[NEWSLETTER] Looking Back on 2023
a year of getting my shit together
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Signed up for it
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Let me start by saying that beginning this year with attempting four different x23 projects was probably not the smartest idea. I can’t tell you how many people warned me about burnout at the beginning, telling me to slow down and just focus on one aspect of the project.
I, being a humble and reasonable person, of course, believed that I was god’s gift to tabletop and I’d prove them all wrong.
Last post for any of them was January 24.
So… y’know… nailing it.
I don’t really know why I do these sorts of things to myself. Call it wishful thinking, biting off more than you can chew, whatever. I’m always erring on the side of way too fucking much. I get inspired way too easily by the insane glut of content we have nowadays and, rather than just enjoying it like a normal person, I’m busy telling Mummy that I could do that painting too. Mummy being myself.
As an aside, in this newest iteration of the Newsletter™ you’re going to get a lot more unfiltered thoughts from me.
Don’t worry, I’m not some lunatic with batshit nazi nonsense (despite Substack’s recent news), I just tend to swear more in my casual conversation. Since I want to actually write this and keep up with it, I’m removing as many barriers as I can to actually doing the damn thing - that means keeping my language as natural to me as possible.
Ergo fuck it, we ball.
Unsurprisingly then, 2023 was a very quiet year for GRP. I found myself working on a lot of little things, getting sidetracked, starting new little things, getting distracted, and on and on and on it goes. So, basically, I’m at a point where I have a million little projects that are in various states of progress that I should probably execute on.
That’s the reality though, isn’t it? Being a designer is constantly fiddling with shit that doesn’t need fiddling with. Never being happy with a final product. Constantly reinventing the wheel so you can be the smartest boy, even if it never actually sees the light of day. At least you know you did it—and that counts for something, right?
Alright, enough deprecation, let’s do a quick headcount and see where we’re at.
Projects In-Progress
Pocket Encounters. As you may or may not be aware, I’m working on a memo pad filled with 100 encounters. Each encounter has a table and an illustration. Or at least, that was the plan. Here’s what’s changed prior to launch:
Around 50 of the encounters now pair up to form a mini-adventure, complete with hooks and consequences and a little more depth.
The encounters are sorted by theme: Tranquil, Conflict, Mystery, Discovery, and Omen.
Better indexing for the keywords and some other formatting changes for easier use / readability.
Release Date: Not entirely sure, but I’d like to do it sometime in 2024.
Whispers of the Green Tower. This is a one-shot adventure for DND 5E and other fantasy adventure games I started writing basically on a whim. After running a lot of games this summer for folks from adventures I felt were poorly optimized to supply session-to-session fun, I wanted to make something I felt was pretty strong no matter where you took it.
The strategy for writing this adventure was to treat each “encounter” as a toolbox the GM could use to pivot the adventure based on pacing. Obviously this is a skill GMs need to refine to run good games (lackluster pacing is the death of a game), but what if the adventure gave you some options not just for the region or overland, but for all the potential encounters?
I’m working on the last part of this adventure, where the party delves below the tower and finds the entire place is controlled by an elven cult that are trying (and failing) to control an ancient magic artifact while battling the fact their leader is slowly going blood-mad from recently becoming a vampire. Fun stuff.
Release Date: Should be on dmsguild sometime in early 2024, probably for free.
Dungeoneering: Catalysts. The third (and likely final) supplement to the quick and dirty Dungeoneering line before I revisit the rules and clean up some stuff. Adding six more roles, a bunch of magic items, new spells, etc.
This will be my first time using BackerKit for crowdfunding compared to Kickstarter so I’m eager to see how that plays out. Speaking of campaigns, this one will also include an adventure (similar to how 2022’s Dungeoneering: Wanderers had The Nine Tombs of Athal-Kar).
The adventure is called “The Starlit Spire” and will be set in my Barren Lands setting (where NToAK takes place), but you can strip all that out to have just a fun dungeon.
Release Date: February 2024 is when the campaign will go live and I intend on having the PDF finalized by campaign’s end. Physical copies will start shipping shortly thereafter.
