Fall '22 Murmurs: Gen Con and more
An ENNIE win, plus: Good Strong Hands, Deadlands, Swords of the Serpentine, etc.
Sale notice: Many of our games are all on sale for 20% off on itchio until November 28th. Pick up PDFs of The Great Soul Train Robbery, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, The Tabula Initiative, or Bring Home the Babe at a reduced price.
Greetings. Since the last newsletter, I have moved and begun a new job. All good developments, but they have delayed this installment—partly because I have not fit as much gaming in during this season of my life. Therefore, I will declare that this issue covers the entirety of fall 2022.
First, news from way back at Gen Con. We won an ENNIE! 9th Level’s Level 1 anthology took home the gold for Best Free Game/Product at the ENNIE Awards.
Congratulations to all the designers who contributed! And congrats to me. My game in the anthology is called “Once, This Land Was One…” It is a storytelling game about building up cities in the post-apocalypse. You start the game by rolling every dice you own to represent a great cataclysm. Then you take turns drafting dice from the pile and answering story prompts based on the dice you draft. Eventually, you start trying to steal dice from other players’ cities.
Funny story: I first drafted the game while we waited in the hospital for our first daughter’s birth. I hoped those bleary thoughts would hold up, and indeed they did! Now that daughter is an adventurous almost-three-year-old, and that game is part of an ENNIE-winning anthology.
Again, the anthology is totally free, so if you want to download this ENNIE-winning game, go ahead and do that here!
The rest of this newsletter is going to consist of brief reflections on games I have played over the past few months, starting with highlights from Gen Con:
Gen Con
Briar Bound: A fun kickoff to Gen Con—playtesting a storytelling game based on the Br'er Rabbit folktales with designer Kandi Jeanne. This session was presented by the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Program.
Good Strong Hands: A fantasy RPG from Nerdburger Games inspired by The Neverending Story. Our session featured a redcap, a pixie, and a legendary stag descending together into the labyrinthine maw of a dead(?) Void leviathan. The world of the game had a great mix of the whimsical and the sinister, and the mechanics create interest no matter the roll outcome. Basically, rolling misses gives you XP, rolling exactly one hit gives you magic points you can spend on special abilities, and rolling more hits means you “mark Shadow” as the Void itself gets more interested in you.
Champions: A trad superhero game, notable mostly for the premise of the session. The setting was superhero high school Sky High on Valentine’s Day. We dealt with flying bus malfunctions, games of dodgeball, and super-powered prom-posals. Then when the dance concluded, we all felt a psychic backlash and woke up at the start of Valentine’s Day again. Yes, it was a Groundhog’s Day-esque time loop scenario! I had a blast, even though we ending up mostly circumventing the system’s actual rules to tell our story.
Hollows: An in-development game from Rowan, Rook, and Decard about hunters battling behemoths while wielding cursed weapons made of toxic masculinity. (That’s not my interpretation, that’s literally what the publisher says the game is exploring.) The sort-of-grid-based-but-abstracted tactical combat made the game feel a mix of queasy and empowering, so I think it’s on the right track!
Back Again from the Broken Land: I’ve written about our Tolkien-esque PbtA game plenty of times before, so here I’ll just note that I loved the choice the Turncoat made in this session: the character had not only collaborated with the Doomslord, but gotten married to him—and given birth to twin children. With this choice in place, our session was not just the epilogue of one quest, but the prologue to a future story about the twins.
Mouseguard: A classic game about valiant mouse warriors protecting woodland communities from predators. Our session involved negotiating with beavers, hiding from bears, and building a stink bomb to drive off a pack of wolves. It was also my first experience with the Burning Wheel system, which was intriguing but a little hard to get a handle on in a one-shot.
Vaesen: Free League’s game of investigating monsters out of Nordic folklore. Our session involved a malevolent spirit of winter and a neglected domovoi. I played a Sherlock Holmes-esque pre-gen, and I worked in some good references, e.g. “Once you have eliminated the plausible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.”
Vow of the Knight-Aspirants: Really fun to run this session of my game about Arthurian squires. Seeing people experience the modular playbooks in person was a highlight. This party of squires found a way to break the curse on a knight-turned-wolf by literally wrestling with a malevolent spellbook to get it to give up its secrets.
