It’s been a while, very busy with vacation and then diving back into finalizing Pine Shallows texts & layout. (Check the Kickstarter update for more details).

I wanted to hop in to point you towards a crowdfunding campaign I’d love to get more attention.

Frog and Toad

The Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel are some of my favorite books. I loved them as a kid, and I’ve been reading them to both my kids. Cozy, philosophical. Tales of real friendship.

The relationship between Frog and Toad is so warm and genuine, even though they’re quite different. I will always return to them.

A Week with Frog and Rabbit

This is why I am so enthusiastic about A Week with Frog and Rabbit by Côme Martin. This game just hits the vibes so well. Frog and Rabbit are a duo of friends very similar to the original Toad & Frog, but Côme gave them their own character.

I’ll be honest: While the game is a bit too freeform for my tastes (I think I’d might introduce some of the specific mechanics from Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast for the different stories), the themes, art & writing is immaculate. The original books of Frog and Toad are all focussed on a specific season, and by introducing the game as playing out in a week, it perfectly fits.

During the week Frog and Rabbit have some simple cozy activities like fishing, go for a walk, visit a sick friend and drink some tea.

Frog and Rabbit also have scary adventures like a flood hitting their town and maybe worse, even have a fight. In some of the Frog and Toad books they tell each other stories, and on the end of the week that’s what Frog and Rabbit will do. What stories will your Frog and Rabbit tell each other?

While it’s currently crowdfunding for a print release, you can already get your hands on the digital version on itch (in both French and English).

The crowdfunding campaign for Frog and Rabbit just has 3 days left, and it has not reached it’s goal yet. Don’t miss out on this great little game. I know I can’t wait to visit Frog and Rabbit for a week!

See ya next time!

Peter

My plan was to have this episode follow the session 0 a bit sooner, but I misjudged how much time getting the Kickstarter out in time would take me. Like I said in the previous post, most of the game has been playtested, but I’d like to get some extra miles in the solo rules before sending them to being finalized and edited.

A short one today, it’s a busy week this final week of the Kickstarter!

Pine Shallows now on Kickstarter

Welcome to Pine Shallows, a small coastal town. A sunny and cheery tourist destination in summer, Pine Shallows empties when autumn’s chill comes. Strange things keep happening in the town’s off season, but local adults are so focused on preparing for next summer that they simply ignore or write off these strange occurrences. That’s why it’s up to you kids to get to the bottom of things.

What is Pine Shallows?

Pine Shallows is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by The Goonies, Stranger Things, Gravity Falls and middle grade adventure book series like The Legends of Eerie-on-Sea in which you portray small town kids going on adventures and solving mysteries.

Quick recap

In the session 0 we created our character: Lewis.

Lewis, a mysterious orphan

Lewis was found as a baby on the beach by some fishermen after a storm, between debris and broken cargo. Whenever the fishermen find anything out of the ordinary they bring it to Gertrude at the local Aquarium. While she is very knowledgeable about any sea creature, a small human is not in her area of expertise, so she went to her friend Archibald at the Grand Pine Hotel. Together with his very busy husband he has been raising Lewis since he was found. They have proven to be very loving, but also very unconventional parents. Gertrude still drops by every week to check on Lewis, she might even have picked some things up about tiny humans.

• Brawn: 0

• Heart: 2

• Brain: 2

Other stats & counters:

• Max Morale: 4

• Current Morale: 4

• Plot Points: 1

Connections:

• Gertrude ‘Big G’ Willington, the guide at the local Aquarium

• Jacques Estorel, bestselling thriller writer, cryptid enthusiast & husband of Archibald Smithee (the manager of the Grand Pine Hotel)

For a complete re-read check:

The mystery : a CRIME was committed by a VILLAIN.

We rolled up a murder mystery.

French teacher Jean du Loupe di Loupe was found murdered in the local closed cannery. He taught French at the school of Lewis. He dressed like a fashionable dandy, and, if you looked good enough, you could spot strange symbols tattooed on his arms and legs.

For good measure I’ll also rolled up a story complication and weird event. The weird event is that Bones are found that aren’t of any known creature, and the story complication is that everyone’s attention is on the major game at the end of the week. Ok, we can roll with that!

Story clock

To keep this campaign a bit short, we use a story clock with 6 segment. With the current rules we need at least 3 segments filled in to resolve the Story Clock. We get a +1 bonus for 4 or 5 segments, and a +2 for a completed clock.

The current rules have a specific number of filled segments to gain +1 or +2 bonuses based on the size of the Story Clock. I’m thinking of simplifying this to always being able to resolve the clock when your 3 segments short, with each of those last segments filled in giving you an extra +1 on the resolve roll.

Scene 1

We know what happened, and where it happened. Let’s roll for which Lewis starts. I start with a simple question: is Lewis at school when he finds out about the murder. I’ll use the Yes/No oracle. I rolled a 3: a simple Yes.

To spark some extra ideas, I’ll roll on the Action/Subject spark tables: Entertain and Class. Ok, class is fitting, but not very helpful.

I imagine Lewis being in class, but Jean, the French teacher, didn’t show up. They just threw on a French movie in class to keep the kids entertained. Lewis sees some teachers talk outside of the class. They look shocked and seem to discuss something frantically. Lewis walks to the door to eavesdrop. Is he successful? I could use the Yes/No oracle but as this requires some stealth I’ll make a Brawn roll. Lewis has a 0 in Brawn, so that’s a straight 2d6. I rolled an 8. That’s a success with a complication. We could decide on the complication, but to test out the tables I’m rolling on the Complication table (not part of the currently published version yet, but available in the updated version later this year): 64, that’s An unexpected connection is made.

Ok, Lewis snuck to the door, but still couldn’t understand what the teachers were saying. He tried to open the door slightly. They don’t notice. The staff talking are the biology teacher and the school librarian, she is holding a book.

The librarian says, ‘I heard Jean was found in the old cannery in the harbor, surrounded by weird glyphs and candles, with a large symbol around his body.’

Buddy Witherflor, the biology teacher looks shocked, ‘what? I knew he was up to something, with these weird tattoos and all.’

The librarian holds up the book to show the cover, ‘it was this symbol .’

Lewis is shocked. It’s a book written by Jacques Estorel, one of his fathers, showing a strange glyph on the cover: A History of the Cryptid Cults of Pine Shallows.

Next time...

Does Jacques Estorel know more? Are the tattoos of Jean related to these symbols? Will I have more time to do more then a single scene?

Do check out the Kickstarter, I’d love for more people to get their hands on the game!

See you next time!
Peter

As you might know, Pine Shallows is now on Kickstarter: Good news, we reached the first stretch goal. This means a new adventure will be added: Salvaged Memories, a weird science exploration of the local junkyard written by Willie Sullivan (who also wrote the excellent Midnight Light adventure.

Next stretch goal: more art. Speaking of art. I like to give you some input in what art you’d like to see more off. It was suggested to me that people like maps. Would you like a map of Pine Shallows to be added, or would you rather see some extra locations, scenes from adventures or quirky NPCs? Let me know in the comments!

Appendix N: the influences of Pine Shallows

Pine Shallows has been inspired by a lot of movies, books and games. Curious about which media inspired this game?

If you get the game, these are also great to mine for inspiration for your own adventures in and around Pine Shallows.

Movies

• E.T. (1982)
  Kids having to help an alien, with government agents on their tail? That’s what this game is made for.

• The Goonies (1985)
  One of the main inspirations for Pine Shallows, both for direct elements as the overall themes and vibes. A group of scrappy kids going on an adventure right in their own town, trying to find a hidden pirate treasure, it just feels like a RPG scenario!

• Stand by Me (1986)
  More serious than most of the other fiction in this list, but the themes of friendship and teen adventure are direct influences.

• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
  A group of kids needing to stick together while cleaning up the mess from adults together with a generous dash of weird science? Perfect!

• It (1990 mini series & 2017/2019 movies)
  Pine Shallows leans more into humor and adventure then the horror of It, but the character backgrounds, oblivious adults and mysterious hidden history of the town all feel right for Pine Shallows

Series

• Stranger Things
  Like It, this is darker and more scary than I’d expect a Pine Shallows game to be. On the other hand, it has the right elements: kids discovering weird things happening while the adults won’t believe them or are too busy to listen! A mysterious government agency! Strange powers!

• Gravity Falls
  Cryptids, ancient lore and conspiracies combined with humor and hijinks all taking place in a small quirky town. Great fodder for plot ideas!

• Dead End: Paranormal Park
  Weirdness behind the scenes in a theme park? Sign me up! This cartoon features a diverse cast, and great writing.

• Scoobie-Doo
  Classic monster hunting!

Books

• The Legends of Eerie-on-Sea series by Thomas Taylor
  These books are a great inspiration for Pine Shallows. These middle grade novels take place in Eerie-on-Sea, a small coastal town with mysterious orphans, cryptids, ancient languages, and a talking cat. Highly recommended!

• The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series, especially #5: The Unmapped Sea by Maryrose Wood
  Miss Penelope Lumley becomes the governess of a strange bunch of kids that were found howling in the wild.

• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
  A classic! Secret societies, conspiracies, and so many adults that just won’t listen to the kids.

• Greenglass House by Kate Milford
  A hotel just outside a seaside town, mysterious guests arriving during the off season, add some smugglers, conspiracies and theft, and you have a great mystery!

• Winterhouse by Ben Guterson
  An orphan living with a nasty aunt and uncle receives an invitation to the ominous Winterhouse Hotel. Curses, mysteries and a big library. What’s not to love?

Tabletop Roleplaying Games

• Tunnel Goons by Nate Treme (Highland Paranormal Society)
  Pine Shallows started out as Tunnel Goonies, a Tunnel Goons hack. Tunnel Goons is a great little hackable game.

• Camp Flying Moose for Girls of All Kinds by Alicia Furness
  Cozy, supernatural adventures at camp. A game more people should play!

• Under the Floorboards by Chris Bissette
  The 2d6 resolution is inspired in equal parts by Under the Floorboards by Chris Bissette and various Powered by the Apocalypse games, like Patchwork World by Aaron King.

Any influences you think might hit the spot? Please let me know! I’m always looking for more ideas for this weird, little town!

See ya next time!
Peter

Welcome to Pine Shallows, a small coastal town. A sunny and cheery tourist destination in summer, Pine Shallows empties when autumn’s chill comes. Strange things keep happening in the town’s off season, but local adults are so focused on preparing for next summer that they simply ignore or write off these strange occurrences. That’s why it’s up to you kids to get to the bottom of things.

What is Pine Shallows?

Pine Shallows is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by The Goonies, Stranger Things, Gravity Falls and middle grade adventure book series like The Legends of Eerie-on-Sea in which you portray small town kids going on adventures and solving mysteries.

The digital book contains the rules to create your characters and play the game. In addition, the city of Pine Shallows is detailed with numerous locations, supporting cast and hooks. Also included are Catch Of The Day, Grasp of the Understory and A Boat Ride to Valhalla, three complete starting adventures. The Pine Shallows Guide to Adventure is brimful of random tables to generate hooks, clues and supporting characters. With the Solo Rules you can explore Pine Shallows on your own.

I hope you’ll support it, it’s been a long time in the works!

Find the campaign here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monstermind/pine-shallows-a-meddlesome-kids-game

Thanks!

Peter

Join me as I start a new solo campaign for Pine Shallows. I’ll try to follow the rules-as-written as much a possible, I am play testing after all. The part I’m least happy about are the current rules for the Story Clock, so they will get extra focus.

I will let the dice speak whenever I’m not sure, using as much of the provided random tables as possible.

Pine Shallows?

