#125: 2023, Names, & Lists!

Thomas Manuel

The game is getting good and there’s so much stuff to click

I. Dear Reader

Happy New Year, folks. Fingers crossed for 2024, eh?

So last week, I asked for names for our collaborative citybuilding game that we’re all playing and you folks really delivered. Maybe you all did too good a job because this one answer from reader, Aaron, reminded me about something important:

A city’s names – Nham Sin by the old pump-guard families down in the deep, Khim Sin-har by the brass lords of the upper strata, Turnwater by the traders of the night roads, Trickstream by the knaves of the dusklight eaves, Hanam by the records of the empire of the dead.

Our city has got many names! Obviously! And in some sense, the more names the better.

But we still still need to pick one name for a couple reasons. One, because there is probably an official name for the city and two, the more important reason, so it’s easy for us to refer to the city without being confused. So, vote time!

Delta is a great name from reader Alex that is “both the landmass that forms at the mouth of a river as it meets the sea and the symbol for change over time”. Clepsydra from Charles is Greek for water clock. Riffing on that, Ron suggested Chronourcleftis, which sorta means “thief of time” in Greek. Boyd suggested Clog Uisce as the Irish Gaelic for water clock. And finally, Immoria from Preston.

There were other names but substack limits polls to 5 options so I had to choose. Thanks to everyone who submitted!

We also got some neighbourhoods which I’m adding to the website (that will be finished this week hopefully).

But other than the name, we’re officially starting through actual rounds of i’m sorry did you street magic. Every round begins with a compass. A compass is sort of our direction or theme for the round. Every submission (neighbourhood, landmark, person) has to be based around our compass. Anything can be a compass. It can even be a specific neighbourhood or person. So the simple question: What about our city do we explore first?

Sound off in the replies.

Yours annually,

Thomas

II. Listen of the Week

  • Questing Beast reviews Errant, an OSR ruleset that collects and builds on and grows the generally rules-conservative canon.

  • Marx Shepherd and I interview each other as they hand off the Yes Indie’d Podcast to me. Here’s Marx talking to me and then finally, me interviewing Marx.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

  • Linda Codega writes about #Dungeon23 for Gizmodo. And a lot of people have been sharing their plans for the writing they plan to do:

    • On the Age of Ravens blog, a huge inspiration table and some exciting plans for a hexcrawl in a ruined city.

    • Jason of Pretendo Games talks about his plans for making a soulslike setting: “I will practice restraint and limit myself to only one poison swamp.”

  • Max Fefer is doing a series on Jewish RPG designers and content creators.

End of Year Wraps

Resources

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.

  • Nothing this week!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

This newsletter is written by 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!

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