Velocimancer Games

Well would you look at that, it’s next week! Feels like it was just last week.  Because it was.  Time is a river that has flooded its banks, and we will all drown in its bitter, brackish tide.  Uh I mean leeeeeeet’s talk about Amberlodge hahahaha. A recent thought that entered my head was that the lodge has been mothballed, so there’s some basic starting trees, storage, and equipment, and several facedown rooms and groves that can reveal new tapped trees when explored or storage rooms or machinery when excavated.  Are there a limited number of rooms? Is it a fixed or variable setup of face-down cards? Decks? I feel this overpowering urge to take the cards I have made, matching/version/compatibility be damned, get a pen, pencil, and several blanks, and just start playing the game into existence, scribbling on cards as they would come into play.  Do I want achievements? Could they grant a separate special ubiquitous currency that can be spent universally across all the different systems?

And it is somehow midday Sunday, and I’ve got a house to clean so I can’t spend a lot of time on this.  I started a new playwriting class this week (student, not teacher) and have written about ten pages (??!) of new play so I don’t feel too terribly guilty about not having gotten games stuff written, but I still want to get in a design post for the week.  So seeing as how it’s Sunday and there’s no topic associated with Sunday, I’ll just do a short general update and get on with my day. I’ve chatted recently with a couple of different designers from around town, and it’s been really great to just talk shop with folks whose minds work in a similar but not identical fashion to my own.  Providing feedback on other people’s designs, rulebooks, and prototypes is a good stretch for the creative-analytical muscles, while providing less ego-stress than talking about my own designs.  That being said, it gave me a thrill to bring up my previous post about Fantasy GM Squared Design aesthetics

Alright I have written 70 goddamn pages in this blog by now.  It’s the end of another week that has gotten away from me, largely because I’ve been in a lot of goddamn meetings, my work is launching an entire new Resource Center on Monday, I’ve been preparing for a reading of the 38 (???) pages I’ve somehow written on my current play, and which I just heard.  Good news, the pages are very bad! More time for games writing.  Or, I suppose, I could improve the play pages.  We’ll see which wins out. As it’s far too late for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday, I think I’ll just chat a bit about hierarchy of information today.  And of course let’s frame it in terms of experience.  Now, for a play, particularly one that disregards unity of time and chronological order, you can present information however you please.  I generally tell my students that they need to have an intention that they’re fulfilling, but you could present it randomly, just to be a piece of shit.  But if you drop your