As I wrote about a few weeks ago, for all of October I was sucked into a daily design challenge that was helping me stretch my game design muscles and push me to experiment with mechanics, play materials, and thematic ideas that I haven’t previously touched.
Over the course of this challenge, I wrote:
- 2 micro-supplements for specific games: a Landmark for Heart: The City Beneath and a Faction for Blades in the Dark
- 5 generic supplements, mostly tables or prompt lists
- 4 incomplete games—these ones are missing whole sections of rules or have unfilled tables or prompt lists
- 18 “complete” games—many of these are woefully imbalanced, some are missing key guidance or crucial prompting, but all of them ought to be playable as written
- 1 lyric game, which is technically playable but not sensible to group with the ones above
Phew…
That was probably too much. I shouldn’t have written that much. And by the end it was mostly stubbornness and sunk cost that was keeping me going. But it was also a lot of fun and an enormous amount of writing and design exercise. I’m probably going to need a bit of a break, but there’s a lot of ideas in here worth revisiting! I want to walk through a few I’m excited to come back to, just to get some commentary written down and summarize my intentions for further work.
So here’s a small selection of the games I wrote that I believe have the most potential and are highest on my list to revisit (in addition to the three I highlighted earlier this month). For each of these, I’ve briefly summarized the game itself so that nobody feels like they need to go read a whole other post all the way through before continuing.
WORD WIZARDS
WORD WIZARDS is a loose, silly one-shot game built around using spelling bee questions as a resolution mechanic. The setup involves accidentally summoning a horrible monster, after which players attempt to fight it by answer spelling questions to determine how their actions play out. If they get answers right, they accomplish what they intended. If they get them wrong, they can rewrite reality to accomplish something helpful but different than they intended.
This was Day 2, and it’s the first complete game I wrote. It’s also the moment I realized I was in trouble. From this point on, the average length of my complete game posts increased gradually. It’s hard to say whether that’s because I got less efficient or my mechanical ideas got more complex, but I like the simplicity and efficiency of this early entry a lot.
The writing itself is passable but could certainly be improved, and the setup prompts aren’t as flavorful as I’d like. Additionally, the game is really lacking resources to help GMs find sufficiently fancy words to prompt their players with; I'd have to do some research to track down good links. Besides that, though, there’s not a whole lot I want to change. It just needs to be playtested!
Scattered to the Stars
An asynchronous, multiplayer journaling game that shares a notebook (with friends, or through a “little free library” like I see around my neighborhood). It’s about survivors from an alien planet that was destroyed in a supernova, who are now doomed to roam the galaxy apart from one another. The radiation of the supernova has given them a deep connection with the stars themselves, through which they can sense and communicate with each other even while lightyears apart.
The goal of the game was to build something out of the deep loneliness of being the last of one’s kind while still capturing a sense of awe and hope about the universe. There’s undeniable Outer Wilds influence, but also inspiration from Umurangi Generation and Superman stories. I think the core idea of the game is strong, but the prompts (specifically the Memories to fill in) are light on specificity and likely need to be more evocative before the whole thing can come together.
There’s also a tension here with using prompts to invent a fictional alien species. They ought to be distinctly non-human and non-earthling, but I also try to avoid the pitfall of collapsing them into a monoculture. There’s a lot of fine tuning to be done around accomplishing this goal elegantly, especially in a way that doesn’t feel like shallow box-checking.
Ihezohr
Ihezohr is a storytelling game about a party of victorious heroes who climb a tower to find out what happened to a friend who they parted ways with along their path. It’s essentially a love letter to the friend in your TTRPG group who got too busy and had to drop out of the campaign (usually with some thin narrative pretense).
The game uses a tarot deck with the major arcana representing rooms in the tower. The rest of the cards are used by players to conjure memories of time spent with their old pal Ihezohr and to deal with challenges on the floors of the tower. There’s a bit of a metafictional element to it all, but I hope it comes across as both celebratory and somewhat restrained.
As written, there's a little bit too much weight to a single “play”, where a player who’s contributing to the scene must play a card, introduce fiction to the “present” moment of climbing the tower, and also reminisce about Ihezohr through a flashback. I don’t know if this is too much cognitive load, but either way I could imagine the structure getting stale if every maneuver includes a flashback.
There’s also an emerging mystery around Ihezor’s whereabouts and goals, assembled piece by piece as players pass around the role of portraying the tower. I don’t know if those pieces work well yet, but a playtest will help answer that.
Also, it's worth noting that the name “Ihezohr” came from fantasynamegenerators.com. I thought it was kind of funny that it sounded like “eyesore”, even though that seems incredibly mean if you read into it even a little bit. It’s mostly just a generic fantasy-sounding name.
Among the Ruins
A world-building game about exploring a post-apocalyptic world and encountering ruins that tell the story of its past. It uses a die, a block tower, and a custom set of rules for stacking blocks that produces odd and expressive structures.
I had been wanting to make something using a block tower, as popularized by horror RPG Dread. Well, now I have, but I didn’t use it in the conventional way. The block-building in this game uses a d6 and a set of rules about how to arrange the new block onto the structure, which begins from scratch instead of as a complete tower. I was a little surprised how compelling the building was once I started ironing it out; I have some confidence that this piece of the game will work (though I’d probably want more example structures listed in step 1 of the Encountering Structures section). I've also always had a strong affinity for what you might call "verdant post-apocalypses", which meant I had quite a bit of fun testing the building rules and imagining the ruins they evoked.
I’m much more uncertain about the “talk about” prompts, which suggest freeform conversation topics to use—be it in character or out—as the wanderers make their way towards the next ruin (for the players, this covers the time during which blocks are being placed). The idea is to provide a left-brain counterpart to the very right-brain task of arranging blocks, but I’m not convinced it’s actually helpful to try to talk over that step. This would probably be a key focus area for playtesting, in addition to honing the World Questions that drive the overall storytelling.
Honorable Mentions
Plenty of the entries were either much farther from being complete or just less compelling objects altogether, so here's some one-liner pitches and links for those who really have a lot of time to go read around:
- No Honor is a game for 3+ players about a heist gone wrong at the 11th hour, where impending betrayal leads to a standoff just moments before a clean escape.
- Final Dive is a solo game about exploring an alien ocean and collecting parts to repair your submarine and ascend...all while avoiding a beast that lurks about the depths.
- No Empty Spaces is a table of storytelling micro-games that can be used as part of a hex crawl to add some variety between mysteries, monsters, and loot.
- Destined Wielder is a collection of 2-player mini-games built around a shared series of prompts exploring the relationship between a chosen hero and their sapient weapon.
- Something is Out There is an incomplete solo game about monitoring trail cams while something terrifying stalks through the park, played by marking up a trail map.
- Dream Sequence is a lightly competitive duet "interlude game" designed to explore a character's backstory and a GM's future prep by playing out a prophetic dream.
- Reap What You Sow is an unfinished and unhinged solo journaling game about time management, writing poetry, and the illusory simplicity of farming.
Farewell October
And that's it. There are maybe a couple others in the overall collection, which you can browse here, that I’d love to explore more eventually. For now, I’m very glad to have done this! And I'm also glad that it’s finished.