Velocimancer Games

Hey!  Long time no anything.  How the hell have you been? Me? Constantly drained.  Doing much more playwriting and theatre admin than game writing.  But it’s TTRPG Tuesday and I’m back to report that despite it taking much longer to make  than a pamphlet should, I got the push I needed from MegaCorp/Logan running a Company game jam in the month of October and I got a v1.0 together, edited, and submitted by the deadline.  I met some cool people, gave and got feedback, and had a better product for it. Thinking about it, now that I’ve got my first creator upload to itch, I wonder if I shouldn’t take the opportunity to clean up my creator page and upload my other games; starting with Riders and maybe a cleaned up What Makes It Move; and then perhaps moving onto my non RPG stuff, I dunno, can’t hurt and I can always take it down if I decide to publish, right? I’d like to do another of these; the community aspect was fun, and I’d also like to prove my chops a little with something longer, lo

Well well, it’s been quite a minute hasn’t it? But we’re back this week, with another TTRPG Tuesday.  I missed the deadline for the 18-card TTRPG Design Contest, but I have so many failed entries that got to 60-80% of the way to a complete v1.0, and this time I wanted to get to 100%, even if just to break my habit of abandoning designs.  I got a first draft of the rules, the character sheet, and the cards, and I’ve printed, cut, and sleeved the cards.  Tomorrow I’ll film a little video (the last requirement of the contest) and put up a tweet with some pictures and links to the rules, and see if there’s any interest in playtesting or providing feedback.  Honestly it’ll also be fine if it just goes on the shelf, and I turn my focus over to The Envy of Ajax.  First though, I wanted to post-mortem my process a little and evaluate what there is. First off, the game feels tough, but I kind of like that.  I think that in 1.0, there might be too much Trait loss and not enough ways for low roll

Bonjour, and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday.     I’m running out of time to get a design in for the ButtonShy contest, and I don’t know if this last week of the month will have enough free time for me to finish it.     So just as an exercise, let’s lay out a plan for what it would take to finish this Riders design to the point where I could get a submission in by the 30th. Get the rules down.    I’ve got a limit of 3 pages, so just getting the bones down is a good start.    A lot of it is already in my general notes, and my notes on the setup.    The usual format: Title copy, Components, Synopsis, Setup, Gameplay, End of Game Finalize and either Wordify or just scan the character sheet Do a spreadsheet of cards.    Start with doing one side, worry about making cards double-sided only after hitting the first goal Instead of the usual card template, make a blown up single card template, and build the cards in that If I can plotz out Rules + MVP components, I’m set, that’s enough for submi

Welcome back! To TTRPG Tuesday! We’re going to pick up exactly where we left off, with an experience first approach for the Riders RPG.  I’m already yawning for my bed so let’s crack on! It should be like the first time I encountered tokusatsu - what is this? Is this power rangers? What does this word mean? Oh my God it’s Power Rangers.  Wait Power Rangers isn’t a straight translation? The original series is its own thing? Its own decades-long franchise? And Masked Rider has its own franchise? But they’re related and cross-over? (Shit… I should make Rangers as a companion version) The players are toku fans who go No fucking way, I can’t believe this is an RPG (even though there are other toku-inspired RPGs) or weeby Western superhero fans looking for that capes and cowls feel but with a parallel aesthetic. The players sit down, they see the character sheet, they go okay, this is familiar enough but has things to set it apart.  I like the bars for tracking stats.  They build the world t

Well well well, if it isn’t a late night Mechanic Monday! As I’m winding down for the quarter and hit my goal of ten Out of Mana posts, I figured it was fine for me to trot out this non-OOM idea that’s been sitting in drafts forever.  Take a looksie! Determining Suit Desirability in a Trick Taking Game In GREEM, the deck is shuffled and twelve cards are dealt facedown into a pile to form the Scoring Deck.  The remaining forty cards are dealt facedown to form a hand of ten cards per player.  Two cards are revealed from the Scoring Deck, each placed in a row corresponding with its suit.  The player to the left of the dealer then starts the game by playing a card to begin the trick, and all players must follow suit if able.  The player who plays the highest-valued card of the leading suit takes the trick.  At the end of a trick, the top card of the Scoring Deck is revealed, and placed in a row corresponding with its suit.  The winner of the trick then leads the next trick, repeating until

