Blogs & Mysteries

I. Spotlight

The Bloggies begin and end in a whirlwind. The winners for the main categories have been announced. Here are my favorites among them:

In Advice, it’s Writing Rooms in Pairs which is Sean McCoy’s technique for populating dungeons.
In Critique, its How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons, which is the start of series on Jaquays’ influence.
And of course, Mapping the Blogosphere is a cool project.

I also enjoyed this critique of the Bloggies categories that asks: where is the poetry? Given that these change each year, it’s very possible that next year’s event incorporates something like this.

(I think it will always be a dungeon-y focused thing because that’s the focus on both sides of the equation: what the audience is interested in and what’s being blogged about. It’s a cool way to follow that scene.)

II. Media of the Week

Quinns Quest is back with a review of, gasp, a PDF? People said it couldn’t be done! Anyway, it’s Public Access from The Gauntlet. (Can’t embed the video because it’s age-restricted, I think.)

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.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

It Came From The Bookshelf reviews another supplement for Mage the Awakening and comes away baffled: “If we could subpoena the emails of White Wolf, circa 2005-2009, we would see a conspiracy at the highest levels, where the people in charge of the editorial direction of the line knowingly, and with malice of forethought, pursued a calculated strategy to make the overall cosmology of the game as janky and unpleasant as possible.”
- I find these reviews funny and I hope you read them in the same light.
This is thorough overview of the way different PbtA games do “bonds” or generally try to connect the character together through relationships.
Jeeyon Shim has a fun post about worldbuilding by creating a glossary of words and what they mean in the setting.
Burn After Running has a nice breakdown of three different ways we read RPGs: The Daydream Skim, The Proper Read,The Prep Reference.

Opportunities

The IGDN Tabletop Diversity Foundation is looking to support four marginalized and underrepresented designers through mentorship and grants.
The Diana Jones Award for Emerging Designer is open for nominations for new designers (i.e. have not published before 2023).

IV. What am I playing?

I had my first moment of frustration with Gradient Descent this week. It’s nothing to do with the game really, more a by-product of dungeon exploration and PDF design. I had the party split up and go into separate rooms. This led to me furiously flipping through two sections and then one of the sections referenced an NPC that was sketched out in another section — so now I was getting lost between three different sections.

I also fell prey to an interesting thought pattern that was interesting to observe. Because it’s a dungeon with multiple entry points, the players might be moving “forward” but as the GM you have to flip “backwards” to a previous page. This is a very obvious thing to happen because it’s not a linear dungeon and so the book is sketched out in one direction but that’s not necessarily how people will move through it. I shouldn’t have been surprised but in play, I wasn’t prepared and getting getting confused. It’s a small thing, partly due to my own inexperience with running dungeons. But it’s also not a skill I expect to get much better at either!

I’m enjoying this game — the characters just learned of the central tension of the game, the existence of androids that are functionally human in every biological way but are controlled by Monarch, the AI that designed them. They immediately have to consider whether they are such an android, whether their friends are androids, and so on.

The whole experience of this space has been weird and surreal to them. They’re being treated strangely — sometimes friendly, sometimes threateningly, never getting straight answers. There’s a building sense of “something is up and we’re going to find out what it is”. The problem is of course I’m starting to worry is whether there is a good answer to that mystery or not.

So far, the answer to “why did these characters wake up in deep freeze with their memories wiped” has been “Monarch is running some weird experiment”. Monarch is running hundreds of experiments all the time, so it’s very plausible that this is one of them. But what is the experiment about? Something to do with infiltrator androids but I’m not sure what. I am to some extent playing to find out that answer.

This isn’t how some people like doing it — they want a concrete answer. But I’m not that person. I’m interested in keeping that question open and seeing whether my players force the game to resolve that tension or not. The joy of using Psi*Run is that the players answer their own questions about their backstory and discovering their backstory is the key driver of their exploration. They’ll need my help to do it but it’s going to be a collaboration and I’m keen to find out their half.

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.

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Play Fearless: Greatest Crits — curated RPG zine of table-tested GM insights shaped by actual play and lessons the hard way. Small print run, PDF available. One week left.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

Downcrawl and Skycrawl are two well-reviewed setting toolkits from Aaron A Reed, bundled with some adventures.
The giant hexcrawl Wolves Upon The Coast as well as the poetic sourcebooks &Monsters, &Treasure, some of Luke Gearing’s best work.

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.