonialism, and world history through the lens of creating a more interesting pantheon for your games. Understanding the real world is key to making your games more than just technicolor cutouts- more than just ‘war god’ and ‘death god’ and ‘ocean god.’ Worth a read, and then a reread!
A brief example:
Adventure Writing Tips
Throne of Salt blog sharing good design templates and advice harvested from sources now often lost. Like this:
How much good game design did you learn from websites that don’t exist, from bespoke PDFs and posts that you forgot about?
The internet itself is not an archive, and information can be lost. Try and do your part to pass along any tips you’ve learned. (Psst- that’s a big part of what this blog is for!)
Runecairn Wardensaga Cover Art
Absolutely love this cover art- plus, looking forwards to the release of Wardensaga! Cool!
Car-Centric Built Environment
If you live in America, you must have figured out by now that some fundamental things are going to have to change in the very near future. One of them is the way that cars and the automobile industry have worked together to shape our cities and towns into sprawling suburbs and giant parking lots. This type of development is uniquely damaging and inefficient- we simply can’t have everybody driving their cars around all the time. It doesn’t scale.
Anyways, don’t let me get started. Understanding the problem requires understanding its causes, and the linked threads are useful for that, with multiple deeper links and PDF sources. Omar Wasow is an academic- these are not QAnon theories or internet garbage.
Paper Mini Jam
Hairic Lilred’s Paper Mini Jam ended, and a lot of people came and drew a lot of cool little folks. Adelina Rose’s Forest Folk, above, might be my favorite. Adorable and friendly-seeming folks.
Dungeon Urchins is another cool one- in it, you print out and fold the character stands and the dungeons and the monsters, all in a very bespoke black-and-white ink style. Very personable and charming, the rules included are approachable and functional. Reminiscent of Hero Quest, in a good way. One criticism- the art is strangely low res on the character standees and it makes the symbols difficult to read. I don’t have a printer or I’d see how it looks on the page. I’d love to see Dungeon Urchins with higher resolution character art and another pass at the symbols.
Seven Rings
Even if you’re not interested in the game for some reason, look at that cover art! Inspirational work from a top-notch designer.
Mere Anarchy
Super simple and concise rules and good art. The website has useful oracles and hex kit tiles and a couple other things you can use for your own projects. A sample table:
Neat, right?
A Surplus of Souls
Science-fantasy microsetting, pay what you want. I think it turned out nicely for a first attempt! The art does most of the heavy lifting for the setting. By adding the card context, it turns the art into explicit gaming material designed to be traded hands and looked at interpersonally, which I think is interesting. The quotes and text are designed to be short and evocative- just enough to whet the imagination.
I think if I were to expand it further, I’d make two decks- one for characters and one for locations. Drawn in pairs, this becomes an NPC+Location oracle- which is basically an adventure generator.
So, what did you think?
Read anything interesting lately you’d like to share?