#101: Messiness and Mysteries
I. Dear Reader,
Just a quick update from me this week: I’ve been playtesting For The Other City, my hack of For The Queen that is about noir mysteries that stretch across two cities that are interdimensionally stacked on top of each other. Like For The Queen, you play the game by drawing cards and answering the prompts on them.
But I want to talk about the ending. In terms of fiction, I think it feels like the best mysteries are the ones that wrap up really neatly. But when it comes to games, I think neatness is a bad goal to aim for - messiness, sloppiness, is almost unavoidable in actual play and so I embrace it.
I still haven’t nailed the ending procedure of For The Other City but I know what I’m aiming for: an ending that is as much about getting answers as it as about questions that were left unanswered and contradictions that were unsolved. You’d think this would be unsatisfying but it isn’t - turns out answering some questions while ignoring the various questions that those answers spawn is perfectly easy and fun to do!
(Once the game is finished, you can let me know if it works for you!)for
Yours developmentally,
Thomas
II. Listen of the Week
Hessan’s County is a Youtube channel focused on small indie games with videos. They’re doing a series on SRDs and I liked how simply they explained the Breathless SRD.
On the Ludology podcast, an interview with Dan Thurot, who as a boardgame critic has a lot of stuff about writing about games.
III. Links of the Week
On the Gauntlet blog, an interview about Broken, an RPG where you explore how a tragic relationship breaks by breaking ten physical objects in your house.
The biggest of big news: Roll20 and DriveThruRPG are merging together. It’s a consolidation of two behemoths of the tabletop RPG industry. It’s unclear what advantages the consumer will get except access to their DTRPG content directly in their Roll20 accounts but maybe I’m wrong.
(There’s some - potentially unfounded - speculation that this is a sign that Wizards of the Coast might be taking back their licensing deals with the two companies as they take more and more things in-house.)
A short post on the Possum Creek Games blog about how mechanics can affect a game even if they’re never used.
On Gnomestew, an interesting post about how “why” is the most important question in your game world.
On the Alexandrian, there’s a new series about how to run cities and urban adventures. Here’s part one and part two.
Mythoi is a fun newsletter that features folklore that you can use in your roleplaying games.
There’s sales on everywhere it seems - discounts at the Exalted Funeral store, the Evil Hat store, SoulMuppet store. Good time to buy books, I guess!
IV. Small Ads
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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