Eye of Poseidon+In Heaven Release - and some reflections on growth, and suggestion for Finish The Dang Game Jam

The game that started it all for me Eye of Poseidon, is finally out!...



https://wolf-eel-games.itch.io/eye-of-poseidon-quick-start-rules

(... Somehwhat. This game roughly what it was a year ago, with a few last-minute editions to make it actually-complete, but it is still just a Quick-Start based on the long-abandoned Forged in the Dark system and heavily based on a Moves structure that I've grown out of... more later)

Want to enact the court dramas of Star Trek? In a submarine? In the apocalypse? With strange underwater flora and fauna, deteriorating underwater settlements and just a hint of cynical

I've also released IN HEAVEN!! 




https://wolf-eel-games.itch.io/in-heaven


This is a tool for generating exiting and strange afterlives for your PCs once you've ruthlessly killed all of them. It has 5 random tables, most of which contain some kind of mention of Monkeys.

Buy both of these things. They are great



___________________________________________


So I started working on Eye of Poseidon in 2017, and have been working on it on-and-off, but mostly off this year. It is strange. When I started, I was all hyped up on the Forged in the Dark train, in fact, so hyped up that I forgot that I didn't like playing it very much. When I realized I didn't, it was pretty much too late - I had playtested a version, and I had playtested it well, but I realized that half of the fun was the framing, rather than the game.

This is not to say the game isn't fun - I played some excellent games with the system, but that I am very different now. The entire OSR happened to me, the un-happened when it unravelled (G+ closing,  the exposing of abusers in the movement), and now I don't know where I sit. You can't unlearn the lessons you've taught yourself, you can merely move on to whatever you like now. So it just so happened that I have the bones of a playable game, that I've spent MONTHS of my life on, but have no motivation to go back to in its present form. What do?

I very much want to finish Eye of Poseidon. The most common advice designers get is to not get distracted and have a strong vision, but sometimes change is good. Sometimes what you were doing isn't what you think you were doing. Sometimes its something else. Is it better? How the fuck will I know!

But how? And when will I have the time?

Well. That's a thing I've been thinking about. Introducing...

_______________________________________________


FINISH THE DANG GAME JAM


Arriving on Itch shortly, I will be hosting a jam dedicated to finishing our dang games. Games that are left in your Google Drives, your InDesign projects, games that you've practically made and forgot. I want you to finish it.

The rules -

1. You have to have some sort of physical proof of the game you started with, a photo of the paper you scribbled down the idea on, a txt/doc file, a full-on PDF.

2. Finish the dang game in three months. Want art and good editing? Want long essays about the philosophy of being a game master? Well those aren't the game. Finish the dang game so I can dang well play it. If you can get art and good editing in 3 months, that's fine. Just finish the gosh dang game. I don't care. Jesus.

3. Upload what you started with and what you ended up with to the Itch and add it to the game jam. It's not a competition, and you should charge whatever money you think is appropriate for it.

Like this idea? @ me on this tweet and tell me so https://twitter.com/YakovPettersson/status/1194635070033678338

Or comment on this blogpost I guess

Announcement will probably be on twitter or this blog

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Table-Centric Design

Recently, I've been questioning the primacy of "Design" within RPG products. There's a kind of determinism that is generally accepted among RPG folks that Design determines what Play looks like. Listening to some versions of what Game Design is, you'd get the sense that the job of a designer is to manipulate and mind-control the people who play it, and perhaps to teach lessons about some things. If they are correct, and game design truly is a form of Vault-Tec style behavioral control, we might have to ask ourselves if this is even desirable? I don't doubt that design to a certain extent shapes the behavioral patterns and the choices role-players make, but I find that designers more often than not overrate their own presence at the table in a rather self-aggrandizing way. There is a famous, perhaps dubious sentiment surrounding Vampire The Masquerade - that the games mechanics seemed so contrary to the intended playstyle of the game that it is a wonder a...
Read more

you can use dnd to play anything

for reasons yet unknown, I will not capitalize the first letter in any of these sentences, unless I want to. calm down. have a snack. call a friend. have you been on RPG social media for more than 3 hours? have you ever seen one of those hot-take thread wherein people list obvious truisms as if they were controversial? have you ever seen one of those people who will spend their days arguing against fictional people? then you've probably heard some version of the following: you don't HAVE to play dnd. there are OTHER games, that do what you want BETTER. they're not really wrong. there isn't a sentiment there that we can make any normative claim against. so what's the problem? it follows a narrative we've discussed previously - the design centric perspective . It's follies are as follows: 1. it gives us a value judgement that tells us that specifically curated, "optimized" experiences, that carries with it the intentions of its authors, ...
Read more

Addendum to "Table-Centric Design" - On Mattering

I am extremely pleased and humbled with how many people responded so charitably and kindly to the recent  Table-Centric Design , were I outlined some recent ways I've been thinking about design. I did however, make a tactically beneficial mistake of referencing the recently dug-up corpse known as   "system matters."  Tactically beneficial, because a lot of people responded to it, gave good feedback and better criticism, but a mistake since it might leave people with a distorted impression. This could have made the impression like I don't believe system matters, which is not true. It could also make the impression that I believe the tangential opinion - that system doesn't matter as much as people think it does. I also don't believe this. I am not trying to be obtuse, I swear. System does matter. If you've played games published by other people a lot, you just know it. The pain of a clunky rule that constantly needs to be looked up everytime it is trigg...
Read more