My Favorites

There are two hazards that come out of doing any kind of endurance challenge: the first is that quality tends to vary wildly over the time that you’re doing the challenge; the second is that you’re going to get drained by the end of it. If you start from the beginning of this journey, you’ll see that the quality of the layout, and the information density, and the quality of the games starts pretty rough, but over the course of the month those things get more refined. Towards the end, the well has run pretty dry and my enthusiasm for the project was lower, and my opinion of the work definitely declined. Going through this blog in reverse chronological order, you’re met with some games I’m not super keen on first out the gate because they were me more or less stumbling over the finish-line.

I’m not proud of every game I’ve made this month, but there are some that I really like! Some of them did something I thought was interesting with the rules or setting, some are just fun ideas. So I wanted to highlight a few of those here at the top of the list. Click on the title to go to that game’s page!

Accounts Receivable

The second game in this challenge is built around one of my all-time favorite tropes - the idea that even in the face of the end of the world, there are some people who are still going to go to work and do a job that doesn’t matter anymore, if it ever actually did. It kind of just highlights how utterly senseless and abstract most of the work people do really is. But also, the idea of a latest-stage-capitalist apocalypse feels a little like a prophecy.

Forget Me Before You Go

I’d never written a solo role-playing game before, and this felt like an idea that really, really wanted to be a solo journaling game. I know that, for myself, gaming is often something I do to connect with others, and the idea of a solo game felt antithetical to some of the ideas I consider to be integral to role-playing games. But in discussion with some of the folks on the NaGaDemon discord, I found myself intrigued by the idea, and I kept coming back to the idea of the profound loneliness that sprouted from social anxiety. The idea of needing everyone you love to forget about you to protect them, but struggling against your own need to be close and be loved… I don’t know if I managed to fully encapsulate that in a one-page game, but even writing about it now has me feeling some things.

Shoots, & Leaves

This one admittedly got away from me a bit, but I think that actually kind of helped the game a bit. It’s abstract. It’s weird. It’s about protecting and promoting the Oxford comma. Which like… Kay, I’m a bit of a language nerd, but not in the way most language nerds are. With nothing but love: English is the Swamp Water of languages, that horrifying amalgam of every flavor of Slurpee poured into the same cup and stirred. I talk and write like I do because that’s how I was taught, but like, I also recognize that the way I was taught has some inherent problems.

Anyway, this one’s probably the weirdest game in the list, and for that reason alone I kinda love it.

Let Me See that Rulebook

Not an RPG in the strictest sense, I think this one is the best idea I had all month. Basically, I turned rules lawyering and cheating into a meta-game. Play D&D, and change the rules as you play. Feels like it’s destined to end in complete fucking chaos, and to be honest, I’m super here for that.

Me, My Demon, and I

I really liked some of what I did in Noah’s Yacht, but it was early in the project and both the formatting and my own myopia kept it from being the game it could have been. I think in a lot of ways, Me, My Demon, and I is the game Noah’s Yacht should have been, just with the theme flipped. And to be honest, I think the theme is stronger on this one, but I do really want to make more good TTRPGs that lean into Christianity someday. I’m not Christian myself, but Josh is, and we’ve sometimes discussed the fact that there just aren’t enough good Biblical role-playing games. This one ain’t that, but I think there’s still a lot of potential for something like Noah’s Yacht to work.

Eureka

I find this one legitimately disturbing. I wrote an article in art school about the idea of true artificial intelligence being entirely unknowable and detached from humanity because human beings are gross and weird. Like, the fact that you’re in a body and your body has needs and meeting those needs results in you expelling some nasty stuff from that boy is super gross and weird and deeply, utterly human. Computers never have to deal with that. They don’t know what it’s like to get ‘hangry’ or sexual frustration. So I wanted to explore what happens when you’re freed from those constraints. And my first thought was that it would be sort of utopian, but it didn’t take long for me to trip face-first into the reality that you just… Wouldn’t be human anymore…

System: A Suburban Apocalypse

This one is neat because I knew, even as I was writing it, that it wanted to be a bigger game. I love me some Progression Fantasy in fiction, and one of my favorite genres of that (despite the fact that there’s some asshole gatekeeping the term) is a System Apocalypse - the type of story where the world ends, at least in part, because the laws of the universe have been rewritten to be the rules of a game. But a game about a world in which the game system is diagetic really desperately wants a super crunchy system for the players and their characters to interact with. For a one-pager there just isn’t enough space. When I come back to look at expanding some of these, this one is the first one on my list for like, a super-chonky 4th Edition-inspired slug-fest of a game.

Castelia City

My role in the podcast is to be the weird pretentious one, and this is probably the most pretentious thing I’ve ever committed to paper. It’s a serious-business TTRPG setting about Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, a weird kind of aesthetic holy grail of game design. It also has one of my favorite resolution mechanics.

Which ones were your favorites!?!?