My 2019, My 2020

2019 was quite a year, huh? In January the contract job I’d had for 2 years came to an be end, and while looking for a job a started doing zines. In February I started a new contract job, but in March I developed a herniated disc that caused me terrible pain and forced me to take 2 months off of work. I got back to work in May, but I developed some kind of fatigue issue that lasted another 2 months. This month I got an offer to do the same job on a permanent basis, but caught a cold to round out the year. On top of that there were some family issues that I won’t get into here, but suffice to say they didn’t help.

Projects

All of that is probably why I didn’t get anywhere near as much done as I wanted to. I did keep up with doing tables, but they ran later than I’d hoped, and I‘m sure you’ve noticed how weird they got at times. On the plus side, I did get a lot of writing done for Kageshima Declassified, and made a good start on Podcast From Another World. I’m also working on a new RPG history zine called “Small Games Big Dreams,” about Tinker’s Damn, RandomAnime, and OVA, plus a brief update on new developments with BESM (what with the 4th Edition PDFs having come out, plus a couple of people shared stories about GoO with me). I was able to get in touch with the creator of Tinker’s Damn through Facebook; he’s still doing art, though he was a bit shocked that anyone knew or cared about his RPG from 1997.

Although the core stuff for Pix is basically done and ready for playtesting, I’ve been working a bit on support material, notably the set of NPC archetypes for the “Story Tools” chapter. I’m trying to do a section on special items (similar to the magic items in Fantasy Friends), but those are really, really hard to write. As with Fantasy Friends, I’m running into the thing that the vast majority of special items in games and fiction are combat oriented, so that coming up with items for a non-violent game requires sifting through a ton of stuff. (This is also why I now own all four volumes of the AD&D Encyclopedia Magica in print.)

The very latest is that I got inspired to start on a new RPG called Against the Whole Damn World, which is kind of like Scott Pilgrim in that it’s about cool but flawed people in a world like ours except a lot of things run on video game logic, particularly River City Ransom logic. I’m still in the early stages of working on it, but it’s shaping up to be the next evolution of the Powered by Fury rules behind Magical Fury and Angel Project. Like them, this is a game where characters have a lot of fights that are really about moving the story forward and thus use very fast, simple rules. The setting of the game is San Francisco 64, a weird take on SF, I guess because I deal with Silicon Valley nonsense enough IRL that I want to mock it in an RPG.

Plans

I’ve had a hell of a time getting friends together for gaming this year, so in order to both do playtesting and just to have fun playing RPGs I’m planning to set up a small Discord server. It’ll be invite-only at least to start, but patrons will have an open invite.

I also want to start doing more with itch.io, both putting more of my stuff on there and trying it for an open beta kind of thing with some games, starting with Pix. (Though that’s another thing where patrons will get free access.)