Local Woman Three Weeks Away from Having Survived This Year and It Didn't Kill Her
Terminal Out this Week, a Year in the Review, Looking Towards 2024, Dragonmeet
This is gonna by a Rat Tidal Wave sized newsletter as I ride the current to the end of the year. (I ran most of my Rat Wave jokes into the ground by month three of the newsletter but had this one in the back pocket).
I started this iteration of the newsletter back in January so this marks twelve successful monthly newsletters. I'm proud I've stuck to that and also I hope it's been interesting to see progress on various things or keep up to date on what I've been up to. This newsletter is gonna be half reflection on the year gone and half talking about my plans for the year ahead. Tidal Wave sized was no joke.
2023
5 Going on 6 Releases
I released five games this year with a sixth coming out digitally soon.
The Man We Knew - A noirish thriller for Orbital Blues
The Infinite Dancefloor - A game of nights gone bad and messy mistakes, set to music
The Ballad of the Bastard and the Tinkerer - An introductory adventure for Wild Duelist, a tale of sworn rivals who must keep each other safe
Thirty Foes OR Once again, we are defeated - A storytelling and map making game inspired by Seven Samurai, built a village and see what you’re willing to do to keep it safe
An Illustrator's Guide to the Dreamtlands - A solo journalling and sketching game created using the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky.
and of course Terminal, which will release digitally before the end of the month
So that's two adventures, three original games (one of which was a hack of Time to Drop, the other two being completely original). There's a range of different genres. I got more into writing stuff with more defined characters in places this year. I think I developed as both a designer and a layout artist this year. I'm satisfied with the things I've made and how I've grown from making them.
I'm most proud of everything I accomplished with Terminal. Of the smaller releases I think Thirty Foes is maybe my favourite.
This is Your Lifepath
I started an interview podcast, This is Your Lifepath, and released eight episodes I think are really interesting and insightful. The conversations I had making the show were really fulfilling
.
Next year I'm going to record and release a second season of This is Your Lifepath (maybe more, a year is a long time). If you have any recommendations for guests you'd like to see let me know.
I think at the time of finishing the first season I expected I'd work on the second sooner than I did. I think I wanted to get to a place of relative person stability before I started work again, as it's a lot of organisational effort and I like to do a lot of research as well as being in the right space for an interview. Still, no time like the present and I'm excited about the possibilities of a second season.
Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer/GenCon
I won an award this year! I was recognised by the Diana Jones Emerging Designer program. It was nice to feel seen, rather than feeling like I was making things completely in the dark. The resources offered as a prize have let me push myself as a designer, and the honorarium has been a life saver while facing some personal uncertainty in the later half of this year.
Part of the prize also involved getting to go to GenCon. That was the first time I’d been to America, and the second ever time I’ve left the UK as an adult. It was really nice getting to play games of Thirty Foes and Fear the Taste of Blood with people, it was lovely meeting people and making friends and overall I had a really great time out there; even though my bones exploded on the journey.
Terminal
I ran my first Kickstarter for my first game I made with an actual team! I’ve talked about Terminal so much in this newsletter I don’t know what else there is for me to say there. Oh yeah, it’s out this Thursday!
(Digital release of the core book this Thursday, to be clear. Then next month the stretch goals will be added in before we go to print.)
The Kickstarter went well, and was another things that's helped keep me afloat, as well as resulting in a game that I'm feels like one of the best things I've made.
Game Soup
I started a second podcast! There's been a months worth of new Game Soup episodes since we last spoke.
On the last episode we ended up going over the things I said I'd make at the start of the year and why some of them didn't happen. Also Chloe has innovated attack podcasting!
Dragonmeet
Dragonmeet was at the start of the month and was my first time tabling a stall as myself rather than working for someone else. I think it went decently and it was also a nice time getting to hang with friends, put some faces to names and chat about games.
People seemed excited about the first proper printing for To Embrace a Swamp Creature. Dreamtlands also sold pretty well, if you end up playing and sketching anything with the game please share what you came up with; it's always really pleasant to see.
