Life since last time has been your typical batch of time-devouring madness, but through some sort of perfect storm of desperation, inspiration, and sheer bloody-mindedness, I seem to be ready to get back on my nonsense. The brainstorming has been nigh constant the past fortnight, so let’s gooooo!!!!!
However, as I finally start to recover some energy and drive to do actual game design, I find myself still jammed into a familiar pigeonhole. I mean, I sort of want to have a broader library of games. Different genres, different play modes, you know, diversifying the ol’ portfolio. As you’re about to read, however, I can’t seem to get away from ideas that fall under the umbrella of ‘science fiction’. And you know what? Why fight it? I can diversify when the mood actually strikes me. So, here’s what’s been cooking in the pan with all those brainmeats.
Stern Thoughts
“More missions, more mission guidance, and more advice on building the setting, the Fleet, and the Enemy!” That’s what I said last time when it came to A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase. Although those steps have been pretty much relegated to the domain of brainstorming since, the brainstorming has… expanded. I feel like A Stern Chase could be another full-blown project for me, akin to Starlit Wreckage. Sales and bundles mean I have built up something of a budget for the fancy art stuff, but what does ‘full-blown project’ means in terms of design? Just a ton of missions? Doable, feels unsatisfying.
I mentioned before that A Stern Chase scratched the Band-of-Blades-like itch, but that itch got a bit more reinforcement when I read Back Again From The Broken Land. Like Band of Blades, the Lord-of-the-Rings-but-on-the-way-home Back Again From the Broken Land has an established route that the characters are taking to their destination. Unlike BoB, BAFTBL offers more than one route for its GM to run, each having different set dressing, threats, and themes.
So pulling from both of those sources of inspiration, now I’m thinking that I should write A Stern Chase to also have multiple established routes, defined by ten specific Advance missions that have to be completed, with a few Assault, Rendezvous, and Supply missions sketched out for each stop along the way. That gives me a framework to create more example missions, but the multiple routes also gives me a way to show off how different versions of A Stern Chase could be. You could have your ‘standard’ Battlestar Galactica, where the goal is to find a refuge from the Enemy chasing you. You could go down the FTL path, where the Fleet is trying to reach allies to warn and rally them to deal with the Enemy head on. Perhaps the Enemy is instead an eldritch beast of the stars, and the Fleet has to traverse an increasingly unraveling reality to try and find a way towards another one.
Perhaps, like BoB, there may even be branching paths, to give the Fleet some interesting choices about which one to take to reach their goal.
In any case, so many ideas! Now to put them into play.
PocketQuest ‘23
Then, just as I’m starting to chew on A Stern Chase again, DriveThruRPG drops the news that they’re doing another PocketQuest, their now-annual answer to the game jam culture that thrives over at itch.io. I have some vague notes that still may pursue last year’s summer camp theme (something about a jenga tower playing the roll of the fire that eventually collapses on itself in a shower of sparks), but this year’s theme is SPACE (Not of this World).
I mean, come on.
A Stern Chase is an itch-first offering, so it makes sense to have a DTRPG-first one as well (both will eventually be on both). Like making sure to visit a friend who’s only ten minutes away, if I can’t pull off a PocketQuest challenge that is smack dab in what is apparently my wheelhouse then there is something quite off. As I’m contemplating exactly what to to do for PQ23, however, I’m re-realizing something about my design work.
I’m not a system-from-scratch sort of person.
I can iterate and hack pretty darn well (I force myself to claim). Transit is Powered by the Apocalypse, A Stern Chase is Breathless, Calling Cards heists some honey, QUILL.exe is pretty obvious, Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage got its mechanical spark from The Chained Oak. In the very early days I wrote set dressing, and an adventure for Pulp! the RPG. Designing a system from the resolution system up? I don’t think I have the chops for that.
I mean I guess that might sound like a bit of a put down, but for once I don’t think I’m being mean to myself here. As I’m trying to get back in the saddle I’m thinking about how I do things (why is another ‘letter in the making), and I’ve always thrived (here defined as ‘actually got something off the ground’) when an idea and existing mechanic were married together. I never feel particularly comfortable calling myself an artist, which in the cold light of a newsletter draft I’ll admit is a bit silly, but there really is an art to putting a unique twist on something that came before, and if that’s the kind of artist I am then so be it!
To that end I don’t know yet what system I’m going to go with for PQ23, but I’ve got a list - now they they just need to go through some sort of mental dating game show to find the idea they’ll hook up with.
The Extras
Always Be Bundling
The Sprinting Owl Bundle Club is currently running a Vs. Bundle event, and I’m in (and running!) half of it! Appropriately given a lot of the above, you can find most of my creations in the Sci-Fi Is The Best! Bundle. It’s in a friendly competiiton with the Fantasy is the Best! Bundle, which I am not a part of (this may have something to do with that latent desire to diversify my game offerings). Anyway the bundle I’m in has 55 scientifically fictional tabletop games worth $288.97 for $25 or more, all proceeds split evenly between the creators.
However, April was Neurodiversity Awareness Month, and another bundle for that has continued on into May. The Neurodiversity Charity Fundraiser Bundle for Diversity Saves includes A Stern Chase and is teamed up with Diversity Saves, “a 501(c)(3) committed to the promotion and uplifting of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, Neurodiverse, Disabled, and other marginalized communities in the tabletop roleplaying game industry - to raise funds for grants to Marginalized Creators in the TTRPG space!” 104 games - video and tabletop alike - worth ~$386 for $5 or more, all proceeds go to the charity.
Both bundles are running for another week or so as of this writing. If you happen to be reading this in the future when the bundles are over, the individual games are all still worth looking into.
Something Cool To Check Out
Over at Cannibal Halfling Radio, we have fully released our actual play of DIE the RPG, which I mentioned last time. We don’t dive too deeply into the mechanical how-I-kill-a-Fallen bits of the game, but oh my do we ever plunge into the depths of the character creation, relationship building, and emotional WHAM that the game has to offer. Let’s just say that there are some long moments of silence in Pt 3. that have nothing to do with dead air, and everything to do with the impact of what a player had to say.
I’ve been reading The Ink That Bleeds by Paul Czege, which I backed during Zine Month ‘23. It’s all about solo journaling/roleplaying games (which I think counts as ironic, as the Czege Principle got named after him way back when), more specifically about immersion and bleed. Reading through it, I think I’d classify my own solo journaling RPG experience as a character study rather than an immersive experience… but then there are games like A Requiem for Horizon Prophecy Online: The Final Four which still haunt me. In any case it’s a fascinating read about a fascinating iteration of the medium. I don’t believe there’s a full digital version out yet, but you can read an excerpt of The Ink That Bleeds here.
I’ve got PLANS, I’ve got GOALS, I’ve got SECRET PROJECTS I haven’t mentioned here because they’re either too nebulous to define in text or I don’t want to jinx myself by making them tangible. In any case, I’ve got some work to do before I can appear before you again in an honorable state.
Until you catch the next Dispatch,
Seamus