New Games From December 23 and January 24

I. Dear Reader

1. Protect the Child: A Forged in the Dark game about monsters caring for a strange, mystical child. Playtest version. (Mintrabbit, Free)
2. Aftermath: A solo-friendly sci-fi about a team of first responders trying to make the world a better place after a terrible war. (Ember and Ash)
3. Space Aces: Voyages in Infinite Space: A comedy scifi sandbox inspired by the Hitchhikers’ Guide. (Stephen Hans)
4. The Connection Machine: A cerebral scifi game about exploring a dreamlike world and overcoming trauma. (Tanya Floaker & Julia Nevalainen)
5. Daybreak on the Battlefield: An unofficial set of extra playbooks for Girl by Moonlight, the excellent magical girls game. (Ben K Rosenbloom)
6. Buried in Ice: A mystery for Apocalypse Keys, the Hellboy-inspired PbtA game. Something trapped in a glacier thaws out and causes havoc. (Morgan Eilish)
7. Boyfriend Dungeon: Life on the Edge: The videogame gets officially adapted into a PbtA game. Explore your inner psyche, confront you fears, and also smooch swords. (Trumoi)
8. Like Real People Do: A two-player prompt-driven game about a mage trying to keep secrets in a vault but the vault wants to be a real person. (Meghan Cross)
9. The Mystery Business: Scooby Doo-inspired mystery solving game with no combat. You beat the baddies by setting traps to catch them. (Greg L)
10. The Flood Bell Tolls in Saint Magnus: A system-neutral campaign set in a drowning city on the verge of rebellion. (Tempest RPG, PWYW)

Also, cheeky last minute addition, the Showcase Zero bundle features games that came out of my playtest community. It’s got my scifi horror game, This Ship Is No Mother, as well as the mecha game of friendship and war, Spectres of Brocken and more.

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II. Media of the Week

• People Make Games take a good look at jubensha, a gaming phenomenon in China that started out just as spiffy murder mystery party games but has transformed into much more, including what sounds like scripted larps where everyone cries at the end. Really cool story.

• The new season of DiceExploder is back with John Harper talking about Psi*Run, a unique game by Meguey Baker that should’ve inspired a slew of games but inexplicably didn’t.

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• Please consider joining 100+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.
• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

Reviews

• Indie Game Reading Club reviews Stonetop, the community-focused iron age fantasy game from Jeremy Strandberg.
  • It’s a solid review and also features this neat bit of analysis about how PbtA developed: “Monsterhearts spawned the branch of PbtA games that are concerned with constrained, evocative moves with a strong editorial voice. Dungeon World, conceived as a reverse-engineering of Dungeons & Dragons style play, is concerned with efficiently resolving tasks, boiling down the activity to its core essence.”
• Cannibal Halfling reviews Free League’s vanilla-ish fantasy game, Dragonbane: “…when we live in the world of Old-School Essentials (also a translation, though from Gygax to English instead of Swedish to English), there’s clearly recognized value in taking an old system, cleaning it up, and sending it back out.”
• Explore Beneath and Beyond has a blog series reviewing and discussing all the early adventures and scenarios published for D&D. This is part one.
• Possum Creek Games publish their 2023 year in review including completing the mammoth Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast.
• DIY & Dragons explains why we should all probably stick to calling it “Jaquaysing”.
• A short post about the oldest ttrpg forums – usenet groups.

Misc

• ZineMonth 2024 is around the corner and since the “official” site isn’t ready yet, there’s an unofficial” page listing all the projects being crowdfunded. Take a look and submit your own if you’re doing one.
• There’s a game jam to create a megadungeon in honour of Jennell Jaquays.

From the archive

• Skerples’ cool blog post about how to portray aliens and alien intelligences in your game, approaching it from a bunch of different angles. (Issue #8, Sep 2020)

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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.

• Be Kind. Rewind is a solo journaling zine that asks you to remember a time when video stores were a huge part of your life. Launching next month on Kickstarter!
• Making a Tabletop RPG for YOUR Particular Kid is a guide for creating TTRPGs with your kids based on XP from the ENnie awarded TTRPGkids! Check it out on Crowdfundr!
• Carve your own fate with Runecairn Wardensaga Remastered, a refreshed and updated version of 2-player Norse fantasy Soulslike TTRPG Runecairn. Live now on Kickstarter!
• LAUNCHING JANUARY 30: Tabletop Gone Mad combines fill-in-the-blank scenarios with streamlined d20 mechanics to create customized one-shots that are easy to run, fun to play, and compatible across d20-based systems.
• Community Radio, a quick playing improv game inspired by Welcome to Nightvale, is crowfunding soon! Sign up for launch notification and more info!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Relics, an urban fantasy game of earth-bound angels, is in a new bundle.
• Also, dwarf clan fantasy game, Axes & Anvils, from designer Andrew Shields

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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!