The Naga and the Demon
National Game Design Month 2022, aka NaGaDeMon, came and went over the course of November. It was a bit of a trip!
I mentioned previously that I wanted to do a Lost & Found game, and I settled on writing a game about making a game. At first it was going to be following a game through its design cycle, but then I started aiming for it to be more about the game’s entire life span. Act 1 would about the game getting made, Act 2 would be about the game when it has been published and is being played, and Act 3 would be for when it goes out of print.
Props to Complicated Board Game: The Card Game for some thematic inspiration for Act 1.
My problem, from a design standpoint, is that each act is very different in subject matter. So things like the events that the player can choose and the effects of time passing between, say, Acts 1 and 2 are probably equally different, whereas with other L&F games such things can be used regardless of what stage of the game you are in. That means more pages, more content, and a decent amount of waffling (is a New Edition something that should happen when time passes, or should it be an event that the Publisher chooses).
I basically ended up with a pretty crowded drawing board, but used up so much time brainstorming (*and on other things) that there was no way for me to complete the game to any meaningful degree. So Lost & Found: Game Design had to be put back on the shelf - I still want to revisit it, cause I think it has some genuine potential.
I still really wanted to slay another nagademon, though, so I scrambled. Lost & Found Mecha? Not enough time, and come on Seamus you can’t make another solo game about giant robots.
Yet.
Eventually, I took a look at the first submission for NaGaDeMon ‘22, a business card RPG called Power Poetics. That got me looking at the Tiny Library, an entire collection of such wallet-sized games - which I had actually found out about some months ago when reviewing its one-page-game follow-up the Tiny Tome.
So that’s how you get master thieves leaving Calling Cards, trying to balance getting away with the goods and getting famous.
It’s an even-more-minimalist hack of Honey Heist, with most of the design work being flavor and ideas - your master thieves may be trying to steal the entire concept of property ownership while being opposed by Laverna, Goddess of Thieves, among other over-the-top heist ideas. The real learning going on was the layout challenge of getting everything to fit, and then for fun trying out cool stuff like the gold gradient for the text.
Costs a buck, but why pay when you can just grab a free community copy? You’re a master thief, aren’t you?
Stern Missions (and other Developments)
This is always the way with me, I talk about doing something in a backburner sort of way because other projects are further up in the queue, then can't help but move the backburner project to the front for a while. (*this was the other things)
A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase now has an additional five pages: two example missions each for Assault, Resupply, Rendezvous, and Advance missions as well as some barebone schematics for how missions are built in the first place. I want both of those to expand. More of each kind of mission, maybe a total of six for each type, and more comprehensive How To Build And Run Your Own Missions advice. For now, though, decent sampling.
Each mission has a Difficulty Rating assigned to it, as well as a number of successes the Fleet needs to get in order to complete the mission and get its reward. So you can adjust the Difficulty Rating when designing a mission to say how difficult any given thing is going to be, and adjust the number of successes required to change how short and sharp or how much of a slog the mission will be overall. You can also be on multiple missions at once, like needing to launch an Assault mission while also trying to finish an Advance mission to dangerous levels of Enemy Pressure.
This does have me taking a hard look at Enemy Pressure increasing Difficulty, though. It's... oof, it could get really rough really fast, between needing to get, say, six successes and the difficulty for everything rising as high as 10-12 as Enemy Pressure increases, and then you need to launch another mission to try and stop the bleeding. Granted, getting all the way to the end isn't supposed to be easy, but I'm worried that the combination of factors will lead to players needing to get bogged down in Assault mission after Assault mission after Assault mission. I might go with my gut and yank that part of the wiring out, or maybe (*gasp*) see about getting some playtesting done.
Next steps for me are more missions, more mission guidance, and more advice on building the setting, the Fleet, and the Enemy!
Also, not to be overlooked, Stern Chase has earned enough revenue at this point to afford some cover art that isn’t just me poking about with geometric shapes!
The Extras
Always Be Bundling
I’m a man of many markets - by many, I mean two. When it comes to itch.io, I’ve found that the best way to make sure that people get to play my games is strength in numbers - always be bundling. To that effect, I’m in two at the moment.
Ind of the Year 2022
The Ind of the Year Bundle is actually kind of a big deal, the third year the bundle focusing on highlighting a diverse collection of indie roleplaying games is running, and I’m even helping to run it this year! There are fifty games in there, 10 for $10, 20 for $20, and so on up to 50 for $50. A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase is tucked away among the 40s. If you want to know about more of the awesome offerings that are included, Sam Leigh did a great job of highlighting several per tier. The Bundle runs until the New Year.
Solo TTRPG Holiday Spectacular
Want a bunch of single-player roleplaying games? Have a bundle! It’s more modest and much less tiered than IotY - 16 games for $30 - but I think it’s still a pretty good gift for yourself or someone else who likes to tell their own stories. Gems include Moonlight Necromancy, Coven Dinner Party, The Pleasant and Precisely Correct Prophecies of Phineas Holmes, and of course Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage. The bundle runs until the end of January ‘23.
Something Cool To Check Out
We recently played a session of DIE the RPG for Cannibal Halfling Radio - there’s a decent chance you’ll see the first Now Playing episode drop in January. Based on a comic of the same name (and with its comic creators joining the game design team), DIE is about a group of flawed people who used to play roleplaying games together reuniting for one last game - only to be pulled into the world of DIE and forced to make the choice between sticking around and going home - and if they don’t make a unanimous decision, either blood will be shed or the world will end.
It’s a very meta game that leans into conflict and confronting a character’s personal problems, with a great amount of creativity baked in as the entire group contributes to building the ‘real world’ background story and the game world. It also doesn’t pull any punches - just designing your Personas together, the characters who play the game within a game, was an emotional slugfest. Definitely worth checking out - you can pre-order it now, or if you want more proof you can keep an ear to the ground at CHR for when our actual play drops.
2022 was a very weird year for me, creatively speaking. I might reflect on that thought in more detail in the near future, or I may knuckle down and just charge into ‘23. Who knows, you think there’s actually a plan around here? If you find one, let me know. Otherwise -
Until you catch the next Dispatch,
Seamus