Good Monday, Gamer!
Thomas Manuel's piece on building lore in TTRPGs, Elden Ring style, is out in the Indie RPG Newsletter this week. Elden Ring is a high bar in world lore, and getting that feel in our games is yet another holy grail of gaming. When I think about world lore (setting, history, mysteries, etc) - there’s the Branded stuff. Star Wars, Glorantha, Forgotten Realms —it’s vast, and it could be like drinking from a firehose playing with it. The DIY route could be a whole career path before you get something to the table! There’s a middle path somewhere, and posts like Thomas’s will always be interesting to see how other gamers approach the work of world-building. I’m a fan of Sine Nomine’s process in The World of the Red Tide, of Star|Worlds without Number fame; I’ve used it to start West Marches games. It is a very gameable resource!!
Outside of Thousand Year-Old Vampire, I’m not fond of solo journaling games. I think there isn’t enough ‘game’ there for me. I’m currently reading The One Ring’s Strider mode and am considering giving it a go. I’ve run Free League’s version, and it’s a solid game experience. The Strider solo rules build on that game with modifications to the rules since you’re a party of One Aragorn-like ranger. There are the standard “Oracle” mechanics, which are off-putting to me —I feel like we can do better, my hope in this play-through is to figure out a better way. We’ll see!
It’s been a heavy week of guitar practice for me. I’m learning to play “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” on guitar. My son plays drums, and I think we’re gonna team up on this one for his Rockband school’s show in March. I’m subbing in as their band’s guitar player for four songs already. Joan Jett’s version of “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, and Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” We’ll get that last song this week. I’ve been fretting 🤣 over being rusty… but it’s all coming back!
Judd Karlman from Daydreaming about Dragons turned me onto Canva about 100 years ago; I love this online tool for creating visual things. I’m using it to make map tokens for Foundry VTT and my Edge of the Empire game, The Outer Rim Blues. I have physical meeples, tokens, and coins for IRL game sessions and would use those if this was an IRL game. In the VTT space, I could go full actual representation…but I feel like that leaves nothing to our imagination space and everything to a video game experience. So, I like to go minimalist or close to analogish for feel. It’s also a lot less work!
Speaking of lore rich worlds..I’ve been spending a lot of time getting lost in Vagrus The Riven Realms.