A rules lite game inspired by Gravity Falls, the Goonies and middle grade adventure books. Pine Shallows is a sleepy sea-side town where strange things keep happening, but local adults are so focused on their busy lives that they simply ignore or write off these strange occurrences. That’s why it’s up to you kids to get to the bottom of things.

Follow Pine Shallows on Kickstarter

Campaign Setup

We start with some basic steps: character creation & a first adventure hook.

• Create your character(s).

• Roll on the Random Adventure Generator tables to create an initial hook & setup a Story Clock

Character Creation

I’m even letting the choice for character background be let by dice. There’s 10 character backgrounds so I’ll roll a d10.

I rolled a 1, that means my character will be a mysterious orphan. They get the following three abilities:

• Finally it makes sense! - You can spend a Plot Point to establish a way the current plot is connected to your mysterious background. State something: it’s now true.

• Mysterious Aura - People in town still remember the day you arrived in Pine Shallows. Start with +1 Heart.

• Responsible Adult? - Add your guardian as your Connection. Either create your guardian from scratch or pick from the supporting cast presented in this book.

Next is dividing up 3 points between the main stats (with an extra +1 in Heart because of the background). I’ll make my character a smart and courageous kid. Morale starts at the regular 4.

• Brawn: 0

• Heart: 2

• Brain: 2

Other stats & counters:

• Max Morale: 4

• Current Morale: 4

• Plot Points: 1

We still have to flesh out the character by adding their name, age & pronouns, and think of some basic other background ideas, but let’s first create their Connections, maybe they’ll spark some ideas. We have one Connection due to the Responsible Adult? ability, and because we play solo with a single character we get another one. Let’s roll these up!

Connections are relationships our kids have with some adults. While they won’t go on adventure with us, they might be able to help out with advice, the right tools, and an alibi whenever we arrive home late!

I’ll roll twice on the Known Character table from the Pine Shallows Guide to Adventure, the supplement with all the random tables. This is a table with 12 entries (at the moment). First I rolled a 2 and 5, which results in Gertrude ‘Big G’ Willington, the guide at the local Aquarium. Next I rolled a 5 and 2, which points to Jacques Estorel, bestselling thriller writer, cryptid enthusiast & husband of Archibald Smithee (the manager of the Grand Pine Hotel).

This already sparks some ideas. I’ll roll a name first and they I think I know enough to create some background information. I rolled a 3 and 6, my kid is called Lewis. I tried rolling on the nickname tables, but I didn’t feel like the results fit my character idea. There isn’t a table for last names at the moment, if I feel that’s lacking, I might add that later. For now ‘Lewis’ will suffice.

My idea so far: Lewis was found as a baby on the beach by some fishermen after a storm, between debris and broken cargo. Whenever the fishermen find anything out of the ordinary they bring it to Gertrude at the local Aquarium. While she is very knowledgeable about any sea creature, a small human is not in her area of expertise, so she went to her friend Archibald at the Grand Pine Hotel. Together with his very busy husband he has been raising Lewis since he was found. They have proven to be very loving, but also very unconventional parents. Gertrude still drops by every week to check on Lewis, she might even have picked some things up about tiny humans.

Setting the scene

Now we have to start the adventure. First we roll on the Random Adventure Generator. I rolled a 5: a CRIME was committed by a VILLAIN.

For results with a villain there are three options:

• sometimes you might know the culprit and the adventure is about how to catch or defeat them

• leave them a mystery for now, and discover it through play

• roll multiple suspects.

I’ll first roll for the crime. Then we can decide if we want to already roll the villain, roll multiple suspects or if we want to discover the villain during play. Oh, exciting, I rolled a 3: A foul murder. Guess we’re running a murder mystery. I think I’ll keep the villain a mystery for now. But who got murdered? There is tables for known characters, but I want to keep these alive for now, as they are the defined NPCs of the setting. Luckily there is also a way to generate a random madlib style adult: person-adjective occupation with mannerism.

This results in: foreign teacher who has a tattoo with strange symbols. I don’t have name tables yet, but I like give them regular first names, with stranger last names. Let’s make this a French dude: Jean du Loupe di Loupe. He taught French at the school of Lewis. He dressed like a fashionable dandy, if you looked good enough, you could spot strange symbols tattooed on his arms and legs.

For good measure I’ll also roll up a story complication and weird event. The weird event is that Bones are found that aren’t of any known creature, and the story complication is that everyone’s attention is on the major game at the end of the week. Ok, we can roll with that!

As a starting location I rolled the closed cannery. Hm, let’s say that’s the location the body of Jean was found.

Wrap up of session 0

I think this is a very nice starting point! I’ll let these results and rolls sink in a bit, and next up is an actual session. Keep your eyes peeled for that!

If you want to have your own adventures in Pine Shallows, you can find the current version on here on itch.io (if you supported on of the big chariry bundles, you might already own it!). And be sure to follow the pre-launch page of the upcoming Kickstarter campaign.

To be continued...

First playtest thoughts.

My first conclusions are that some of the tables might need a bit more entries, and name tables for adults might be a nice addition too.

In the main game first the stats are assigned before picking a character background. To be honest, while this has never come up during playtest sessions, it felt more natural to first pick a character background.

What are your thoughts so far?

Leave a comment

Last year I’ve played just 4 different roleplaying games, but my collection keeps on growing faster. I read everything I buy, but I’d love to play more sessions and certainly more games.

This is a short, incomplete list of games I want to play mainly to self-document and see how much I got able to play by the end of the year.

🌲 Pine Shallows Kickstarter start April 2nd!

A rules lite game inspired by Gravity Falls, the Goonies and middle grade adventure books. Pine Shallows is a sleepy sea-side town where strange things keep happening, but local adults are so focused on their busy lives that they simply ignore or write off these strange occurrences. That’s why it’s up to you kids to get to the bottom of things.

Follow Pine Shallows on Kickstarter

Games I played last year

• Milk Bar

  Milk Bar is an exploration-first game all about diving into abandoned Soviet superstructures in search of technology you can use to build your Milk Bar.

  
  I’m part of the playtest group for this game, and I love the way that having a homebase (the titular Milk Bar) incentivizes going out on missions to search and find new resources to build up your community. This has been a (mostly) weekly game. The longest campaign I’m currently playing.

• Stravagante Gigante

  A rules lite table-top roleplaying game about whimsical fantasy adventures. I played “Doctor” Jasper Fiddlebog, a charlatan riding a snail.

  

• Mausritter

  At one of the two cons I visited I played in a Mausritter adventure with my eldest kid. Since the con, where I also bought the Dutch translation to Mausritter and the Estate campaign, I’ve started running it for my kids.

• Some 5e

  I did play in a 5e oneshot with some local friends. I liked playing a game with them. I will never like 5e combat though.

Games I want to play this year

Reasons I might not be able to play all these games: local meetup is both at an inconvenient time, and mostly focuses on 5e (although there’s also Mothership and Pathfinder tables), my friend group is very 5e focused. My kids are up for a lot, but I there’s some games we need to built up to (and we first want to get more milage into our Mausritter campaign).

Addendum: When I started this list, I assumed the local meetup I’ve been looking into would still be full with mostly 5e games, but they just asked for new GMs to step up, so I suggested three of them, so at least one of the games on the list will be played soon!

• Mausritter

  Continuing the campaign I started with my kids! They love their mice, so I’ll turn down the lethality a few notches.

• Eco Mofos

  Post-apolyptic eco-punk NSR weirdness. I’ve played this solo, I’d love to play this with the right group.

• Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

  I’m aware of the whole history with this game, but ever since I got my copy of this tome, I really want to play it. The ‘official’ podcast by Jeff Stormer and friends only increased this. This is even more an issue of finding the right players for: I’m even hesitant myself to play this without people more experienced in coop/GM-less games.

  I just love the idea of a legacy tabletop game, but it might be just a bit too story game for me.

• Pine Shallows

  My own game of kids & mysteries coming to Kickstarter this April. Mainly on my solo list because I want to fully playtest the solo procedures and tables.

• Look to Starward

  Next up on my solo list. This is my upcoming solo-first retro science fiction adventure game inspired by the science fiction books of Jack Vance. I have a first draft ready, and it needs two things: layout and playtesting.

• Land of Eem

  Described as The Lord of the Rings meets The Muppets, this game is one I’m also eager to dive into ever since I got the big books from their first Kickstarter. The Mucklands Sandbox is so big, filled with quirky NPCs, weird places, and lots of hooks and adventures. I just love the whimsical vibes, without it being just for kids.

  

• Dragontown

  This series of adventures by JP Coovert overlaps in vibes with Land of Eem, but is system agnostic. I’m not sure with which system I would run it. Probably something OSR/NSR, but with limits on the grimdark & lethality. What would you use to run it?

What games are you looking forward to play the coming year?

Leave a comment

See ya later!

A small update post with some news.

In this newsletter:

• 🌲 New art for Pine Shallows

• 🥔 Bloggies Nomination

• 🇳🇱 Dutch translation A Visit to San Sibilia

• 🧊 Hiria: the Eternal City in the No Ice in Minnesota bundle

• 🔗 Cool links

🌲 New art for Pine Shallows

To prepare for the upcoming Kickstarter of Pine Shallows I commissioned some new art. I’m so excited to show it off!

People who follow me on Instagram might already have seen it: I’m proud to present the new cover for Pine Shallows by bertdrawsstuff. Bert made the first version almost 3 years ago, and he gave the cover a great glow up!

Bert is also working on new character art for each of the character backgrounds. I can’t wait to show these off, they are going to be great.

I also asked Penflower Ink to create some cool scenes of kids on adventure. The first scene shows off the mysterious lighthouse of Pine Shallows, the second scene might be familiar to anyone who knows the starter adventure ‘Catch of the Day’.

Currently I’m updating the layout to include the great new art. Keep an eye out on the Pine Shallows itch page. To follow along with the upcoming Pine Shallows Kickstarter page.

🥔 Bloggies nomination

I’m very proud to have received a nomination for the upcoming Bloggies with my post The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games in the new Meta category. Bracket voting begins Monday, February 16th.

Honored to be in the bloggies. Excited for the voting. Scared because my blog is up against the great Jeff Stormer of Party of One, with his post Thinking About Actual Play As Nonfiction.

Check here for a complete overview of nominations and voting information.

🇳🇱 Dutch translation A Visit to San Sibilia

Next to the existing Polish & Spanish translation, A Visit to San Sibilia​ is now also available in a Dutch translation.

Thanks to Tom Blok (Project Epos), Heleen Kleiboer & Jan Hoos for proofreading.

If you come to a con in the Netherlands, you might even find a print version of the translation soon (at the very least at RinCon & Main Quest Con).

Let me know if you’re interested in a print copy of the Dutch version.

Hiria: the Eternal City in the No Ice in Minnesota bundle

Jes the Human organized another great bundle to raise funds for Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota in response to the Trump administration sending ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and the reckless murder of an innocent people by ICE agents. ILCM provides free immigration legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota.

I donated my solo journaling game Hiria: the Eternal City to the bundle. The bundle already raised over $200k, but it would be great if we could collect even more funds to fight the fascist thugs.

Check the No Ice in Minnesota bundle with over 1400 games by 651 creators.

🔗 Cool links

• I love Bill Making Stuff, a great Youtube channel where Bill creates miniatures, monsters and scenery from scratch. Recently I really enjoyed his video where he made an in-universe zine for his common setting.

Nice inspiration for everyone creating their own worlds or settings.

• One of my favorite zine related Youtube channels is catmothcrow. In this tutorial she shows how to make the classic mini zine.

