Card Making & More not-Daggerheart Talk

I. Spotlight and Media of the Week

After the People Make Games video about Jerry’s map, I’ve become quite taken with the idea of making stuff that’s card-sized. This has nothing to do with RPGs but I feel like there’s a huge overlap in terms of who will enjoy this kind of activity.

First, there’s the idea of “artist trading cards” which are card-sized collages (or anything else) that you trade or give away to friends or fellow artists. If you buy from artists or you’re an artist yourself, you’ve probably heard of these but I had not and it was a wonderful little peek into a cool tradition.

Inspired directly by Jerry’s prompt cards, this video is about making cards that are explicitly prompts for creative projects or hobby activities. I think that you could probably make even cooler prompts than the ones in this list but it’s a guide to getting started.

I think one of the cool things for me to do is to make a custom oracle deck, as James D’Amato talked about on Dice Exploder a long time ago.

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II. Links of the Week

Articles, Essays

Thursday Garreau writes an excellent list of Mothership recommendations with separate categories for short scenarios, campaigns, settings, and more.
Staying on Mothership, their new sourcebook Wages of Sin seems to be a hit. I’m not a fan of the concept of a book about bounty-hunting at all (even as I’m completely sure that McCoy, Gearing, and all have done their best to avoid the more distasteful implications) but Valeria’s review did make me perk up.
On Old Men Running The World, there’s a nice discussion about Tim Denee’s free game of restaurant drama, Every Second Counts. It’s a trimmed version of the Agon system with a timer that makes for tense one-shots.
Idle Cartulary reviews Patrick Stuart and Amanda Lee Franck’s The Doom of the Dark, another instance of the gloomy fairy tale adventure having a real moment.
Sarah Doom writes about “experting while female” discussing the ways that women get pushback even in areas where their expertise should be obvious: “I have examples of players challenging my authority as a GM at conventions and at home, including on a game I made.”
If you’re running the Kala Mandala adventures, these after action reports might be useful. Tomasz has done almost all of them that have come out and does a very granular level of GM advice.

Misc

On Rascal, the staff at Rowan Rook & Decard have unionized despite having no real complaints with the management because unions are good to have, just in case.
We talk about actual play like it’s purely a digital thing that occasionally happens online but here’s a cool example of a Scottish group Tartan Tabletop who every night are playing a D&D-themed one-hour comedy show in a theatre. Because it’s a game, it’s a different show every night, which is pretty cool. (via Geeknative)
There’s a TTRPG For That has a cool list of Fae and fairy themed RPGs.
Not RPGs but: If you’re a fan of my articles about tabletop RPG cultures around the world, you’ll probably like this collection of mostly video game histories from different countries.

III. What am I playing?

Following on from last week, I spoke to my players over text about how we’re not really using the rules for Daggerheart. They’re responses were really interesting. I’ll paraphrase what they said but I can quote what I asked them:

When we meet next time, I want to ask how this campaign feels different from previous games — not content-wise necessarily because as [player] said, it’s a very dense story which has more to do with this urban “pressure cooker” vibe. This game has been the one where we use “the rules” the least. Is this noticeable at all compared to other campaigns? Do you feel more limited or more free than usual in your ability to act on the world?

This group is pretty diverse in terms of what they like (which is normal for gaming groups where you draw from your friends) so they had different things to say. But in general, they have felt the difference primarily in the lack of clear ways to engage with the world and generate predictable outcomes. There are also no support for thinking through their characters. But that said, they’re liking the challenge of navigating the world solely through the fiction and have basically figured this style of play out as we’ve played over the last few months. It’s started to feel freeing, rather than limiting.

(Do they like it enough to keep doing it? I don’t know, we’ll find out when we’re done with this game and figure out what we’re doing next.)

There’s a thing that happens in games in general: You’re the player, you’re the hacker, you respond to every challenge with some sophisticated version of “I hack”, and then a few sessions in, you’re confronted by a problem that you can’t hack your way out of. Suddenly, you’re a little unmoored, hopefully in a good way in the sense that you feel challenged.

This campaign is like that but the whole game is problems that you can’t hack. There’s nothing you can definitely do, there’s nothing to really even be good at. This overlaps with OSR play a lot but it’s probably closer to what S John Ross refers to as high-trust trad. Because unlike OSR play which often centers on cleverness and problem solving, this is really about character and values. It’s fun but intense.

I want to be clear that this isn’t about Daggerheart anymore. It’s about the way my players barely use any character abilities and because of the specific campaign I’m running. We’re off the map.

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.

Virtual Battle Mat: the simplest VTT online. Drop a map, place tokens, play. Voice and video built in. No rules engine, any system. Feels like a real table. vbm.games

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

Inkwell’s NPC Portrait Decks, 700 pieces of character art that don’t use AI.
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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. 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.