#31: Heart's Beats
Dear Reader,
Format changes at the Indie RPG Newsletter, this week. Welcome to the new front section. It’s going to be me sharing something I’m excited about. This week, Friends at the Table announced their new campaign of Heart: the City Beneath. Heart does some really cool things that I think - if embraced - could change the conversation works at the table. The core principle is Player Pro-activity.
The primary way to do that is Beats. Character get advancements or powers in Heart when they hit specific Beats. Hit a Minor Beat and gain a Minor ability, and so on. These could be fictional (“Gain access to knowledge that someone tried to conceal”) or mechanical (“Take Minor Mind fallout”). But the best part is by choosing them, players are telling the GM what they want to do. And the GM facilitates them doing it. The GM’s role is to help players hit their Beats.
Another way they encourage this in the GM advice section, the designers ask you to just ask the players what kind of jobs they want. To quote them, “have them tell you what the mission is and then make it horrible.” Because character creation involves answering the big question of “Why do you delve into awful places?” and because dungeon fantasy is so familiar to most gamers, it’s easier to start the game with a sense of what you want to do as players. It’s not a cold open.
I’m very excited about games that try to change the player and GM dynamic. I want to talk way less as a GM in my future games. Help me!
(Bonus: This week, I read an article called Bingo Style XP on Judd Karlman’s blog. Basically, once you hit a row on the Bingo Card, you get one level. And because players can help fill it in, it works just like Beats in Heart: the City Beneath - except it’s totally modular! Check it out!)
Pro-actively,
Thomas
Watch of the Week
I stumbled on lots of good stuff but this video was the real highlight. On Collabs without Permission, Vi spends 40 minutes exploring malaysian designer Zedeck Siew’s entire body of work. Zedeck’s work is primarily adventure design for old school games but despite not really fitting within this newsletter self-avowed mandate, this video was too good to not share. I really wish we could see more work like this but that said, it looks like this video took around a year to make - which explains the scarcity.
I’ve been thinking about stuff like this for indie games but this kind of work takes time. Lots of time. And there doesn’t seem to be the audience or infrastructure to support its creation based on the views on the video - which is a real tragedy!
Links of the Week
A short interview with the designer of Coyotes and Crows, an RPG about an alternate future America where colonization didn’t happen. Big team full of Indigenous artists. The game already broke 100k on kickstarter so it’s clearly going to be huge.
On the Pod of Blunders blog, using a solo game to tell bedtime stories to kids. And for them to tell you some back!
On the Gauntlet, a neat hack of Mothership and Trophy Gold. I’ve been wanting to try out Mothership’s adventures but I’ve never been excited by the system itself so this is cool.
On the Liber Ludorum blog, an exploration of The Stygian Library: “There are four types of labyrinths. They all converge in one library.”
Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar writes about how he cobbles together small games for his friends in 40 minutes. It’s cool to read about the process of such a talented designer and I especially love the permission to be sloppy! (But also rolling my eyes at “we’ve played all the one shot games” comment.)
Brian Yaksha of Goatman’s Goblet looks at the slice-of-life nature of Ultra Violet Grasslands and inserts some overarching plot into the mix via a horrifying plague of extra-perception.
A wild solo hack emerges. Now if you want to play Shadowrun: Anarchy on your own, someone’s done the work.
Some fun opportunities for designers:
Trollish Delver Games is running a spotlight programme - essentially trying to help use their platform to promote a new designer.
Possum Creek Games is giving out grants for people who want to make Wanderhome content.
Soulmuppet Publishing is looking for pitches for horror or sci-fi adventures.
Some people are trying to revive the itch.io forums and I think it’s a great idea. It seems like such a natural space for game-realted conversations to thrive.
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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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