• I think I forget to share this when it was published. For a previous charity bundle Jes the Human did a flip through of Pine Shallows.

See you in the next one!
Peter

The year is nicely underway and the whole world feels, well, not better. What a mess. It feels like our make believe games are insignificant in the whole scope of things, but it’s one of the things I do get my joy from, so no stopping me.

Also personally next year will be interesting. I quite my job in tech due to being completely burned out with the state of tech (especially AI). I’m looking into becoming a primary school teacher, but that’s a slow process. Which does mean the coming months I have time on my hands to focus on game stuff. More about that later!

Published in 2025

I didn’t publish much in 2025. This year I had the following releases:

• The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games (May 2025)
  PWYW - A manifesto of sorts based on the Five Laws of Library Science. Started out as a blog post here.

• Boat Ride to Valhalla (October 2025)

  PWYW - A two page adventure for Pine Shallows, a submission to the The RPG Jamboree: Vikings & Myths

Game income in 2025

I thought it might be helpful to show an overview of what a small potatoes one man show ttrpg creator makes in a year. This was a bit of a low action year: I did not run any big crowdfunding campaigns, and both new publications in 2025 were small (and PWYW).

My gross income was about $2400. There will be some rounding errors due to juggling 3 currencies (euro, dollar and pound). After Paypal and platform fees are subtracted this leaves about 2300. Other costs were about $100 (postal costs for sending zines overseas and a commission for a future game), which leaves me with a net of about $2200.

Nothing to sneeze at, but far from a living wage.

Game income by platform

As you can see the biggest chunk of income comes from itch.io (43.8%). It’s were I sell most of my digital games. I did put up some of the bigger games on DriveThruRPG, and it was worth the effort, but barely. I’ll only put up bigger games or OSR adventures there. For small PWYW and supplemental stuff it’s just not worth the effort.

With 22% Indie Press Revolution (IPR) is the next biggest chunk. It’s a great way to get your physical zines into peoples hands. They are also VERY reliable. Every quarter you get a nice report on all sales, and a few days later the payout. Highly recommended to get your stuff to them! IPR still has a limited amount of copies of my games, so this number will go down in the next year until I publish a new physical game.

Grab one of the last print copies of A Visit to San Sibilia or Hira: the Eternal City at IPR!

To be precise, the 21,7% royalties were an advance on the French translation of Hiria: the Eternal City. The French edition of Hiria has yet to sell enough to earn out the advance, but it’s nicely on the way. Apart from some (good) questions during the translation process required almost no work on my part. We’re working on a French translation of A Visit to San Sibilia, but that won’t see publication until 2027 probably. Nice to have in the pipeline though!

The last chunk with 9.7% are some physical zines that were sold directly to some shops.

Game income by title

On itch.io I combine similar games in bundles with a small discount as an incentive to buy more games. This skews the results a bit, so I present both the income per title split out from bundles and with bundles as a separate category.

In both cases you see my two solo journaling games, A Visit to San Sibilia (2021) & Hiria: the Eternal City (2023) performing best. Considering a bit part of the income for Hiria is due to the advance for the French translation, it’s clear that even after all these years San Sibilia keeps being the best seller.

Weirdly enough the last half year the game had an real uptick in sales. No idea why (itch analytics are not that helpful), but I’m happy either way. It being a solo game there are a lot of actual plays pointing back to the itch page, and I also get a decent amount of referrals from reddit to the game. I just wish I knew how to accomplish that for my other games!

You can see bundles do help: about 20% of sales are of the bundles. But there’s no way of knowing people might have otherwise spend the same on single games. Still, grouping similar games in bundles with a small discount is a practice I’ll keep doing.

Plans for 2026

Like I said, I have resigned from my job, and haven’t started a new one yet. Apart from some long postponed projects in and around our house, I will have more time to write.

Looking at the things I planned for 2025 I see a lot didn’t materialize last year. It was a weird, weird year. I didn’t get around to do a lot I wanted to do. Most of the things I mentioned there, are things I still want to do.

There’s two major things I really want to do this year, and those are related to Pine Shallows and Look to Starward.

Look to Starward

As long time readers of this blog/newsletter know I’m working on Look to Starward, a retro science fiction adventure game. I hope to be able to publish a first draft soon, to get initiali feedback and to slowly work into a state that can be published physically.

Pine Shallows

Next to that Pine Shallows, my meddlesome kids game inspired by Gravity Falls, the Goonies and Stranger Things is coming to Kickstarter for a physical release. I have commissioned more art, I’m redoing the layout and working on the precise planning of the Kickstarter.

Follow Pine Shallows in Kickstarter

Hopefully my plans for 2026 work out better than the plans for 2025. What plans are you most excited about, and what are you doing in 2026?

See you in the next one!

Peter

Pine Shallows?

I realize not all people reading this newsletter might know Pine Shallows. Pine Shallows is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by The Goonies, Stranger Things, Gravity Falls and middle grade adventure book series like The Legends of Eerie-on-Sea in which you portray small town kids going on adventures and solving mysteries.

No combat rules?

Pine Shallows doesn’t contain combat rules because (usually) there are no long combat sequences in the media that inspired the game (Goonies, Gravity Falls, etc).

Still, I do get the question sometimes on how I would handle combat (and my own players also have started more than one fight). Usually combat be handled by the available mechanics.

Pine Shallows (as written) only has player rolls. It uses a PbtA-like 2d6 roll with failure/mixed success/complete success.

If two players fight, I would use a single opposed roll: both roll, best result wins. On a draw, roll again.

For combat with NPCs, depending on the importance I would switch between a single roll, or a clock (usually just a 3 or 4 segment clock).

Single roll combat

Single roll: ask for the plan/strategy, let all involved players roll, with one player having the main roll, and the others contributing using the Helping rules. On a 10+ success the NPC is beaten, if it’s a 7-9, it might cost the characters something ( maybe a grown-up saw it happen, for example).

Combat using clocks

For a more important fight, I’d use an opposed clock, probably of just 4 segments, maybe more for a ‘boss fight’. One clock that fills a segment when the players succeed, even 2 segments on a 10+, the other clock fills on failure. First clock to fill determines who won the fight. Circumstances and good planning determine if the players have (dis)advantage on their rolls.

Make it narrative, so if they fail or have a mixed success, the next roll is based in the fact that the NPC has the upper hand, if they have success the NPC is on the back foot, etc.

The losing side is defeated, but the outcome of a combat will almost never result on extreme injury or death. Losers might be knocked out, just give up or be locked up, be creative!

Coming to Kickstarter soon!

Like what you read about Pine Shallows? I’m still planning to release it in print. There is a big change I’ll be running the campaign in , but you can follow the Kickstarter campaign for Pine Shallows to know it firsthand!

As a small break from all my longer running projects I joined a one day in-person event that kickstarted the RPG Jamboree: Vikings & Myths, with the goal of creating an rpg related game, module or supplement in one day.

I’m proud to present a new Pine Shallows adventure: Boat Ride to Valhalla. Written, laid out in one day. And for the first time I even made some own my own art for it!

Can you save the Viking Longship Museum while also giving viking ghost Bjorn Snaggletooth a proper viking funeral by setting his longship afloat & setting it afire?

The adventure is available as Pay What You Want, so give it a read! Hope you like it!

Be sure to also check out the other excellent entries in the RPG Jamboree: Vikings & Myths, and even better, join the jam!
Thanks,
Peter

PS. Like Pine Shallows? I’m still planning to release it in print. Due to well …points at the whole world … I’m not sure when I’m running the campaign, but you can follow the Kickstarter campaign for Pine Shallows to know it firsthand!

I’m deep in the word mines, working on some short stories with a strict deadline and also hard at work with trying to combine all the posts for my space adventure game into a semblance of a game.

I’m just popping up to promote my yearly Birthday Sale in which I give my age in discount. Running for another two days get all my games (or just one or two) with a 47% discount. I’m old!

Find the sale on itch.io: https://itch.io/s/159794/birthday-sale-2025

Ok, back to the word mines for me. See you in a bit!
Peter

This is the fourth installment in the design diary series, where I design a roleplaying game inspired by the science fiction works of Jack Vance.

In the previous installment of this design diary we look into what type of characters our retro sf adventure game will have, and what they will do.

In this article we look at:

• a name for the game

• enough rules to start playtesting

But first some news

Hira: The Eternal City got a French translation: Hiria: La Cité Eternelle

Some places where you can buy it: Philibert | Black Book Éditions | Oeuf Cube | Le Passe Temps | Playin

Have a shop and want some copies? Find more information at Neoludis

The Name of the Game

Naming things is the bane of my existence. There is a reason I'm using scripts to generate all these names for characters & planets. But, well, a game needs a name.

For me the idea and themes of my game are pretty clear. I can also explain them if you give me a few paragraphs. There might be a slight mismatch, depending on how familiar you are with the source material, but you'll get the gist of what I want the game to be. But the name, well, the name needs to evoke the theme in a single word or sentence.

With help from people in the Lost Bay Discord and on BlueSky I have been workshopping some titles. The runners up were: Look to Starward, and Perilous Planets.

While I love the alliteration of Perilous Planets, it feels just a bit too pulpy and too focussed on the planetary romance. I might keep it for an adventure or supplement taking place on a single planet, like Vance's Big Planet or the Planet of Adventure novels. So: meet Look to Starward.

Basic Rules

In my mind the game will work best either as a solo game, as a duet game or as a coop game with a small group of players. First I want to know if the current tables (or at least the concepts of the tables, I haven't filled all of them yet) will support play in a solo/coop style.

My first plan was just to use the same core of rules I've used before in Pine Shallows: 3 or 4 stats with just a few points assigned between them, and the familiar Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) 2d6 roll with success/success with complication/failure.

When you attempt something, roll 2d6 and add a Stat. A result of 7+ is a success.

6– You fail and the situation gets worse.
7–9 You succeed, but there is a complication.
10+ A complete success.

Recently I found Hardcase, a solo cyberpunk game set in a space station, in which characters are just scraping by. It uses very similar rules, which confirmed this can certainly work for an sf solo game. It also shows how you can scale the heroics up and down: In Pine Shallows you divide 3 points between 3 stats, in Hardcase you just have 1 point to add to a stat. Hardcase is a way grittier game. For Look to Starward I'll be using 3 points, and we'll see during playtesting if that's not too much.

A nice thing about Hardcase is the modularity: most things are handled by the 2d6 base mechanic with some clocks to track progress, but for some specific cases (combat, cash & debt, retirement) there are slight variations, mainly of what success and failure entails.

This feels like a very nice way to build up game: just start playing, and create or update small modular subsystems when needed.

Character Death

One open question I have is: does a game need the risk of character death?

Ok, the answer is no, but it depends on the genre of course. Pine Shallows does not have character death, but it doesn't even have combat rules: It's about kids solving mysteries. For Look to Starward I'm still going back and forth. I think it makes more sense to escalate the complications whenever you lose combat, instead of risking character death:

• waking up somewhere trapped.,

• losing a companion

• crashing your spaceship in an place away from civilization

Big consequences, but not death: it emulates a genre where heaps of complications are stacked upon the main lead, but they always persevere.

The question is: is it fun to know the story will always be ending in a good way (for the character), or should it have a change of defeat or other setback that is too big to overcome?

Leave a comment

Combat

In the books of Jack Vance, combat is mostly short, with a quick outcome. Mooks get dealt with (mostly by incapacitated them, not necessarily killing them) easily, unless they outnumbering the protagonist. More capable adversaries might deal out story consequences: leaving the main character stranded or trapped, while beating them often is with subterfuge or a longer combat. Defeating the main antagonist is almost never done with direct combat, but requires a lot of plotting of their demise.

