Shit ass month all around

November ain't a great month for me at the best of times to be honest. I've never been a fan of Thanksgiving. And I don't think I have to explain why this one in particular sucked shit. I had a hard time working to the quality I expect from myself and want to produce, so no real update of content this month. I hope you please understand.

This month's book was supposed to be The Heart, a book about the importance of empathy and kindness and I was, as you might fucking expect, not feeling it. But I still managed to get about half of it done.

I also managed to edit almost 200 pages of content for Evil Hat for a new game I can not talk about in any real way. But it was nice to be able to work with them once more. If you're counting that mean I have a total of 4 whole games I have worked on or am doing work on in development, 2 of which are my own.

And it was nice to be able to step back and reevaluate the work I have been doing on Protect the Sacred. On a personal level, I've been pretty satisfied with the way I've been delivering the pulp elements of the game, but I really feel like I could be delivering better and harder on the politics that drive it.

It's still about the deconstruction of pulp adventure, pro museum and academic reform, indigenous rights and agency in our own narratives, the role, expression, and importance of culture. In Exceptionals where the metaphor was the mutant metaphor of x-men and familiar, I was able to spend paragraphs in first person confessionals. But different game, different rules. I was struggling in a good place to say the things organically.

Sure, I have a giant essay about "the ethics of 'It belongs in a museum" but how do characters express it in a way that being a professional magic adventurer exploring other spaces and solving problems with the power the community granted you permeates everything?

But I think I have solved it. Each playbook should be about how they can play that role. And it'll only take a little bit of minor editing that fluffs up a space I wanted to beef up in the second edit anyways.

Minorly, I also solved more than a few gameplay flow issues that came up during testing. There is now a rule for holding actions, a new clock-like mechanic that's easier to understand, and re-edited the approaches mechanic to better reflect their intent.

This month, after I return from MFF and telling some folks I love them, I plan on doing my yearly personal art jam thing in the hopes of making a present for you all. This year it's a little game jam and a little selfish. I want to make a game specifically for my friend groups to play (and test some systems I want to use for the game after protect the sacred while I'm at it). Specifically, I want to make a game that can be played on top of other games. I want to make a game that emulates and creates the melodramatic soap opera of card game shonen battle anime.

Obviously, the hard part of the game design here is that a card game battle is often inherently a 1 v 1 deal, How do you make that engaging and interesting for the people not involved? My solution is to really engage those social systems. In other words, I want to gameitize that part of Yugioh where people are on the sidelines commenting on the game, making it a fun resource management affair. I don't know if I'll finish the game in a month, but I'll have a most of it on your desk by new years either way.

Either way. A neighbor brought me venison, so I have frybread vension tacos on the way (real wolf hours) and the love of friends ahead of me, and I hope you do to. Honestly, I might try to run Protect The Sacred testing just to get more data and spend time with folks.