Something Stirs at the bottom of the Oubliette
Hey there! Long time no see… As you can probably tell from how many more projects have popped up on my Role-Playing Games page since I last posted on my blog I’ve been pretty busy and not very talkative about it.
Because 1) I’m trying to be a bit more professional about things and 2) everyone’s favourite whiney man child has shackled himself to a billion dollar bird shaped time bomb of debt I wanna get this blog back up and running at a somewhat more regular pace. To start off I want to recap some of the stuff I’ve been doing in TTRPGs over the past… nearly a year and then… get into some of the stuff I’m working on now and want to take you along on the ride for the development of.
Let’s get it shall we.
Cool Projects for Cool People
Since the release of Jack Kills Giants I’ve had the opportunity to work with a bunch of cool creators in this little Indie TTRPG scene of ours. Some of the projects I’ve had a hand in are available now, others are still in development or in that tenuous period of waiting to be released. You can check them out in more detail on their respective project pages.
Getting to work on these varied projects was a lot of fun and it’s been cool to see my art improve a lot in the process. Some of the pieces I did for Sharps of the Knife/After the Serpent (which is where the picture to the right is from) are amongst my favourite drawings I’ve done this year. Professionally I’ve also experienced a bit of growth over the course of this year, taking myself and my work more seriously and valuing my labour more.
Shout out to Tibbius, Sage and Jason for being fantastic collaborators.
Also… I still can’t believe I got to work on a project with Alec Sorensen If you somehow see this Alec uh… your art is cool as heck and we should like… make a zine or something sometime.
Game Jams & The Spectre of Scope Creep
I entered into two game jams! It’s the first time I’ve done one and of course… on the very first game jam I entered I ended up not fully completing the book till… seven months after the jam… good work Andy!
Jokes aside, despite the major hubris of writing what I believe is probably the biggest (by page count) adventure written for Cairn and deciding to do… 86 full colour illustrations for it I still am very happy with the result. The Weft & The Weave features a good half of all my favourite drawings of 2022 and I really really like a lot of the npcs I wrote for it. Turning some of those illustrations into art prints to sell on this website is on my to-do list, especially the Ogre… I love that ogre.
After the massive over-reach of Weft and the Weave I wasn’t planning on doing another jam for a while, but then I saw the Medieval but Queer Jam and I knew I just HAD to do something for it. So I drastically reeled in the scope of the project and managed to put out something I’m really happy with in under a month. Misericorde had been on my list of names to use for games for ages and it just felt so perfect for this, especially once I realised I could take Tam’s Bone & Black as the basis for a solo/duet game about being a squire who is really… really gay for their knight.
As I have already mentioned on the Misercorde page, Tam and Amanda P were huge helps on this. Tam is a font of knowledge when it comes to Solo games, a niche I don’t have a heck of a lot of experience with but I’ve fallen in love with and Amanda’s notes on Arthurian stuff were super handy (go play Pilgrimage of the Sun Guard, it’s pretty neat, also the L.F.OSR version is GORGEOUS)
So… What’s Next?
Lots of things! But, more specifically, I’m working on a couple ttrpg projects right now. The first one I’ll mention is a system agnostic adventure (at least currently) called: The Lady, The Salt, The Flesh, which started out as me doing some illustration commissions but turned into a full on collaboration with the ever wonderful Cosmic Orrery.
Set in a salt-encrusted seaside town being slowly drowned by a cursed tide. I’ve been having a lot of fun writing it together and actually just started working on some layout stuff for it today.
I’ll be posting sporadic updates about it in future, especially once I start on the rest of the art for it.
The second thing… which I alluded to in the title of this blogpost is a new game I’m developing which will become the main subject of this blog for the foreseeable future. I’ve been wanting to talk about all sorts of things related to game design and graphic design for a while and I find it much easier to talk about in context of a specific project so I figured I might as well use this project, which is still in a fairly early stage, as the focus for all that.
I’ve gotten the core system worked out and have enough to start doing some limited playtesting, which you will be hearing all about. Unlike Jack Kills Giants which literally started with only a name, this project I’ve just been calling the “Dungeon Crawler Thingy.“
I’ll talk more about it soon but for now I just want to share a little snippet of the layout from the playtest doc I’m working on with no explanation of rules or anything, just some words and art to give you a sense of this game’s vibe. This is one of the 8 player character archetypes you can choose from.
Spoiler: it’s gonna be weird, nasty, gross, scary and again… really… really weird…
you haven’t even seen the weirdest of it yet, believe me!
I haven’t worked out what sort of posting schedule I want to/can do yet so I won’t say when the first blogpost in the dungeon crawler development blog but you should expect it fairly soon. It’ll probably be a bigger post than most of them will end up being as I want to go over everything I’ve done so far with it.
Until next time,
Andy.
