TTRPG enthusiast from Germany, rolling dice since 1988. As an eternally online player and GM I create games for easy VTT use in various genres.
74 posts
Looks Like SWADE Is Back On The Menu!
Looks like SWADE is back on the menu!
More Posts from Chaosmeistergames
SHROOM GOONS. Little Mushroom Folk on Big Adventures. Completely free, powered by Tunnel Goons. Artwork by Skullfungus. Just need some six-sided dice, writing utensils, some weird friends and your imagination.
Open Gaming Jam has started
The Jam has just started on Itch! I would love to see some of you fine creative folks participate and share your open-license games. Don’t know what a Jam is? Essentially various creators come together to make something for a specific theme/topic/system and share it on Itch.io. Can be free, can be sold. However you like. They usually run for a month so you need to get cracking. However, there is no need for the game to be finished by the end of the Jam. Many participants in other Jams developed their submissions further, even into Kickstarters. https://itch.io/jam/open-gaming-jam
I looked for the old text files from my Savage Space game from a decade ago. I got lucky and found them all! That brings me great joy. I can get to work right away instead of first having to get everything out of PDF.
New paths going forward
Last November, I shared on Rеddіt my 2-year perspective as a full-time game designer.
Since then, that post's been seen more than 80,000 times.
The conversation helped me investigate aspects of my career going forward.
And some important changes are about to happen.
If you follow me, you probably remember a thread from August, in which I announced that 2022 would be my last attempt to make this path work.
Well, it's 2023.
And although I consider my Раtrеоn a success, I'm still below 50% of my goal.
What now?
One of the major takeaways from that reflection was that I spend most of my time promoting my games, rather than making them.
My actual "job" is selling games, if I'm being honest.
Ironically, I'd potentially make more games if I were not a full-time game designer.
In general, the advice I received on how to make a sustainable living out of games was to double-down on that path.
Do more marketing, follow more trends, become an actual company.
Look at my career as a proper business, not as an art project.
And also:
Foster a community around one of my games, offer support and create supplements, and so on, instead of making many different games.
Either that, or offer my services as a freelance writer/editor.
All these ideas have something in common:
I don't wanna.
It took me a long time and a high dose of self-honesty to admit that I'm not willing to do that.
I've just turned 40, and after leaving a somewhat successful career to pursue my dream, I'm not ready to succumb to what the market demands.
Not quite yet.
So what am I going to do?
Stop.
Not with games, but with the rest.
To become what I truly am, I'm deciding first to stop being what I am not.
No more constant marketing, no more trying to keep up with 11 different social platforms.
I'll still promote and share my (and friends') stuff eventually, but I'll stop worrying about it.
It was like having 20 tabs constantly open on my mind's browser.
Spencer Campbell once said he wishes he could be a TTRPG hermit who goes into the mountains and then eventually emerges with a new game.
Well, I might just try that.
Hopefully, the free time allows me to explore more, to be curious once again.
To let my mind wander.
I'll continue with my Раtrеоn, I love that little cozy corner we created together.
I also polled about creating a game design-focused nеwѕlеttеr, and got an immensely positive response.
So that is going to happen.
Again, with no commercial pressure whatsoever.
I am well aware that this resolution is a self-inflicted commercial annihilation.
The Algorithm™ will swallow me whole and spit me out on the shores of irrelevance.
But I'm tired of swimming against the tide.
I just want to float for a while.
If you like what I do and want to support me on this unusual path I am in, I deeply appreciate you.
I gathered my nеwѕlеttеr, my Раtrеоn, my games, all in one page.
Here are all the ways you can follow me.
Feel free to share it around.
Patchwork World is a weird fantasy game that mixes principles from powered-by-the-apocalypse (PbtA) and old school renaissance (OSR) games. I wrote it for people who prefer or need simple character sheets and rules and for people trying to move away from D&D. I’ll go into more detail about each of the bolded terms below.
1. WEIRD FANTASY is the genre description I settled on because the game is fantastical, it’s about fantasizing about a better world, and it doesn’t draw from the same fantasy traditions as D&D.
