Frederik Jensen’s nascent imprint, Thoughtful Games, now has an English site. Montsegur 1244 is one of my favorite new games and #1 for takeoff once the Durham Three’s 4e ardor cools a bit. I’m super jealous of the west coast rascals who got a chance to play the fresh translation. We will burn harder.
I had a playtest-fest yesterday; Clinton did a splenic bypass. I’d been at a creative impasse with Business Solutions in particular and that’s over now. The thing I’m doing with Medical Hospital – the tactile, player-skill-equals-character-success thing – turns out to be just the ticket for Business Solutions as well. Clinton pointed this out and I’m so happy about it. We played enough alpha Medical Hospital for me to proceed with confidence and man, Business Solutions is pretty much done. I just need to run a few full games, get it out there for some blind testing, and that’s that. A pretty exciting development! I’m not sure how long it’ll take to come together but I bet it’ll be ready in the early fall. Information design will be a big challenge and I want to get that just right – the game relies on stuff you need to reference more or less constantly, and I’m not yet sure how to present those things in the clearest possible way. It’ll fall into place, I’m sure. Maybe the list of photocopier malfunctions goes on the back of the character sheet or something. Thanks to Joel, Clinton, and Mike for their help and ideas!
Luke Crane and I chat about art and game design for his audio column at See Page XX. It wasn’t actually an ambush; I knew what I was getting into. It is telling that questions about what constitutes art are difficult to answer. In retrospect, I think I’d revise my reply after thinking about what separates “fine art” and “craft” a bit – a beautifully turned chair leg can be functional art, so a game can as well.
My entry in the Fight On! Adventure Writing contest. I was reading about African witchcraft and how witches make torches out of the anal gland paste of hyenas, and the next thing you know, zam! Adventure! I statted it for The Shadow of Yesterday, which probably dooms me to derisive scorn from the old skool judges, but it’d be easy to run in any system. If you ran it in 4e you’d need a 7-9th level party, because Gnolls are unapproachably badass in 4e.
OK, so everybody picks a character (there are eight to choose from, including a dead professor and a pair of dogs). You have a sheet with a description, a special ability you can use once per adventure, and three traits. Two are positive and one is negative. You draw a playing card and put it face-down over any three numbers in a card sequence, two through king, printed on your sheet. Like so:
The game revolves around creating situations for other player’s characters to deal with. Once you’ve set one up, their player draws a card and compares it to their sequence. If it is below or above the blocked part of the sequence, a positive thing happens related to the low or high trait. If the draw occurs in the blocked portion of the card sequence, a negative thing happens based on the bad trait. if you draw a two or a king, the card gets flipped horizontally, to cover five numbers, like so:
Your character succeeds, but with sacrifice – things are going to be harder for you. A second draw of a two or king switches it back. You keep drawing cards and creating narrative challenges for each other until an ace shows up, which is the signal that the chapter can end at any time. There are five chapters in a complete adventure.
There’s more to it than this (each chapter is driven by situation elements and there are crises that can pop up to make use of special powers or kill characters), but at its heart it is a very simple storytelling game with few moving parts. I think it will behave, in play, very much like the loopy fifties adventures of the books. Anyway, thanks, Trollbabe!