2024
So that was my year as Rat Wave Game House. It was also a pretty big year when I think of just regular life stuff. I talked before on here about finishing a course of therapy, I moved house, I quit changing. I'm still looking for things to feel settled. I'm starting to feel at peace with the possibility they might always feel a little shakey.
What does the year ahead hold then?
Well firstly, as I mentioned upletter, Terminal will release digitally this Thursday. I’m getting edited stretch goals back to their writers to check over and hopefully next month we add those into the PDF and then go to print. Terminal as a release will kinda straddle the year. I think I’ll always think of 2023, in part at least, as the Terminal year. But 2024 is when people are actually getting their hands on it, getting it to the table and making a bunch of swashbuckling cyberpunk misfit action heroes ready to make their own future.
Other than fulfilment of Terminal, I have six games tentatively planned to release next year, in different states of development. They are (in an order that is not a release scheduled, to be clear):
PSYCHODUNGEON
Transgender Deathmatch Legend II: Grand Slam
Ritual Magic for Besties
The Test of Time
The Other Side of the Coin
Godslingers
PSYCHODUNGEON
I've talked about this game before. Here’s the hard sell:
Glyndain is a city in a world of mobile phones and magic spells, mass transit and malevolent demons, the supernatural intermingled with the everyday. It's a strange world but one all too familiar.
In Glyndain when peoples trauma hits a breaking point their troubles manifest physically as a psychodungeon full of monstrous nightmares. Plumbers are called in to clean out the dungeons and close them off. It’s difficult work. Dangerous. The kind that follows you home. Part adventurer, part handyman, part therapist. Still, it’s a living. You’ve got bills to pay and rent to make. It’s time to go down, down into the PSYCHODUNGEON.
PSYCHODUNGEON is a post-dungeon fantasy concerning a group of poor cityfolk acting as psychoplumbers. Within an individual delving job there are three asymmetric roles in the game; the Dungeon itself, the Client it's manifested from, and any number of Psychoplumbers who will delve down. The game uses a token-based system built on the Belonging outside Belonging framework, and suits 3-7 players. Players work together to shape the world, set the mood and tone, create trouble and look for solutions.
The current progress of PSYCHODUNGEON is that the first complete draft is finished. I've done some concept work on the interior artwork. I've commissioned a cover by the brilliant Jessica Kuczynski, whose work you can look at on her website https://jessicakuczynski.com/
Next steps involve getting the draft to the editor, working on some layout samples and figuring out the crowdfunding campaign for the game. It's looking to be a similar size as To Embrace a Swamp Creature, in A5 full colour. I'm considering, if the numbers are good, printing both softcover and hardcover editions with the crowdfunder. PSYCHODUNGEON is just a matter of timing and beginning to shout the game more.
I think a lot of my early Terminal hype was just talking about working in the game. With PSYCHODUNGEON mostly finished I can't rely on that, so I need to get used to making tweets hyping up something that isn't out yet, and doesn't have a set release date. People do this all the time, obviously, but it's not usually been how I use social media so there'll be a slight learning curve.
Transgender Deathmatch Legend II: Grand Slam
I've talked about working in Transgender Deathmatch Legend 2 here before. This is a title reveal. I'll also elaborate a bit more on the format for this sequel/new edition.
There's been some slight rules revisions that I think make fights more dynamic and exciting and also integrate non fight mechanics more into the fights more cleanly and tactically. A big revision includes the introduction of three new fighting styles, inspired by Running from Skeletons game Untapped Talents which was made for the Fight Card Jam last year.
The book then includes six new crawls. Crawls include taking in a faction of wrestlers with their own personal beefs who've trashed your flat, a Warriors inspired crawl, the-Raid-in-a-GIC, a crawl through designed to cover your most emotional rivalry, and more.
The books also includes some additional modes of play, new guidance for all players, some personal essays on my history with wrestling, wrestling history, and thoughts on art, as well as a table of 52 wrestling names so you can draw opponents from a deck of cards in a quick play Arcade Mode. Format wise I'm imagining a landscape A4 book with each crawl occupying a double page spread.
This is further off then PSYCHODUNGEON, though similarly the writing is mostly complete (pending some playtesting of a new mode and some rewriting). I want to work with an artist on this and need to make an approach soon.
