#38: Multiverse & More 🌠

Apr 25, 2021

I. Dear Reader,

This newsletter is absolutely packed with links to a whole bunch of amazing things so I’m going to skimp on the opening note here - on the excuse that you’ve got enough to entertain you below.

I’ve had a bunch of nice conversations about last week’s edition. Really validates my feeling that we need more teaching resources in the hobby and that reading even 50 pages of a PDF is not fun!

I’m going to actively think more about this podcast. From my POV, I right now reasonably have the skills to identify games, reach out to designers, and record, edit, publish the podcast. What I don’t have is: the time. Or rather, the money to buy that time from the other things that I need to do to pay rent. This is more or less an insurmountable obstacle right now. Crowdfunding via Patreon or KS seems like an obvious solution (patrons could vote on which games they want, etc) but that’s scary and I know next to nothing in that area. If anyone is willing to help with that, let me know.

If anybody wants to just take this idea and just do the whole thing, even better! ;)

Yours ponderously,

Thomas

(PS. This newsletter has now more than 600 subscribers!)

II. Media of the Week

Slugblaster, the FitD game about bored teens going dimension hopping, has a actual play podcast. (Disclaimer: I contributed a tiny handful of words to this game for money.)
Have you heard of Princess World? It’s tagline is “the game of girls who rule” which is honestly way too good to not mention. It’s a really clever and cute PbtA game and it’s now got a shiny new actual play series for you to check out. (While the game is totally great for playing with kids, the podcast may not be.)
The designer of Electric Bastionland does a video readthrough of Errant, unknowingly revealing why it’s a top tier example of how storygames and OSR games can be friends.

III. Links of the Week

News / Articles

Multiverse, a videogame-like Virtual Tabletop Top, raised $17.5 million from investors. That’s a lot of money for an industry that was supposed to be worth only $55 million a few years ago? Anyway, looks like they’re going big!
The authors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were roleplaying long before Dungeons & Dragons: “They invented characters with luxuriantly fantastical names - Roseabelle Egramont is your next tiefling rogue in D&D, you're welcome - and told stories of dramatic escapes and revolutions.”
On twitter, a beautifully illustrated playthrough of Thousand Year Old Vampire.
Linda Codega continues their excellent writing at Tor where they matches SFF fiction and RPGs. This time, they pairs games with the Grishaverse, the new YA series coming to Netflix.
There’s a new issue of the Indie Zine with a whole bunch of games and articles themed on gender. On twitter, an excellent showcase of what the new issue contains for anyone who’s interested.
Burn After Running is a blog dedicated to one shot RPGs. They’ve recently been talking about how to do a good low fantasy one shot with some recommendations.

Games

Wicked Ones, the FitD game where you play monsters and build a dungeon, is now free in PDF.
The Zone is a “storygame of magical realism, mutant weirdness, and collaborative self-destruction.” But that’s not the best part. It’s also completely digital and looks amazing. You can play a GM-less game with your friends and the website will walk you through the whole thing.
Brandon Leon-Gambetta, designer of Pasion de la Pasiones, launches RADCRAWL Worlds, a game that “tries to blend some of the inscrutable weirdness of blaseball with the setting of high fantasy dungeon crawling and the pickup for a minute then go on with your day play style of idle games.”

It’s played through Discord and looks very weird and cool.

Game Design

Logan Timmins, designer of Preparing for Paris, is talking shop on his blog: “If we think of a story as something we build together through collaboration and joined creativity, then the game we play is the toolbox to help us. As the designer of that toolbox, I think ‘What tools do my players need?’”
The designer of Trilemma Adventures pitched a design framework that he called MOSAIC Strict and it’s catching on - including with me, apparently!

Reviews

A couple of nice reviews of Wanderhome if you’re looking to read more about the hit pastoral fantasy - here and here.
If you play one-on-one and like Norse folklore, Beowolf: Age of Heroes sounds like a really nice game - and I say this even though it’s based on the 5e OGL.
On Gnomestew, a review of World Wide Wrestling 2e.

IV. Small Ads

This section contains sponsored links and advertisements.

Explore ominous occupations and weird careers with Odd Jobs - an anthology of 11 system-neutral micro-settings, each with a campaign you can play in a month, currently on Kickstarter.

These ads help keep this newsletter going and I’m very grateful for them! If you’d like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here.

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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