There's also no big numbers of enemies to wade through: even mooks are often named characters with very colorful personalities.

This means that whatever rules we'll use for combat, it should usually be over in just a few rolls, but might have big (preferably plot-based) consequences for the characters. Failure should usually lead to interesting setbacks, not death.

Hardcase uses Conditions, where they work like this: you gain a Condition when you get injured, or get a specific emotional state. Examples include: 'Broken Arm', 'Fatigued', 'Hungover', 'Possessed' On 3 Conditions, your character dies. Conditions can be cleared, with some optional rules about how severe Conditions are, which has an effect on how hard it is to clear them. Depending on the importance of the NPC they need 1, 2 or 3 conditions to be dealt with. This ties nicely into very simple and short combat rules: one or two rolls usually determines the outcome. If you fail you get hurt, if you succeed your opponent gets hurt.

Conditions also have nice in play effects, giving you lingering Disadvantage on certain actions, which feels like it stimulates roleplay more than a dwindling number of hitpoints.

Playtesting will have to give answers. What are your thoughts?

Leave a comment

Clocks

I like clocks (or tracks, whatever terminology floats your boat). They're a nice way to track any type of time or progress combined with an easy way to select the complexity or duration (simple? Use a clock with 3 or 4 parts. A faction building a new headquarters in difficult terrain? Use a clock with up to 12 parts).

Story progress

One good use case for clocks, especially when playing solo, is for tracking story progress. In the Pine Shallows Solo Procedures I introduced a variant on the Progress Move from Ironsworn and the Theorize Move from Brindlewood Bay.

Mechanically Look to Starward (and its cousin Pine Shallows) are closer to Brindlewood Bay using the same 2d6 roll. The Theorize move is basically rolling the 2d6 plus the number of clues used for your theory minus the complexity of the story. While I like the openness of it: players can decide when they roll, I don't like the fact you need to both add to and subtract from your roll. Complexity is a predetermined number that basically is a way to predetermine the length of play when solving a mystery.

Story progress is of course a bit different compared to solving a mystery, but it can be fitted to this by filling a clock or track segment whenever your character makes progress on their goals (see Part 3 of this series for more about goals in Look to Starward), and using that instead of clues for your roll.

In the Pine Shallows Solo procedures I used a variant on this, which still is not very intuitive. Getting this right will be another one of the focus points of playtesting. Yup, lots of playtesting to do.

What's next?

Well, collecting all the bits and pieces I wrote about in this whole series, and make a very bare bones playtest version out of it.

And then playtesting, with all the questions raised in the series so far.

Would anyone be interested in this playtest version? Let me know in the comments!

Also, let me plug Hardcase on more time. Check it out, it’s a great game.

See you next one!
Peter

Hi,

This is the third installment in design diary, where I design a roleplaying game inspired by the science fiction works of Jack Vance.

In the previous installment of this design diary we created the first version of a planet & culture generator, now it's time to look a bit more into what type of characters our retro sf adventure game will have, and what they will do.

Generator for characters:

1. character goals/quests/jobs

2. character types

3. characters names

A short warning, this article is kind of going everywhere, this basically follows my thought process while hacking together this game. Hope you enjoy it!

Looking at the source material

As a start I'll analyse some of the main characters, their mentors/sidekicks, their antagonists and their goals from the science fiction books of Jack Vance. This is not exhaustive list, but enough to be able to define some starting backgrounds and character goals.

Planet of adventure

Main character: Adam Reith, a single, very capable hero. More like classic planetary romance.

Sidekicks: Traz Onmale, a young, brash nomad and Ankhe at Afram Anacho, a talkative, flamboyant renegade (who still sees his previous alien masters as superior), and later love interest Zap 210, a young woman who's emotions were suppressed by her mandatory diet.

Antagonist: A different alien group in each of the 4 books. Not many of Vance's books have as much aliens as these.

Goal: Escape the planet

Ports of Call & Lurulu

Main character: Myron Tany, a talented young man, freshly graduated, eager to go to space

Mentors: After he is left stranded by his aunt, the crew of his new spaceship

Antagonist: Dame Hester (his aunt), but mainly her sycophants.

Goal: Mostly a picaresque story with short subplots, Myron does not have a major goal apart from seeing the universe.

The Cadwal Chronicles

Main character: Glawen Clattuc, a talented young man. We follow him through his graduation and his early career in Bureau B, the local police.

Mentors: Mainly his father, a senior Bureau B agent, but also Bodwyn Wook, the Bureau B director, and Eustace Chilke, the vagabond off-worlder pilot.

Sidekick: Wayness Tamm, his love interest.

Antagonist: Mainly his aunt & nephew, who are jealous of his status within the family (there is a maximum of 20 'indexed' people per family, and there might not be room for both Glawen and his nephew). Also the greater conspiracy threatening Cadwal, with his aunts sister at the top.

Goal: Find the murderer of his first girlfriend. Find the legendary Charter of Cadwal so it can be kept as a nature reserve.

The Demon Princes Series

Main character: Kirth Gersen, a man trained by his grandfather to exact revenge on five arch villains (the Demon Princes)

Sidekicks: Jehan Addels, his banker and reluctant confidant.

Contacts: Kirth is a former IPCC (space police) cop

Antagonists & goals: Kill the five arch villains who killed everyone in his home town.

Emphyrio

Main character: Ghyl Tarvoke, a young stubborn artisan

Mentor: His father Amiante

Antagonist: The rules of Halma

Goal: Revenge for his fathers death and finding out who is making money from the art he and his fellow artisans make (and some revolution thrown in).

Trullion

Main character: Glinnes Hulden, a retired soldier in the Whelm, the stellar navy combating starmenters (space pirates)

Mentor/sidekick: Akadie, a 'wise' man with peculiar philosophies.

Antagonist: Not a main one, but mostly a local, impoverished aristocrat Lord Gensifer.

Goal: Gain enough money to buy back the island his brother illegally sold.

Marune

Main character: Efraim, Kaiark of Scharrode, an amnesiac, who discovered he is an aristocrat in a very strict society

Sidekick: Matho Lorcas, an off-worlder

Antagonist: Other members of his aristocratic household, who wanted him out the way

Goal: Find out who he is, and later who poisoned him and why

Quick summaries

• Night Lamp
  Adoptee with amnesia tracks down his home planet.

• Galactic Effectuator

  Miro Hetzel is an effectuator: a private investigator. These are classic detective stories (in spaaaaaace)

• Wyst

  Jantiff Ravensroke is a young artist who wins a prize to travel to Wyst. He learns about the culture, and in the end stumbles on a plot to replace the Connatic, the rules of numerous worlds.

• Big Planet

  The crashed crew of a spaceship from Earth tries to reach the Earth Enclave on the enormous Big Planet: a planet colonized by misfits, faddists & cultists. Picaresque early planetary fantasy. Later returned to in Showboat World, a later, farcical picaresque story.

• Mask: Thaery

  Jubal Droad, a (slightly arrogant) young man born into a minor noble house is recruited in the planets secret service. Plots concerning his family nicely tie into the major storyline.

• Blue World

  An earlier novel taking place on a single water planet. Sklar Hast grows tired of his conservative culture where all people worship giant sea creatures. He rebels.

• The Durdane Series

  In the first part, Gastel Etzwane, son of a prostitute and an anonymous musician travels the cantons of Shant: each with their own laws, governed in total by an anonymous hidden ruler, the Anome. He takes it on himself to defeat the Anome, as he sees the laws as unjust, and Shant in unprepared for an alien take over. Second two books move away from Shant and focus on combatting the aliens and are some of the lesser works of Vance.

Character types

We can divide these examples in two main categories that cover most of them:

• Young adventurer

  • Often excels in studies, but not much world experience

  • Has one or more mentors

  • Sometimes a sidekick/romantic interest of similar age

• Grizzled spaceman

  • Has a previous career:

    • Effectuator: crime solvers for a certain organisation (IPCC agent/weasel etc), or at least experience as such

    • Retired soldier/marine

  • Organization connection

  • Good fighting skills, lots of world experience

  • Often a sidekick who is less of a vagabond, or a weird poet/philosopher

Both of these character types share the fact that they don't fit in to the rigid cultures featured in a lot of Vance's novels or at the very least will question the status quo. Perfect for player characters!

As a start I'll probably define these two options, but we could introduce some kind of lifepath character creation. Might be fun!

Character motivation & goals

The books of Jack Vance have a tendency to go into the picaresque: there might be an overarching plot, but often the stories are a combination of shorter plots & hijinks. Sounds like a match in heaven for a tabletop roleplaying game, if you ask me.

My plan is to give every character an major motivation, but also offer some more concrete short term goals. Hopefully the combination of these two will emulate the wanted type of stories.

Motivation

This table will give each character their major motivation.

1. Revenge

2. Escape

3. Find their origin

4. Solving a mystery

5. Explore

6. Change the status quo

The motivations are broad on purpose. I'm still debating on how they could be filled in. Is it needed to have them more specified before starting play? A lot of Vancian characters have a clear purpose from the beginning of their story, while others slowly discover their world is not as they thought it would be and in the proces discover their own purpose.

There's basically three different methods I'm thinking off for fleshing out the general motivations:

1. Question prompts

2. Subtables

3. Leaving it open

Question prompts are something I use pretty heavily in my solo journaling games A Visit to San Sibilia & Hiria: the Eternal City. For different options you pick, or encounters you have, you get a list of open, but evocative questions you can pick and choose from. This might work pretty well for a solo player, but I'm not sure if this would work with multiple players (maybe if they have a common motivation, and go round the table answering the questions?)

I did some brainstorming for the option of subtables, but I'm not sure I can come up with enough interesting options, or at least, I'm also worried this method might exclude the cool stuff players would come up with themselves.

1. Revenge

   Subtable of revenge for what, revenge on who?

2. Escape

   Escape from where? Locations & situations.

3. Find their origin

   Why don't they know it? Where they adopted, did they lose their memory?

4. Solving mysteries

   Is there a single mystery to solve, or is the character a sleuth, motivated by puzzle?

5. Explore

   Does this even need a subtable?

6. Change the status quo

   Are they rebels, revolutionaries, or just malcontents?

The third option is to leave it open and only provide some very general oracle tables. This is the easiest for me as a game writer, but it feels like a distinct lack of scaffolding for payers.

Which option would you like the best as a player?

Leave a comment

Short term goals/jobs

To kickstart adventures it's always a good to have a job or other short term goal next to the big overarching motivation. In a previous blogpost where I looked at solo procedures I also checked ways to randomly generate adventure hooks, usually in the form of jobs, missions or quests.

I will probably start with a simple set of tables like the one from Eco Mofos, and see if it suffices, otherwise I will expand them to a size comparable with Cloud Empress or Stravangante.

Character names

Characters need names! Mostly useful for creating NPCs on the fly, but as someone who is terrible with coming up with names on the spot, I love a good table filled with flavorful names I can just roll on.

Like I did in the previous post for planet names, I started with collecting a lot of character names from the novels to have source material on which to base the new names. Following the same procedure of feeding them into a Markov Chain Generator (which is not generative AI, but basically a statistical method creating similar words/sentences based on a dataset), and the curating the generated names to keep the ones that evoke Vancian names the best.

Markov Chain Generator

A Markov Chain generator is a simple probability based method to generate predictions, which can also be used to generate sentences or in this case words.

You feed your generator a list of names, and it just counts which letters follow combinations of other letters. So if your list is:

• alpha

• alpaca

it will see an 'a' is followed by an 'l' or 'c', but a 'p' might be followed 50/50 by an 'h' or an 'a'.

