My second Trail of Cthulhu adventure, Many Fires, has been released by Pelgrane Press. Like my first one it is full of real stuff, including references pulled from multiple Spanish accounts written in 1542 and actual newspaper clippings from 1915, which should add a frisson of weird terror to the amateur historians among you. For the rest of you there are monsters and Mennonites.
I put out a focused call for playtesters for Durance, a small game that started as a Game Chef entry, and got 30 groups to commit to playing it blind. I was surprised and gratified! I assume half of them will follow through and that’s a massive amount of targeted information.
Durance is a bit of an experiment in information design. The rules are brief and don’t really give you much to go on. There’s more color than procedure, but what procedure there is is, I hope, very clear once you begin playing. In this way there’s a leap of faith that may be necessary to really find the rules, fiction and social space all mesh in a satisfying way. It is a game that may not read well, which I try to make up for with very juicy color to entice people to try it out, at which point all the bits coalesce into something really special and terrible.
There are a few bits I think can be pared back even further but I will know that in a short while.
Matt Snyder’s doing an interesting thing over at Rolejack, offering up juicy gaming morsels that are system agnostic. I sent him some awesome Victorian chapter headers from J.W. Buel for all your three-fisted imperialist adventuring needs.
I’ll be in Sacramento for a couple of days next week teaching nurses how to make games. These are basically low-tech chaos simulators where I get a room full of people trying to do the same thing at once with limited time and physical resources. The tasks vary from little quests to research to judgment calls based on medical evidence. It’s pretty fun to watch and the best part is that my hard work is done by the time I present the game. I’m still working on it but by Monday it’ll be ready to go. My stethoscope is already packed.
Hey, look at this cool thing Tim Rodriguez made!
Look at it on your mobile device! Tim developed the app and gets all the very modest proceeds, should you decide to press “buy”.