I was just informed that my semi-old-skool aventure, Khas Fara: Village of Fear won an honorable mention in the Fight On! adventure writing contest. I’m stoked! Anything that results in me being sent Gnolls in the mail is pretty much a big win. I will chain them up in my shed.
The winner was David Bowman’s Spawning Grounds of the Crab Men, which deserves all praise for that earth-movingly rad title alone!
I’ve been thinking about weird materials to incorporate into procedures, like string and twigs. I want to show people how to incorporate weird stuff into fun procedures, and I want to have a wide range of activities for people to choose from out of the box. If all you have are scissors, sticky notes, and paper clips, you are good to go, but with a little extra prep you can go further.
Medical Hospital is all about the index cards - you make character, situation, and associated stuff on cards that interrelate in play. There are a few places where having a reference will come in handy, and it’s never a lot of stuff, so I made a handout of index-card sized cheat sheets. They can be double-sided, too.
There’s a card for stress actions, two cards for perks (gaining and spending), a card for cardiac arrests, two for surgical complications, and a list of jargon for the anaesthesiologist to shout when a procedure gets out of control.
My hope is that people will have a stack of index cards they can carry around,with characters and situations they can mix and match and the references obviating the need for hauling the actual rules.
I more or less doubled the word count of Medical Hospital this weekend, which feels great. A lot of assumptions and hand-wavings got articulated and a lot of useful material got added. Maybe more important than that, I found the game’s voice, which is a little irreverent and conversational.
Expect to see me flacking playtests of this and Business Solutions at Gen Con! I’m going to write a bunch of examples and then shop it around for external playtesting. If you are interested, please get in touch.
There’s a thread over at Story-Games asking designers why they make games right now. It’s full of great reasons to make games, some of them perceptive, some of them funny, some of them sort of poetic.
I’ve always made games, as far as I can recall. In first grade I upgraded a pretty boring game into the magnificent and unplayable “Jesus tic-tac-toe” (you needed ten across!). After spending a feverish weekend playing Wumpus Hunt on my uncle’s brand new Kaypro II, I reverse engineered it for tabletop play. Another time I drew page after page of elaborate combinations of choose-your-own adventure and side-scrolling analog video game.
I’ve always loved to play, and to create new things, and to puzzle out conundrums, and to express myself with words and art and performance. My love for making games is a little obsessive and weird. I’m OK with that. I think play is important – I think it is a survival trait just as valuable as thumbs. I love to play and I love the clever, strange, kind-hearted and passionate people I get to meet and play with. I love the fact that I can make things with skill and pride that return some small measure of good to the world.
There’s so much goodness – my own joy in creation, my delight in play, my deep satisfaction in seeing others similarly delighted in my work, a profound sense of camaraderie and mutual support, and the rewards both material and emotional. Making games brings me all this and I’m very grateful for it.