I. Dear Reader,
It’s time for one of my favourite posts to write every year. Here is every game I’ve played in the first half of 2024:
Series
Fathoms Deep (as GM): Let’s get my own game out of the way first: I’ve ran about 11 playtest sessions of Fathoms Deep, a game about a community of salvagers aboard a living ship in a flooded world. The game is my big project. If I was studying game design, this would be my masters’ thesis. It’s got a lot of parts – action-packed underwater dives using my flavour of card-based Forged in the Dark, a cool map where you move your ship around, downtime scenes, campaign arcs based on survival, hope and salvation, etc. There’s a lot of tinkering left to do and I am in no hurry to finish because, deep breath, it’s about the journey! Like in the game!
Pasion de la Pasiones (as GM): We took the spanish telenovela game and set it in a X-men-like school. Sadly we didn’t get to play past the first couple sessions but it’s a slam dunk concept and a great game. My game of the year for 2023 if I remember correctly!
The Wildsea (as GM): This was the big campaign that marked the first half of the year in my (online) home game. It has a lot of overlap with my own game, Fathoms Deep – both are pirate-games-without-pirates. But Wildsea has a very different tone – it’s optimistic high fantasy in the vein of some of the best D&D 5e games I’ve played. I would easily recommend it as a game for people who are playing 5e and want something to easily switch to. The world and setting is lovely – a solid thematic core garnished with a variety of fun ideas, great flavour, and lots of stunning, evocative art. I had so much fun playing zany characters to match the vibe of the zany world. The system isn’t my cup of tea for a variety of complicated reasons but this is a fantastic achievement, especially since it was the designer’s first game afaik!
Rich Kid Problems: Last year, I played Capitalites by Sam Mui and this year, we returned to that classic genre of rich people behaving badly with this game by Maria Mison. It’s a light storygame – improv heavy but good fun.
Last Fleet (as GM): We’re one month into this Battlestar Galatica-inspired game by Josh Fox. It’s far future space opera with humanity on the edge of extinction – all inter-personal politics and feelings in the face of almost certain doom. I love this game already. It meshes perfectly with my directorial GM style and helps me serve up some fantastic moments. It feels like every session, I am throwing some impossible decision or loyalty-threatening revelation at my players who pick up the ball and run with the ball unflinchingly. It definitely helps to think about it as prestige TV and frame scenes using that language – lots of walking and talking in corridors, that sort of thing. The characters aren’t on the same side, there aren’t missions – just agendas and obstacles. Will write about some of the cool design stuff going on when the campaign is done.
One Shots
Okay, got to rush through these!
This Ship Is No Mother (as GM): I ran 4 great games of my little lets-make-Mothership-a-storygame game. These were mostly at online cons or things like that. I love playing this game.
Wizards Grimoire and Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands: Getting to play two games from the Bakers was a real treat. Wizard’s Grimoire is the start of a series of games that flip the GM-player relationship in great ways. You should check it out. Firebrands is a game of daring mech pilots told in dramatic vignettes where the less you force a narrative, the better!
Steal away Jordan and Tales of a Fisherman’s Wife: These are two games from designer, Julia Ellingboe. I think Steal Away Jordan is my favourite of the two. Even as you wrestle with the discomfort (if you’re not Black) of playing Black slaves in the American south, it’s still a game about being heroes with a lot of delight and joy at the heart of it! Fisherman’s Wife is a game of Japanese ghost stories with tentacle porn on the cover. I’m not sure what else to say!
Navathem’s End (as GM): This game by Pam Punzalan and Sin Posadas fits well with Wildsea on this list because it feels like an alternate take on the genre that is D&D 5e. It’s that light-hearted brand of heroic fantasy but with a different ethos – less colonial, more grounded in community.
Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast: A book which is probably as fun to read as play. You probably have heard about it enough but if not, go listen to the Yes Indie’d episode about it.
After the Mind, the World Again: This is a Disco Elysium inspired game where there’s one player and four GMs who play facets of a detective’s mind. It’s not really a one shot game – definitely takes 4 hours or more but we rushed the ending and got somewhere. Also, free!
City of Mist (as player): I always joke about wanting to read this game but bailing as soon I as open the PDF to see that it has more than 500 pages. The new version has cut half of the system out so maybe I had a point.
The Hunted (as player): This is a slick one-shot game – Forged in the Dark folk horror in the vein of Blair Witch Project and the like. Easy to play and run, would do again.
Swords without Master (as GM): This game should’ve inspired a whole design lineage. The text is a bit tricky to parse but if you get a chance to play this, you should take it!
Damn the Man, Save the Music: If you like Empire Records and don’t mind doing some improv, this game is great.
Cloud Empress (as player): The giant psychic cicadas are a great linchpin for a setting. If you play the game, head straight for them.
There was a bit more here and there. I already wrote about playing older games like Metamorphosis Alpha, Bunnies & Burrows and Dallas RPG on here. There was also a lot of playtesting including a very fun session of Protect the Child by Mint about a found family of monsters looking after a child a la Monsters Inc. Overall, another very satisfying half-year.
Yours contently,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- On Yes Indie’d, I sit down with Tom McGrenery, game designer and co-host of Fear of a Black Dragon to talk about the term “fantasy non-fiction” and how it can illuminate some of the principles of old school fantasy or OSR games. It’s a good conversation!
- AA Voigt has a nice video about two games from Kevin Nguyen, They Took Our War and Before the Boats, which uses the games to mainly talk about their subject matter – the American atrocities in Vietnam. Definitely relevant to some of the stuff we discussed on the Yes Indie’d episode.
- Theory From The Closet was an early RPG theory podcast and the backlog is available on the internet archive. I haven’t listened to most of it but it’s an interesting find for anyone who wants to do some fishing.
- 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.
III. Links of the Week
- Ennie Award nominees have been announced.
- One of the things I noticed was that it doesn’t seem as North America dominated this time. Of the Product of the Year nominees, two are from Italy (very cool!), three from the UK, and while CBR+PNK is from a US publisher, the designer Emanoel Melo is from Brazil, I believe.
- GAMA’s Horizons Fellowship for marginalized tabletop designers in the US/Canada is open for applications.
- There’s been a data breach at Roll20 but there’s no expected action from you as passwords weren’t a part of it.
- Mint from There’s a TTRPG for That writes about why designers should play games that they think they won’t like.
From the archive:
- The Indie Game Reading Club had a nice breakdown of what we expect from rules: consensus & resolution, learning, facilitating experiences. (Issue 37, April 2021)
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.
- Less than 2 weeks until ION Heart launches on Backerkit. [Follow the launch of our cozy solo mech TTRPG here and we’ll give you the QuickStart to try out. 🚀
- Grimwild is D&D heroic fantasy meets a fluid cinematic ruleset. Low GM prep, no mechanical slog, pointcrawl exploration, and lots of creative freedom. Back it now!
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
- The Fading Suns bundle returns with all the core books of this space fantasy game from Ulysses Spiele.
- There’s also a new bundle with a clutch of new supplements and settings for the game.
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!
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