Other Stuff That I’m Working On
Ädamίr. Where do I even start with this?
What started as an original RPG system is now starting to feel like maybe… not? Maybe just a campaign setting? The idea was pretty cool for me at the time, inspired by Tékumel, Pendragon, Forbidden Lands, Elden Ring, etc. I wanted to go deep in the worldbuilding and create a sprawling history and sense of scale and livability. I wanted the player characters to be basically just some stats, a background, and some narrative story hook stuff—things so universal the NPCs would have them as well (the reasoning being if a PC died or retired, a player could literally just ask the GM for an NPC in the world and play them).
Easier said than done, obviously. But it’s cool and it still inspires me, so I’m gonna keep chipping away at it when I don’t want to work on other stuff.
Release Date: Who knows?
Through Shadow & Stone (TSNS). Here’s a weird one. I was listening to Into the Megadungeon, which is a wonderful podcast you definitely should be listening to, and got to the episode with Josh McCrowell where they started talking about his upcoming game “His Majesty the Worm” and how it deals with tarot cards as a mechanical randomizer in lieu of dice.
That got me thinking about cards in general, specifically a playing card deck. Playing cards are actually pretty dense “information vehicles” in that they have four main pieces of information you can read from them:
Color (Red or Black)
Suite (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades)
Number (A-10)
Face (Jack, Queen, King)
I started to wonder if you could have a fantasy adventure game and campaign with deckbuilding as a sort of inventory management, all using just a simple playing card deck, where:
52-card deck, 4 Suits, 13 cards per suit
Classes:
Warrior (Clubs)
Thief (Spades)
Mage (Diamonds)
Healer (Hearts)
2-10, J, Q, K serves as deck (12 card deck)
Each card represents different ability based on the class (fighters have more attack cards, wizards have more spells, etc)
The Ace is a special power that the class can do (Mighty Deed for Fighter, Invoke Deity for Cleric, etc)
Leveling up grants deck manipulation abilities (Scrying, Draw Cards, Trash Cards, etc)
I’m a real sucker for this kind of shit, making games using things you already have around the house. Or at least if you go to someone’s house, odds are they’ll have them. This is why Dungeoneering uses d6s and no other dice. There’s something really fascinating to me about these sort of “minimalist” games, if that’s the right word to use.
Also, I love that the suites actually sort of match the classes in terms of theme.
I don’t know if I’ll finish this one out but I’m having fun exploring the potential mechanics for it.
Release Date: Seeing as this is barely a functioning idea, nowhere near soon.
Mothership Module. Got my name scooped, but that’s the least of this module’s problems. I really enjoyed the idea of mech support in the Mothership system as a lot of games, but designing mech piloting feels:
Kind of like the opposite of what you want to be doing in Mothership from a Warden’s perspective, unless you make it psychologically terrifying or dangerous.
Like a super complicated thing a lot of ttRPGs get wrong.
So, we continue plugging away at it. Thankfully, part of my work in the time where I was working on dungeon23 went towards this, so I won’t be starting over from scratch. There’s some meat still left on those bones.
Release Date: Quite possibly never. Optimistically, 2025… ?
That’s really all I feel confident sharing right now moving into 2024. General goals for the New Year is to, essentially, get my shit together and start putting out projects. At some point I have to get these out of my head and into your hands or I’ll go nuts.
As for the newsletter, one thing I’ve always personally struggled with is keeping up with writing in a way that feels consistent and rewarding. Writing is hard, obviously, but I can write for my regular campaigns or my projects with very little issue. I think sitting and writing in a newsletter makes me feel like I need to be supplying you with actionable or useful content (in other words, always be selling) but that’s just not useful or conducive to inspiring me to write.
I think, for now, this is going to just be my thoughts on a weekly basis. Sometimes I might update about a project, other times I’ll just be kind of rambling about what I’m working on. Sometimes I might miss a week entirely. Or two. I want to give myself the leeway to fail sometimes so I don’t get in the position I keep finding myself in—biting off more than I can chew.
At the very least, I’d like to maybe try to not keep choking on all of it.
- Nate