Velocimancer Games

 Yeah okay definitely didn’t just finish the last post, doomscroll for a hot second, then start in on this one.  Yeah so anyway, today I want to knock out my first actual honest-to-God Mechanic Monday in a while by barfing out some thoughts for Fantasy GM Squared that came to me while I was listening to an episode of Dan Thurot’s Space-Biff Space-Cast where he interviewed TauCeti Deichmann (about Sidereal Confluence, which I am absolutely going to buy the second edition of). I know what you’re thinking: Fantasy GM Squared? That old chestnut? That game from the 2010’s? Isn’t it done by now? Interviewer, go fuck yourself.  I had a brainwave about a way to inject another element of Fantasy Sports into it, so while I don’t know if this would actually help the game, my brainworms compel me to get it down and puzzle it out. Hot and Cold Streaks by Class In Fantasy GM Squared, Heroes may out-perform or under-perform their printed abilities based on how the season unfolds.  ...

You know what I’ve got an idea for a Mechanic Monday I can post tomorrow but I’m staring down the end of a long post-less week and I don’t know if I’ve ever posted about the game idea I had last Christmas for a game that takes place in an Excel spreadsheet, I probably did but it’s been a damn while, so why don’t I take today to apply the Experience-First lens to that design? No dissent? Off I go then! Marginalia (named for the little scribbled words and images readers and authors alike enjoy making in the margins of texts) is a spreadsheet game about letting a demon tempt you with shortcuts.  Inspired by literary-tinged demonology, like in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, or even C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, as well as the black magic betting game Cordial Minuet by Jason Rohrer, and my own experience doing some very repetitive work as a student librarian’s assistant; the feeling I enjoy and want to emula...

Hahaha what up Google search results.  It’s me, something not relevant to your query, degrading your SEO. You most likely do not want to click this! Anyway, buckle up no one, it’s time for another TTRPG Tuesday. So as I alluded to a couple of days ago, I finally scheduled a meeting with one Mr. Logan Dean, the designer of The Company RPG (and an all around good guy rough all around the edges).  It was an excellent chance to get some real clarity and re-calibration considering the wheels I’ve been spinning on this particular project.  I was heartened to learn that a lot of the work I’ve done so far is usable for the kind of scenario he’s looking for, and pleasantly surprised to learn that the target scope of the project is more manageable than what I’d been planning out.  If anything, it’ll behoove me to scale down a little, and I won’t have as many gaps to fill in.  Here’s my big takeaways from the meeting: Scenario Target Scope: 2k words, 1.5hr – 2hr  Thin...

Welp, it’s the end of the next week! And my teeth are gone, and the ruins of my mouth mostly healed.  Don’t go to Lincoln Park Dental Specialists! That’s enough personal content.  Onto the game design personal content. I’ve been looking back over my posts during this pandemic, from when my world abruptly changed in March, to when things normalized enough that I laid out a Bare Minimum+Ambitious+Realistic plan in May.  Interestingly, I’ve long since hit the “3 months of a game design post every week” milestone, though progress has been much slower than I’d hoped on FFGMGM Beta or an Alpha for another game.  Qualifying that: BURN is my most ambitious design and extraordinarily difficult both to build and to test; I’m very pleased with my fuck-it-all playtest of Amberlodge and all the theoretical work I’ve done but it’s been difficult to synthesize those two things into a full build; FGM-squared has been a great ride in terms of the meetings I’ve had with collaborators,...

Recovering from wisdom teeth.  Wrote this Saturday? Sunday? Forgot to post earlier.  Here you go. Ok, so my teeth are coming out shortly, time to pre-write a TTRPG Tuesday because I used up all my post-vacay glimmers (that would have made for a good Mechanic Monday) on this past week’s post.  So.  TTRPG Tuesday.  As I asserted in my last Company check-in, I don’t think I can complete the scenario - on my own.  And I want to meet with the RPG’s creator before I spend more time going down dead ends.  But I do want to bring more LEGOs to that playtime, and it’s going to be a bit before I can really hold a meaningful conversation with anyone, so let’s get some more things together. First off, I’ve made a crude but serviceable map; mainly it fulfils the basic need I had for a foundation based loosely on reality, that is sized and sectioned interestingly enough for the storytelling purposes but simple enough that it can be changed around to suit future edits...