For generating words that make sense it usually helps to look what letters follows combinations of 2 or even 3 letters.

I used a Python library called markovify to write a script that can generate words based on a csv list of words.

If people are interested I can do a more in depth post about using Markov Chain generators to generate names for your games. Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Most characters have a simple name: just a first and last name. Some people have titles, and some people just go by a single name (the mad poet Navarth being a prime example). To account for the types of names I started by creating this table:

• 01-70 FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME

• 71-80 FIRST_NAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME

• 81-85 FIRST_NAME

• 86-90 LAST_NAME

• 91-95 TITLE LAST_NAME

• 96-100 TITLE FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME

You roll a d100, and then for each of the resulting components, you roll on the corresponding subtable.

The numbers are still to be tweaked after playtesting. I wanted to make sure the most regular is just a single first & last name, but maybe the other names are a bit too uncommon.

First Names

Vancian first names often resemble 'real' names. They all sound like plausible names: Ervan, Jerdian, Kirth, Bemus, Ghyl. Often one or two syllables, sometimes more for more extravagant names. Especially in his older books a dash of existing English names is combined with a more outlandish last name, so you might encounter a Jack, Hester or Mildred.

Here I ran into some issues with the Markov generation: when setting the prediction of the next letter based on just 1 or 2 characters the chance on gibberish gets pretty high, and when you set it higher, generated names tend to be quite a bit longer then the original name. To get some good results I had to do some runs on different settings and curate it A LOT. When curating I also wound up just adding and tweaking entries.

1. Antelin

2. Adar

3. Adelinnoc

4. Ailia

5. Ailkinnet

6. Altris

7. Amiaster

8. Amidie

9. Ankadios

10. Apole

11. Arth

12. Atta

13. Averdhra

14. Baney

15. Bannoc

16. Bante

17. Bodario

18. Bode

19. Bodelia

20. Bogan

21. Bunth

22. Buntrig

23. Buntry

24. Caffinnoc

25. Coness

26. Condrey

27. Dairdy

28. Dins

29. Dobbett

30. Duggardy

31. Dugo

32. Duisy

33. Endester

34. Errig

35. Estel

36. Eusz

37. Faderl

38. Fadias

39. Flia

40. Flon

41. Ganchen

42. Gastevan

43. Glayn

44. Gliannah

45. Glinnoc

46. Hance

47. Haness

48. Hess

49. Hessilo

50. Ifney

51. Jace

52. Jehary

53. Jodardy

54. Jodelys

55. Jodwynes

56. Jorl

57. Julinney

58. Kile

59. Kirde

60. Kirdhroop

61. Kiro

62. Kure

63. Lalu

64. Liliantry

65. Lorne

66. Lugg

67. Luggina

68. Luter

69. Madred

70. Milda

71. Mildrig

72. Miless

73. Mirdian

74. Moffin

75. Morl

76. Moulia

77. Muren

78. Narence

79. Nios

80. Orles

81. Ottel

82. Pogar

83. Pogg

84. Poonwitus

85. Salte

86. Schader

87. Sios

88. Skoor

89. Skornet

90. Thar

91. Tibberleg

92. Tinness

93. Tinnet

94. Udes

95. Uthea

96. Vallonwitz

97. Vion

98. Waynn

99. Wilia

100. Zhdel

I'm quite happy with this list, but since creating this list I've been adding more and more names to the source list of first names, so I might do another run with the generator to see if I can find some even better ones.

Some entries I didn't keep:

1. Caffinnoc

2. Caffinka

3. Gaggin

4. Gagmondelinne

5. Mouliondern

6. Omonessilo

7. Poop

8. Shirt

9. Spantry

10. Wabbin

Last Names

There are distinct phases in Vance's work. In his earlier works he stuck mostly to regular Anglosaxon names, while later he went more in the direction he used for the first names: making them sound like regular names without using a lot of actual names. I curated the list of names for the last name generator to contain mostly names from the second phase, as those are the more 'Vancian' names.

1. Addenbane

2. Asheyr

3. Ashgaven

4. Attledune

5. Audmarkin

6. Ballander

7. Ban Fal

8. Bandolph

9. Blan Brouty

10. Blarne

11. Borce-Top

12. Byzane

13. Carilleg

14. Casz

15. Chanshaw

16. Chig

17. Clagath

18. Clatz

19. Colph

20. Darcantfoy

21. De Faleby

22. Detter Yestlei

23. Diduc

24. Dorreronsi

25. Dwyn

26. Dydinger

27. Erlincuris

28. Etzels

29. Falt

30. Farlingwitch

31. Faus

32. Filke

33. Finnelstaff

34. Gassit-Darius

35. Gline

36. Gontwill

37. Grasgan-Gole

38. Grotesz

39. Gundali-Sri-Tanch

40. Guntillman

41. Hambalter

42. Harspiek

43. Harve

44. Hesphorner

45. Heth

46. Holderling

47. Hrostick

48. Ibramurous Tremboran

49. Jaganigatz

50. Jeck

51. Jiroulk

52. Knerwick

53. Lam Anacawany

54. Lan Blas

55. Lanaquisle

56. Lodwy

57. Lysidderson-See

58. Madice

59. Malagave

60. Maursty

61. Mirby

62. Miskins

63. Of Poulsant

64. Ollaverty

65. Orching

66. Pallemont-Faide

67. Pansig

68. Pomph

69. Pullish

70. Rohorray

71. Rolverty

72. Ruter

73. Scamy

74. Seriu-Ngone

75. Serloc

76. Stig

77. Swal

78. Tarabeston

79. Teesq

80. Thammatz

81. Thaw

82. The Magrave

83. Thoury

84. Thrumble

85. Ulsx

86. Underbee

87. Unsh

88. Unspitzel

89. Vedels

90. Vermould

91. Waldenfroe

92. Wart

93. Waunderwood

94. Widdersen

95. Witz

96. Woodking

97. Woof

98. Yamp

99. Yika

100. Zamm

Titles

Some occurring titles from the books. Some of these are more job descriptions then titles, so I might split it up into a 'proper' title and a job description table (which I can add to with regular functions like merchant, banker, pilot, etc.)

For playtest purposes this will probably suffice. It does not need to be a d100 table of course.

1. Arbiter

2. Arch-TITLE

3. Bailiff

4. Benchmaster

5. Brother/Sister

6. Cadet

7. Captain

8. Chief

9. Chief TITLE

10. Commander

11. Constable

12. Controller

13. Count/Countess

14. Curator

15. Dame

16. Damsel

17. Deacon

18. Didactor

19. Director

20. Discriminator

21. Doctor

22. Duke/Duchess

23. Effectuator

24. Guildmaster

25. Hierach

26. Hierophant

27. Intercessor

28. Lady/Lord

29. Madame

30. Marshal

31. Master TITLE

32. Nunciator

33. Overman

34. Panarch

35. Prince/Princess

36. Professor

37. Rector

38. Saint

39. Second TITLE

40. Sir

41. Superintendent

What's next?

This wraps a good portion of character creation, enough to start creating both players characters and non-player characters. It might be fun to add some extra adjectives or descriptors to be able to flesh out NPCs a bit more.

Roll up a character name, and post it in the comments!

Leave a comment

Of course one thing is very much missing: actual character stats and play rules. Next installment I'll go into setting up the minimal required rules needed to actually start playing.

See you next one!

A small detour from the design diary of the last few installments, but don’t fret, it will return next time!

Sometimes you just get a thought and have to write it. I've encountered the Five Laws of Library Science a few times now, and everything they make such an impression on me again. You know the feeling of reading something that just makes so much sense, but you never thought about it yourself in that way? Well, that.

It got me thinking on if they could be applied to roleplaying games. And, yes, they could.

The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games

The original Five Laws of Library Science were formulated by the Indian librarian S. R. Ranganathan and published in 1931. The are as follows:

1. Books are for use.

2. Every person his or her book.

3. Every book its reader.

4. Save the time of the reader.

5. A library is a growing organism.

I've seen them applied to other topics, and while thinking about it, I realized they perfectly fit roleplaying games as well.

The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games

1. Roleplaying games are for play

2. Every player their game

3. Every game its player.

4. Save the time of the player.

5. Roleplaying games are a growing organism.

First Law: Roleplaying games are for play

Is my roleplaying collection too big? It might be. Did I read every zine and book I have? Most, but not all. Will I ever play them all? No, I probably will play just part of them.

But, and this is a big one. For most of them I can imagine myself playing them. While reading them, they spark ideas, possible scenarios, potential scenes, characters I could make. Reading is play.

You might even plan to run a game and start taking notes, creating the world, filling it with hooks & non-player characters. You might create a character or multiple characters, going through character creation, weighing different classes/backgrounds and other options. Even if you never reach the table, you have played the game. Prep is play.

I always have lists of games I still want to play or run, either with a group or solo. These lists might change, as tastes and trends change.

Get rid of games you don't enjoy, games you never see yourself playing, but don't feel guilty for having a ton of games and not enough time to play them all at a table. Nothing beats a good session with friends, firing on all cylinders creating something none of you could have created on their own, but all play is valid play.

Second Law: Every player their game

In the original laws this law mostly focuses on librarians making sure they serve a wide ranch of patrons. Librarians should respect that everyone is different and that everyone has different tastes regarding the books they choose, without judgement or prejudice.

As a player or DM I see this as an encouragement to try out different games (either solo or with a group), to find the ones that fit your gaming style and tastes. Sometimes this means playing a game that's not really your taste, to be able to play with your friends (hopefully they do the same for you!).

Also, try not be a snob about other peoples favorite games. Hype up games you love, rather than disparage games you don't like. (Which, I must admit, can be hard. I have shit-talked 5e more often than not). You have to accept that you might not be the target audience for a certain game.

You don't have to like every roleplaying game. You can just shrug, accept it's not for you and move on. You don't have to back every Kickstarter, you don't have to keep all games you bought. And maybe most importantly, when people are enjoying it, you don't have to rain on their parade.

Third Law: Every game its player

This is very much related to the second law, but in this case the focus is on the game. Making sure a game find its audience. This is an encouragement for all indie game designers. Make your weird shit, there will be somebody who will fucking love it. There will be an audience for your games, how small it might be. It might just be someone's new favorite game.

Of course, to find an audience for your game, you need to make sure people find. Marketing sucks, I know, but there is nothing as great as hearing from people who played your game and liking or even loving it. That will only happen if people can find it, and especially if the right people hear about.

Your game deserves to be made, and your game deserves to be played. This will also require effort by the creator. If there's art, make sure it fits the vibes. If you post about it, make sure you have a good pitch.

This is something I also still struggle with. Being part of a community helps! I'm part of several game designer discords, with lots of people helping out when you're crafting both your games and the promo needed to get it out. There's tons of great resources. A great starting place is the ZiMo discord. It's a bit dormant during most of the year, but buzzing in Zine Month (februari). It contains links to resources from game design, art, layout to publishing and promoting your games. I'll post an invite in the comments down below.

Fourth Law: Save the time of the player

In the original laws this is of course relates to the whole library: it must be organized in a way readers can quickly find the books they want to read.

The nice thing about these laws is how they can applied on different levels: in this case we look at one specific game. Is your game organized in such a way the player can quickly learn the game? How easy is it to find the rules they need during play?

Not every game needs an index or even a table of contents (but please add one if it's more than a few pages).

(Of course it also would be great if it was easier to find the game you want to find. Looking it at you, itch.io and DriveThruRPG.)

