Cold Starts & Campaigns

I. Spotlight

A couple of links that are interesting to put next to each other:

Martin Ralya has a very thorough post about how they’re running a zero prep (well, they do campaign prep but almost nothing session-to-session) improvised sandbox campaign with Traveller.
- While most sandbox theory comes from the OSR or older trad design, it’s nice to see someone approach from the position of “how to do this while making everything up one the spot more or less”. The answer is oracles and, you know, just making stuff up. What? You wanted more? The answer wasn’t going to be mindblowing! It’s an old conversation, what did you expect? You’ll have to read the post for the finer points and the details.
Orthopraxy blogs about trad adventure design, in response to a Questing Beast video that criticized the layout and structure of modules from Goodman Games. The author quotes a paragraph from Impossible Landscapes about how the adventure required you to eat it, chew it, and then internalize it. Using this metaphor of “eating a book”, the post argues that there is a pleasure in consuming texts.
- Again, it’s the olde “reading versus referencing” conversation about what a book can and should be. But it’s useful to surface this once again as it is a conversation that every book in the RPG space might have with itself.

II. Media of the Week

Nothing this week!

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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

On the Thought Crimes’ newsletter, Quinn Murphy publishes his key note speech about TTRPGs and Hip Hop. Don’t go in expecting a graduation lecture. It’s an introduction to how these two mediums have more in common than you might think. It’s FUN to hear from someone who cares about both.
TTRPG Fans has two posts sharing the news of what to expect from Crows, an early-development dungeoncrawler from MCDM, and Blades ’68, the imminently-crowdfunding expansion for Blades in the Dark that trades grunge for classic rock.
- I’ve played Blades ’68 and it’s great. If you like the original, I think you’ll like this too.
- I’m a bit disappointed with the news about Crows because I was hoping for a lighter version of Draw Steel but I feel like we might be getting a different game. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s easy enough to make a lighter version of Draw Steel — I should actually just read it.
On tumblr, Talen Lee writes a nice post about David Prokopetz’s Eat God, which is about weird muppets trying to well, eat god.
As the Bloggies continue, Clayton Notestine rounds up the winners across all the categories in the previous years.
There’s a TTRPG For That makes a cool list of games aimed at kids in grade school.
Age of Ravens posted their deep dive into Mutants and Masterminds 2e as well a guide for 3e for new players.

IV. What am I playing?

We played the first session of Gradient Descent via Psi*Run. Gradient Descent is a mini-megadungeon by Luke Gearing for Mothership. It’s an achievement of form factor, fitting in a giant, sprawling space in just 60 pages. It’s core question is a version of ‘what maketh a man’. If androids can be made that are functionally the same as people, what does that mean for humanity? It’s an almost 20th century question, something that people wrote about in ’60s sci-fi novels. I’m keen to see if it feels good in play.

Psi*Run is one of the classic storygames from Meguey Baker. It’s about amnesiac mutants running from unknown men in black. It’s famous for being the primary vehicle for the very satisfying Otherkind dice mechanic, where you roll and then allocate dice to outcomes. It’s a bit like Citizen Sleeper the videogame if you’ve played that.

I chose this combination because there’s a suggestion in Gradient Descent for starting players off in a cryopod without their memories. It seemed to fit well and I was excited about the odd combination. But I knew — and this proved to be true — that the “you start the game with no memories” is the coldest of starts.

If you imagine a hot start as being thrown into the action in media res with action and explosions happening right away, a cold start is when things take a while to warm up. Players can feel lost when trying to decide how to roleplay so actions are tentative. We only get to do 15-30 minutes of actually playing so I’m not worried yet but I’m hoping after our first full session of play, we’ll be fine. Psi*Run as a system should do its job and get us going.

V. 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.

Fellow creators! Get some art for your next release without resorting to DEMONIC AI. My creepy hand-drawn ink illustrations are SUPER CHEAP and come with a very generous Creative Commons license.
Archmage’s Gate is a standalone, open-world solo adventure RPG gamebook. Compatible with 5e & OSR.
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This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

Painted Wastelands, a dangerous, pastel setting for Old School Essentials.
A historic archive of Strike Force by Aaron Allston, including the original 1988 superhero adventure and thousands of pages of notes from his 22 year campaign.
And alongside, a bundle of Champions 6e.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.