Velocimancer Games

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...

Hello and welcome back! Another post? So soon? How? Why? Don’t question it.  It’s a TTRPG Tuesday. Today we’re revisiting the concept a few posts back where I proposed a magic system based on hosting spirits that consume you.  Since then I’ve attended my first Session Zero hangout, as well as a local TTRPG designer meetup here in Chicago, and have been very energized by the conversations I had in those spaces.  Session Zero in particular was great for iterating on the >1 minute’s worth of explanation I had for the magic system (which I’ve dubbed Channelers for the time being), which yielded many realizations, one being that this is inherently more horror-sympathetic of a system in feel and inspo than any of my usual stuff.  But the main exciting thing to come out of that convo, is Philosophies.  These stand in as classes/backgrounds, but have less to do with the combat role of a character (as the Spirits can shape that) and more to do with how the charact...

Hello and welcome back to the blog! Since my last post where I laid out a milestone checklist for getting a prototype of Guildmanager (fka Fantasy GM Squared) to GenCon, I put my head down, worked hard, and… actually pulled it off! I finished making components for, and actually printed, the nicest prototype I’ve ever made.  I did NOT figure out a VP component, and I did not get as far as doing the rulebook in Canva, but I DID make all the other non-Hero components (including the double-sided Streak markers at the very last minute) and expanded the rulebook with diagrams.  And I DID re-learn Canva enough to (after a half hour of truly baffling false starts) make a Sell Sheet like I planned to.  It even had a QR code to the website I finally got off my ass and built/paid for. While the prototype went to GenCon, it did not get demo’d, but that’s okay.  Just hitting my deadline is a pleasant surprise for me, and while it came down to the wire, the important bits of th...

Hello and welcome back to the blog for another Mechanic Monday! This one's kind of a catchupdate as well - for starters, this blog is likely moving soon.  That's because I'm finally getting my act together and building out a proper site for Velocimancer Press - a central internet place for all my creations, game design, playwright, and beyond.  Of course, I'm not going to throw out existing work, so a lot of stuff will still link out to itch, NewPlayExchange, this blog - but it's time I did this properly.  Past time, really.  And so what if this breaks all my old tweets linking to this blog in the velocimancer.com domain? Hopefully I can set it up so that all error pages eventually lead any visitors to their target content anyway. But back to the Mechanic Monday - I don't actually have some new thing kicking around my head (well, besides the idea of adding solar panels to Armberlodge; and revisiting the possibility of moving the Legacies off the FGM-Squared c...

Hiya, welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday! A brief one today, as I just had the barebones of an idea pop into my head and I wanted to gently fan that spark.  One trend in games that I haven’t attempted yet is the journaling form of the solo TTRPG.  I’ve purchased a few, started one, never actually gotten all the way through any.  But I think it’d be fun to do one that has accounting/ledgers as the premise: Perhaps the game is an ledger for a business, and the further into the game you go, the more pages reference previous pages; so the direction of the business is influenced by how faithful the accounting is There are a couple of supplemental materials, mostly brochures; some are referenced by the Ledger, as the prices of products for the business But some of the brochures are costs for various niceties - luxuries, vacations, escort services, offshore accounts, all the big and little things people embezzle for Part of the game is crunching the numbers for the busines...

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday.  This could be a short one as I’m pretty well exhausted - not so much due to physical exertion as Massive Ramen Lunch and Subsequent Interrupted Nap.  But I submitted myself for a thing today that, if I got it, would mean a chance to develop one of my designs under the guidance of someone more experienced.  There’s so much incomplete work in my portfolio but oddly the one I ended up choosing for my pitch was the system I laid out in the post about Cold Iron Company .  Looking back on it, I’m surprised that I extruded that burst of creativity almost a year ago, and also, that there was so much to it.  I forgot how much I built it out beyond the Statuses table (which remains my favourite part). In terms of what I would want to work on, I think the following: Better delineate between the system (currently unnamed, all the crunch, the statuses and the character composition, plus a way to grind reputation with different fa...

Heyyyyy it’s… after midnight on a Monday.  But I haven’t gone to sleep yet.  Is this a Mechanic Monday? A TTRPG Tuesday? The idea I have in mind is… both! Spirit Power Via Three Stats Player heroes are capable of extraordinary feats, by allowing primal spirits to inhabit them.  Just the act of inviting in a spirit is taxing, but channeling the spirit is truly… costly.  No matter what a spirit promises, they all hunger for life, they crave being real and whole and tangible again.  They drain their hosts whenever their powers are called upon; heroes can strengthen their sense of identity to resist this subsumption, but no one gets out of this alive. Heroes have three stats: Other, Resolve, and Self.  Self represents a hero’s health, be it mental, emotional, and/or physical.  Other represents the amount of spiritual charge a hero is carrying.  Resolve is a hero’s ability to protect their Self from the corroding effects of Other. Be it magic, mart...

Hey, it’s been a minute, how about a TTRPG Tuesday? I’ve got updates to make before I turn in a final draft of a project, so I’m in the headspace.  Today I figured I’d return to the old “How would I gameify an IP well”, with Blue Lock! I’ve been getting into sports anime - not surprising considering my proclivity for battle shonen and access to someone else’s CrunchyR*ll subscription, and the fact that in real life I’ve been going FULL jock over the last year or so.  Blue Lock I’ve been watching every Saturday, and when I’ve done cardio in the basement I’ll watch Haikyu! Oh, and I watched all of Pride of Orange, because hockey.  These are all fun, with highs that land especially well with someone who’s finding an escape in sports, while also relying on tropes at certain points, or a humour that still isn’t always my cup of tea, or just elongated pacing. But I’m having a good time, and there’s certainly some lessons to be learned in how to structure conflict, int...

Hey, what’s up, it’s Mechanic M- It’s TTRPG T - Fuck it, it’s Whatever I Want Wednesday.  Even if I am starting to draft this on Tuesday. My thoughts today are all about what’s in the subject line.  I’m at a peculiar place in my artistic/craft space, maybe I have been for a long while, but it’s crystallizing for me lately as a confluence of a number of factors: chief among them, the pretty damn dire state of my theatre company, and the Chicago storefront theatre scene it belongs to.  Weirdly, this low point in my chief artistic practice coincides with unexpected success at my dayjob, and some recent wins on the writing side: I’ll be performing a piece for a sold-out storytelling podcast recording next week, and I’m getting some paid writing work for a supplement of a TTRPG I admire - my second time being able to say that. But beyond individual bright spots, I’m trying to look at the big picture: What’s all this for? What am I working towards? Have I been honest with mysel...

Happy 2023 and welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Wow, how long has it been since I did a post that wasn’t RPG-based? No one knows. Will this year be a return to 2020 form? No one cares. This week, I’ve been thinking about aUction games, especially on the heels of Dan Thurot’s recent interview with Amabel Holland about Watch Out! That’s a Dracula. I’ve always liked auction games (Medici was the first Knizia I put real time into) and I’ve had a lot of auction mechanics on this blog ( a roundup of them , even), and I thought I should try and see if I can string some of them together into one game, weird and wild but at least playable. I specifically want this to be a bit hodgepodge and messy, as I think that auction games already tend towards clean and I’d like to fight against that both with complexity and accompanying theme. I’m thinking hidden identities of the bidders, and innate as well as acquired player powers, which led me to think that themewise we could do a cyber...