Fifth Law: Roleplaying games are a growing organism

For this one I can be short: just look at the broad range of indie games being published. From very trad to OSR, from guided, co-op to solo games, journaling games, lyric games. The boundaries are continuously being pushed, but for the more traditionally minded people enough of the innovations seep back into mainstream gaming.

Roleplaying games are living and thriving. I love roleplaying games, and I'd love to see what the next 50 years will bring.

What's your favorite of these laws? How would you interpret them?

Leave a comment

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science

• https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2017/09/five-laws-of-library-science.html

• https://the-lost-bay.itch.io/make-accessible-ttrpgs

  A guide to making accessible tabletop roleplaying games

• 🌲 Pine Shallows Flip Through

• 🪐 Design Diary - Creating a retro science fiction adventure game - part 2

Hi all,

Before we continue our scheduled part 2 of my design diary, I wanted to highlight a flip through Jes the Human did of my game Pine Shallows:

Pine Shallows is currently part of the RPGs for Accessible Gaming bundle! Get the game and 200+ other for just $10, and help a great charity in the process! The bundle will be available until March 23rd.

Creating a retro science fiction adventure game - Part 2

This is the second installment in design diary, where I desifgn a roleplaying game inspired by the science fiction works of Jack Vance.

In the previous installment of designing a retro science fiction game I looked at what defines the setting, the type of characters and the the type of adventures they go on.

In this article I want to start designing the elements needed to get to a minimal working version of the game. As the focus of the game is to emulate the numerous weird worlds and their cultures, I want to start with some random tables to generate them.

I identified the following three things I want to be able to start playtesting:

1. Generators for planets & their cultures

2. Generator for characters:

   1. Characters names

   2. Character goals/quests/jobs

3. The main game mechanics:

   1. Succes/failure mechanic

   2. Tracking progress

As traveling from planet to planet and meeting all kinds of weird cultures is one of the main focus points of the game, that's where I'll start.

Generating worlds

One thing to keep in mind for this game is: verisimilitude is not a goal. These are not generators to generate every possible planet, they are focussed on planets that are inhabited by humans, and that have properties like the worlds in Jack Vance.

As a start we can just have two simple tables to get a nice spread of possible (but inhabitable) planets by combining climate & number of continents.

Climate

• 2-3 - Cold

• 4-5 - Cold with temperate zones

• 6-8 - Temperate, Earth-like ranges

• 9-10 - Warm with temperate zones

• 11-12 - Hot

Continents

• 2-3 - No major water bodies

• 4-5 - More the 50% land, 1d4 big seas

• 6-8 - 25-50% land, 1d4+1 continents

• 9-10 - Less than 25% land. 1d4-1 continents

• 11-12 - Only a few small islands

Planet features

Apart from the basics (climate & continents) we want to add some weirdness to each planet to make the unique. I don't know how many entries this table will be when I’m done with it. I might start with 36 entries for a d66 table, but if I have enough ideas it could even be a d100 table. For now even with just these 14 entries, we have enough to do some playtesting.

1. System has another 1d4 inhabited planets

2. Multiple moons

3. The inhabited world is not planet, but a moon

4. Alien ruins

5. Old planet: rolling hills, no steep mountains

6. Young planet: steep mountain peaks and rough weather

7. Megafauna

8. Megaflora

9. Highly volcanic

10. Large tides

11. No (big) local flora

12. Semi-intelligent animals

13. Rich in resources

14. Poor in resources

For the complete game I might add some more tables to round up generating complete solar systems, including uninhabitable planets, but only if during playtesting it feels that those tables are needed.

Number of cultures

In the books of Vance there are usually just a few distinct cultures per world. A lot of them have just one, or maybe two or three. Another number of worlds in the books are on the other end of the spectrum: they feature very balkanized worlds, having been settled by countless distinct groups that all have kept to their own small piece of the world.

This is the one option where I want to try out different methods to see how they wind up in play. It could be a simple 1d4, with the results for 1-3 being exactly the number of cultures, and 4 being a balkanized world.

Another more weighted option could be this 2d6 roll:

• 2-3 - 1 Culture

• 4-10 - 1d2+1 Cultures

• 11-12 - Balkanized

I’ll try both of them out when playtesting!

Culture tags

If there are a small number of cultures, you can roll for all of them before encountering them. Roll 2 tags per culture. Use the tags to determine their relationships, and which group might be the bigger or more dominant. Feel free to re-roll any tags that don't inspire you, or that feel contradictory, but if possible try to make it work.

For a planet with a large number of cultures, you can always generate a few, or generate some overarching tags that they all share.

This table is now very close to the needed 36 entries for a d66 table, but it should be easy to expand it a bit more. One other option is to split it into a list of simple adjective tags & a separate list of tags with a bit more weirder options. This will depend on how much entries I can expand the table with.

1. Egalitarian

2. Cosmopolitan

3. Insular

4. Urbanized

5. Erudite

6. Pious

7. Abundant

8. Colourful

9. Industrious

10. Cosmopolitan

11. Anarchic

12. Corrupt

13. Decaying

14. Tranquil

15. Homogenized

16. Mercantile

17. Balkanized (Could also be part of the number of cultures...)

18. Descended from a religious group

19. Descended from a naturalist organization

20. Descended from criminals

21. Descended from exiles

22. Living tree houses

23. Grown fungal houses

24. Nomadic

25. Strict gender roles

26. Obsessed with poisons

27. Extravagant costumes

28. Extravagant hairstyles

29. Ever-changing fashion

30. Wearing masks in public

31. Feudal

32. Cities connected by waterways instead of streets

33. Floating cities

34. Everyone talks in poetry

Names

This will be a big one. All the generated planets need names. During research (read: rereading the novels of Vance) I started collecting all names I encountered. I don't want to blindly copy names from the planets of Jack Vance, but I do want to have names that evoke the same style and themes.

When looking at the planet names I discovered a few historical sources Vance uses. Names of Saints (Boniface), actual star & constellation names (Rigel, Achernar, Aspidiske), next to made up names (Arbonetta, Dar Sai).

I used two methods: a Markov Chain Generator to generate names, and adding names from similar sources. The sources I used where:

• Markov Chain word generator on a long list of Jack Vance's planet names

• List of Saints, Wikipedia

• List of Arabic Star Names, Wikipedia

• Greek Mythological Names, Wikipedia

The Markov Chain results were all over the place, so I generated way more names then needed, and curated and changed them heavily. After collecting about 70-80 names I added to the list from the listed Wikipedia sources.

Markov Chain Generator

A Markov Chain generator is a simple probability based method to generate predictions, which can also be used to generate sentences or in this case words.

You feed your generator a list of names, and it just counts which letters follow combinations of other letters. So if your list is:

• alpha

• alpaca

it will see an 'a' is followed by an 'l' or 'c', but a 'p' might be followed 50/50 by an 'h' or an 'a'.

For generating words that make sense it usually helps to look what letters follows combinations of 2 or even 3 letters.

I used a Python library called markovify to write a script that can generate words based on a csv list of words.

If people are interested I can do a more in depth post about using Markov Chain generators to generate names for your games. Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

In the end this gave me this table of planet names:

1. Algol

2. Alphanetta

3. Alphede

4. Ambrose

5. Aspe IV

6. Aspidion

7. Azulia's End

8. Bacturgal

9. Barlaam

10. Benedict

11. Bethere

12. Blenkinole

13. Blent

14. Bonille

15. Canor

16. Caphede

17. Charlemagne IV

18. Cicella

19. Clarenes

20. Cunibert

21. Dasq

22. Delius III

23. Denesselrig

24. Derve

25. Deullion

26. Dion

27. Diosophecca Six

28. Edessa

29. Eiselbarren

30. Ellesse

31. Eltanin

32. Ergard Thirteen

33. Fade's Third

34. Falderal

35. Falla IX

36. Formalhaut

37. Gallion

38. Gaude

39. Gorle

40. Hardusk

41. Ignatz

42. Izar IV

43. Jezebella IX

44. Josaphat

45. Kande

46. Karsille

47. Liliasq

48. Lilo

49. Mare

50. Methere

51. Mirt

52. Mirstenbar

53. Morld

54. Mouder's Vale

55. Murgarest

56. Muspelheim

57. New Gornishon

58. Nimrud

59. Nilvosk

60. Nova Bactricella

61. Opora

62. Oran

63. Padwall

64. Pheme

65. Quand

66. Quillic

67. Reim

68. Rhalen IV

69. Rhamnotis Major

70. Rhet

71. Rigobert

72. Saffilo-May

73. Sambal

74. Sanda

75. Saspis Edge

76. Smatz

77. Soudero

78. Spica Nine

79. Tanselrig

80. Tassader's Third

81. Tathea

82. Thamar

83. Tranquil

84. Trullingale

85. Trum

86. Uruk

87. Ushanq

88. Vales

89. Valhallorn

90. Vascaratz

91. Vasq

92. Verle

93. Virda

94. Wale

95. Xandervelt

96. Xotique

97. Yap-Yap

98. Yggdrasil

99. Zacarencely

100. FIRST NAME's World

Generating a planet

Let's try out what we have so far!

Name: Cicella
Climate: 3, Cold
Continents: 10, 1d4-1 continents: 3 continents, Borgen, Pombalie & Doral
Planet feature: 3, The inhabited world is not planet, but a moon
Nr of cultures: 8, 1d2+1: 3 cultures

Culture #1- The Doralion

24 - Nomadic
14 - Tranquil

The Doralion of Doral, the largest continent, are a nomadic people of mystics on an endless pilgrimage following a complicated every-changing route from shrine to shrine. Endless debates over the correct routes and ways to worship are held in calm but intense sessions.

Culture #2 - The Virune

11 - Anarchic
2 - Cosmopolitan

Aglique Vir, the main space port, and the cities around it are inhabited by the Virune. Their culture is young, the different groups is was comprised of can still be found in their carnival societies, of each is a member of one or more. The yearly festival schedule is the only thing that seems to hold this exuberant people together. Their cities are domed, keeping them warm. The domes are badly maintained and there are occasional leaks.

Culture #3 - The Djar

15 - Homogenized
18 - Descended from a religious group

In the frozen hinterlands of Cicella on both Borgen & Pombalie, the Djar eke out a meager existence. They are a simple, conservative people. Vestiges of the rituals of their religious ancestors are still upheld, but more as habits than out of conviction.

To be honest, I’m already quite pleased with the results. I’d love to what planets other people will create.

Leave a comment

What's next?

While collecting names from the source material, I also started making lists of names of suns, moons, continents, cities & landmarks. Using similar steps as used for the planet list I want to turn all the collected names into d100 tables so players can generate planets completely with their sun & moons, continents and cities.

Again I might start with using shorter lists so we can start using the tables, and slowly add on them.

Would you be interested in seeing how I create these tables as well, or should I skip it until I publish the first version of the game and move on to character creation?

Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Next to that are the steps I mentioned in the introduction. Unless I’ll go more in depth for creating the random tables for city, landmark & other name tables, the next installment will probably be character focussed:

1. Generator for characters names

2. Random tables character goals/quests/jobs

See you next one!

Peter

Hi all,

One of my current works in progress is a roleplaying game inspired by the science fiction works of Jack Vance.

In the world of analog adventure games, Jack Vance is mostly associated with the Vancian magic systems inspired by his Dying Earth fantasy books, but for me his science fiction works have been foundational1. Jack Vance is one of the sf writers with the most works translated into Dutch, so I've been reading his work since an early age, when I was devouring every science fiction and fantasy book in our local library. Early last year I started rereading a lot of his science fiction output. I love his kind of science fiction: more focused on weird cultures and mystery then on tech and aliens.

