#23: Games and Worlds and Stories 🗺

And I’m back! I have emerged from the world of work and MS Word to discover that this newsletter reached 400 subscribers last week which is a nice little milestone to celebrate - and you’ve got to celebrate when you can. Thanks to everyone who shared this around!

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I. Psst. You Ever Try … Worldbuilding Games?

You might call them toolkit games or gamifying prep but they’re a genre of their own in TTRPGs. Games that are about slowly inventing details about people or places, accumulating these little nuggets of information together into a glorious, patchwork vision. There is a common genre staple in monster fiction which I am going to masterfully describe as “parts of a thing combine to form a bigger, scarier thing”. Not in a Voltron-sense where perfectly-designed mechanisms interlock beautifully. More like a blob monster - maybe one made of garbage or human bodies or ahhh, spiders! Well, that’s my convoluted metaphor for how these games make story out of lore. Say what you want about lore but nerds love it. I don’t really know why but we do!

Which is why they’re great for introducing new players to the hobby - especially people who really enjoy fantasy or sci-fi novels. I have a friend who doesn’t really enjoy games of any kind - not boardgames, not videogames, nothing. But he loves fantasy novels and we played an excellent session of Microscope together - which he enjoyed! We made a sand-blasted world where djinn and dragons were opposing elemental forces that kept reality in balance.

They’re also apparently great to pull out when a session looks like it’s going to be cancelled because one or two players might not be able to make it. In a blogpost about combining Microscope Union, Mork Borg, and Curse of Strahd, the author talks about how a cancelled session led them to playing Microscope Union, a game about building a family history, to flesh out the lore of one particular character in their campaign. I really like the general idea of spending cancelled sessions like this.

This week, I also caught an interview with designer Taylor Crumrine on Draw Your Dice, an interview podcast. On the podcast, they discuss Beak, Feather and Bone, a map-labeling game - each player represents a city faction and takes turns describing specific buildings in the city map based on prompts. It’s one of a whole suite of recent games that come explicitly out of the idea that ‘prep can be play’. (Bonus: I was really intrigued by the point that Taylor makes in the podcast that trad games like 5e have a vested interested in a culture of unrealistic expectations around DM responsibilities, specifically around pre-prepared, concrete worldbuilding. It helps them sell adventures and splatbooks under the promise of ‘doing the work for you’.)

If you want a podcast that does this in action, check out All My Fantasy Children - which uses a new worldbuilding game every episode to build out one part of a shared world. Lots of recommendations in their back catalogue.

I think these sorts of games also offer a great place to start designing a game if you’re interested in that. They’re explicitly about conversation and asking questions. You can spend your time thinking about very specific prompts rather than rules per se.

But, and this is my last note link on the subject, on their worldbuilding newsletter, Kaelan discusses some potential pitfalls of collaborative worldbuilding games. Might be useful to players and designers.

(Photo by Himesh Kumar Behera on Unsplash)

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II. Listen of the Week

Apart from the interview with Taylor Crumline linked above, I really enjoyed the latest episode of Daydreaming about Dragons where Judd reminisces about his favourite gaming experiences over the years. I loved the story of his Game of Thrones / Westeros game with his father though content warning (because it’s a very Game of Thrones moment involving violence towards children).

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III. Links of the Week

• On the Liber Ludorum blog, an essay on dystopia and technology in Neurocity, a new neo-noir game by Gavriel Quiroga. The game, in the designer’s words, aims to evoke “an extreme existential experience that has as a central theme the struggle between the human spirit and the omnipotent technocracy of a brutal system.”

• I stumbled across a series from 2020 by Mids Meinberg called ‘Designing for Gamefeel’. I’ve just read the first part of the series on Modality which is essentially the idea that different parts of game play having their own mechanics (like say, having different rules for combat) is a good tool for generating very specific ‘game feel’. I might not agree with everything said but I love this kind of talk.

• The Iron-Bound Tome, a blog I recently found that focuses on Warhammer Fantasy and Ars Magica. If you like those games, you might find something cool on this blog.

• Gauntlet Publishing has an interesting offer! If you’re doing Zine Quest 3 and your project is related to Trophy, Brindlewood Bay, or Hearts of Wulin, you can apply for a $250 loan from Gauntlet Publishing. If your zine doesn’t fund, you don’t have to pay it back.

• Also, this wonderful introduction to RPG layout and grids resurfaced so here’s a link to it: “A longsword in your arsenal against unfinished projects. The grid helps you marry other elements, like typography, maps, and copy (the words) into a unified whole.”

• Maytaway Quarterly just launched! It’s an all-Indigenous sports and gaming magazine and looks really interesting.

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IV. Small Ads

This section contains sponsored links and advertisements.

• Stare Back is a self-reflective drawing / text-drafting game, out as PWYW on itch.io. Look into the mirror, question who you are, draw a portrait, rub it out, and do it all over again.

These ads help keep this newsletter going and I’m very grateful for them! Check out Stare Back and let me know what you think!

If you’d like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here.

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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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