Monday Musings #155 🤬
...Body by Jay
Good Monday, Gamer!
For 154 Mondays, I’ve written about other people’s games. Twilight: 2000. Burning Wheel. The Black Sword Hack. Mythic Bastionland. Apocalypse World. Coriolis. Monster of the Week. I wrote about them because I love them, because I’ve run them, because the table taught me stuff. Stuff that helped me make my own things that I hope people play.
“I ain’t got no body by Jake” - LL Cool Jay.
🤬 LIFTED: INDOMITABLE
My big, solo (sorta) TTRPG project.
I launched the Kickstarter for Lifted: Vault 01 almost three years ago, thinking I had the setting framed and the system locked in. Cortex Prime plus Marvel Heroic toolset, drop the Lifted world on top, ship it, profit. Then I started running it. And I figured out pretty quick — we already got this game. Back to the drawing board.
Lifted: Indomitable is what the table built. Ordinary folks with extraordinary powers living in a tech-aggressive world. The heroes aren’t organized because the heroes aren’t organized is the point. No Avengers. No JLA. The good guys are misfits, and getting them organized is the players’ job, session zero forward.
Here’s what’s lifted from those tables:
Relationships, but asymmetrical and evolving. The way real comic-book teams actually feel — somebody owes somebody, somebody hurt somebody, somebody isn’t speaking to somebody. The Fastball Special needs a relationship. Without it, two players coordinating a move is just two players coordinating. With it, it’s a moment.
Death, mechanized. You can go out in a blaze of glory. You can come back later. Comics taught us how this works; the rules just had to listen.
Entanglements. Personal complications. Enemies, debts, histories that won’t stay buried. The cost of advancement is more story.
Antagonists, antagonists, antagonists. Three more times for emphasis. Threat dice that grow every session an antagonist is in the field. Agenda pools for the ones with grand schemes. Mjollnir. RUBICON. Dr. Faust. Abzu and New Atlantis. The Dead Presidents Society. The Arbiter. Most of my page count goes to the people the heroes have to stop — antagonists.
Hand a GM the antagonist toolbox. Trust the players to make the heroes. And you’ve got games.
Right now, I’ve got 230 pages of Indomitableness. Nathan and I did the final walkthrough of the manuscript last week. He’s on the last layout pass. After three years of outline, write, run, revise, run, revise — the book has its shape. Layout is the last gate.
Then it’s done.
🤬 MAD-DICE
RollWithMe.xyz flatlined and I fumbled three games in a row. That’s the origin story of mad-dice.com.
I’m a console gamer these days. My PC-tinkering years are behind me — I spent the day job slinging code and SSHing into VAX/VMS systems, and by the time I got home the last thing I wanted was another tech headache. So I’m picky about TTRPG software because I know how it should feel. I love Foundry when the modules are great (Free League’s Twilight: 2000 module is the gold standard — 50+ sessions logged). Owlbear Rodeo saves me when a system isn’t supported. But for a Zoom-and-dice night with friends, RollWithMe was the move, until it wasn’t. So I built Mad-Dice.
“To do it, you do it.” mashed up with my programmer credo: as simple as possible, but not simpler. I set out to build a thing that does what I actually want — roll dice, chat, drop in images, no fuss, no logins required to start a room. As effortless as posting to a social feed.
What’s live on mad-dice.com today:
Real-time dice rolling with any notation you’d want — 2d6+1d4, 4d6k2, 5d6s5 — IYKYK.
Chat alongside the rolls. Game feel, not just numbers.
Image uploads and inline art straight into the feed.
Dogfooded in public. I ran a CBR+PNK actual play on Mad-Dice last spring — a Gone in 60 Seconds-flavored Forged in the Dark heist series in Gibson’s BAMA sprawl, three nights, fifteen high-value vehicles to boost. Diegetic player pitch, encrypted mission briefs, the works. Wrote it up as Ghost in Virtual Seconds and Pt2. Every session was a bug report I gave myself.
Cortex Prime-readiness is the goal. Not there yet.
🤬 TINYCON.EVENTS
Warhorn announced it was sunsetting (or changing hands — the details got murky) and a bunch of event-organizing friends panicked in my inbox at the same time. Where do we run our events now? Different versions of the same question from people who’d built whole conventions on the platform. I had an answer in the back of my head, because I ran Games On Demand Online in 2020/21. TinyCon.Events is my answer. Community-funded. Ad-free, forever. Never sells your data. Works for a one-time game night, a house con, a full convention. The platform serves the gamers, not the platform. But it can’t be free. So I ran a Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter came up short. The question I kept getting was “why annual funding? Just do subscriptions.” Even con organizers asked me that. Warhorn used PWYW subscriptions — and not many folks used it that way, not many cons that could did...until it was going away. I learned some stuff. The TinyCon manifesto still stands. I’m working out the next moves. I’ve got some ideas.
🤬 THE MAD JAY CATALOG
Setting up shop on the brand-new rpg-trader.com — creator-direct, no middleman, no algorithm...yet.
Lifted: Vault 01 — the original Kickstarter zine. The setting primer. The first time Lifted showed up in print for Champions Now.
By Aecer’s Light — a smaller zine, my first. Burning Wheel, Dunegon World and mices.
Lifted: Vol 1 — the Indomitable PDF. When it’s done. Soon.
PF Greatest Crits — a best-of-Play-Fearless zine. The newsletter as artifact. With a couple of guest contributors.
T2K: Heavy is the Crown — my one-shot-plus scenario for Twilight: 2000.
The Dictionary of Fearless Gaming — it’s got a few entries missing...but maybe those are guest authors?
Watch the rpg-trader profile. I’ll announce drops in the new home as they ship.
🤬 THE MOVES
A few things landing in the new spaces over the next few weeks:
Diceology — the podcast — is getting a reboot and a new website. I’ve been running SecretKC (my Kansas City cocktail and nightlife newsletter) on Beehiiv, and it’s been AWESOME, so Diceology is moving over there too.
Dice Unknown — a new Diceology AP series — kicks off with a Rich Rogers collab: Wild Talents: The eXorcists. Rich and I have been talking about doing something together for a while. Wild Talents is Greg Stolze’s One-Roll Engine supers game, and The eXorcists from the Lifted antagonist roster is the game. A different system’s take on a corner of my setting.
Muses of Play Season I has wrapped — final episodes are in edit. We’re talking about Season II guests now.
Play Fearless moves to Beehiiv. You won’t need to do anything — you’re already on the train. There are plenty of solid reasons to leave Substack these days; the extreme lack of support for the Games category is mine. The move opens up a lot I can’t do here. (Beehiiv, like Free League, doesn’t pay me to say that, but it’s still true!)
MadJayZero on Patreon remains the workhorse. I’m working out tiers to include TinyCon and Mad-Dice and fund their maintenance and development. Current Play Fearless subscribers will be folded in.
Grimoires and Zero Day Bandits are still WIP. ZDB more demo-ish than Grimoires. These are my moves into making indie video games. I’ve gotten to meet other indie devs and some pro indie folks and talk about bit-slinging. I’m on track for a demo debut for Steam’s Octoberfest. And yes...Beehiiv will let me segment posts for folks who care about this stuff too!
One more Monday Musing left.