Velocimancer Games

Well well well, if it isn’t TTRPG Tuesday.  Didn’t think you’d have the guts to show your face around these parts again.  Siddown, have a drink.  You old sunuvabitch - how the Hell have you been? I promised at the end of my last TTRPGT post to stop, take a look at the DOLLIE Extraction as a whole, figure out what kind of experience I want to craft, and work backwards from there.  So okay.  I’m going to try and cover both sides of the experience; the player’s side, as well as the GM. So, for the player side: I think that the premise itself has some baked-in horror, but that it doesn’t necessarily have the associations of dread that your Cosmic Horror or Alien or Deep Sea stuff has.  The darkness is inherently frightening; the void; the depths; madness.  So where should the chills come from? I want to create an experience where the on-the-ground situation is different from the mission briefing.  I want the coup-in-progress to make things eerily ...

Well, I let Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday go by without writing a blog post, and I have very dire doubts about my ability to get any writing done tomorrow.  Now, yes, I did knock out three posts last week, but I still don’t want to let a whole new week go by without keeping this up.  So let’s see if I can knock a meaningful post in less than an hour, and while typing on my phone. Today I want to talk a little bit more about something that I’ve touched on before re:gaming and which I’ve adapted to be a big part of my philosophy on writing (specifically playwriting and how I teach it): the Experience-first approach.  I increasingly believe that talking about mechanics or theme (or characters or plot points) is a flawed lens through which to view the subject, as those are parts of a piece of a composition, not a view of the whole piece of art or its impact.  It seems trite but: talk about the feelings or journey or atmosphere that you wish to evok...

When I was younger and even more in my feelings than I am now, I remember angrily scrawling a list of People I Was NOT, and it was just one person (my Father, with whom I did not get on) and I hid this “list” in much the same ineffectual way that other, savvier young people hide erotica.  That was at least half my life ago; these days, my Father nods in approval at my wife downloading Signal, and texts me his protest signage to proofread.  Time makes fools of us all. But my adolescent proclamation wasn’t an entirely useless exercise.  As an Artistic Director of a theatre company, I sit in on a lot of designer presentations, and often the designers in question will bring in reference materials to show the kind of pallette / style / vibe they are going for, to give a preview, talk goals, get on the same page.  While this is one of my favourite parts of first rehearsals (which are almost always 45 minutes too long for my old bones), I feel it’s incomplete without the ...

It’s TTRPG Tuesday again, and I’m still on my The Company kick, still thinking about The DOLLIE Extraction.  I think something I got hung up on was how much bigger the scope of this environment was than the default scenario, but I think that the genre kind of demands (and this happens to make my job easier) a more sparsely-populated setting.  I was kind of picturing a packed Cruise Ship with clones in every corridor and berth, but part of that corporate horror genre (which again I hate) is the creepy factor.  The constant fear that you’ll encounter something, and with each moment that passes without silence, the terror only grows.  Commando raids and fighting off hordes of enemies is more the domain of zombie movies, which I hate ever more.  No, I think I can keep my caste system, my named and numbered copies and Frames, but that there should be fewer active threats; awake, that is.  I think that the ship should be teeming with experiments dormant or in sta...

Hello, and welcome back to Mechanic Monday.  I’m your host, Fin Coe, and I think I went the whole week without getting suspended on Twitter! To celebrate that, and my recent v1.1 tweak of Fantasy GM Squared, let’s do that thing where a blog post comes out on a Monday and dives into a specific mechanic.  Okay, go! Draft Order as Waiver Wire In Fantasy GM Squared, the Draft Order is determined randomly at the start of the game, by drawing the Guild’s Draft Order Markers from a bag and placing them on the Draft Order card.  Starting with the lowest numbered Guild in the Draft Order, players turn in their Draft Coins in exchange for a new Hero.  The Draft Order carries over into the Season; after each Category is revealed, players may make a Waiver Claim, again starting with the lowest numbered Guild in the Draft Order.  However, higher-numbered Waiver Claims, placed on top of previously placed Claims, supersede those Claims, and only the top-most Waiver Claim is...

I should work on this so I stop boiling my own blood over a willfully obtuse friend of an equally obtuse in-law opining on FB that police shootings are all accidents.  I am so filled with rage and loathing, so much of the time.  Oh man, I hope getting political doesn’t cause my readership to fall from zero all the way down to zero.  That would suck. So I’ve been back in talks with Those Ironrise Fellas about Fantasy GM Squared, and we got to talking about solo modes.  I had honestly never thought about FGM-sq having a solitaire option, which is wild since I think about solo games… all the… time… (Stares into the Void thinking about that rebel Prince of Hell deck thinner game idea again) Anyway I’d never thought about it because not only are Fantasy Sports are such an interactive experience, but that interactivity is a feature, not a bug, and a key feature, not an add-on.  The greater the interactivity in a Fantasy Sport league, the more profoundly you expe...

So, it’s Thursday.  The latest I’ve gone in a week without writing a post.  No Mechanic Monday, no TTRPG Tuesday, no General Checkin Wednesday.  I didn’t end up drafting any of my planned ideas for those.  At first I thought about not doing a post this week, because I didn’t want to distract from the, you know, crisis of police violence against black people finally culminating in any sort of consequence.  But I didn’t do a Black Out Tuesday because I think that’s mostly cheap easy nonsense, and I think I was just looking for an excuse not to write, and that kind of thinking is bullshit.  So precedent or no, I’m getting a post out today.  And I think I’d like to wax on a little bit about capitalism and the chokehold it’s placed on board games.  So you can just stop reading here if that’s not your bag. A larger piece that I’m still trying to put together in my brain is an examination of what art could be if it were freed from needing to be profita...