Happy New Year! A lot of folk have been writing recaps of the year. I am not really big on that. I will, as usual, review the doings of Hessan’s County since our last newsletter, but I will focus more on moving forward than looking back.
On Youtube
This last month on YouTube has been busy, though unusually I did not do any of my Shorts reviews. In fact, the only game review I did was of the Far Horizon’s CoOp’s O Morningstar! This game is a GM-less narative TTRPG where you and your companions play Lucifer and the other fallen angels that make up the Hosts of Hell. Based around a card-driven event system, you reflect on points in Humanity’s past and future and how these points of history remind you of your failed attempt to rebel against Heaven to better the fate of yourselves and Humanity.
SRD Series
Instead a lot of our time on YouTube were taken up by different explorations to help out creators. If you are a long-time viewer, you are familiar with the System Reference Document (SRD) miniseries. This month, we looked at my first SRD and most recent SRD, Carta and Dominus. Both are great systems to get started in creating TTRPGs with, but for different reasons.
Carta is a useful system for creating solo games. As a card-based system, you create a board with the cards where the action takes place. In Carta games, this board could represents the passage of time, a map, your character’s physiology, and so much more. Each card represents an event that occurs in the game and it has optional survival and resource-gathering mechanics. What is even nicer about Carta is that this card board could be incorporated into other systems as a randomized map/event generator, helping to create the scenes that the roleplay takes place in without having to rely on a GM. I personally did this with Run, Villein Run and Perilous Voyages.
Dominus’s simplicity comes from being a simple system combined with a super-useful template. There have already been hundreds of games created using Dominus by members of the Brazilian RPG community and you can easily be among them. As I alluded to, I have recently created a Dominus game in only a couple of days of work here and there, but we will discuss that game a little bit later…
A New Series
Because I cannot help but keep making more work for myself, I have also started a new miniseries under the TTRPG Talk banner!
This time, I wanted to look at different games that have interactive character creation systems that are essentially mini-games in themselves. My first TTRPG was Traveler, so I have always found these types of character creation systmes to be both a good introduction to a game’s feel and useful for building out far more than just the base mechanics of your character. This is especially true for “Lifepath” systems, that follow the development of your character over the course of their lives from adolescence to where the story your game is telling picks up. These can take the form of linear lifepaths or non-linear ones. So far we have released two different videos detailing the character creation systems of Sherwood and the Mongoose’s 2e Traveler.
On the Blog
I promised myself I would try to be more active on the blog and so far I have. We released two new book reviews in the month of December. I won’t describe them much here (that is what is the review is for!). However, let me give you a little taste.
The Red Scholar’s Wife is a book from Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe. This is her science-fiction setting built around a number of different classic Asian cultures spreading into space, especially from what is now Vietnam and Southern China. In this addition to the canon, a young tech scavenger and mother named Xích Si get entangled into interstellar politics & piracy when she is given an offer she cannot refuse from the sentient pirate ship Rice Fish.
A Coup of Tea is the first in Casey Blair’s magic-infused Tea Princess Chronicles. Our Princess, Miyara, feels in her heart of hearts that a life in bureaucracy or court life is not for her, so she leaves. What results is a whirlwind of drama as Miyara tries to find her role, her art, and a new home & family to call her own.
On Games
A new month, a new game. Doing research for the Dominus SRD video left me itching to give it a shot. I brainstormed with Taeyang, my child and recent collaborator, on what I should try to adapt. The resounding result was Octonauts.
Octonauts is a British-produced TV show based around a collection of creature “Octonauts” who work together to try and explore the ocean and make it a better, safer place. It is an adaptation of a series of books originally written and illustrated by MEOMI, the studio of Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy. Each of the episodes / books features fascinating creatures of the sea and the wet lands around it. The brave Octonauts are solving problems, helping creatures in need, or occasionally getting themselves out of self-inflicted mishaps with their knowledge, seemingly endless technological resources, and belief in the inherent self-worth of all beings.
In Carcinauts, I have tried to emulate this. Since it uses the Dominus system, it is designed to be run without a Game Master. This means that you could use this game for a quick, episodic game with friends or a solo adventure into the Deep Blue Sea.
Looking forward…
As I mentioned, I wanted to make this newsletter a bit more forward facing rather than just recounting the year that has passed. What what is in the works for Hessan’s County in 2023?
Well for one thing, there will be a lot of change for me! I mentioned in the last newsletter that I was hoping to get a job with a Washington DC-based NGO. Well, that has come! I start with my new Partnership on January 3rd. I am unsure still exactly what this will mean for myself, my family, and Hessan’s County, but One thing I know it will entail is a move from rural Ohio to the DC area at some point in June or July if all goes well. If you are from around there, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Discord!
Between my new job and the transitions that entails, I will likely be scaling back my game production in the short-term. I am still working on a scifi fleet action RPG using on the Xd6 SRD set in the universe of my URCAT game and will likely be doing iterative work on Geldcist and Project Hypaethrus, but I would not expect anything to be released in January or maybe even February or March. No ZiMo, Dungeon23, or other related projects for me this year.
That said, I do hope to be trying to maintain or increase my production on the YouTube channel. One reason for this is because I would love to be involved in promoting all you creative folks out there with the upcoming ZiMo 2023! If you would like me to potentially cover your game or maybe even be on a stream with you, then please shoot me a DM on Twitter or Discord and I will do my best to help you out.
I am also looking at continuing to practice and finally finish my related YouTube series on my book-binding experience. I have been making a lot of book cloths for book covers. I just need thematic games (length 24-64 pages in A5/Half-letter format per volume, multi-volume is possible) to bind with them. So far, I have bound a several copies of my game, Sageuk! and one two-volume series containing Cezar Capacle’s Not A Demon. Let me know if you have any suggestions!