My buddy Jackson and I put together an itch.io storefront with our backlog of work. You can check it out here if you want. It has A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet, which I wrote WAY back in the G+ days and hasn’t been available for a couple a years, plus the amazing Brushwood Lullabies and PILGRIM by Jackson. Everything is PWYW, and currently we plan to keep it that way.
I really can’t bear to do the promotion game as it probably should be done, but we’ve put a lot of work into these various projects and maybe somebody might like them and also they can be had for free if people so choose, so here we are:
The itch page also has a bundle with two new zine-sized games I’ve been working on a while. I put them together because they’re both playtested-but-experimental and in a form that is complete but not necessarily final (if I have the gas, I want to come back and gussy up the layout and maybe get some more art in them).
One, called Pretender Complex, is an improved version of this PvP PbP Fate game I put together for my friends during (what was for me) some of the roughest times during pandemic isolation. In retrospect, it was an interesting exercise in thinking through what I design towards. It was a profoundly ugly time in my life, both because of personal tragedy and worldwide catastrophe, and what I really wanted was to make a game that fit as comfortably as possible into what was going on in people’s lives. An asynchronous game designed about remote play seemed really appealing because of how hard it seemed to “be on” as a human being (especially on camera), and I think my players liked making requests for historical characters to drop into the game. Accordingly, a lot of the game is much more about how to handle the logistics and juggle the needs of a bunch of people than it is about genre stuff or mechanics per se. I definitely don’t think the game is like a noble exercise in virtue or anything like that, but I did find myself thinking about kindness or respect for people’s time as something to design towards a little more. I’m not sure that it succeeded on any of these counts, and the zine itself is a little rough, but it’s finished and you can read it.
The other, called Descender Complex, started as an actual joke: what if you used a Sudoku board as a representation for character abilities?
Riffing on this turned out to be actually pretty fun, as was making a bunch of overwrought JRPG playbooks. I also stuck in another idea I had been keeping on the back burner, which is a tactics-heavy combat system that focuses on the interesting decisions that arise from B/X’s phased initiative system rather and deprioritizes other conventional tactical elements like granular spacing. The playtest actually went really well, and the phased initiative and simplified movement made pandemic-required online play quite pleasant. There’s a lot more tactics, character customization, and board game vibes than what I normally do, but overall it really seems to work.
These are the first two projects I’ve finished since 2016, which is pretty wild to think about. I hope you like them.
