Wolf

Working on a classless, level-less hack of the Black Hack for the 10th Anniversary Black Hack Jam. It’s inspired by Into the Odd, Dogs in the Vineyard, sword & sorcery, the Dying Earth genre, and so on.

It’s a dark world where survival matters, resources are tight, and combat is dangerous. Magic is both very wild and dangerous but also lethal to casters, though the rewards may outweigh the risks. But failure is also part of progressing and improving your character.

You primarily advance your stats and abilities through dying. Because of the nature of this dying world, its wastelands, its lack of metals, a big part of the game comes down to harvesting resources and crafting them into potions, poisons, and equipment, which makes another tier of advancement.

Since you don’t level up like in a traditional TTRPG, improving equipment and being clever with status effects will be a big part of play.

I’m hoping to have the core of the mechanics ready by the end of the month.

Right now, I’m stretching past 70 pages in the word document for this hack and while there’s a decent amount left to do, I think the heavy lifting is behind me. There’s a lot of tinkering left to do but the frame of this has largely come together.

However, there’s a possibility that I’ll end up reworking the entire combat system to be more similar to Dogs in the Vineyard. Which is to say, rather than have traditional stats, the game will be driven by dice pools. Not only for combat, but also for various kinds of encounters.

Switching to dice pools is a big shift and will require a lot of work to transform the entire system.

Something I’m noodling over. Something I’ve been meaning to blog here about, but no time like the present.

Over the rest of the month, I’ll be making more frequent posts her about designing the game and specific topics, but this is your monthly email to keep you up to date on what I’m up to.

Which brings me to…

And Other News

First, the big news.

Broken River Books is launching a year of zines!

Go there to sign up to keep up to date on the campaign. The campaign begins in about one month so now is the perfect time to sign up, download Issue 0, and follow along as we approach launch.

Following on the heels of that, Broken Katana’s crowdfund will begin October 13th!

As you can hear from that video I made way back in February, I was going to launch this back in March. Then I was going to launch it in June. But here we are and it’s time to just begin this campaign.

For those who don’t know or don’t remember, this is for the omnibus of the Howl series. It will contain Howl, Iron Wolf, Broken Katana, and a fourth as yet unpublished volume which will only be available in this omnibus.

Go sign up now to keep up with the campaign and be notified when it launches!

My hope is that I’ll be able to get to 100 followers before the launch date.

Along with all that, we’re coming up on the final weeks of Songs of my Mother, the epic fantasy trilogy I’ve been serializing on Royal Road. Go check it out! There are already 350,000 words, about 1,300 pages of this story uploaded.

On the game design front, I’ve been doing various game jams this summer, as you may or may not know.

Most notably, Tony Tran and I have put together an adventure for the Appendix N Jam: A Seance on North Fork Road.

It’s gotten great reviews so far! So head over to the Appendix N Jam to rate and review!

As part of the One Page RPG Jam, I made a game about sumo wrestling called Rikishi Rising.

It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, truthfully. Along with the original design, heavily influenced by Dogs in the Vineyard, I made a D6 system and a Simplified version more appropriate for children or people less interested in roleplaying and more interested in chucking dice.

The Simplified version came directly from feedback from my 7 year old. He’s been playing it for hours every day this week, which is very gratifying! He’s having a lot of fun, which delights me and makes the whole design feel more fun to me.

Because this is why we make things, yeah?

I think I may end up expanding it to a more fleshed out zine. Hard to pack a whole system into a single trifold.

Anyway, check out Seance on North Fork Road and Rikishi Rising on itch!

And check back in here periodically for more updates about the Pink Moon Hack.