March 2024 - Full Spectrum

Hello hello,

February and March ended up being pretty busy months!

Spectres of Brocken

The big accomplishment for the period was finally getting all the Spectres of Brocken books safely to the USA and UK and now onwards to backers. I'm still dealing with claiming compensation for the damaged books though, and that's like pulling teeth.

The other big thing I got up to was finally releasing Full Spectrum, which is a digital supplement for Spectres of Brocken that I've been working on for a while now. I worked with seven other incredible writers to create seven new World Tendencies (playsets) for Spectres of Brocken and I'm really proud of what we've put together.

The new World Tendencies expand the world of Spectres of Brocken to include giant cooking Stations, agrimechs modified with insectoid parts, transforming jets, solar sailers, art deco and noir-inspired Jackets, resurrected skeletons of ancient beasts enhanced with alchemical metals, and even the spirits of cities formed from the collective unconscious of their inhabitants.

You can get it on itch.io here, and I've extended the launch sale for another week so you can still get it and the base game of Spectres of Brocken for about 15% off.

Triple Play

I've also been continuing on updates and playtesting to the Triple Play projects.

I worked on new starting Missions for BLADEbreaker and did a short playtest to figure out Carrier creation and getting into an Engagement Roll for a mission. I haven't done much more in terms of playtesting, but I'll get into some of the reasons for that after talking about SPEEDMECH.

I also did a couple of really fun playtests of SPEEDMECH, and put together some PDF game sheets to playtest the game in person (you can download the sheets from SPEEDMECH's itch page). This also included an update to cut down the number of starting Planned Actions available to each Frame and hopefully simplify the early game.

The in-person playtest went pretty well, but it did highlight the need for a more elegant solution for managing initiative order when played in-person.

The approach I used for the in-person playtest was to have strips of paper where we wrote down our actions and initiative numbers, and then arrange those on the table. However, this does take up a bunch of time and space, so I wonder if there's a better way like having pre-set dry-erase tiles. I'll continue to figure this part of it out, as I would like to do more in-person playtesting.

One of the things I've decided I'd like to try is to place BLADEbreaker and SPEEDMECH in the same shared setting. I'm still working through that at the moment, and there are some challenges since both games treat mechs differently and I want to make sure the shared setting can accommodate that. I think it'll be really fun, and providing two different perspectives on the same setting is very creatively exciting to me, but I also understand the challenges and ultimately I'd be ready to pull the plug on this experiment if I realise that the games would benefit from having different settings.

However, for now it's very fun for me to work through that, and it's going to be very important for BLADEbreaker especially, because one of the things I really want to have from the get-go is a strong sense of the interplay of factions and competing priorities in a resistance movement, so this setting work will be crucial.

I haven't been able to playtest Get In The Dungeon, Losers! this time, but I did do a second pass on the resolution mechanics which I'm pretty excited to try out.

In Other News

Just last weekend I was part of a panel for Big Bad Online called "You Made A Game: Now What?", about figuring out next steps after making a game. There's so much more we could have talked about, but alas, we only had just under an hour to cover the topic. It was still a really fun and informative panel and conversation, so do check it out and all the other cool panels from Big Bad Online. I'm still making my way through the ones I missed, but I can definitely recommend a few that I managed to catch:

• Why Do Monsters Have Stat Blocks, Anyway? Designing Beyond Colonialism
• Some SEAsian Perspectives: Working with Culture and Heritage in Game Design
• To Tome or Not to Tome? Finding the Right Format for Your RPG

The main reason I missed a bunch of Big Bad Online panels is that I went to join my first ever LARP, a combat LARP put on by the fine folks from MyLARP. While I have always been curious about LARP, especially parlour LARPs and how they intersect with storygame design, the main reason for joining the LARP was to actually meet one of the organisers. I had learned that he's also named Aaron Lim, and while I had moved back from Melbourne to Malaysia, he's in the process of moving from Malaysia to Melbourne, and well, he's also a game designer! So we had a fun time meeting up this past weekend and getting to know each other and our different sections of the RPG hobby.

Finally, another thing that I worked on last year got released this week. I had a fun time contributing locations for one of the stretch goal islands for Deathmatch Island, and that just released to backers this week! The one little tidbit I loved about the locations that I contributed (for Junk Island) is that I managed to sneak in a small reference to Undead Unluck, a manga that has no right being as fun and good as it is after a pretty uncertain start. If you've checked it out and were put off by the early chapters, I hope you trust me and push through because it goes to some really weird and fun places.

I think that's it for now. Looking back at it now, I did get quite a bit done in the past couple of months haha. Until next time!

Colourful regards,

Aaron