Instead, I wanted to recreate the feeling of playing games like Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World for the first time. I drew inspiration from books like Hav by Jan Morris, Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness, Circe by Madeline Miller, and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I wanted the game to feel like my favorite surreal comic books, like Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Rudy by Mark Connery, and the works of A. Degen.
In Patchwork World, you can burst into a herd of cats, be haunted by your troll grandma, speak with birds, and tend a crystalline garden.
2. PbtA: Patchwork World draws on the principles and system originated in Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker and the “roll with the questions” iteration created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta for Pasión de las Pasiones (one of the finest RPGs ever written).
Players (including the GM) have clear principles to help them get started, like being a fan of each other and being open to change. Players have a lot of power over what a session will look like based on the moves (special abilities) they pick for their characters—a group that owns a castle (the Castle move) and can burst into cats will have a much different approach to problems than a group with a Magnificent Weapon and a bunch of curses.
And rolling with the questions means that every time someone makes a move, they have to consider the state of their character, both emotionally and fictionally. You have a better chance to avoid danger if you made an ominous prediction about it, for example, and you’re more likely to win a fight if you’ve witnessed your enemy acting unjustly.
3. OSR principles are tailored around “old school” gaming and are often phrased as in opposition to newer “story games” like Apocalypse World. But looking at the headings in the classic Principia Apocrypha, one of the building blocks of OSR culture, there’s a lot that aligns! And a lot of stuff I love.
Embrace chaos, telegraph lethality, subvert expectations, build responsive situations. These are all principles I love, and I tried to give the GM advice and tools to do this. There are lots of tables to roll on in Patchwork World to build strange places and drive the strange occupants of those places.
It’s also really easy to make a character in Patchwork World, much like in OSR games, because…
4. SIMPLE CHARACTER SHEETS & RULES! I run games for people with full-time jobs, people with kids, people with ADHD and memory issues. And it can be such a barrier to say to people like that, “We’re going to have a bunch of fun! But we’ll have to reference this big book, and you’ll have to parse this tiny text, and if you want to be a cool wizard, you’ll have to flip back and forth between even more complicated rules.”
Patchwork World has no stats (thanks to rolling with the questions) and no classes. Making a character is as simple as choosing two moves (and if I were richer, I would have printed them on a deck of cards so players could just have them that way) and describing who they are.
(And because I embrace chaos, there’s also a table to roll for random moves instead.)
Other than their two moves, players will need to reference a simple sheet to track their wellness and experience and a sheet of basic moves that everyone has. And you’ll only need two six-sided dice to play.
5. MOVING AWAY FROM D&D is hard! You get invested in those big books and the time and money you’ve spent on them. You’re invested in the stories you’ve told. I get it. But D&D ended up actively pushing against a lot of what my weird friends wanted to do in a game, and we’d either have to follow the rules (meaning stuff was less cool), write new rules (more homework for the DM), or toss the rules away. And if we did that, why bother using them in the first place?
If you’re moving from D&D to Patchwork World, you can still play an elf wizard, a human fighter, a dwarven barbarian, or anything else like that. You can have cool weapons, fancy magic, and roguish charm and stealth. Just choose those moves and get going.
But you can also be an elf barbarian without having to worry about balancing your stat bonuses. Or you can be sneaky and cast spells without having to make it to a level three subclass or deal with multiclassing. And my hope is that once you start getting weird with that stuff, you’ll only get weirder.
6. A FINAL WORD: Making Patchwork World was an intensely personal experience for me. I was writing it in 2020 and 2021, in the rise of COVID and the aftermath of my city’s police murdering George Floyd a mile from my home. I was thinking about building communities in a broken world. I was struggling with the solitude of lockdown, away from my joyfully radical and queer communities. I was thinking about how much I’ve changed and how much I still want to change. So this is a game with rules for building communities, for mutating, for going on dates and making friends.
But you can also have a cool sword that takes memories or an eyeball helmet that sees through walls. Players have been grubby raccoons, otherdimensional children, necromancer puppets, and sullen teen busboys. This game has brought me a lot of joy! Maybe it can bring you some too. (It’s free, btw.)
(Doing a little post here about each of my games so that they’re around for me to reblog or link to. Reblogs welcome!)