Ritual Magic for Besties
I've not mentioned this game here before, though I did talk about in on the Game Soup episode "An Owner's Guide to Ectoplasmic Canines". Funnily enough, it's the game that'll likely come to you earliest in the year as I'm planning to release it for Zine Month 2024.
Ritual Magic for Besties is a tabletop roleplaying game for two-to-six players, using a deck of tarot cards. You play a group of magic users, in an urban fantasy setting, gathering together to cast a ritual spell.
Ritual magic relies on the connections between the gathered group, a de-facto coven. In play you build stacks of cards and establish details of your connections as well as how the in-progress ritual is developing.
Ritual Magic for Besties is played across six rounds, a round covering as many turns as there are players. The exact length of playing a ritual will vary depending on the player count.
Once all rounds have passed, or if all players find themselves unable to add to the ritual, then it's at an end. If the spell has been successfully nurtured then one player will take it upon themselves to cast it. If things have gone wrong the ritual may fail. Maybe bad luck or maybe lessons learned. Perhaps some of you were holding back.
The writing is also finished here, aside from planning to add a playlist based optional mode inspired by Phonogram, and I have an artist on board: the wonderfully talented Molomoot. We’re gonna sit down soon and discuss art directions.
The Test of Time
The Test of Time So Terminal was the biggest thing I've written. That also meant it was written differently. I was semi constantly working on it for a period of life three months for the first draft. Most other projects are written in much smaller periods, more sprints, or a series of sprints at least for more mid sized things, than long distance, y'know? I've not exactly decided where my sweet spot is book size wise, at least from a writing side, though I enjoyed having something to tinker on longer term.
So after I finished the first draft of PSYCHODUNGEON I tried to start on something else that scratched that itch and that lead to the Test of Time. Here's the current opening for the game:
Time travel was invented in the 19th Century at least three times. It was invented in the 20th Century more than a handful of times and has been invented in the 21st Century at least once. It has been uninvented on each and every occasion.
Time travellers bereft of their origin find themselves in the Other Place. An extrachronological limbo. A domain outside of history governed by the Time Barons.
People who fall out of the world live in the Other Place. There are many ways to fall out of the world. Sleep. Injuries. Looking for something you weren't supposed to find.
The Time Barons can send you home but they're not in the business of offering something for nothing. The timeline needs preserving. Time Meddlers. Anachronisms. Slips from the way things went. The Barons need these dealt with. Do enough temporal missions and earn a ticket back to your life, or whatever else you left behind.
I've got some core mechanics worked out. It's a sort-of-not-exactly PBTA style, influenced by both Invincible Sword Princess and Patchwork World 6E. Play wise I imagine a series of adventures across time, like a season of Doctor Who essentially. Next steps here are writing more of the setting, figuring out what adventures could look like and what I want to include, and then Drawing the Rest of the Owl.
This is the least solid project. There's a lot of writing done bits there's a lot more to go. There's a chance trying to crack the setting or the adventures could fizzle out. Least likely of the things I'm talking about here to see a full release next year but if I get my teeth sunk in I imagine I'll be talking about it a lot more.
The Other Side of the Coin
The rules of Game Soup are simple: we mash words together, we try not to cross talk, we don't open a Google doc. I'm breaking one of those rules.
Ok so on Episode 8 of Game Soup we smashed together "shadow" and "cyborg" and pitched a game about being someone's Shadow the Hedgehog. We settled on something built around pre-written characters who you create specific rivals to as well as some discussion of structure and fuzzy mechanics. We named it Shadow: The Other Side of the Coin. The idea stuck in my head enough that I started actually putting it together.
I'm currently just calling it the Other Side of the Coin, though that feels subject to change. I've been working out the mechanics and starting on various playsets of pre-written heroes (currently I have rough ideas around a Power Rangers type Toku hero, a space knight, a Mecha diving into meteor strike splash zones and some other much looser things).
Here’s an extract focusing on the core mechanics of the game:
In play the Other Side of the Coin is broken down into Chapters of this epic rivalary. The build up of an individual Chapter involves the Rival building their strength in various Scenes ahead of a Showdown that serves as the closer of a Chapter.