Hello there and welcome back to the blog! Things got away from me this week - by which I mean, I spent all of last week churning out pages of my most recent play, and finished the first draft on Monday, and have needed til now to get my writing feet back under me.  Plus the short week was full of absolutely stupid issues at the dayjob so that didn’t bloody well help.  But here we are, on either a Saturday, when I’m starting this, or a Sunday, if I don’t finish this tonight.  Since it’s an off-day, maybe I’ll just do another checkin about… … … damn.  I just checked, and it’s been almost three months since my Q1 checkin.  And you know what’s wild? I did in fact hit 10 Out of Mana posts, and weirdly enough, with my two TTRPG Tuesday focuses, I have actually begun prototyping again.  And hey, I finished one of the two first drafts of plays that I mentioned not having completed in that update.  Wild! Well then - let’s talk a plan for the rest of the quarter.  I have at least one other non-O

Hello hello.  We’re back this week with another TTRPG Tuesday.  This week I figured I’d think out the Experience I want to create with my two WIPs - The Riders 18-card RPG, and the Company scenario The Envy of Ajax.  It’s going to be a bit freeformy - quelle surprise, eh? The Envy of Ajax: Someone who likes The Company and has played it before sees that there’s a short standalone scenario, and picks it up.  The simplicity of the pamphlet gels with the accessibility of the zine, and adds to the small but eye-catching pile. The person wants to get some friends into the Company - perhaps friends with similar taste in films, but not especially versed in RPGs.  The first zine allows them to build everyone full characters, but for first timers with just one evening at their disposal, the Eurydice Incident seems to be too much of a commitment.  Instead of trying to pick one of the scenarios from the second zine, the GM decides that the pamphlet will be loose enough that they can jump in fairl

Welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday! Although I’m still chugging along in MtG and therefore have all sorts of Out of Mana-ish neurons firing, I’m in an RPG state of mind in terms of what I want to noodle out, so that’s what we’re doing.  Still disorganized though, so have some more stream of consciousness bullets: For The Envy of Ajax, my analysis of the pamphlet situation yields these data points: 3 columns each for the GM and the Players, and the columns can each fit: 1 dense table 2 manageable tables 3 small tables 5 paragraphs totaling >1000 characters. Mixing and matching those fundamentals will get me where I need to go, and maybe I start with layout to determine my actual design constraints, particularly since I tend to go raw unbroken up text before sorting, which might hurt me in this case. I’ve never played a DM/GM-less RPG myself.  I’ve read some, sure, but to be honest that constraint is the most challenging part of the Button Shy challenge.  For that reason I think it

I was planning on completing my daily mission in MTG Arena, and finishing up the blog post I’d started, and maybe getting some playwriting done, but instead I did other very fun and very productive things last night and I have absolutely no regrets.  So since I missed my chance to do TTRPG Tuesday on schedule, we’re going to do a “Whatever I Want Wednesday” - and what I want is to do my TTRPG Tuesday post a day late.  That’s called a compromise! Enjoy. Ok, I’m “participating” in a study right now, so I’ve got some time to kick out some more thoughts for this week’s - TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve been thinking non-stop about The Envy of Ajax, and I downloaded What A Terrible Night so that I could get an idea of the amount of information in a pamphlet RPG, and how that information is presented.  I can visualize the trifold pamphlet stood up, like a DM screen, with Setup and Player information on the outside, perhaps map/environment, and enemies, story beats, items and their consequences on the in

Here we are, face to face with, I believe, another Tuesday.  I kind of want to keep it short so that I can go for a run, but also have a lot of thoughts buzzing about my brain.  Let’s just barf out some freeform thoughts for this May the Fourth TTRPG Tuesday! Recently talked over the possibility of writing more scenarios for The Company.  While I’m going to write whatever my grotesque heart and sad little brain want to write, what was mentioned as an actually usable contribution is a pamphlet sized (<1k word count) scenario.  The draft of the DOLLIE Extraction that I handed in was ~1600 words, so that’s still a fairly large amount to work with.  I mean, cutting out the Shepherdesses or otherwise reducing the enemy list, building in less plot or backstory - the same concept could easily (ok, perhaps not EASILY) have come in under 1k.  What might make a good candidate for a shorter thing? Well, it should definitely be one Act.  I’m torn as to whether it should be a standalone adventur

