A Guy Made Of Bees

I. Dear Reader,

There’s a problem with my post from last week. And I think it has to do with the guy who has bees living inside of him from Heart. If you’re not aware of it already, let me quickly explain: Heart is a fantasy game where you crawl through a living dungeon and one of the classes you can play is called the Deep Apiarist and they have magical bees living inside them.

I would bet that in 99% of games of Heart, someone plays the person with bees in. No, really, if you played a game of Heart and no one picked this person, let me know. I can’t overstate how (unjustifiably) confident I am about this – I’ve even heard Heart being described as “a game where you can play a person with bees living inside them”.

I honestly can’t tell what particular magical alchemy is happening here that makes this seem so fun. I don’t know why this idea fills people with delight. Is it because on some subconscious level we understand that every human being is a hive mind, an organic community of billions and billions that uses electricity and chemistry to trick itself into thinking that it thinks and isn’t being thought-at? No, no, probably not.

Regardless, it’s not the art or the name. It’s the concept itself that is grabbing you by your worn-out shirt collar and shaking you. And that’s design, right? The designers did that.

Which is basically a long run up to say that when I effectively said that getting you excited to play the game isn’t a design problem, I was wrong. Actually I was so wrong that even before I wrote it, I had sat down and looked at my salvage game and decided to scrap all the playbooks and re-imagine them as something that could bee as delightful as person with bees in.

Nobly avoiding bee puns,

Thomas

PS. The real moral of the story is don’t ruin a good post with a last paragraph that argues semantics. But I haven’t learned that yet.

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II. Media of the Week

Nothing this week! You know work is rough when it’s getting in the way of your main purpose, listening to podcasts.

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• Thank you to all my patrons including Paul, Camilla and Brandon! You can also support the newsletter on patreon!
• 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

News

• I didn’t share the winners of the Ennies last week but better late than never. Here’s GeekNative with the full list. I haven’t played a single one of these games except for Cloud Empress briefly but I’m excited for Valley of Flowers, which has had a lot of positive buzz around it.
• WOTC has been sending cease and desists to people showing off the new D&D player’s handbook on Youtube. The Alexandrian made a video recommending some other games in response.
• Jahmal Brown (Mad Jay Zero) is crowdfunding a new events site called TinyCon.Events to help replace sites like Warhorn that are shutting down.
• The Brandon Sanderson RPG raises more than 6 million dollars and will – inevitably, it seems – overtake Avatar to become the biggest RPG campaign ever. It’ll probably do it with half the number of backers as well because seem to be really opening their wallets for this thing.

Reviews

• Jared Rascher reviews Pendragon 6e
• Also, this review of 1984 Adventures of Indiana Jones from TSR was an interesting read. It starts by saying it has a reputation for being “one of the worst roleplaying games ever published” and ends with saying that it’s not so bad actually.

Articles

• Amidst all the glowing reviews, Knight at the Opera writes well about Mothership‘s issues.
• Lin Codega writes for Rascal News about the origins of the X-card. (Paywall)
• The Fail Forward blog has a nice post about what you can do to be a good player when it’s not “your turn” or even when you’re not playing but just sitting alongside a game: “these Chorus members occasionally (put pointedly) chiming in with bits of comic relief, descriptive narration, pointed observation or interesting schemes for otherwise stumped parties can add a lot to a session”.
• Ben Robbins talks about the effect of prefacing descriptions and actions with “I think…” versus when we drop it and just make big declarative statements.
• Pandatheist has a bittersweet post reflecting on her visit to GenCon: “In some ways this was one of the best cons I’ve ever had. In others it made me want to never go back.”
• The Molten Sulfur blog has a fun post about a Songhai prince in hiding and how that bit of history can make for a fun adventure.

From the archive:

• Sean McCoy talks about the limitations of violent encounters in RPGs: “One the easiest traps to fall into as a new referee in tabletop rpgs is to treat violence the same as video games do.” (Issue 44, June 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.

• Last Chance to Back ION Heart 🤖 A lo-fi solo mech TTRPG from the award winning creators at Parable Games 🚀 Blast off with us and get your copy on Backerkit here
• Tabula Rasa: the characters wake up without their memory, needing to figure out what they can do and who they are, and then deal with pasts they don’t remember.

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

• There’s a bundle of the core rules and 12 adventures for Mazes RPG from 9th Level Games.

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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!