#nagademon

We have a logo by our artist, Tricks! The game's ashcan is coming before the end of the month!

You can read more on my progress on the game at this hashtag! I'll be releasing my Week 3 progress report soon!

Said the Mother to the Maiden

Under the eyes of the Fool rove the witchy road and your visions will often mislead you. You will feel, you will endure and you will learn in turn.

Said the Crone to the Maiden

With the eyes of the World and the soles of the Fool, I will follow the witchy road, seeking guidance from the Arcanas. I shall be Witch, Mother and Crone when I return.

Said the Maiden to the Wind

The Cog That Remains needs ~7 more purchases, and then it will have broken even on art!

October always ends with a bang of real world labors and requirements that distract me from the joys of tinkering and puttering. But now that November and the NaGaDeMon is upon us, the creative energies of the Internet denizens have carried me along with them. I'm taking the Into the Odd hack I've been working on and writing a one-shot adventure for it, in the setting I've been working on.

I've said before I want a high magic setting (link to statement post). When I was considering making this setting for Pathfinder 2e (and I still haven't ruled out using it for those purposes sometime), I was set on using the Pervasive Magic rules.

From Pathfinder's Pervasive Magic...

The Pervasive Magic rules state, among other things that "players choose their characters' associated magic trait and can select from the pervasive magic backgrounds and feats" -- For those not fluent in the PF2e lingo, Backgrounds are selected at character creation, Feats are mostly selected while leveling, and Traits are tags that can be associated with basically anything that has a stat block, which is, in PF2e, basically everything (spells, items, creatures, locations etc.).

So as you can imagine, adding a magical trait like Arcane or Divine to literally everything in the whole game is a pretty radical shift in the opposite direction from the typical OSR-style play.

And then the other day I watched an old Chris McDowall stream and it got me thinking about spell slots, because sometimes, especially if your brain has been long poisoned by video games, when you roll a character with really high WIL, you really want that character to feel like a wizard, just the same as when you roll a character with really high DEX you want them to feel like a stealth archer or what-have-you.

...To Magic Pervading All Things

You see, magic users in my setting don't NEED to lug around old books just to flick on a torch from afar. They just know and use a lot more magic than most people. Their first thought when solving a problem is how magic can be involved, the same way a skilled handygnome starts checking for dulled teeth on her cogwheels.

Cairn-like (perhaps not the most accurate term, but how I conceptualize it) inventory slot systems inspired the Burdens system of Mythic Bastionland. What if we re-Cairnify that system?

My first draft of the rules propose making a much more lenient inventory slot count than Cairn, in search of a high fantasy, mmo/crpg/diabloclone gamefeel. The rule went: you get 10 Inventory slots or your STR score, whichever is higher. So then what if spell slots work similarly, but inverted -- you get 1 spell slot or WIL-10, whichever is higher? That puts the maximum "Physical Inventory" capacity at 18 (the same as HP and Attribute Scores) and maximum "Mental Inventory" capacity at 8, a somewhat arbitrary number in the system but double four is pleasing, from the perspective of the numeral themes I'm trying to hit in my setting.

But maybe that's all too convoluted and cuts against the freedom & classlessness that I'm after. Maybe we can cut back to the default 10 Carry slots from Cairn and then 10 Mental slots, to keep everything streamlined. The Carry slots can hold physical sorts of Fatigue, and the Mental slots can maybe hold mental sorts of Burdens.

After a month of my inktober challenge of tying a ttrpg to each prompt, now it's November 's time to be busy with NaGaDeMon, a month long game jam I have done for the last few years with more or less success.

This year I am going to do Witch-Knights of Azulmarr

It all started with seeing a picture of a witch knights on social media. It all started with an idea for a character creation tarot system. It all started with a thought of implied system. Where does that lead ?

You are Witch Knight of Azulmarr, a prestigious order of the Kingdom. You were chosen according to prophecies. Now you must find the Major Arcanas to restore the kingdom to glory. 

