Whirly Times #1
We join a jam, share a roadmap, and do a show-and-tell.
Thank you for being among the first to subscribe to Whirly Times. I want this to be a more personal way to reach out, tell you what Max and I have been working on with Sirly Whirly, what cool stuff we’ve come across, and ask you about your own ideas.
Cast your vote: Sirly Whirly joins a Jam!
Itch.io is hosting a game jam called the ‘Finish Your Damn RPG (jam)’. I’m sitting on some nest eggs after focusing on Incarnis this whole time. I’ve narrowed them down to two, but I need some help to decide.
That’s where I’d like you to come in. I want to make games that get played, so please do tell me what interests you! Check out a mini-pitch for the two ideas below and click a vote button to vote. Whichever wins, we’ll turn into a concept game, with a free playtest kit on Itch.io.
I want to dive into a rabbit hole of our own unreliable narration.
or
I am ready to sail the warped waters of personal dream worlds.
Index card roadmap
Of course, making new games is the core of what we want to do with Sirly Whirly. But there’s more. I like index cards, so here’s a quick video that explains the things we would like to do next with Sirly Whirly through this humble rectangular medium. The next step would be to decide on a chronological order for these cards, but we’re still pondering on that. Soon…
Resources for your game (of Incarnis)
Watabou made a free web-based sigil generator. This web app is a great way to generate abstract symbols for your god, like the planet symbols we associate with the gods Venus, Mars and Mercury. Try it out! Below is a d3 d3 roll table I generated on the fly (open the app, richt click, select ‘3x3’ and ‘simple’, and set colours to whatever you like).
Lame Mage has a great post about Building Better Gods that applies directly to Incarnis. By default, a god in Incarnis starts with three domains: one intrinsic, one through a landmark, and one potential domain. Look at your domains and consider each a part of your god’s personality.
Issue #67 of the Indie RPG Newsletter has some great advise about questions as mechanics. I’ve already tried out ‘Paint the Picture’ with great effect, in which you lay out a scene’s theme, and ask the players to describe what their character sees that underpins this. It’s a neat little tool that can add some collaborative worldbuilding to any game.
This month I played: Blades in the Dark
A tabletop RPG about a crew of daring scoundrels building a criminal empire in a haunted city full of thieves.
As you can tell from Incarnis, I’m a big fan of episodic, narrative-driven games in which each session is a self-contained story. That way I always feels like I achieved something at the end. Blades in the Dark has distilled this to an art form.
One of the tenets of Blades is ‘act first, plan later’. Don’t take this the wrong way: your characters are scheming scoundrels that spend their hours planning their next score and scouting their next target. But the players just assume that this happened and cut straight to the action. Only when an obstacle is right in front of you, do you figure out if and how your scoundrel tried to prepare for it.
Think of Oceans Eleven, where you get a montage of how everything goes smoothly until it doesn’t. Where the characters hit what seems like a dead end, until you go to a flashback where the characters anticipated and prepared for exactly this occasion, and packed the right tools. Blades in the Dark plays exactly like that, with brilliant systems that make the ‘on the fly’ preparations feel like a fair and limited resource that can backfire as much as it can help you.
I’ll be playing more Blades in the following months. I'm curious; are you interested in a play report? Please do let me know :).
November was a big month for RPG launches. Here’s the loot we grabbed.
Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG 1st Edition Boxed Set
Everything you need to play Mothership in one horrifying box.
The Mothership ‘edition 0’ zine inspired me to make my own RPG zine. The layout of that beauty is worth the price alone, and the system is very light, intuitive and powered to create an isolated horror-survival experience. Now, this Alien inspired OSR game has a boxed set. I know I’ll be using this to draw my dad, a big sci-fi fan, into the world of table-top RPGs.
On Kickstarter until Thu, December 2 2021 3:00 PM CET.
CY-BORG
A nano-infested doomsday RPG about cybernetic misfits and punks raging against a relentless corporate hell.
I loved Mork Borg to bits; The OSR game with a “spike-flail to the face” attitude that did not take itself seriously at all, but featured a system that was super streamlined and purred like a kitten (segway, my wife and I adopted 2 kittens this weekend. Yay!). Can’t wait to dig into the cybernetically augmented follow-up.
On Kickstarter until Wed, December 1 2021 8:00 PM CET.
Index card RPG: Master Edition
Combines ICRPG's numerous worlds, streamlined D20 rules and critically acclaimed GM know-how all in one high quality hardback.
This game! The previous edition injected purified FUN into my D20 games. The GM section is a masterclass on creating fun sessions whatever system you’re using, and it is so quick-to-table that you can just wing it during play. Prep becomes something you only do because you want to. My last D&D 5e campaign should have had the subtitle “Powered by Index Card RPG”.
Pre-order, shipping this December.
Fluxfall Horizon
A fast and light RPG about players who jump from Earth to parallel Earth, each step closer to their destinies!
Fluxfall Horizon is the debut RPG of the fantastic Youtube RPG reviewer Dave Thaumavore. Given my own position, I can’t help but have a soft spot for debut RPGs. I also love Powered by the Apocalypse games, and I ALSO love gonzo jumps between worlds and genres. So yeah, backing this was a no-brainer.
On Kickstarter until Wed, December 1 2021 2:20 PM CET.
That’s it for our first issue. More to come!
Please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see more of. We’re really just exploring the possibilities here and would love to hear what interests you the most.
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