#18: Dreaming About 2021
Dear reader,
As the wine-dark sea of 2020 recedes from the shoreline of our lives, I assume that you too are sighing with relief. Nothing changes when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st and yet, I shall feel triumphant nonetheless. The reason I bring this up - other than for an excuse to say wine-dark, which was possibly Ancient Greek for blue - is to say that this newsletter is powering down for the rest of the year. Not going full radio silence, rather it’s being turned down from high heat to a low simmer - if I can mix metaphors. Till January, it’ll just be the links round-up. Which is most of the utility this newsletter offers anyway!
Cheers,
Thomas
I. Dreaming About 2021
There’s no greater way of making a fool of yourself than making lists for the future so with that in mind, here’s a list.
Community Organizing
Co-Ops: After tweeting about RPG co-ops, I had really good conversations with Liam of Sandy Pug Games, who runs his outfit as an informal co-op, and Yochai Gal, who’s name might be familiar to you if you participated in the communities around Dungeon World or Into the Odd. Yochai has been a part of the founding of at least 2 full-fledged tech co-ops so the person with the most experience that I know at least.
I think co-ops are a drastically superior economic and social model for most of work. But they’re hard. I mean, it requires some measure of trust and pro-active communication and those things can be scary. But I take some comfort that even playing a game together requires that to some extent. Every good thing does. It’s not really about RPGs, it’s about everything else.Itch.io: Itch is a storefront but it’s also a community. People have tried to organize around it before. There was a whole sub-forum for tabletop games created after work by Orion D Black and others. But the sub-forum died - for what I assume are the usual reasons. I have no interest in recreating something like that. I’d like to write more about Itch and create a resource for publishing on Itch, especially around the tagging system.
Also, I think that Itch Jams could be the basis for an alternative festival-like event that replaces the Ennies. Every year that I’ve been online, people complain about the Ennies bitterly. They’re awards and people hate awards almost as much as they need the boost that awards can give them. Last year, people talked a lot about alternatives. I’d like to contribute to one of those alternatives next year, try to get it off the ground. Not sure what kind of labour is involved, but if someone does, I’d like to help.The Play-by-Post Guide: This is just… We told the r/pbp community that we’d do it around June last year so the very least I can do is finish it before June next year.
Playing Regular Games: This year, I played most games over text and I enjoyed it but I need to get over my shyness and start playing over voice or video. I look forward to playing my first Belonging outside Belonging game. But my big, big wish is to run Ultraviolent Grasslands (using Into the Odd) or Band of Blades (I still haven’t done that.)
Designing Games: Ah, well, you know how that goes.
II. Watch of the Week
My panel on Metatopia is now live on Youtube. In it, I dunk on authenticity and quote Borges. BJ Recio talks about Cthulhu and how it’s more snack-y than scary. Lots of fun stuff.
Also because that’s self-promotion, here’s an extra video:
Ahead of the Dragonmeet convention, Epistolary Richard asked a number of people to contribute audio, video or written messages where they:
describe the indie game they most enjoyed this year,
an exciting trend that they see, and
a game they are looking forward to.
Lots of great suggestions and generally a fun watch.
III. Links of the Week
Articles and Reviews
A review of a Disposable Heroes, a colourful card-based PbtA game.
Indie Game Reading Club talks about ‘Deciding What To Care About’ from your character’s point of view.
“I’m not certain as to why, but pen-and-paper roleplaying games are referred to as tabletalk RPGs, or TRPGs, in Japan. It apparently refers to how folks talk at the table and likely refers to how a lot of early TRPGs were more theater of the mind”, and more with 10 Things I learned about Japanese Tabletalk RPGs.
“Avoid public looking-for-game forums like Roll20's and Reddit's r/lfg like the plague. They're impersonal, indirect, and chaotic. They're the most publicly facing ways to find games online and are consequently flooded by clueless, flaky people with minimal investment in actually getting a game going” via Playing RPGs Online 101. The key takeaway is that you should find the discord servers for specific games. If you want to play Masks, find the Masks server and look for games there. It’s good advice.
The youtube channel Collabs Without Permission summarizes 26 zines in around 20 minutes. It’s chaotic and whimsical, definitely not a serious review so temper expectations. But if you like Troika, there’s like a dozen small pamphlets and zines here that you may like. If you don’t like Troika, not sure how much you’ll get out of this. Spearwitch is a RPG bookseller, which along with Floating Chair Club and now, Monkey’s Paw Games in Canada is a trifecta of small-scale online shops for you to buy physical copies of indie games if you live in North America.
News
Jon Petersen, author of Playing At The World, announced a new book called the Elusive Shift which is about the early (very early) history of the term ‘roleplaying game’ and how people explored the meaning of this new type of game.
Discussions
How do you transition between socializing and playing the game? A nice discussion about the awkward tone-shift between conversational catch-up and the game session. Nothing new here, just a reminder that these messy social questions are something that everyone wrestles with.
RPG Theory
Liber Ludorum puts together an excellent directory of resources for those interested in RPG theory and history. Something to bookmark. Also, I love the commitment to titles that baffle and tease as much as they explain. Big part of the blog’s charm at this point!
IV. Small Ads
This section contains sponsored links and advertisements.
Weird Wild West is a free rules-lite RPG set in the American wild west. Each player has a bit of magic and lots of reasons to use it. Have fun!
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This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer. Happy to be here.
If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. My game, the Spider and the City, is a part of a large bundle of indie games - 25 games, 70% off - check it out here. Lots of fun games including Epidiah Ravachol’s The Dread Geas of Duke Vulku and Diego Old Skull’s Lost in the Deep.
Thanks for subscribing and take care out there!