Good late evening loyal listeners.  It’s another surprise late night installment of Out of Mana.  Happy Mechanic Monday! I actually bought myself a few booster packs of the latest set for my birthday yesterday.  However many years clean and I just grab the first needle I see, amazing.  But the theme of the set (Hogwarts but no money to TERFs) was on my radar months ago, and I always knew that if I was gonna come back, it would be for this.  And I really like the set! Witherbloom/Silverauill, obvs.  I should’ve gone for one of the blue schools, as blue fuckery offers the most control and therefore (in my limited, annoyed experience) the most (and most unfun) wins. Speaking of Strixhaven and its new mechanics, why don’t we get down to it? Reserve Powers In GREEM, players purchase buy and sell goods, as well as special player powers that let them define and accelerate their strategy.  Prior to the start of the game, players assemble a six-power reserve.  As one of the actions on their tur

Just did a post yesterday, so let’s cut the chatter and get back on schedule with a Mechanic Monday. Whole Combinations of Pieces as Win Condition In GREEM, the board begins with a (randomized?) setup of neutral pieces, each of which can move along one axis - North-South, East-West, NE-SW, or NW-SE.  On their turn, a player can move either a piece or a stack.  In the first instance, the player can claim a neutral piece and move it in the direction that the piece allows.  If the piece lands on a neutral or friendly piece, stack the pieces - the new stack can move along any axis that any of its composite pieces could move along.  A player may also use their turn to move a stack, but may not move it onto or past an opposing piece or Stack, and may not move it onto a piece (or a stack containing a piece) that it already contains.  Once a player creates a stack with all four types of piece, the stack is removed from the board and added to the player’s scoring area.  The game ends once a pla

Well, I ended up taking last week off for a move, and now it’s almost the end of the week after that, so let’s try and get something in shall we? I’ve been playing a fair bit of MtG:Arena, so I wanted to jot down some of what I’ve learned as a player, and make some associated notes for how those lessons can be applied to broader game design Let’s start broad - I’ve always said that MtG is essentially a game design sandbox.  A couple of specific goals, but myriad tools that can be used together in endless combinations to expand those goals and to create different types of engines for achieving them.  And I’ve come to realize that deckbuilding closely mirrors which rules go into a design.  As a youth, I had a very limited cardpool, and had seen very few games in play, so I knew very little about momentum, control, or engine building.  The deck du jour at the time was the premade Sliver deck and it showed off all that Magic and its colour pie were capable of - but all *I* took from it was

Did I really end my last entry with “Til net time!”? Lord I hope that was an intentional cyberpunk joke.  Look, it’s 11:36pm and I’m tired, and I’ve already been writing all evening, so you’re getting the bare minimum from me - especially since I still need to shower and get back to MtG Arena, which I’ve now downloaded.  RIP priorities - you would have loved me having you. Excess Damage Represented by Additional Pieces In GREEM, each player has stacks of 3, 2, or 1 checkers.  On a player’s turn, they may move a stack a number of spaces equal to the height of the stack.  If a stack lands on a friendly stack of equal or lesser height, the stacks are combined.  If a stack lands on an opposing stack of equal or greater height, it removes the opposing stack.  If a stack lands on an opposing stack of lesser height, it removes the opposing stack and creates a new friendly stack, which has a height equal to the difference between the two stacks.  The game ends if all spaces on the board have a

Weeeeelcome back to Mechanic Monday! I definitely have something for this, and DIDN’T just scroll back a few entries to that informal list of mechanics and latch onto one that I can roll out into a sheet, slice into very very fine strands, boil in salted water, and then hurl at the wall.  And it’s definitely well thought out, and not loopy from tiredness at all ok here we go! Trojan Horse Battering Rams In Cyber-GREEM, you have a number of attack vectors to try and infiltrate the system of a rival corporation.  A runner? Don’t be silly, individuals don’t have the resources to compete with ponderously powerful financial entities, it’s just giant conglomerates harnessing skilled and indentured labour to mount electronic offensives and counter-offensives on one another.  There are five lanes between players, and each round, players play cards face-down into their side of the lanes.  At the end of a player’s turn, they choose two lanes with which to boost and attack; cards may be revealed

Well, there’s less than two hours left in the week (less than fifteen now that I'm actually pressing Publish), so let’s try and get a post together, since I need to feel in control of my life.  There’s a lot that’s up in the air right now, and I’ve just been utterly unable to do much game design stuff outside of this blog.  So today’s going to be a roundup / quarterly report, and I’ll also see about pre-writing tomorrow’s Out of Mana.  I think my goal was to write ten of those? And I’ve already done 6, which is genuinely shocking, to me, but I have been pretty single-minded in my commitment to updating this blog (Perhaps! To the detriment! Of my other projects!) so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  But put aside tomorrow’s post for a moment, and let’s focus on this week; it’s not quite three full months of 2021 down, but we’ve got some definite data, so let’s just dive in. Now, I took the last week of 2020 off, so I didn’t actually do a quarterly report, just various deranged end of

