nekoewen

My Life With Maid RPG (Zine Draft)

I haven't been able to do much in the way of working on zines lately, but I thought I'd share with you guys the current draft of My Life With Maid RPG, a zine I'm working on about Maid RPG and my relationship with it. I worry that I may have gone a little long writing about the games I've done derived from Maid RPG, but you can judge that for yourselves.  A friend of mine is working on art for the cover, but that's taking time (since she's perpetually swamped w...

April Secret Bonus Table: Unnatural Disasters

This month's Secret Bonus Table is called "Unnatural Disasters," and it's for generating ridiculous names of bizarre disaster movies in the vein of Sharknado and other potential Syfy Originals.

• Beecano
• Godpasta
• Lasergeddon
• Quetzalzilla
• Mandemic

And I think you have to agree that "Mandemic" justifies the whole endeavor. Or something. Share your unnatural disasters in the comments or something!

2019-04-01 13:02:00 +0000 UTC View Post

April Table Pack: Weird RPG Terms

Hey guys. Today is the day I finally start actual treatment for my herniated disc. I've been feeling less bad, but mainly by way of avoiding activities that lead to my condition causing me pain. I managed to do this month's tables at least, though they're perhaps even more weird and random than usual, which is saying something.

This month's table pack is called "Weird RPG Terms." Two of the tables are ones that will appear in the Kageshima Declassified supplement for Kagegami High, whil...

Small Company Big Mess Zine

Small Company Big Mess is a zine I put together about the history of Guardians of Order and Big Eyes Small Mouth. It's pretty critical, but in the course of researching and writing it I wound up lamenting GoO's lost potential. I wanted to get a bit more content up for patrons before the end of the month, and this is something I've been thinking about sharing with you guys for a while. I've blathered about it a bunch, but now you can just crack open the PDF! Enjoy!

2019-03-30 18:57:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Dragon World: Easteros

Easteros is the default setting for Dragon World, the anime comedy fantasy Powered by the Apocalypse RPG that I've been working on for quite a while. Its name is a dumb parody of Westeros from Game of Thrones (and there are a few other GoT references in here), but there's a lot of anime nonsense, some JRPG weirdness, and a sprinkling of ideas from Discworld. Oh, and a few references to my own...

Personal Stuff

The short version of this is that I’m dealing with a medical problem that has me pretty severely messed up at the moment. It’s brought my creative output nearly to a standstill along with a lot of other things in my life, and it’s hard to say what will happen from here on out. Thanks to the PPACA I have health insurance, so I’ve been seeing doctors and taking meds, but it’s taking time. The support of friends, family, and fans has meant a lot to me over the past week, and it’s rem...

March Table Pack: Rings of the Lord

And here's this month's table pack, a collection of Tolkien randomness. And apparently most Middle Earth cultures don't have last names! Weird, huh?

March Secret Bonus Table: RPG Design Challenger

At the risk of writing stuff that I'll have to post again, I'm still getting used to the new day job, which unlike the previous one doesn't let me work from home, hence the start of March whipped by at lightning speed.

In any case, here's the March Secret Bonus Table, which is in fact a set of three tables, which you can use to generate an RPG design challenge for yourself!

Supplements!

In the world of RPGs, supplements are simultaneously totally natural and kind of weird. It’s natural that when a game gives you some cool bits and pieces to mess with, you’ll want some more of those. It’s weird because there are weird economic incentives involved.

Back when The Forge was going strong, the indie RPG scene was concerned about the “supplement treadmill” that larger publishers kept falling into. D&D 3.5 alone (not counting D&D 3rd Edition or third-party d2...

I Hate You Draft

I did a long post about it on my blog, but I Hate You: A Cartoon Story Game For Two Good Friends is an idea I had ages ago that I’m now trying to turn into a reality. It’s a weird little story game thing aimed at classic cartoons with a “predator vs. prey” dynamic. The Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons are the most obvious take on these, but a big portion of Looney Tunes and...

February Table Pack: Gaming

This month's table pack is a set of four tables to generate titles for different types of games, specifically arcade games, card games, indie video games, and wargames. And now I want games called Cupcraft, Dead Daddy, Paper Planet, and Stanley Valley to exist.  And I want to go to an arcade and see  Bubble Beast, Burger Bobble, Double Crisis, Food Enforcers, House Fighter, and Mortal Kong.

If you try out the tables, share some of your favorite random titles!

2019-02-01 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post

February Secret Bonus Table: Hit Points Lovecraft

This month's Secret Bonus Table is a very silly one based on my @LovecraftNames (or Hit Points Lovecraft) novelty twitter account where I and followers try to divine the true meaning of H.P. Lovecraft’s first two initials!

What do YOU think the "H.P." in H.P. Lovecraft stands for?

It's Almost February!

Hey guys! I wanted to give you a quick reminder that tomorrow will be the first time you get charged with the new monthly setup for my Patreon. If you haven't yet updated your pledge level to where you want it, now's the time!

Also, I have February's table pack and Secret Bonus Table all ready to go, so those will be going out to patrons tomorrow morning!

Novel Excerpts

I wanted to share some bits of the novels I’ve been working on, so I put together this PDF with excerpts and notes about four of them (Night After Night, Sigil, UFO Girl and the End of the World, and an as yet untitled isekai story).

Although I like to think I’m okay at putting words together, with novels in particular I struggle with plotting and also just getting up the discipline to do it. I’ve successfully done NaNoWriMo twice, but the resulting draf...

Anime Stuff

In the process of going crazy with zines, I put together one called Small Company Big Mess about the history of Guardians of Order and Big Eyes Small Mouth. It’d been a while since I last even seriously thought about BESM, and while I’m still critical of the Tri-Stat system, I can at least appreciate that BESM and other GoO games meant a lot to a lot of people. Looking deeper into the h...

Pix Playable Draft

The setting of Pix is a fragile, buggy video game world born of hope and tragedy. A princess escaped to Pix from a cruel and doomed world, but the evil Lord Chaos followed her and wreaked havoc on the world. His final blow caused the Sundering that cut Pix off from the human world. King Raster and Queen Vector introduced the Glitch into the core of Pix, imprisoning Lord Chaos but damaging the code that underlies the world. Today, Pix is a peaceful place. In the game, you play as a monster who...

January Secret Bonus Table: Rainbow Magic

Star vs. The Forces of Evil is a brilliant cartoon from Disney XD about a zany magical princess named Star Butterfly who goes to live on earth, specifically in the home of a boy named Marco Diaz who enjoys karate, pining after an unattainable girl, and being organized. For Star, magic is kind of like jazz, specifically a kind of jazz that’s like a Lisa Frank sticker book on fire, and I put together a three-column generator table to let you make up colorful magical spells that will ...

January Table Pack: Studio B

Studio B is a party game I made that’s essentially a reskin of Channel A for American B-movies. I went as far as to self-publish it on DriveThruCards, and when I was waiting to see if the Channel A Kickstarter would fund I channeled that anxiety into working on a series of Studio B expansions, which would up being a series of three stand-alone expansions for different era...

Happy 2019!

This is it, the launch of the new version of this Patreon! If you haven’t already, please go ahead and update your pledge level for the new monthly structure!

My 2018 in Review

2018 was kind of a weird year for me. Mundane life changes made it so that I wasn’t able to have weekly hangouts with friends anymore, which was a pretty radical change compared to the past decade or so. 2018 was my second year of working at a contract job for a big tech company where I was mostly tel...