#124: Our City Needs A Name

Also, the form for the itch roundup is ready!

I. Dear Reader,

Merry Christmas, folks! We’re continuing our game of i'm sorry did you say street magic, a citybuilding game. Last week, I asked folks to submit adjectives that will define our city.

The game's rules say we need 3 adjectives - just enough to give us a sense of our city without it becoming a straitjacket. We want to discover the city as we play.

But we received more than 40 submissions! So I see my job as sieving through these submissions, seeing the emergent patterns, and picking the 3 adjectives that I think are most inspiring when combined together.

What patterns did I see? People are seeing a city that is ancient, crumbling, eroding, maybe even sundered or inundated. They're seeing a city that is vertical, looming, labyrinthine. They're seeing a city that is dense, vibrant, colourful, proud, beautiful. They're seeing something inter-dimensional, artificial, technomagical. Maybe its sustainable, solar, growing, or potentially alive. They're seeing a city that is hidden or snowbound. They're seeing a city that is under threat - besieged or occuppied or teetering on the edge of some other disaster.

This is a lot - and a city can be all of these things. And if you want to channel any of these adjectives, please go ahead. But for the purpose of clarity, here's the three adjectives and the pitch for the city:

It is stratified, clockwork and canaled.

What does this mean?

Imagine that when people say time is a river, they mean it literally. Imagine the river of time was routed into canals that spread through a great city. Imagine this city as tall, built upon layers and layers of different communities and neighborhoods. Imagine these canals entered the city at the very top and then slipped and flowed all the way down through the city's many layers until it escaped and found its way into the sea of chaos. The river of time brings odd gifts and sometimes even odder things wash up on the shores of chaos. Some people call the city a giant water clock ticking up to some great event. But people who live there just call it home.

I hope that sounds appealing. If you want to see the website I’m building to host all the responses, you can do that here (there’s a full list of all the adjectives there).

So this week, what we really need is a name for the city! Please comment below.

But names are hard, so instead, if you have an idea for a neighborhood, you can go ahead and respond that. Every neighborhood needs a name, a 2-3 line description, and a true name.¹ Read the footnote for more info about true names but also don't stress too much about them, we'll discuss it more next week.

Hope you are as excited by this city of ours as I am!

Yours adjective-fully,

Thomas

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Also, as mentioned before, from 2023, I’ll be doing monthly round-ups of new indie games on itch.io. If you release a game in January, then please submit it through this form! There’s some FAQ-style info as well. If you have any more questions, let me know!

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II. Media of the Week

• Shannon Appelcline does a nice review of roleplaying games in 2022 with the Dieku Games podcast.

• John Wick talks about Freemarket, a really intriguing diceless transhumanist game from 2010.

• If you’re interested in the Zine Month initiative, a new video reveals that it will happen again in February 2023 as promised. The focus will be on sharing and building up projects that don’t use Kickstarter though Kickstarter projects will be allowed. There will also be lots of workshops starting from January.

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Meguey Baker continues her series of using thread and fabric to do worldbuilding.

• Yochai Gal, designer of Cairn, has a guide to writing a setting up on his site. He boils everything down to: Theme, Terrain, Details, and Factions.

• On the traverse fantasy blog, an interesting visualization of how various OSR games compare to each other and old version of D&D.

• Ostrich Monkey Games has a nice designer deep dive into their game, Layers of Unreality, which is a really neat sourcebook for generating a weird depthcrawl for Liminal Horror.

• Judd Karlman shares his mashup of Into the Odd for use with Tombs of the Crystal Frontier by Gus L.

Resources

• Jean La Verne has published Affinity Publisher templates for product mockups of RPG books.

News

• WOTC announces changes to the OGL which might mean that the biggest D&D publishers like Kobold Press will start having to pay royalties.

• Chaosium announces that it won’t use AI art in its products.

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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.

• Nothing this week!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• A big bundle of 13th Age, one of the best D&D replacements out there, including core ruels, adventure paths, bestiaries and more.

• There’s also a bundle of The Fantasy Trip which contains the legacy edition which is already a massive book!

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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.

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!

Thanks for subscribing and take care out there!

1. True Names are the unique twist of caro asercion’s game. This is what the game says, “Every Neighborhood has a magic all its own. To confer a true name, come up with two or three descriptive, sensory images that paint a clear picture of the Neighborhood in your mind… Dizzying mirror-glass windows, cobblestone boulevards, a funicular railway, sidewalk patios, burnt coffee, painted fingers, a forever sunset, hushed secrets, an abandoned dream: any of these could be facets of a true name.”