July 2022 - Game Mecha's Toolkit

Hello, wings and dings!

It's been a busy month for me with work and also prepping for the Kickstarter for Spectres of Brocken.

Spectres of Brocken

Oh, you didn't know about the upcoming Kickstarter for Spectres of Brocken, a tabletop storygame about making friends and then years later going to war against them in giant mechs? Well, you can find the pre-launch page for it on Kickstarter here and also get a preview of the rules here and a look at the playtest character keeper here ;)

I was initially planning to launch the campaign in mid-August, but then I remembered Zine Quest 4 is happening then so I've delayed the launch until September (tentatively 13 September 2022!) which gives me some more time to get some art ready (check out the new WIP piece I've gotten from Alex Connolly below!), update the preview PDF, work on the campaign page and do some actual plays so you can see what the game is like in action.

I also managed to get a playtest in with the new sub-prompts that I talked about in the last newsletter. The playtest went well, and even though we didn't end up using any of the sub-prompts directly, I think they helped give the players a framework of the sorts of things they could do with the moves and that's pretty much what I wanted it to do. A piece of a game doesn't need to actually be used to have an impact on how you play the game. Its existence is gravity enough.

BLADEbreaker

The other thing I've been working on even while I'm mainly focused on Spectres of Brocken is updating playbooks for BLADEbreaker. I've finally gotten to update all nine starting playbooks to match up with the style of the five or so that I've been playtesting at Playtest Zero events, mainly to give them some more variety in how they use their Special Resources. I've also updated each playbook with an additional special ability option to build out the design space for them.

The new special abilities focus more on the concept of exposing a BLADE's Weak Point, giving new ways to either make that happen or capitalize on it. Because of the difference in scale, whenever you try to deal with a BLADE directly your default position and effect will be Deadly and None. You can certainly improve that with Gear or having Aid from allies, but a key way to even the playing field is to expose a BLADE's Weak Point, opening up the scale of position and effect to the players.

Other things I wanted to do with the new special abilities are open up space for non-combat abilities, and find more ways to work in Gear descriptors and Special Resources.

I also still really need to work out the strategy layer and Downtime phase of the game. I've made a start, as you can see in the previous update, but there's still a fair bit to fill in like the Faction and Region maps and how they would tie in to the Downtime actions. Once I work these out, I'll also want to do a pass to add Special Abilities that affect those areas of the game.

So yeah, that's been what I've been working on this month, game design-wise. I've also done a bunch of playtesting with the Playtest Zero crew and I'm really happy that we've been going strong with the second timeslot that's geared towards US Pacific time zones. I've also been playtesting a couple of adventures from Reach of the Roach God with people on the Discord server which has been super enjoyable. Since my regular RPG group is knee-deep in Beam Saber, it's been nice to go back to doing some good old fantasy adventuring with that.

Until next time then, I hope your friends don't end up becoming bitter rivals that you have to fight against in giant robots.

Mechanical regards,

Aaron