Rewinds and Periods of Transition
Plural Witchcraft Highland Rampage, Fight Card System Kit, Godslingers and another sneak peak
Dare thoust surf the Rat Wave this month? In theory this will be a shorter letter as I didn’t have a full release this month, but perhaps that just means I have free reign to fill this with strange meanderings. Read on so we can find out together?
Plural Witchcraft Highland Rampage, remastered
This month I remastered and re-released another older game of mine; Plural Witchcraft Highland Rampage is back!
PWHR is a rules-lite action game, based on Kazumi Chin's Invicible Sword Princess.
You play a group witches sharing one body. Someones you care about have been taken, by a clan answering to the self declared Crown of the Lowlands, an anti-magic will-be despot.
Using your shared skills, individual talents and powerful magic you'll cut a path to rescue what you love.
This follows on from the similair remaster to Follow Me in the Night, with the exception that PWHR had actually been taken off Itch by me before this remaster. While the Follow Me in the Night remaster was 99.9 percent the same original text there was some more notable restructuring of the game text for greater clarity throughout. Also different to Follow Me in the Night the remaster for PWHR uses much of the same original visual elements but with a presentation that I think is much more aesthetically pleasing and mood setting.
PWHR was the fourth (?) game I ever made and the last thing I laid out in word before I got Affinity. It feels like it comes from a very different place in my life, which is odd to look back on, but having got to know the game again during the process of this remaster I feel very comfortable saying it’s a good game that’s worth your time.
Itch: https://ratwavegamehouse.itch.io/plural-witchcraft-highland-rampage
(This might go up on the Lulu store at some point if I remember to upload that so you know, keep your eyes)
The Fight Card System
I've done an update to the text of the Fight Card System Design Kit. This is the kit for making games using trick-taking combat similar to Transgender Deathmatch Legend, Forecaster: The Body You Share and BLOOD//RUSH.
The update integrates some of the variations to the system I did for Forecaster.
It also includes the permissive license for making supplements for Transgender Deathmatch Legend.
Free on Itch: https://ratwavegamehouse.itch.io/the-fight-card-system
Playtesting: Godslingers
I hate the idea of playtesting, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. At least I thought I did, I recently started some playtesting for Godslingers and have found it enjoyable. Godslingers is a game complimenting the setting of Old Gods and Young Guns, focusing on cosmic cowboys holding on to dangerous supernatural power that threatens to consume them.
Our first session focused on creating the dead gods and the cowboys who now hold their power. I think we created a very exciting pantheon whose tales were interwoven in fun and dynamic ways. Then they were all dead.
Our second session was playing out an introductory adventure I had an early draft of, A Bullet for a Dragon. Our posse of Stormchasers, challengers of the fantastic and unknown, ventured to Agathos where a the local corp had riled up the planets famous dragon to try and drive townsfolk away.
They faced off with a dangerous mercenary corp then gave chase to try and track down the corpo orbital station. Intercepted by the dragon Jane the Preacher unleashed the power of the Solicitor of Faust and wrenched the dragon’s soul from it’s now lifeless body. Once they reached the corps Orbital Locomotive Jane unleashed the dragon’s soul from her gun and destroyed the entire ship in one burst.
On land the posse found the dragons soul had found it’s way into the feckless and corrupt sheriff of Ship Valley. Stratus, wielding the power Cirrus the Storm-Shawled, pulled the soul from Sheriff Hollow’s body. The dispersed soul created a rain on Agathos that will never end.
The rain pours down as the posse returns to their flying saucer and leaves Agathos behind.
I think the game seems to be working mostly as I hoped. It’s light while pushing towards dangerous endings. The thing I’m interested in now is how well the gradual consumption of the main cast works, but we’ll see about that in the future.
Other Playtesting
I’m hoping to playtest Thirty Foes, a storytelling game inspired by Seven Samurai and the Magnificent Seven, soon. It uses coins and cards to detail a village on the brink of a dangerous attack, and questions what your cast of characters would sacrifice to preserve it. If that happens I’ll likely include a report here.
Podcast
I’ve been recording two new episodes which will hopefully make their way to your earwaves soon. An interview with Marx Shepherd, and an interview with Tanya Floaker (which I need to pick up some last questions for as we went long on the initial recording).
After that I’ll take a minor-break (more planned than this accidental break) and work on the second series of This is Your Lifepath, which I’m envisioning as twelve weekly episodes. It’s possible schedules get tossed around though as I like to accommodate Kickstarters and such.
Work in Progress: Terminal
The big project I’ve ended up working on a lot this past month is a game tentatively titled Terminal (that alliteration was accidental but I ain’t editing it). It’s a Matrix inspired game of digital pirates fighting the robot authority inside and outside of a simulation that much of humanity are kept under.
It’s a hack of Inevitable, the Doomed Arthurian Western by friend-of-the-pod (and also y’know, friend of mine) Jelly Muppet. Inevitable is currently kickstarting and I got to spend some of the last year playtesting it. It was great, some of the most dramatic character work I’ve got to see in an RPG campaign, and I highly recommend giving it a pledge. Here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soulmuppet/inevitable-rpg
Terminal writing has mostly focused on the key characters and locations so far, but I’ve almost finished up character creation and will then begin working the big quests and dooms.
Periods of Transition
I’m finishing up a significant run of therapy soon. Talking to my therapist in my penultimate session we discussed how I felt like I was currently in a period of transition. Which is fine, that’s implicitly a period of discovery and there’s joy in that. But I did say I felt tired of spending most of my life in periods of transition.
As this applies to games I think it’s getting time for me to figure out what is it I do, beyond just vibing on high-effort whims. Maybe by next months I’ll have some more exciting things to point to. Or maybe not. That’s the joy of discovery right?
It’s lightly raining here, and my coffee curdled, and this will all be ok
See you next month