#1: Welcome to the Indie RPG Newsletter!
#1: Welcome to the Indie RPG Newsletter!
Hello, readers!
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Indie RPG Newsletter! This newsletter is put together by me, @chaibypost, as a way of better contributing to this lovely hobby. This is a weekly roundup of what’s I’ve been seeing in the Indie RPG scene, curated and framed for your reading pleasure!
I. John Battle’s Video Essays
I hadn’t seen a video essay about an indie RPG till I watched John Battle’s The Miracle Mystical Whimsy Machine of Troika! Troika is a gorgeously-written, zany RPG and John Battle expertly captures the appeal and joy of the game.
But if that’s not your thing, I *highly* recommend settling down - with the lights on or off, depending on how you like it - and watching his half-hour exploration of horror, time and memory using the video game Faith and the tabletop games Dread and the Wretched. The narration is perfect and the combination of movie clips, found footage and screen capture comes together to hijack your synapses in the best of ways. Are you ready to think about those memories where your irrational lizard brain fills the dark with indescribable terror? Are you ready to create those moments at the table with your friends?
II. Big Name Boardgame Channels Discover Indie TTRPGs!
Talking about Youtube, is anybody else seeing this? This feels like a new thing to me. Is it a new thing? The boardgame industry is effectively much, much larger than the TTRPG industry - both in terms of visibility and cold hard cash. So the darlings of that space talking and promoting indie tabletop RPGs is going to be a huge deal for small designers. It’s very cool to see Shut Up and Sit Down reviewing Thousand Year Old Vampire and playing Mothership but you know what’s even better than that: Dicebreaker making videos about small solo RPGs that you can find on itch.io. More videos like this please!
III. Game Jams on Game Toasts
Hey, have you ever wanted to just make a small game and put it out there? Maybe you just need that little push? A small community to discuss your ideas, perhaps? Well, the One Page RPG Jam 2020 is going on itch.io for the next 23 days and maybe this is your chance. It’s a casual jam (no gods, masters or judges) where you make a small game that fits on one page. Maybe it has dice, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you toss a coin, or just take turns writing or talking. Anything works. Go on, make a game over the weekend that a computer would never be able to beat a human at.
(From XKCD, used under a under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.)
Even if this jam isn’t your jam, there are a whole lot of TTRPG game jams on itch.io and there’s a handy list here if you want to see them all.
IV. The Manyfold Glossary, or There Are Many Different Kinds of Fun
Unless you’re a spikey ball of snark with the personality that is the equivalent of wrapping a xylopone in tin foil and throwing it down the stairs, you probably agree that people can like different things. And yet perennial bugbear of gamer conversation - especially online - is the million different ways that people invent to tell you that your fun is wrong. Well, there’s been multiple attempts to solve this problem by appealing to the (noble, yet tragic) idea that what we really need is the right words. Regardless of whether that is true or not, words are some of my favourite things so I wanted to share this wonderful article “The Manyfold Glossary” by Levi Kornelson of Amagi Games.
In the post, Levi lists 16 (sixteen!) different types of fun or pleasure you can get from games. It goes from LUDUS (the fun of noodling with complex rules) to VENTING (you probably know this one). Whatever kind of player you are, you’re probably going to have a number of “aha!” moments reading this article. I mean, I love this stuff:
ALEA is the gambler’s thrill - the fun of taking a big risk, the tension that comes with it, win or lose. Games with dice rolls, and especially ones where big stakes are riding on that one throw of the dice, are good at giving alea.
Great, right? Here’s a link to the article again.
V. An Assortment of Links
“Girl Underground made me cry. I don’t know if I could tell you why. But I hope that’s evidence of how sincere and well written it is.” from Technical Grimore
There’s a bundle of games raising money for the Lebanese Red Cross Relief Fund that I contributed a game to. 10$ or more for 52 games and you help an important cause.
The 2020 Diana Jones Award: a perspective from one “honoree”: “..normally, getting an award is a joyous thing. Instead, I have been alternating between rage and tears for the past several days.”
Well, that’s all for this week! Thanks for reading. Send this to your sworn nemesis or subscribe below!