The focus is on the Rival. The Hero only appears in Showdowns, but their presence looms large throughout the rest of the game.
In each Scene the Rival will build a dice pool to roll for their attempt to build strength. Success means gaining dice for their Showdown pool.
In a Showdown the Rival rolls their pool of dice they have gathered in build Scenes. The Hero rolls an opposing pool of dice. The Rival and the Hero both assign all their dice to different actions and reactions to resolve the Showdown, bringing the Chapter to a close.
The obvious subject to change thing here is for sure the amount of proper nouns, striking a balance in clearly delineating different phases but not going so far the game requires constant glossary checking. But yeah mechanically it#’s borrowing a little from Inevitable/Terminal but placed into a more montage structured style of play, as well as then borrowing from other things (Vis a Visage for one).
I'm playing around with writing here, juggling between this and Test of Time, with the immediate aim of figuring out the scope of this. Is this something smaller and self contained that I do as a digital release then maybe a short print run for cons? Or will this be closer to a mid-sized game when fully finished, justifying a different kind of approach?
Godslingers
Hey here's an extract from the first newsletter back in January:
On the horrizon I have three games I need to playtest before I can continue with them. A satanic sports ttrpg called Demon Cage Fireball. Jukebox Tarot, a game about telling stories inspired by musical theater using the music you love. And two games in the world of Old Gods and Young Guns; Godslingers, a GMed-ish
game focusing on grappling with difficult to control divine power, and Thirty Foes, a mechanically funky storytelling game inspired by Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.
Now the first obvious thing is that I didn't know how to count because that's four games. The second is that only one actually ended up coming out. There was a couple of different reasons around DCF and Jukebox Tarot (I fizzled out on the wider book for DCF and I saw a similar game to Jukebox Tarot going to KS so I decided to back burner it).
Godslingers fate is an odd one. I playtested it, it's basically all written outside of some examples of play, but I stalled on it trying to figure out the shape of a release and then was distracted by things I had a more solid idea on.
People's interest in the Old Gods and Young Guns setting got me thinking about Godslingers again and it's something I want to finish (also cause I'd like to bundle it with OG&YG and Thirty Foes at cons).
I'm not sure on timing here. The big finishing touches are finishing off Examples of Play and figuring out layout. The thing I like about the Thirty Foes layout is that it's in conversation with the style of Old Gods and Young Guns without just being a replication. I'd want something similar out of a layout for Godslingers but I'm not sure what that'd look like.
Six for Six
So six whole game ideas, in various states. If I release all of those that's many games as I did this year many of which are bigger. I'm not sure how likely that is. I see three as sure bets. The others are a question of how development goes and new ideas may end up replacing them.
What else if on the docket?
Kayla Dice, Begruding Podcaster
I mentioned up letter but This is Your Lifepath will return in 2024. I'm imagining a second season being between 8-12 episodes long, depending on the guests I find. Game Soup will continue because that's been fun to make. Though Chloe got a job so maybe our recording schedule changes, who knows? Hey Chloe you’re a subscriber are we still on for Wednesday?
Conventions
Kayla Dice will return...to the con floor on 2024. I'll be working Gexpo again hopefully and tabling Dragonmeet. Almost definitely not going to GenCon or other international cons this year, bar strange miracles.
If you're UK based and you know of any smaller cons near you lemme know so I can build my hitlist.
I've also been talking to friends a lot about trying to table at Zine Fairs and Markets around London which is hopefully something I actually get rolling in earnest next year.
How do you measure a year?
I have lots of ideas for what I want the year to look like and a lot to be discovered. Back in January I wouldn't have predicted this year just gone. I expect I currently can not predict the year ahead, though I think I'm more at peace with that.
I expect next months newsletter will be smaller, it won't include an entire year in review after all. I'll have more news on Terminal's physical fulfilment. I'll probably talk more about Ritual Magic for Besties. Maybe I'll have other project or general life updates.
I'll leave you with some playlists I've made for some of the projects I've talked about:
See you next year!