New Games from April and May 2024 + 200th Issue!

I. Dear Reader,

It’s been another great couple months for new games. If this is the first post like this that you’re seeing: every two months I highlight around ten games that were newly released on itch.io. I hear about most of these games through this form.

1. A Terrible Fate: A FitD game about cursed adventurers doomed to re-live the same three days until they stop the world from ending. Uses magical masks, inspired by Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. (Mint-Rabbit)
2. Against the Monster: A story game about a monster hunt, the good of the monster, and the monstrosity of the hunters. Based on For the Queen. Comes in English & German. (Jasmin Neitzel and Andrea Rick, Plotbunny Games)
3. Numberless Secrets: An expansion for Hearts of Wulin that adds a Brindlewood Bay style mystery mechanic to the game of wuxia melodrama. For fans of Ancient Detective and such. (Lowell Francis, Age of Ravens Games)
4. Down the Road Through the End of the World: A game about people on a desperate journey through a post-apocalyptic world, looking for a haven. Based on Psi*Run. (Kodi Gonzaga)
5. Last Train To Bremen: A storytelling game of doomed musicians and poor decisions. One shot for 4 players exactly, using Liar’s Dice. From Caro Asercion, the designer of i’m sorry did you say street magic.
6. Deep in a Matrix of Flesh and Metal: A FitD game of crime and cyber-horror, where you and your crew of down-and-outs will try to become the biggest fish in the overcrowded pond that is Zone Zero, or die trying. (Calum Grace)
7. The Adventures of Gonan: A cute and innovative adventure game based on a fictional kids fantasy TV show, using a scene based structure that looks a bit like Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. (Tragos Games)
8. Into the Blind: A scifi horror hack of Trophy that twists it to tell stories like Alien and other genre classics. (Riley Daniels/Sick Sad Games)
9. Full Spectrum: An expansion for Spectres of Brocken, the mecha game of former friends turned enemies. This contains a collection of alternate settings and scenarios for the base game. (Austin Taylor, Arisia Santiago, Ethan Yen, Fin Coe, Juliet L’mous, Mike Balles, Valis Teoh, Aaron Lim)
10. The Pact: A two-player game poem about best friends, one of whom becomes a vampire at some point in their life. Players explore their relationship & find out what they’ll do to keep a childhood promise… (Marc Majcher / Majcher Arcana)

And as a bonus, a game I contributed to, Chiron’s Doom is out. It’s a storytelling game about an ill-fated expedition to explore a mysterious monument. Can be played solo or up to 3 players. It’s pretty neat!

Get listy,

Thomas

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Feeling Like An Insider (In The Game) … Part Two

Continuing from where I left off last week, I want to keep discussing the problem of “how to make the players feel like they’re actually from the setting (and not outsiders)”. I think I made all the appropriate disclaimers last time so I’ll skip them but here are some claims and if they’re not for you, that’s fine!

Claim 1: There can be too much setting – There is a point where a setting goes from “thorough” to “unwieldy” and after that point, it is counter-productive to helping players feel like they belong somewhere. Another way to frame this is: The more information that is nailed down that is unavailable to a player, the harder it is to feel like an insider. I mean, after a certain point, it becomes unwieldy just for the GM but I think the point for players is earlier than that.

Claim 2: How to communicate setting to players is a game design problem – I’ve talked a lot about teaching rules to players but setting is exactly the same. If a player must be an insider, then the game has to enable that in some way. The usual method of “read these 100 pages” is theoretically acceptable but if nobody actually does it, then we can either complain or accept that it’s a bad way of doing things. And when I say game design problem, I mean, please don’t make this a game master problem – they have enough to do. I like the idea of handouts and a diagetic bestiary and stuff like that but I don’t have a lot of experience with them, so I’m happy to learn more!

Claim 3: Secrets are good (or asymmetry of information is good) – If things are nailed down, they don’t have to be available to all the players all the time. Dividing information among the players (based on their characters) so they can surprise and delight each other in play is great. So if there is a section of the Temple of All-Flesh, the player who is a member should have it. (This also means they know what the GM doesn’t know and can exercise their judgement on whether to make something up on the spot or not.) Being an insider is defined in relation to others so it’s not necessarily about knowing things but knowing things that other players don’t know.