As of now this is almost 2000 words of research, half baked ideas, and lists. To order my thoughts and notes, I thought it might be fun to start designing the game in public. Before writing anything, I want to set up the basic principles of the setting, the type of characters and the type of adventures these characters will have.

Why make this game? Isn't there one already?

Sure, there is the Gaean Reach roleplaying game by Pelgrane Press, but it does quite a different thing then I'd would like: it allows you to play in Vance's worlds, instead of allowing you to create worlds & peoples LIKE those of Jack Vance.

Next to that the GUMSHOE based system does not really vibe with my playing style. It's an important step in the mystery game genre, but especially for solo play, I like the Brindlewood Bay system better. (Also GUMSHOE in this iteration is a bit too crunchy for me).

One big hurdle in mystery adventures is making sure the players find enough clues to solve the mystery. GUMSHOE solves this by allowing the players to always find the clues, and then letting them solve it. Carved from Brindlewood games approach this differently: there is not a predetermined solution to the mystery. When players have collected a number of clues they can try and present their theory and roll for it. The more clues they can include in their theory, the bigger the chance they are right. This might not be to everyones taste, but it fits perfect with the vibe of discovering & defining the setting during play I want this game to have.

So, while there is a game, it's not the game I want it to be. Which of course means I'll have to make it myself.

Defining the setting

Vancian science fiction was never hard sf, already feeling retro when the later books came out. This retro pulp feeling is what I want to emulate.

• The age of exploration is over. This is a lived-in universe. Settled worlds are everywhere, with their own long histories. Exploration, discovering and settling new worlds and is not the focus.
  
  This does not mean travel can't be the focus of a game: the picaresque mode of Vancian novels will be much supported.

• Technology is retro and stagnant. There is FTL travel, there are blaster guns, but not much more progress. There might still be inventors, but they're more tinkerers. There are no space stations, space ships land on planet-side space ports.
  
  Computers do exist, but more as big archival machines, there are limited to none personal computing devices, no smart phones.

• Human centered. Aliens exist, but mostly as dangerous wildlife. If there are intelligent creatures, they don't care much about the universe past their own world, and they'll be uninterested in humans. The focus is on all the weird societies, cultures and foods humans have created.

• There is no canon. No one's version of the setting will be the same. There might be adventures or planets created at some point, but most of the setting will be determined and built during play. There is no timeline, there is no setting guide.

• No big focus on space ships. Space ships are mostly a way of transport: we have space cruise ships & space cargo haulers. Adventures might takes place on ships, but ship to ship combat is not a thing. Most of them can be flown by a single person or a small crew.

• Communication travels at the speed of ships. Information will be transported by ships, there is no separate communication network between worlds.

What about the characters?

While there are some differences, most of Jack Vance's characters share a few common traits. His early works like the Planet of Adventure series fall in the classic planetary adventure genre, with the typical very capable everyman lead. Over the course of career the type of characters evolved a bit, but he did stick to a few characteristics.

Most of his characters are capable, smart and fit young men. They often find the rules of their societies a bit too strict, but have good relationships with good role models. They do break conventions, but out of conviction, not out of malice. They have learned to fight, they can fly spaceships, and they know their way around an investigation.

The stories mainly fall in two modes: picaresque adventures on either a big single planet (Big Planet and it's sequel Showboat World are two prime examples) or traveling from planet to planet (Ports of Call). The other mode is more plot driven, either by revenge (the Demon Princes series is the best one example of this, the main character taking down one of the 5 arch villains who killed his family one by one) or more mystery (the classic amnesiac plot in Marune, one of the Alastor books, where a man tries to find out which of his enemies poisoned him so he lost his memory).

Regarding the type of stories, I think my main challenge is between offering single world versus multiple world, that would require 2 sets of random tables I think. I'll start by focusing on multiple words at first. Supporting both the picaresque and more plot driven modes should be easy enough. Even in the more plot driven stories you still encounter weird cultures and peoples.

By offering systems like the Iron Vows in Ironsworn, you could give a character focus, while still allowing the player to explore the universe according to their whims.

The following character types seem to be the best fitting:

• Young adventurer: excels in studies, but not much world experience, with have one or mentor connections

• Vigilante: might have a past working for 'proper' crime fighting organizations. Often motivated by revenge, loners, but usually quite a bit of useful contacts.

• Effectuators: crime solvers for a certain organization, traveling judges

• Trader/crew man, part of a crew, less of a focus on trade then on picaresque adventures

Danger is certainly a part of the stories, but more in the way of setbacks and wounds (either wounded egos or actual physical wounds), but character death does not really fit. What would fit is a PbtA style success with a complication.

It's good to point out that in his science fiction Jack Vance stuck to male protagonists almost exclusively, this game will be open to characters of all genders.

(In the Cadwel trilogy the love interest of the main character, Wayness Tamm, has her own plotline in the second book, but sadly she gets relegated to the sidelines in book 3.)

While I like his stories, but I'm not blind to the dated views in Vance's books. There's some casual racism and sexism (more in the older works, but still there in the later works). This game will not be for people who liked those parts.

Prefaces & Footnotes

Jack Vance uses footnotes for a lot of his info dumps and worldbuilding, but I especially love his chapter prefaces. In the Demon Princes series each chapter starts with in-universe work of non-fiction or even fiction. Planetary guides, highly opinionated commentaries, fragments of interviews and more. While a lot of the Demon Princes books can be pretty straight-forward revenge stories, the prefaces add a lot of depth.

I'd love to find a way to add a way for players to add their own worldbuilding to the game. Maybe something to frame sessions separate from their own characters or the current plot, or as a downtime mechanic? Or as a special ability that helps establish truths convenient to the current thing happening?

Food for thought! I'd love input on this one.

Leave a comment

So, where does this leave us?

In the next installments I want to start defining the minimal needed mechanics to start some play-testing and actually designing the first sub-systems.

I might change my mind, but for now I want to start with:

• Generator for planets & their cultures

• Generator for character goals/quests/jobs

• The main game resolution mechanic

Where would you start?

See you in the next installment!

I just love me a good weird fantasy city.

Ever since then I've been searching for books and stories that scratch the same itch. This post contains all the ones I've found so far. This is not an extensive guide, as I'm leaving out some books I didn't enjoy, but it should give anyone interested in weird city fantasy enough to read.

What does a city need to be to be included in here? Well, weird, but in the New Weird vein, which can contain any or some of these elements:

• The city is big, often too big to be mappable or knowable completely

• The city is ever changing. Sometimes even multiple stories in the same city contradict each other. It can be post-modern, it can be surreal, it can be magical realism.

• The city is a political hotbed. It's X-punk (often steampunk), but with an emphasis on the punk part.

Also this is what should have been called Urban Fantasy, not books about rural werewolves and suburban vampires.

What’s your favorite weird city?

Leave a comment

Precursors

Of course the new weird didn't spring out of nothing. Whenever you ask for recommendations, these forerunners will eventually be suggested.

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1972)

  I can see the influence Calvino had on a lot of the new weird/post modern writers. Calvino certainly understands the city. I really enjoyed it, but, probably a bit blasphemous, sometimes it feels a bit repetitive and pseudo-philosophical. The descriptions of cities tend to blend together after a while. I appreciate the craftsmanship of the structure of the book, but if it was half as short it would have had more impact on me.

• The Viriconium stories, M. John Harrison (1971-1984)
  Especially the books (Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium) that actually take place in Viriconium had a big influence on my own weird cities (San Sibilia especially).

• Tainaron: Mail from Another City, Leena Krohn (1985)

  Tainaron is a city like no other, populated by talking insects, as observed by the nameless narrator. Atmospheric and beautiful, the prose suggests more than it explicitly says. It's also more a collection of vignettes and musings than what I would call a novel.

The New Weird

The books that started it for me.

• The Ambergris books, Jeff Vandermeer

  City of Saints and Madmen (2002), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), Finch (2010). Each book is very much it's own thing as Vandermeer does not like to repeat himself. Like Viriconium, Ambergris is a city that is never quite the same, a city where even history is not really stable. City of Saints and Madmen is a postmodern collection of short stories, fake histories and 'scientific' articles. Shriek and Finch are more traditional novels. Shriek, with it's focus on artists is a big influence on San Sibilia.

• The New Crobuzon books, China Mieville
  Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), Iron Council (2004). New Corbuzon is steampunk on steroids: weird races in a London-like metropole. Gonzo & political.

• The City & the City, China Miéville (2009)

  Not a secondary world fantasy like the New Crobuzon books, but a great study of a weird city: here two cities occupy the same space without interacting. A great noir detective steeped in weirdness.

• The Etched City, K.J. Bishop (2003)

  Ashamoil is one of the greatest New Weird cities. Often compared to Miéville's New Corbuzon, to me Bishop's Ashamoil feels closer to Vandermeer's Ambergris.

  
  Ashamoil like Ambergris consists in a otherworldly place where the edges of reality are not always as clear. Ashamoil is highly evocative of cities like New Orleans and Paris, while definitely being it's own creation.

• Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (2006)

  Not as fantastical, but certainly adjacent to the genre. Not for the faint of hard. Ligotti does not write happy stories. Decaying city scapes, depressing monotonous lives, creepy puppets and clowns: this is not upbeat stuff. Bleak.

• Thunderer, Felix Gilman (2007)

  Ararat is a great weird city: unmappable, powered by belief and gods with a Dickensian London feel. I especially loved the work on the Atlas, where a coterie of poets, scientists and dilettantes try to codify and describe the geography and history of the city. Very different in tone than the sequel, this is one of the books I would recommend to people wanting more 'classic' New Weird.

  

• Gears of the City, Felix Gilman (2008)

  A completely different feel from the first book, Thunderer. Where the first book sometimes felt like epic fantasy, which got (new) weirder while progressing, Gears of the City is weird from the beginning, but also more claustrophobic.

  
  It's an ambitious book, political, imaginative, dark and funny. While the main plot let me down a bit, traveling through the city and it's different iterations was great. A lot of the side characters add much to the story.

  
  (If you like Weird West, be sure to check out Felix Gilman's Half-Made World novels, especially The Rise of Ransom City).

The successors

It's hard to draw a line between genres as it is, but at some point people stopped calling books New Weird. Still to me these books are very much a continuation of what I love about the New Weird genre.

• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (2009)

  Palimpsest is a city beyond our world, a sexually-transmitted city. Weird, surreal. Not for everyone, but poetic.

• Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds (2010)
  Quite a different setting from Reynolds' usual far future, epic space opera.

  
  The atmosphere and the setting of the book reminded me a lot of the books of China Miéville. Like Miéville, Reynolds doesn't bore us with to many details through info dumps, but slowly reveals the setting, with it's dark, and political undertones.

• The Gutter Prayer, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (2019)

  For me this book (and it's sequels *The Shadow Saint* and *The Broken God*) scratched the itch left by the New Weird. Guerdon is a fully developed weird city, character driven, but filled with non-traditional fantasy creatures, with some politics and intrigue thrown in for good measure.
  
  If you liked the cities from Vandermeer, Miéville & Bishop, check these books out for sure.

  
  One of my favorite fantasy series of the last few years.

• Blackspire, Benjamin Sperduto (2020)

  Like Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Ben is a fellow game designer, but his fiction also comes highly recommended. Blackspire's Lowtown is a filthy and nasty place, but the characters are real, the plot tangles some nice mysteries with political background.

  

Short stuff

Want to wet your feet a bit before diving into the bigger novels? Beneath Ceaseless Skies has been my favorite fantasy outlet for short stories for a number of years now. Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy”: stories with a secondary-world setting and some fantasy feel, but written with a literary approach.

Luckily this means that good New Weird fantasy fits the bill.

