November 2022 - Details, Details

Hello, fasts and furiouses! It's the November newsletter, late again. This time it's because I caught COVID last week, so I took a lot of rest and watched a bunch of sitcoms and played Pokemon until I got better.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I've been playtesting the World Tendencies and decided to add more detail into the Factions, Academy and Training Mechs to provide a more solid grounding for players to build off when setting up the game. I managed to get a draft up for that, fleshing out details for each of the World Tendencies.

I continued the Fire Quartz Crown playtest with the additional details and I think they helped narrow down the focus onto some interesting areas, but I realized I can still do a better job at seeding or foregrounding ideas of how the various Factions might end up going to war in the Conflict Phase. I think it's a promising start, though.

As I had a decent update to the World Tendencies, I decided to update the demo PDF on the Spectres of Brocken itch.io page to include the new playtest content. I ended up using some stock art from Canva as feature images for each of the World Tendencies and I'm quite happy with how they turned out.

I've still got a bunch of writing for the game's main text to do in December, so I'll be focusing on that, but I'll still try to get some playtests in and update the World Tendencies.

In non-Spectres news, I've also been doing more posting on Cohost in November. I reposted the section on "Progress" from the last newsletter on Cohost, and I also posted a summary of my notes on "A Politics of Violence" which was a panel that I ended up doing at Big Bad Con with Pam Punzalan and Tan Shao Han. I think the panel was really cool and I'm quite happy with the discussions that came out of it.

In all the tumult of Twitter's changing landscape, I also decided to revisit a bunch of my old game design related posts and ended up re-working an old thread of mine into another Cohost post, on "Ghost Games". I've been really enjoying using Cohost as a space for more "effortposting", putting up some longer thoughts on games and game design in a manner more like a personal blog than the rapid fire pace of Twitter.

I slowed down on Cohost a bit since I got sick, but I am looking forward to getting back on there and putting down some longer thoughts. I'll probably continue re-visiting old Twitter threads there as well since it's nice to come back to those ideas with the benefit of hindsight and more virtual space to expand on them.

I'll keep the newsletter short this time (if for some reason you do want to read more of my thoughts on games and game design, check out the Cohost posts above!) since I really did not get up to that much more in terms of games stuff this month as I was grappling with jet lag from the San Francisco trip, anxiety over the Malaysian General Election, and then getting COVID.

I will end on a high note though to say that I finally managed to catch up and finish Andor and it fucking ruled. I can't believe how much that show catered to my tastes and I'm really stoked that we got so much great TV this year between Andor, Severance, The Bear and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury (fuck Martin, all my homies hate Martin). I really loved how Andor ended with an incredible 3 episode run, from One Way Out to Daughter of Ferrix to Rix Road, that showed the power of community and solidarity in difficult times and I want to hold on to that.

Remember-to-try regards,

Aaron