Claim 4: Character creation is a key part of this – When players make characters (picking classes, playbooks, etc), they’re thinking about what their relationship to the world should be. If the character creation process is intertwined with the setting (yay!), this is the place for facilitating what players should know to best enjoy their new character. One example of this is Escape from Dino Island where each playbook has information to help roleplay that kind pf character. Like the scientist has a whole sidebar full of information about dinosaurs so they can just drop facts in the middle of the game.

Claim 5: If you’re inventing setting on the spot, having players have authority over the GM can be fun (for the GM) – This is one of those core PbtA ideas – even as I’m sure, like all things, it’s older than that. I probably first heard about it through Dungeon World, where the advice was something like”the elf player is the expert on elf culture” and so on. As a GM, I really enjoy asking my players to be experts on things. And it’s important to remember that these are usually things that will not ruin your day prep-wise, right? They’re probably going to be at least as fun as discovering stuff via a book or a random table.

Claim 6: This isn’t about immersion – I understand where the thought comes from but on one hand, inventing setting can break immersion for someone and on the other hand, not knowing what their character should know could break immersion for someone else. So having a preference on this isn’t about prioritizing or de-prioritizing immersion, it’s slightly tangential to the entire concept.

My last (slightly unhelpful) post last week led to some discussion on social media and elsewhere. Broadly, I think people who know about larps probably have a lot of experience with lots of different solutions for this kind of stuff. If anyone does write about this, please let me know!

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II. Media of the Week

• Lovely video essay about Songbirds 3e, a game that plays with the structures of old-school D&D while talking about some beautiful themes.

• Panic at the Dojo, a game from the designer of Fellowship, was featured on a videogame/animation youtube channel recently and it immediately led to hundreds of sales for the game. Which makes sense because it’s very fun video that excellently showcases what makes the game cool (punching people in many, new ways).

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• Woah woah, it’s the 200th issue of the newsletter. We’re almost at 4 years of doing this every week… Phew, that’s a long time. As always, thanks for reading this! And thanks for talking about it and recommending it to other people!
• If you have a podcast and want to talk to me, please invite me!
• If you can, drop me 2$ a month over on patreon to help keep the newsletter going for 4 more years. And then, I’d have existed for longer than lots of social media sites. How wonderful would that be?

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III. Links of the Week

• Rascal News has a lovely article about physical game stores and the good people that make them special.
  • While the above post is free, there are some other good reads behind paywalls including this one with designer, jay dragon, about the physical release of Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast.
• Nordic Larp has a nice post talking about how too much focus on design affects the practice of larping.
• Ty Pitre of Mindstorm talks about one of my favourite techniques, connecting all the characters via one NPC who died just before the game started.
• The nominees for the 2024 Diana Jones Award have been announced: Adepticon, Ami Baio, Fastaval, TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida, and the United Paizo Workers.
• Delta Pavonis reviews Outgunned, the action RPG.
• Grognardia has a long retrospective on Greyhawk Wars.
• Four Letters At Random talks a little about how much information is too much for an adventure.
• Age of Ravens has a great post about what you can learn from the design of Girl by Moonlight, Andrew Gillis’ magical girl masterpiece.

From the archive:

• I love sharing posts like this, where I’m not sure if they’re right but they’re definitely fun. Cameron Summers on the political economy of game design has such lines like “D&D as chartalist economy” and “The economy of Fate Points, though, definitely mirrors the functioning of wages in the capitalist system.” (Issue 34, March 2021)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Explore the galaxy with your robot best friend in ION Heart. A cozy solo mech TTRPG where you’ll journal stellar adventures with your giant mechanical companion. Try the QuickStart here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Two Shadowrun 5e bundles on offer with almost everything for this version of the fantasy cyberpunk classic: one with the core book and some supplements and the second bundle featuring a clutch of adventures and modules.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!