It’s been a tremendously long week, I’ve missed the windows for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday and I’m absolutely not doing another video.  It is now, somehow, March, so I suppose I could have done a self-evaluatory post for the first quarter of 2021, but I just ain’t got it in me for that level of coherency.  Yes, my usual work does contain elements of a semblance of coherency - all of which will be absent today.  Random game design thoughts: For a future Reverse Out of Mana - a mechanic where surviving something grants you benefits.  So being damaged grants +1/+1 counters? Or being targeted grants protection against that colour? I should go back to the level of initial treatment I did when I presented The Dollie Extraction for consideration, turn that into a template, and flesh out a treatment for the other scenarios that I brainstormed then, as well as the ones from the last couple of weeks. Once I get into the new place, I need one location for all my games, the ones I’ve pur

  This week I decided to go completely off the board - and make a response video to a video by Daniel Solis (whose work is a big inspiration for me) - ' 7 Card Game Ideas '.  Enjoy!

Right! Welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday.  I’m still on my kick for The Company RPG, so today I’m going to brainstorm more scenario pitches, but as opposed to throwing out premises like last time, I’m going to use my Experience-First approach and come up with some of the right feelings I want to evoke, and work backwards from those. There are a lot of corporate horrors that take advantage of cold settings.  Space, the Arctic or Antarctic, various other frozen hellholes.  The cold echoes the unfeeling, inhuman nature of the company that is pushing the characters to keep going despite the deadly environment.  The cold also creates conditions for some horror to hibernate, only to be awoken by the hubristic intrusion of the characters.  So how can we meaningfully invert that temperature? Personally, I love the cold, it’s the heat that drains me.  Extreme heat, wiping out the characters’ fatigue, making them want to shed their armour, making their weapons and tools too hot to touch, mak

Well a TTRPG Tuesday didn’t happen last week.  So, I’m back with another Mechanic Monday! And I’m going to keep Out of Mana going, but with a twist: Instead of fitting an existing MtG mechanic into boardgameworld, I’m going the other direction: I’ve made up an MtG mechanic! Now, the more perfect inversion would have been if I’d taken a non-MtG boardgame mechanic and adapted it to MtG, but actually this one’s entirely made up (insofar as any idea is original any more etc etc).  Sue me! Inflamed Counters An inflamed counter grants +1/-1 to to the creature it’s on; the effects of multiple inflamed counters are cumulative.  When a creature with inflamed counters deals damage to another creature, that creature gains an inflamed counter. Short, simple, to the point.  Very thematically fitting for Red, in fact I now realize that +1/-1 is the Flowstone modifier; could also work as -1/-1 if I wanted to distinguish it further.  As is fitting for MtG, it’s not too convoluted in and of itself, the

Alright, I’ve gotten way too little sleep, my blue light blocker glasses broke, and my eyes are exhausted.  So let’s get right to it today, shall we? Piece Height as Rank GREEM is played on a checkerboard, rotated by 45 degrees.  Each player has a corner opposite the other, and the same setup of one empty square, two stacks of three checkers, three stacks of two checkers, and four single checkers.  All pieces may move four spaces at a time, but stacks of two can change directions once, and stacks of three can change directions twice.  Pieces that move into a space occupied by an opposing piece may capture (remove) the opposing piece, as long as the capturing piece is of the same or greater height.  Pieces of lesser height may not move through or capture pieces of greater height.  The game ends when one player has lost all the pieces of two heights (singles, stacks of two, or stacks of three). So this, believe it or not, is Flying.  The feeling that the mechanic invokes, of opening up a

Hallo hallo hallo.  I’d have liked to get this Mechanic Monday written sooner but last week’s focus was a Writer application, and along with the press of grants reports and proposals due in the month of March, and those deadlines needed the dedicated hours.  And now I’m watching GBBO (a Bread Week no less) while I work, which is hardly a RECIPE for success.  But I still think I can get this post out on time, especially as I did spend a good chunk of my drifting off last night pondering Magic! at the Gathering.  That’s right, it’s another Out of Mana! I’d like to take a stab at flying, trample, regenerate, some classics there, the tribal concept, cipher, scrying, kicker, but the one I want to write about this week is the other keyword from the Kaldheim set: Boast. Cascading Conditional Triggered Abilities In GREEM, the ordinary turn order is alternating actions by each player, but that order is disrupted whenever the conditions are met for a piece’s ability.  When a piece’s ability cond