National Game Design Month (TADC TTRPG): Week 4 Summary (Final)

Hey!  In case you missed it on my socials and Patreon, I was participating in National Game Design Month (NaGaDeMon) 2025 during this month of November.  I was originally going to do it with a Battle Royale-esque TTRPG called Win Or Die, but decided to change course since Win Or Die’s main game jam doesn’t end until January 1st.  So, for NaGaDeMon, I’m working on a TTRPG fangame for The Amazing Digital Circus, which I’m making with another game designer & artist by the name of Tricks.  This is a game for my friend Alex, also for this month’s Eternal TTRPG Jam (about bespoke games).

This is my progress report for Week 4, the last week.  Read Week 1’s here, Week 2’s here, and Week 3’s here!

First of all, the game is out now!  It’s an alpha and still needs some work, but as-is it’s playable and a complete build!  I’m so glad we got it out in time and completed National Game Design Month!

Second of all, to go over my progress for the last week, tbh I was really petering out near the end of the month.  I managed to complete a chunk of the chapter for GMs (or AMs in our game, aka the person running the TTRPG for the players), specifically the “Running The Game” section that goes over safety tools, needed adventure elements, and general tips for making a good experience.  I also wrote the example scenario in our “Going On Adventures” chapter.  The rest I left to Tricks, the co-writer and artist of The Amazing Digital Roleplaying Game.

Tricks really came in clutch in our last week.  Not only did she finish the rest of the writing, but she also made the final layout of the document and put the images in the right places.  I’m truly impressed with how much she got done, and very grateful to have her has a creative partner on this project!

Bez's Pillowrimo Progress: November 29th, 2025

We're on the homestretch for the TADC TTRPG, omg!  Tricks is finishing the last of the writing for the game.

I also released four more microgames today with a friend, and a little character supplement for a game!  So they get added to the "games completed" list at the end of this post!  Again, I'll advertise them later.

Avery Happenstance =  223 words

Closed Moon Days full version = +72 words

Word count today: 295

Total word count: 19787

New word count goal: 20k (only 213 words to go, ahhhhhh!)

5k goal = reached 11/12/25

15k goal = reached 11/23/25

Overall goal: finish creating my TADC TTRPG and at least 1 other game. 

TADC TTRPG = Incomplete. (0/1)

National Game Design Month (TADC TTRPG): Week 1 Summary

Hey!  In case you missed it on my socials and Patreon, I’m participating in National Game Design Month (NaGaDeMon) 2025 during this month of November.  I was originally going to do it with a Battle Royale-esque TTRPG called Win Or Die, but decided to change course since Win Or Die’s main game jam doesn’t end until January 1st.  So, for NaGaDeMon, I’m working on a TTRPG fangame for The Amazing Digital Circus, which I’m making with another game designer & artist by the name of Tricks.  This is a game for my friend Alex, also for this month’s Eternal TTRPG Jam (about bespoke games).

Tricks is a fantastic design partner.  I originally brought her on because she put a collab request in the Eternal TTRPG Jam’s Discord to do art for a game, but she also has some great design ideas.  After I explained my basic ideas, and how I wanted to base the game off of the Polymorph SRD, she & I came up with some fantastic ideas for stats and stuff for the character sheets.  She also came up with the idea to call the GM the AM (Artificial [Intelligence] Master) since Caine from TADC is based on AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.  Brilliant!

We had a brainstorming call on the 7th that really helped push things forward in a great direction.  I went over things I’d come across in the Polymorph SRD that we could use, and we both made the Resolver table for dice rolls based on the stats we’d come up with so far.

Finally, over the weekend, I wrote a full outline of the game’s contents, all the things that will be covered in the rulebook.  I’ve never done that before, and it was super helpful to see everything completely laid out like that.  For those curious, I’ll put that full outline at the end of this post.

I’m also doing something new with this game that I want to introduce to my other TTRPGs too.  Recently psychhound came out with an accessibility guide for TTRPGs called the Accessible Rulebook Checklist, which is “a guide on how to make TTRPG rulebooks more accessible to all at every stage of writing and design.”  I’m trying to adhere to it the best I can as I go, as well as the linked Accessible Design Survival Guide from the post.

This week, my goal is to start drafting the rules.  They’re going to be written as if Caine, the ringmaster AI of TADC, is narrating them to you.  So it’s time to embrace my inner silly little guy and capture his voice!  I also want to nail down all of the images we’ll need for the book, so Tricks can fully get started on those.

That’s all for now.  Until next week!

Game outline: