TTRPG news

I have just released the full early access edition of The Shrike:

The Shrike is a game about fantastical voyages aboard a skyship. It's inspired by Avery Alder's The Quiet Year, John Harper's Lady Blackbird, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, and utopian and dystopian fiction. The 120+ page early access edition is now available, featuring four complete adventures (two multiplayer, two for solo play).

I'm also contributing two mini-RPGs to the forthcoming Soft Apocalypse (Conjured Games) anthology, out in early 2021. Bunnies & Cyborgs is a GM-less doodling and storytelling one-shot game about incredibly flawed plans, bad handovers, unexpected interactions and unintended consequences. You play an endlessly multiplying swarm of 'bunnies' and 'cyborgs'.  In Bunnies & Cyborgs, a bunny can be anything fluffy, and a cyborg can be anything that goes BLOOP BLOOP BLEEP BLEEP. It's from an original idea by Ewerton AKA moon.hermitcrab, who also drew this:

Fury Road Trip is Mad Max meets Little Miss Sunshine. It is partly a hack of /u/remy_porter's work-in-progress Family Road Trip. It is also (weirdly) slightly inspired by compassion-focused therapy.

UPDATE: Fury Road Trip has been cut from the anthology. But it'll find its way into the world in some form or another.

Bunnies & Cyborgs playtest

 

We playtested this thing I apparently wrote (although I can't remember doing so) as a submission for the forthcoming Conjured Games Soft Apocalypse anthology. It was fun! And stable. I hope to run another playtest soon, so get in touch if you're interested. (And/or if you play it, let me know how it goes).

The Shrike

So this is what I've been writing recently. The Shrike is an oracle-based RPG system for solo, co-operative, or GM-guided play. It's about fantastic voyages. You can access a pre-alpha version here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b_MXcdENtS4bjBC03ES5QlPOvrJeg7EqQzirbLQwito/edit?usp=sharing

The Shrike is also potentially part of something a bit new, in the sense that the voyages are mostly procedurally generated. I am slightly hitting a wall (or really more like diminishing returns) in my pseudo-coding abilities, so I'll be developing it as more-or-less a standard RPG for now. But if you happen to be a games developer who might be interested in collaborating on a bigger, more innovative version of it, get in touch. 

Elsewhere: Sad Press Games

Knights of the Thimble

There is a new free lightweight high fantasy tabletop RPG called Dungeons & Drapers added to the Games tab, whose rules may be very familiar to some of you. Other working titles: Skycrawl, Devils & Dwarves, Dweomers & Drow, Danger & Derring-Do, Dragons & Dungeons, Dystopia & Dragons, Hunger & Dragons, Dungeons & Desist.

It is what it is & any comments are appreciated (especially feedback on overall balance), but the interesting bit would really come with the supplementary spellbook, if I ever get round to writing it. There is also a kind of structural joke or provocation to do with race and class; maybe class especially, since it often feels to me that the power that high fantasy RPGs invite players to imaginatively occupy is the power of aristocracy and bourgeois finance, whatever the actual background of the character you're playing. Elf is structurally toff, isn't it? So in Dungeons & Drapers there's an attempt at a nod to the artisanal power of the early modern middling sort. Basically what I'm saying is that it's cool because you're a tailor.

Or perhaps this is just a sign of what happens when you come into some creative practice and start off making wrong & interesting things & gradually start making proper & therefore boring things? *Googles "shrug emoji"; copy-pastes it here*