A Game Deserving of Its Cool Name

Transgender Deathmatch Legend II, This is Your Lifepath season finale and live show, Norwich Games Con, one shot games

Welcome back to the Rat Wave Newsletter! I continue to not stop never stopping and have a tasty buffet of things to talk about this month!

Transgender Deathmatch Legend II

The trailer for Transgender Deathmatch Legend II was released this month and the BackerKit teaser page is up and running. If you're interested in the game (and I do think you should be) then following the launch page and backing on day 1 would be super helpful for me.

Transgender Deathmatch Legend II is a game I'm already very proud of. Tighter revised rules that easily facilitate intuitively tactical combat. New modes of play that facilitated different player counts and styles of play. A set of personal essays covering my feelings on wrestling as an idea and mining personal experience for art. Six new hyper violent hexcrawls ranging from a real old school wrestling feud in beat-em-up, to cathartic close to bone scenarios, to a crawl through time tracking your relationship with your greatest rival.

It's come together properly as a project now (the text has been finished for a while). I'm planning a photoshoot with a friend to create the games art, I'm working on what stretch goals for the game are going to look like. Let's get ready to bleed.

This is Your Lifepath

This is Your Lifepath finished it's second season run at the start of this month. I think the ten episodes I produced this year delivered some really insightful interviews with creators I appreciate.

I cover some future plans for the podcast at the top of the finale (the interview with Biscuit Fund Games). Essentially I'll be taking a break again but will work on some one off episodes to keep in the swing of things.

One of those one off episodes will actually be a live special! At Norwich Games Con I'll be interviewing Leo Hunt, creator of Vaults of Vaarn, live on stage. Come check it out if you're there but for everyone else it will come through to your podcast feeds sometime after.

Norwich Games Con

Speaking of Norwich that's the end of this month. As well as the live This is Your Lifepath I'll be GMing an actual play of World Wide Wrestling in the evening and tabling throughout the day with 12 Pins Press.

Still finalizing what stock I'll be bringing look out for Terminal, To Embrace a Swamp Creature, the brand new Out of the Fold (first time print run) and much more.

Game Soup and Design Musings

The latest episode of Game Soup (my other podcast, a improv game design show I co-host with Chloe Montgomery of Biscuit Fund Games and that I probably don't talk about enough in this newsletter) is a live recording from Newcastle where I work out the start of a game I'm planning to make. I talk about it more in the episode itself but basically it's a light-hearted adventure game one shot in the vein of Gremlins and Jumanji.

I also talk a bit in the episode about my thinking when it comes to one shot games. Namely how I approach them differently due to more often being played with relative strangers. There's a greater reliance on steps and structure because in that context that's what I find helpful. Whereas in longer multi-session games, where I'm playing with people I already know well usually, that stuff is less important to me and so I approach designing those games differently.

I also talk a bit about how I think my present context of what I'm playing can influence my design. I'm currently playing much more one shot games because I've volunteer running games with a queer social at Badger Badger (a board game cafe near me). Conversely it's also been a while since I've been in a proper campaign (though I am spinning up a Terminal campaign shortly). I can feel that affecting my design, mainly in that I'm more drawn to designing games I know that I myself will get to the table, but also I feel better/more knowledgeable as a designer when I'm drawing from recent experiences of how I play.

Anyway, I thought those musing might be interesting to newsletter fans, and if I was right you can find Game Soup wherever you get your podcasts.

Next Month

I'll have reports on how Norwich Games Con and Tabletop Scotland have gone, likely news on the PSYCHODUNGEON release (just dropped a KS update today), and more previews of Transgender Deathmatch Legend II.

Until then!