New Games on Itch in Oct & Nov 2024

I. Dear Reader

Welcome to another itch.io round up. If this is the first post like this that you’re seeing: every two months I highlight around ten new games. Most of these games are small in scope and I usually have not played or even read them. I’m often just picking them based on whats caught my idiosyncratic eye. I hear about most of these games through this form.

1. May You Fish In Interesting Times: You play as anthropomorphic birds going on a fishing trip, who also happened to be rebels in a failed revolution. A cosy fishing game about bonding over shared past trauma. (WH Arthur)
2. Torchlite: Pulpy, high fantasy game based on Cortex Lite. It’s free to read despire being 200+ pages, full colour art. (Xine)
3. Jude’s World: A solo, tarot-based journaling game in which a precocious preteen struggles to reunite their estranged parents. (Button Kin Games)
4. The World We Left Behind: Play as astronauts trekking across an alien planet. You create the planet and discover/author its mysteries. GM-less or solo. (Blinking Birch Games)
5. Cold Metal: A setting for investigative FitD game, Bump in the Dark. Get a bunch of mysteries around the arrival of digital technology to the original 90s setting. (Mynar Lenahan)
6. Lo! Thy Dread Empire: A tactical wargame infused narrative RPG sensibilities. Fight the skeleton war against the death cult of capitalism. (Tanya Floaker)
7. XENO: A Mexican minimalist TTRPG in which you take on the role of a terrifying alien creature sent to Earth to atone for your sins. Ultraviolence/body horror. (Caligaes)
8. Eureka: The beta for an investigative urban fantasy game with an original system.
9. 60 Years in Space: A project to make a “realistic” hard scifi RPG that ends up being 2000 pages long. (Half A Press)
10. Darkest Dungeon 2: This is a fan project that combines the world and lore of the video game with the rules of Torchbearer 2e. Free/non-commercial. (Rolling Intentions)

I’m not sure how useful these round-ups are to readers anymore and as the newsletter goes into its end-of-year reimagination mode, I’m considering whether I continue to do this. If you have thoughts, let me know.

Yours, in December mode,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Quinns Quest, the last episode in season one is a review of Slugblaster. It’s a very positive review, focusing on many things including the Beats system, which provides a high-level character arc for each playbook. The discussion online somehow became about a stray line by Quinns how mechanics like this are welcome because “we’re not good at stories”. I wish people discussed the game, instead of this vague statement where we can’t even agree on the meaning of “we”, “good” or “stories”.

• Matt Colville makes a video about The Elusive Shift, probably my favourite book on RPGs. He reads some excerpts and discusses some of the key arguments the book makes about the early history and debates.

• This is a really powerful documentary about the video game’s industry censorship and silence on the ongoing Palestinian genocide. It gets into long sections about the military entertainment complex and representation of Arab cultures in games.

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• We got 3 new patrons last week, which is lovely. Thank you to Laurel, George and Kenning!
• As always, you too can 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

Rascal

• There was some discussion last week about Questing Beast and his acceptance of sponsorship from a really hateful publisher. Chase Carter wrote about his response of “no politics”.
• I wrote a fun piece of culture crit about evil hive minds in games and scifi and how roleplaying groups are a kind of hive mind already.
• Lin Codega returns to Rascal for a moment with this article about how RPGs influence their work in an LA writer’s room.

Articles, Reviews

• For Polygon, Rowan Zeoli wrote about two new games from Anamnesis‘ designer Sam Leigh, recommends a tabletop game for fans of STALKER , and how DND Beyond will be publishing Free League’s 5e version of LOTR.
• The Philippine Gamer is doing a Let’s Read of the Electric State, the new game based on Simon Stalenhag’s art.
• Leon Barillaro has an interesting post about adventure structures.
• Explorer’s Design has a nice introduction to typography for new layout designers.
• This piece from the Traipse blog about how your worldbuilding choices should be either 1, 10, or 100000 pairs well with an older piece from Explorer’s Design about what the numbers of 1, 2, 3, 4 work in dungeon design.
• Another banger from the OSR blogosphere is 50 magical paradigms or where does magic from in the world.
• Forgot to share this: This is a great post from DIY & Dragons about the various OSR bloggers who invented new fantastical past epochs to make up the prehistory of fantasy worlds.
• Stumbled across this: Lisa Padol reviewed Masks of Nyarlathotep for the New York Review of Science Fiction in 2014.

From the archive:

• Trilemma wrote a very good post about how to make a playground for intrigue: “For intrigue to happen, you need multiple factions in a context where overt violence is impractical (disastrous, strongly discouraged, or incredibly expensive).” (Issue 72, December 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.

• Who killed Brianna Pilgrim? Solve a murder and prevent a war in Orgy of the Blood Leeches, a deluxe campaign adventure for Mothership 1e, now on BackerKit Crowdfunding as part of Mothership Month.

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

• The Heart and Spire bundles return! So much great art and writing.
• Get Swyvers, DIE, Exiles, and Pasion de la Pasiones (among others) in this indie cornucopia bundle!

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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!