I am very pleased with how this game is developing, and planning to make an exciting announcement about it when the time is right, hopefully soon! Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss any news.
Deadlands: The wildest set up of any game at Gen Con. Three tables, three GMs, three parties of Weird West troubleshooters, tackling related problems as we investigate the disappearance of a trio of trains. The best part? We could send “Telegraphs” between tables to compare notes about the supernatural phenomena we were encountering. Ultimately, the parties converged on Los Angeles, where we split up again (with some shuffling of parties) to take on a three-part boss battle against Famine, his horse, and his penumbra of famished souls.
Avatar Legends: Great to play an in-person session of Magpie’s blockbuster adaptation of the beloved animated series! I contributed two playbooks to this game, and at this Gen Con session I indulged myself by playing one of my playbooks, The Adamant. Our session was about protecting a troupe of actors staging a satirical play against reprisals from a squad of Fire Nation secret police. My character was a disaffected Fire Nation aristocrat who specialized in fighting with whips of flame.
After Gen Con
Swords of the Serpentine: I’ve gotten to play several sessions of Pelgrane Press’s game of swords & sorcery investigations in a fantasy city called Eversink inspired by Venice. It’s my first go-round with the Gumshoe system, which I’ve been enjoying. And the mysteries themselves have had lots of fun twists and turns, with us poking around a city full of dark secrets to get to the bottom of a variety of bizarre murders.
My character Caden Coyle is a roguish street rat who’s maybe 12 years old and aspires to become the king of thieves in Eversink. He’s good at stealth and burglary and not much at combat. I still have things to do when fighting breaks out, however, since in this system you can use your “Sway” skill in battle to attack the enemy’s morale.
Right now we’re trying to get the bottom of the deaths of an old adventuring company, which may be linked to something occult they dug up on their last adventure (and/or to the satirical opera the former bard wrote about his old comrades). You can check out a playlist of videos here if you’re interested!
Trophy Dark: For the first time, I played Gauntlet Publishing’s Trophy Dark, a one-shot game of doomed treasure-hunters. I have written for both flavors of Trophy (Dark and Gold) but this was my chance to play Dark. Our session saw two PCs descending into a subterranean nightmare realm and succumbing to obsession and Ruin. It was an intimate and horrific session. Great to see the Trophy rules shine in a gnarly one-shot.
Scare Force One: The biggest surprise of the fall. I arranged to play an online game with my brothers for my birthday. I went in with the least prep I’ve ever done for a session: I didn’t even know what system we’d play, just that we’d pick out a fun-looking Lasers & Feelings-inspired game. We scrolled through itchio’s list of L&F-derived games and picked Scare Force One, a game about an elite squad of monsters rescuing the president. It was a riot. We told a story about a Frankenstein and an invisible man rescuing President Morgan Freeman from Australian zombies. There were invisible gadgets, a kaiju-fication machine, and a zombie dingo guard dog which was won over when the Frankenstein tossed it a spare arm. If you’re willing to get silly and mash up Halloween monsters and campy action movie tropes, this is a very rewarding one-page game.
Elsewhere
—The Bundle of Holding sale I announced previously has been extended to the end of NaNoWriMo! You have a few more days to pick up Back Again from the Broken Land along with other cool games to inspire your storytelling like Artefact and The Magus.
—At Cannibal Halfling, Seamus Connelly has an excellent review of Back Again. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves: “If you want the ‘epic’ moments of The Lord of the Rings, there are other games. What it will give you is longing to see Rose Cotton again, smoking with a friend on the shattered walls of Isengard, a king saying that you bow to no-one, a wound that drives you to sail west, and other ‘great stories… the ones that really mattered.’ That makes it a great game, indeed.”
—Layla (@Pandatheist on Twitter) wrote up a fantastic thread about Back Again. It’s a great meditation, not only on our game, but on what The Lord of the Rings has come to mean for a generation of readers and viewers. Check it out here!
Till next time, may you have a happy holiday season and take home the gold in all your greatest endeavors.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi