No time for monsters

Visiting home and the past

Hello people!

Today I will not be able to bring a new creature to you, I thought I would, but I just got back to my home country after two and a half years of being away (yes, time goes by), and between having to empty my apartment, move all my stuff into a storage room, and then having to fly 14 hours, I haven't had time to complete this week's creature.

But, instead, I thought I'd tell you about the games I've designed and the ones I'm designing.

I started designing games one and a half years ago, after years of having the idea buzzing in my head, and although tabletop role-playing games have been in-and-out of my life since adolescence, I started my creative jump toward the void of uncertainty by writing novels (now I’m in the process of searching where to publish the novels I have written through the years), so it was not as easy to take another creative undertake while balancing other things in my life, until it was internally necessary.

The first jump toward ttrpgs was a small supplement for collaborative magic, to be used in dnd and osr games. This was born from the games I was running at the time, a dnd game and one of lotfp, from which, the later one, delve a lot on the idea of memory, magic awaked by emotions, and hive minds as a conduit to more powerful magic.

From these games I was running, I exported some of my ideas for collaborative magic to the supplement, of which, looking backwards, the more “innovative” piece of the puzzle was the conversion of the slot-system of magic, so canonical of dnd, to a bonds-system, in which for every bond created in a circle of magic, the members of the circle can cast one spell, so all the power is in the numbers and the connections. This system also has some restrictions to what a bond and a circle of magic is, defining some narrative needs to be fulfilled, and some mechanical-logical restrictions for the construction of a circle of magic, that can be easily understood with a “graph” representation of the circle of magic (in the supplement referred as circle of bonds).

My second jump was to create a complete game in two months for the first DriveThruRPG jam, of which the theme was summer camp. Something a little out of my comfort zone because summer camps are very rare in Chile, and they are not at all part of pop culture as they are in the US. But nevertheless I was super inspired to do a new game and in a very fun month I created the idea, developed the mechanic, play-tested the game and drew all the interior art. Fortunately, I had the help of a dear friend with the cover art and from my partner for the layout (they also made the beautiful layout of my first supplement for collaborative magic, even when working in their phd).

For this game, one of the things I wanted to convey was the feeling of doing things on the hide, giving that sensation of possible disaster to every action, and triggering the fear of being caught, a feeling I really enjoyed from Vampire the masquerade. So to bring that feeling to my game, I designed a world in which beings living underground had to go to the “upper-world” to hunt the myths born from the tales campers tell around the campfire every summer. That's how Summer Myth Hunt was born, a game of which I am particularly proud because of the short time in which I developed it, because of its original systems to hunt myths (which, a friend told me, gives the game a “pokemon” feel), the system of free-form magic, and they way in which damage is handled (psychological and physical); as conditions that get on the way of the flow of magic, which characters need to work with the myths they hunt and the magical items they carry.

Just when I finished that game I had a lot to do, but regardless, I wanted to try to make a game for the One-Page RPG jam of itchio, which I did in one week. For this game, I think I was still hooked to the need of that feeling of being caught, so I ended up designing a game of birds that have to infiltrate human society, by taking the shape of a human character from any novel they could find (by laying bookworms on its pages and then eating the worm), to stop a human project that was engendering their habitat. I tried to convey in this game the idea of being an outsider, of being utterly lost in a world full of rules alien to your natural disposition, a world that parasitizes from the place you call home, but in which you have to create connections, and even sympathize with, if you want to save your home and your past.

So, as you can read, I have been dealing with the feeling of being an outsider, something that was obvious, but that I only realized when someone asked me to describe my games and my inspiration for them. Maybe it is something unavoidable when being an immigrant.

Well, I think I will leave this as part 1 of some-number. This being the past, the already accomplished, and in the next, (1 or 2 weeks from now), I will tell you in more detail what I’m working on. Perhaps to some of you this will be interesting, to follow step by step someone else creating, hesitating, erasing, remaking, until reaching something that we can dare call a game.

Leave me comments and tell me about the games you love and what you love about them.

Have a beautiful week!