#visitations

We began with The Librarian’s Apprentice by Almost Bedtime Theater, then they played VOID 1680 AM by Bannerless Games, but I missed that one unfortunately. The most recent game we played was Summit by The Copper Compendium, and next up we’re playing Mountaintop Isolation by La Lionne Publishing.

The first game I made was a solo game, but I hadn’t really touched the genre much since. Jumping back into them here has been really interesting. The Librarian’s Apprentice re-inspired me to think about the Guided by Firelights game I had an idea for back when the game jam for that was happening. And Summit has also inspired me with an idea for a new game that uses some of the same rules for generating visitors (more on that later).

One of the other attendants, Alex, has also been blogging about some of the games we’ve played, so take a look at his Substack for a more in-depth review of Summit, as well as a review of Dead Air which talks a bit about his experience with VOID.

Video Essay Club

On the topic of book clubs, I took it upon myself to start up a video essay club with my old college friends. Each fortnight, we pick a video essay, watch it, and meet back up to discuss our thoughts. I started us off with Art in the Pre-Apocalypse by Jacob Geller, one of my favourite videos from one of my favourite creators. Then we watched It's Embarrassing to Die: The Immortalist Story by Atrocity Guide, a video about the history of various groups in the US who are claiming to know the secret to immortality. Then I suggested a double feature of LegalKimchi’s videos, Bioessentialism in Gaming and Dehumanization and Creating Monsters, about the depiction of “monstrous” races in D&D and other high fantasy. And most recently we discussed The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures by Verilybitchie, about how science fiction movies dress men in feminine clothing, and what that means the films are saying. Next up is Taskmaster and Intelligence by Incidental Mythology, which I mentioned in my last recommendations post!

This whole thing has been so lovely, both as an excuse to experience new viewpoints on topics and as an excuse to hang out with my old friends. During our first discussion, we spoke about how long it had been since some of us had seen each other, and how its really lovely to have a regularly scheduled reason to hang out again after college.

Right now, we're keeping the videos roughly between 30 minutes and an hour, which makes the commitment much smaller than reading a full book. This whole thing was inspired by Game Studies Study Buddies encouraging their viewers to start game studies book clubs, as well as Death To Secret Cinema, an essay by Adam J. Reed in Filmmakers Without Cameras, which is about Reed’s experience with secret cinemas back in university and during COVID. We used to do monthly movie nights in the same server, so this has been a really fun, new take on that!

Game Jam

In a separate friend group (with some overlap), I’d been listening to a bunch of people talk about cool game ideas they have and then not actually making them. This had been going on for MONTHS and it was KILLING ME. So I finally decided to do something about it, I’m hosting a game jame! This is a private jam for my small friend group that I’m running this month, so don’t take this as an announcement of a big public event, but next month’s blog post will probably involve me going through the games we made and talking about how cool they are. Apart from me and one other person (I think?), these are a bunch of first time designers, and its been lovely to hear them all share their progress and collaborate on these projects.

I started making a tactical combat system as a first foray into the system I want to use for larger projects down the line. But I decided that it’s probably not a good idea to make my first tactics system under a time restriction, considering all the playtesting I should do for it. So I’ve decided to pivot to making a solo game, which is much easier to playtest.

VISITATIONS is a game where you play a terrible person and get visited by ghosts who attempt to teach you a lesson. Themeing-wise it’s entirely inspired by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and because of that I’m pulling from a bunch of old illustrations of ghostly encounters to make the art for the game. Here’s a sneak peak of the cover:

Mechanically, it’s inspired by Summit, which I only played because of the Solo RPG Club! It’s all come full circle! I’ll speak about it more when I write a Design Diary post for VISITATIONS, but the way your resources work in Summit—laying out cards and then using the information on them to reference specific journalling prompts—really reminded me of laying out a tarot spread. I want to push the amount of information you get out of the spread further than Summit took it, and I guess we’ll see how successful I am with that. Wish me luck!