Showing posts with label itch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label itch. Show all posts

Friday, August 29, 2025

Housekeeping


So, as apparently happens every August now, I'm experiencing a little personal-life turmoil. Maybe it's my incipient middle-agedness—each time my birthday comes around now, some unconscious drive pushes me into one minor drama or another, raging against the dying of the light or whatever. Also, my country just keeps going more and more dangerously insane; that's not helping.

The upshot is that I've exiled myself, for a little while, from my home computer, most of the software I'm accustomed to using, the digital drawing tablet I recently got (with grand ambitions to flex my long-dormant art skills a little), my cats, and every bit of my usual routine. My plan to post twice a week, every week, to this blog went to pieces almost as soon as I implemented it. Maybe I'll get back to it in September…or maybe in October. We'll see.

What I have managed to stick with is most of the game jam stuff I committed to! I just put the last little touches (at least until I reread it tomorrow and catch a bunch of typos and have to make another round of edits) on my entry for Anne's second Summer LEGO RPG Jam, which I've posted on itch.io and which, if I do say so myself, turned out looking not half bad considering I cobbled it together in Google Docs, half on my work computer and half on my decrepit old MacBook.

Next up is finishing at least a rough draft of my adventure for the FIST Anniversary Jam, and then my voluminous ramblings for the Appendix N bandwagon, which are threatening to turn into a full-blown autobiography, and then the Build a Better World jam, and I've got some Cairn stuff I've been tinkering with that I want to lay out and post, etc. etc. I'm writing and doodling plenty the old-fashioned way, in notebooks and sketchbooks, and reading books I'll need to blog about it, and watching movies I'll need to blog about, and generally staying busy and generating a tremendous backlog of stuff to blog about whenever I do force myself into a proper routine. Which I'm looking forward to!

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Season of the Itch

"Arabs in a Cave by the Sea" by Mariano Fortuny Marsal

It's officially summer, and I hereby declare that summer 2025 is going to be the season of me actually committing to a bunch of game jams. I'm starting strong, hopefully, with a last-minute entry to JAM THIS ALBUM! Vol. 3, which is all about making TTRPG stuff inspired by music or music inspired by TTRPG stuff (folk music being the specific theme for this volume). Having scribbled a bunch of ideas in my trusty old GM notebook over the past couple weeks that sketched out some vague kind of content inspired by this longtime favorite of mine, performed by Savina Yannatou and Primavera en Salonico, I whipped them into a kinda sorta hopefully playable condition last night and this morning.

I swear I'll do the others in a more timely fashion. Most of them, anyway.

Next up is the Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam 2025 (I did actually do this one last year). After that, the classic TTRPG One-page Dungeon Contest Jam, the Summer LEGO RPG Jam (which I meant to do last year), the FIST Anniversary Jam, and the Build a Better World TTRPG Jam. There are a bunch of others that are tempting (a poetry-inspired jam!) but I'm just gonna commit to these five for now and we'll see how good I am at actually cranking finishing what I've started. Other than the OPD contest, I actually have my plans for all of these pretty well drawn up already.

Six jams in three months. Easy! One down already! 

Friday, June 21, 2024

Kicking Out the Jams

 

 

What do you do after you've been blogging about (mostly) TTRPG stuff for half a year or so? Start joining every game jam in sight! First up is the Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam 2024, which was a nice bite-sized way to dip my toes in.

The prompt was to create a one-shot science fiction adventure based on the theme of stellar phenomena, with a bunch of optional restrictions: keep the whole thing on (both sides of) a single page, make it text-only, make it system-agnostic, and introduce a secondary theme of unintended consequences or mystery. Text-only and system-agnostic were my inclinations anyway, and the one-sheet limitation proved to be enjoyably challenging. (And a little mystery? Why not!)

The result: Storm of the Century. Of course, I went with an oops-all-tables kind of approach, because I love tables, and thus it's not exactly an adventure; it's more like an adventure premise and a bunch of tools for fleshing it out. But it was fun to make, and hopefully it's fun to read too!

Bookpost #5