You can read the stories online. Each issue contains at least 2 stories. To get it as an ebook you'd need to buy the issue or get a subscription, but it's certainly worth the price.

• Architectural Constants by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #2, 2008)
  A post-modern new weird story set in a city which seems to change depending on the angle you look at it. Luckily at the heart of the weirdness, there's still, and this is very important, a great story.

• Walls of paper, soft as skin by Adam Callaway (BCS #73, 2011)

  A surreal tale of loss in a city which revolves about paper and the written word.

• Shadows Under Hexmouth Street by Justin Howe (BCS #89, 2012)
  A New Weird flavored story in which we follow an apprentice polisomancer: a city mage, who's searching for his missing teacher.
  (Written by yet another ttrpg designer).

• The Magic of Dark and Hollow Places by Adam Callaway (BCS #96, 2012)
  Another story in the Ars Lacuna cycle.

• Walls of Skin, Soft as Paper by Adam Callaway (BCS #131, 2013)
  Another tale in his Lacuna series. More a series of images than an actual story. But I do love the images Callaway paints of Lacuna.

• The Inked Many by Adam Callaway (BCS #150, 2014)
  The origin story of the Inked Man, a main character in the Ars Lacuna stories.

• Day of the Dragonfly by Raphael Ordoñez (BCS #165, 2015)
  Takes place in Enoch, the world-city. Ordoñez' stories vary between old fashioned weird tales, and more new weird stories. This one is a great mix. While Keftu, our hero, is great weird tale protagonist, battling monsters and old gods, Enoch is a great new weird city, with endless abandoned factory districts, train connections, even to empty parts, and places that bigger on the inside than out.

  
  Influences range from Jack Vance (weird monsters like the maugreth and titles like phylarch are dropped into the story without ever being really explained, which works by giving the place an alien feel), through M. John Harrison (Enoch and Viriconium could be sister cities, how different they are) to Robert E. Howard.

• The Scale Tree by Raphael Ordoñez (BCS #178, 2015)
  Also set in the city of Enoch.

• Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest by Cat Rambo (BCS #195, 2016)
  Cathay is a Chaos Mage, living in the multi-dimensional city of Serendib. Serendib reminded me a lot of Sigil, the center of the Planescape setting.

I want more!

Want to check out my solo journaling games inspired by these weird cities?

• A Visit to San Sibilia - This city never changes, this city never stays the same. Close to the coast in a river delta, San Sibilia’s sprawling districts are connected by rambling trams and ramshackle ferries.

  

• Hiria: The Eternal City - A solo journaling journey into the multiverse You tracked your quarry here, but they escaped to one of Hiria’s manifestations. Will you follow them?

Recommend me anything that you miss from this list!

Leave a comment

Things I finished in 2024

Make a Zine! (March 2024)

A short zine about making zines, with some how-to's, some history, tips & tricks and resources. Available in Dutch & English. This is one is PWYW (pay-what-you-want)!

Pine Shallows - Solo Rules (June 2024)

In 2024 I spend a lot of time doing a deep dive on adding solo procedures to multiplayer roleplaying games. One of the reasons was that I wanted to add solo rules to Pine Shallows, my kids, mysteries & monsters adventure game.

Pine Shallows - Adventure Guide (June 2024)

As a companion piece to the Solo Rules I also released the expanded and updated version of the Pine Shallows - Adventure Guide, which contains adventure generators to create your own adventures from scratch. Helpful for solo players & GMs both.

Passkey Solo Expansion (July 2024)

A supplement for the Passkey SRD by Penflower Ink. Passkey by Penflower Ink is the system behind Stravagante! (whimsical fantasy adventure), Fuorimondo! (space opera) or Greenjackers! (solarpunk rebellion).

After creating the solo procedures for Pine Shallows, I decided to see how flexible they were and I retooled them for the Passkey Jam. Passkey already has some guidelines for playing the Passkey games without a GM either coop or solo. I added some extra tools and tips & tricks.

Vehicle Rules for Eco Mofos (December 2024)

Eco Mofos!!! is one of my favorite games of 2024. I've played quite a bit of it solo, which it has great support for. As you'll see in the WIP section if this newsletter, I've been working on a chase based adventure for it. It needed good vehicle rules, so I got distracted and wrote those first. This contains everything you need to add vehicles to your game: rules for chasing, combat, sample vehicles & factions.

Non-gaming related I finished a short story, but that won't get published until 2025 (also, it's in Dutch).

Things I didn't finish (yet?)

Eco Mofos adventure

This started as a bunch of notes for the Follow the Convoy Jam in 2022. This was the pitch:

You are hired by the GREEN PEOPLE to transport some liberated heirloom seeds to SOLARPUNK TOWN, so the people can break free from the patented seeds that only work one season. Make sure you're ready with your submersible flyer at the designated location in HIGHTECH SEA CITY.

When getting into Eco Mofos this year, I decided to revisit this idea and retool it to that game. It grew to about 500 words, but it needed extra rules for the chase part. So, I got distracted and finished the Vehicle Rules first. Still want to finish this for sure.

OSR Swamp

I love, love small OSR/NSR microsettings like those from Nate Treme (Highland Paranormal Society). This is a bunch of notes for a small setting with a few factions, weird NPCs. It'll probably be a pointcrawl if I ever get to it. Not sure which system would be the best fit. Something lightweight for sure. This is 250 words of unstructured notes.

The Unease

My big new solo journaling game. No weird cities this time, but focussed on art, art by forgotten artists to be precise.

You found an artwork by a long forgotten artist. The artwork spoke to you. It changed you. What do you learn about artwork, the artist and about yourself?

I had some initial notes, when I tried to fit it into the Lost & Found SRD (the system behind Artefact and Bucket of Bolts). It could fit, but it doesn't feel like the right approach.

I parked it for now. I still love the idea! This is about 1400 words.

The Forevernever

When I started writing Pine Shallows I was working on this game in parallel. It's the companion Meddlesome Kids game, focussing on regular kids discovering a fantasy world: think Oz, Narnia, Neverland, Wonderland. This year I just tweaked it here and there. This was mostly a PbtA style game, which I moved away from. I still need to rewrite it to the current Pine Shallows rules. With 2750 words, this is my biggest WIP.

Soapbox Opera

Pine Shallows did get some nice additions this year, but one thing I didn't manage to finish is the racing game/adventure I'm writing for it. Main inspirations are Hodag's NOW! THIS IS HOVER-RACING! and the Song of the Frogacle adventure from The Estate Adventure Collection for Mausritter. Both great mini-games. I'm still a bit torn on if it needs a bit more 'adventure', or if it can stand on it's own as a racing mini game. 700 words of notes.

(Next to that I have 1700 words of various adventure hooks and rumors for Pine Shallows. Some duds, some promising ideas.)

Nameless Vancian SF game/setting

Jack Vance is one of the writers with the most works translated into Dutch, so I've been reading his work since an early age, when I was devouring every science fiction and fantasy book in our local library. Early this year I started rereading a lot of his science fiction output. I love his kind of science fiction: more focused on weird cultures and mystery then on tech and aliens.

There is a Gaean Reach ttrpg, but it does quite a different thing then I'd would like: it allows you to play in Vance's worlds, instead of allowing you to create worlds & peoples LIKE those of Jack Vance.

As of now this is 1000 words of lists and notes. Currently leaning into making it solo, but could go either way.

Also in 2025: Pine Shallows is coming to Kickstarter., follow it here!

Let me know which of my 2024 releases you enjoyed the most, and which one you look most forward to in 2025.

See you in the next one!
Peter

Vehicle Rules for Eco Mofos

The ruins and wastelands of the world are littered with the remains of planes, trains and automobiles. A lot of punks and wasters use jury-rigged, battered vehicles to get around, patching together parts from all kinds of unique machines. How does your punk get around?

ECO MOFOS!! is one of my favorite games of 2024, and I'm proud to present my first content I made for it.

Vehicle Rules for Eco Mofos contains:

• Vehicle combat & chase rules

• 10 example vehicles

• 4 new factions

• Compatible with all Mark of the Odd and Cairn-like games.

• Art by Daniel Locke

Tavern Talks Interview

Emir of the Ecole de Golem YouTube channel was so kind to interview me in his Tavern Talks series. I talk about getting (back) into ttrpgs, creating ttrpgs, my games A Visit to San Sibilia, Hiria: The Eternal City, and the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for Pine Shallows.

Pine Shallows Kickstarter

Coming to you in 2025: the Pine Shallows Kickstarter campaign.

Follow the campaign here to be notified when it launches:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/monstermind/pine-shallows-a-meddlesome-kids-game

Next newsletter

Stick around for the next issue, in which I’ll showcase all the games I’ve been working on this year I didn’t release (yet?).

See you next time!
Peter

While I try to write a newsletter at least once a month, time got the best of me. Part of this is the lack of actual ttrpg writing and design I got done the last few months. I have some projects I'm working on, but sometimes it feels like I'm not making any significant progress.

Part of this is just getting into the swing of things since the new school year started. Work, kids (and their activities), it's a lot to juggle sometimes, and I have to tell myself to take it easy on myself. I do this for fun, so I shouldn't force myself to grind it out.

The other part is that as a creative person I just have TOO MANY creative hobbies. I did manage to write a short story, and I have been busy with stuff for my band like doing promo for our new record (more on that below) and booking gigs.

So, not much news from work I did on my projects, but luckily people seem to enjoy what I did put out, which results in some nice Pine Shallows related stuff I can share.

What's so great about Pine Shallows?

You could listen to me ramble about it, but let Talen Lee tell you!

Pine Shallows is a game I'd use to run a Gravity Falls style game and I think that it's almost completely waste-free as a game purchase. In 40 pages you get a tight design, it shows its influences well and clearly, and the game system is both simple enough to connect to the vibes of the story it's telling and uses its tools to give players agency within that story space that complies with the way these stories go.

It's great.

Check out on the complete post on Talen's blog.

Introducing Midnight - A Mystery Adventure for Pine Shallows

Looking for more Pine Shallows adventures to run? I am very proud to present the first 3rd party Pine Shallow adventure: Midnight Light by Willie Sullivan.

Strange lights. Forgotten secrets. A chilling mystery.

In Midnight Light, something eerie is happening in Pine Shallows. For over a week, a strange light has been blinking from the abandoned W. Pordobel Memorial Hospital at exactly midnight. The adults aren’t paying attention—but you and your friends are. Now it’s up to you to discover who—or what—is sending the message, and why.

You can find Midnight Light here: https://o0sully0o.itch.io/midnight-light

Want to create your own Pine Shallows adventures, mechanics or other content? Check the Pine Shallows Third Party License.

Catch of the Day - Actual Play

Want to see how Pine Shallows plays in practice? Check this great actual play of the introductory adventure Catch of the Day:

Pre-launching the Pine Shallows kickstarter

In the beginning of next year I'm planning to run a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to fund a print run of Pine Shallows. Follow here to make sure you get notified when the campaign launches.

Current projects

• Eco Mofos Vehicles & Chase Rules
  Text and basic layout are done. Needs some polish and some art. Coming soon! These will be highly compatible with Into the Odd and other Mark of the Odd games.

• My 60s garage rock band the Mieters released a new album 'Waar de win is' (like the title, all lyrics are in Dutch. The album does include some instrumentals as well).
  We're still eagerly awaiting the vinyl version, which sadly got delayed a bit, but you can check it on your favorite streaming service. Amongst others it can be found on Bandcamp:

  Or Spotify:

Or Apple Music.

The album also includes our Halloween track we released last year, in this video you can admire the acting chops of my bandmates and me:

See you next update!
Thanks,
Peter