Between starting a new job and the beginning of potty training, it’s been a long couple of weeks for me. More life stress means less time for hobby gaming, which means less time reading about abandoned temples and ancient empires. More time reading about dinosaurs eating tacos and Enphase solar microinverters. You know how it goes, surely.
Regardless: This edition, we have an interview with the designer of Errant, we have Rust and Humus, Movement and Light, Punnett Square Treasure- plus, the Forests of Another Name Jam wraps up. (Also my ‘work in progress’ Hex Kit tile pack.) Icons from Gontijo Designs!
Meet the Publisher: Ava Islam
There’s a full paid version of Errant available for preorder- and a free carrd based version to look at in the meantime. An insightful interview with a very thoughtful game designer. More from Ava:
I have a simmering idea for a project that is sort of an experiment and exploration of a lot of things I find compelling in RPGs right now outside of the OSR-sphere; OC and FKR play cultures (c.f. John Bell's excellent "Six Cultures of Play" essay), tactical combat, and games which combine a system with a specific, finite campaign (Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast is doing something similar). If this experiment comes to fruition, I also envision it as a series of different games united by a mechanical engine but with distinct and discrete campaigns.
Sharp stuff (imo). I’d love to see how a project like that turns out.
Gontijo Icons
Some truly excellent designs. I plan on using these to tag my work going forward- these are inspired.
Treasure Squares
Another banger from @eldritchmouse. Just go read it! (seriously)
Rust and Humus
Imaginative broad-strokes speculative fiction. Like most good stories, it starts with a tree:
via @infrabeige.
Movement and Light
An in-depth look at the history of The Dragon Game and its treatment of both light and movement. From the intro:
…it’s difficult to separate light and movement since they are intertwined in how players perceive and then interact with the game-world.
And a snippet:
Insightful, well researched, and interesting.
Playtesters
Lots of replies about playtesters, compensation, and shared experiences. Might be useful for you?
Joe Sparrow Tarot
Energetic and colorful 79 card tarot deck. Clear, cartoon-influenced card art and very lovely colors.
Forests of Another Name Jam
It’s over*, folks. 39 entries! Some very cool stuff came out of it; some examples:
Follow the Bones, a “12-page booklet of supplementary rules and tables for generating enigmatic, surprising quests” by Symbolic City.
I Am The Forest, “a solo TTRPG focused on map-making and story telling…
You play a Forest attempting to win back land usurped by a threatening civilization.” by Grismund.
Forest Farragoes, “a Half-Dozen Random Tables pertaining to Forests. Expository Vignettes, Helpful Happenstances, Harmful Hinderances…” and more. by ktrey.
The Dreamer Swaddled in Reptiles, “A pocket realm encased beneath a lavender glass dome, a strange forest tucked between the pages of a dream, a serpentine hallucination.” by Em
There’s a lot more cool stuff to look at, if you’re interested. 39 entries!
*If you have a project that’s ‘late,’ just let @yochaigal1 know- he will add you onto the list.
Alan Moore’s Writing Lessons
Lessons from a master writer as interpreted by one of the most creative and original minds currently in the TTRPG scene. Lots of lessons to digest. This is one of those threads I know I’ll be coming back to.
World Sketch (Work in Progress Hex Kit assets)
A simplistic and stylized Hex Kit tiles designed for designing broad sweeps of land and then refining later. This is still a super-early draft: here are my preliminary design guidelines:
Textured non-obviously-repeating hexes
Simple, clear icons
Easy to read at small hex sizes
Variations on color, multiple shades
Able to be mixed and matched with other tile sets
When it’s done, the dream is to be able to use Hex Kit as a sketching tool, by putting down blocks of color and then going back and adding detail. The test map above shows the concept- the colors have to be different enough that it’s not monotonous, but similar enough that you can see that there’s a difference between the yellow-tan dirt and the brown dirt. Hopefully the textures help with this.
Ideally, I’d like to have 5-7 colors each in 10 or so shades. I’m currently at 6 colors, with between 3 and ~9 shades each, plus a couple of folders for icons and outlines. Working with Hex Kit is actually super easy, especially when you manage to scrape some thoughts together and make a template in Affinity.
I’m not much of an icon-maker, so I have been borrowing from game-icons.net and Maki Icons.