An OSR for the heathen — a side project that got out of hand

Game Design Log #10

Hi all!

This is me trying to continue this trend of posting every week, so you are aware of where my mind and my efforts are focused on.

Lately I have been in between different projects, still advancing with The Promised Ones, but also with an ongoing project with a collaborator, all of them long-term plans.

And I’m super enthusiast about how things are going, but I miss the feeling of finishing things, of pushing an idea until its non-perfect but somehow final form.

That’s how I realized I needed a project to get into that I could finish faster, a smaller kind of game I could finish in a couple of months (active procrastination someone said?).

So I decided to amalgamate two ideas I had orbiting my head for a while, never too far from the corner of my eyes: i) write some sort of compendium for the homebrew I kept in my notebooks, and ii) create a game inspired by the tales, myths and, let’s say it, history of my country, Chile.

And that’s how things got out of hand.

I began writing for this game hyped by Mork Borg (that had just arrived at my mailbox), and invigorated by a game in person I had just played (the first in-person game I had in almost three years).

And then I began to draw characters, and music was hitting hard, with Hooded Menace, Oranssi Pazuzu, Bell Witch, Power Trip, and all the bunch.

I was deep in it, with the energy that one has when working on something new.

One and a half months fast-forward, and I’m here, with a game that is almost complete, some drawings and updating my layout software due to drivethruRPG no longer working with Scribus (a shame).

So I wanted to show you the first two pages of it. The layout and final design is still on the thinking tank, but I have some designs for characters and well, almost all the game already written, just some long tables away from finishing the text (and a whole lot of testing on the table).

Tell me what you think, I'd love to know if this is a vibe that excites you and makes you want to play.

In the next post, I may show you a little more before things are ready to be free in the wild (where and how I'm going to set them free is something I'm still trying to figure out, maybe itchfunding or something simple like that, but that's a topic for another time).

And that’s all for today, see you soon!