Time for another Out of Mana! How many of these am I going to do? Let’s see if I can get to ten or twelve of these and then evaluate.  That’s a ways off either way so I’d better get writing. As I don’t believe the pandemic will end anytime soon, I expect the only gaming I’ll do this year (for the first half at the very least) will be remote/digital, I’m looking forward to when MTG: Arena hits iOS, and may even dip my toe sooner using my laptop.  As long as I strictly limit my budget, I think it’d be another fun way to get some social gaming into my diet - between Terraforming Mars and Star Wars: Squadrons, I’ve spent a grand whopping total of $50 on at least 50 hours of human-to-human social time gaming, and I’ve actually really enjoyed it.  I’ve grown even weirder in isolation, and my speech patterns especially veer wildly between halting and Podcast Played At 1.5x Speed, my sentences twisting and splitting and tangling unresolved.  A little extra human contact, attached to an exercis

Had a wretched Monday and didn’t get the Out of Mana written in advance.  Have now remedied that so that I for sure have one for next Monday, but since it’s Tuesday how’s about a TTRPG Tuesday? I really enjoyed writing a scenario for The Company RPG, so today I’m just going to brainstorm the concept seeds for a few more possible scenarios. The DOLLIE Reprisal: The ARC team is tasked with securing a Company weapon that has hit the black market; weaponized clones of themselves, a byproduct of their Hall of Mirrors raid. What Music They Make: A Company scientist has reported sabotage at a sonic research and testing site in the far North.  The ARC team arrives to find 23 hours of night, with a rapidly dwindling supply of hostages to save, and an ever-increasing and screaming blood-sucker problem. The Othersun Town: In remote Huang Bai, the border between here and somewhere else has been rubbed thin by government meddling.  The heat hits different, the plants are growing strange, and absolu

Hello and welcome back to Out of Mana, a limited run of Mechanic Mondays where I take a look at Magic: The Gathering abilities and postulate a way that mechanic could form the basis of its own game (or serve a larger role as a central mechanic anyhow) despite not having played Magic since high school.  There’s been a lot more, uh, armed insurrection since my last post, so, you know.  Not entirely sure this one’s going to be the well-reasoned erudite entry into the canon that I hoped for at the end of my last entry.  But at least it’s inspired by a more recent ability? And so hopefully it’s a more mature mechanical basis on which to build? Circumventing Hand Size with Partially Purchased Actions In GREEM, you have a default of one and a half actions per turn.  Cards half an action to prepare (play face-down from hand to tableau), half an action to complete (activate a face-down card from your tableau), or a full action to rush (activate a card directly from your hand).  You start with a

So I had an Out of Mana entry mostly written yesterday, but the apps for iPhone of Google Drive and Docs (where I write these) was bugging out, so I didn’t get to post it.  I'm so mad about it that I also wrote out another non-OOM Mechanic Monday post for the buffer.  So anyway I’ve finished that post but will leave it til next week, and do a TTRPG Tuesday today. As you may have seen, the DOLLIE Extraction has been announced as one of the missions included in the forthcoming supplement for The Company RPG, Conflict Resolution Guidelines.  If you’ve followed this blog, you watched the components take shape in real time, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the final form, in all its polished and printed glory. Almost more exciting than the fact that I got paid to do games writing is the fact that unlike my last freelance RPG work, I’m proud of the work I turned in, and equally (though this may seem counterintuitive) thrilled and confident that the work I’ve done will have been c

‘Allo! I took a week off.  On accident.  It’s fine, I still managed to do 52 entries in 52 weeks, so, cheers to me, huh? Anyway I have half an hour to try and knock one of these out.  The first entry in my Out of Mana series! No buffer, a clock ticking down, an idea pulled out of my posterior, just like I drew it up! Timer as Cost Inspired by Haste, GREEM has cards where the cost to play represents the number of turns between when the card is played and when it becomes active or takes effect.  Stronger cards tend to take more turns to activate, or are limited in how many copies can be in a deck.  The game is one of timing and disruption. So what I’m picturing here is maybe a time travel theme, two opposing chronosorcerers trying to pull off immense feats while undermining and disrupting one another.  Probably cards that let you add, remove, or move around time counters, destroy cards that are at a certain timer count, get more than one card going, activate cards at a specific high numb