Stuff I've Written

Eagle-eyed readers might notice a new page on this blog: My Work. 

I have, at times, fancied myself a bit of a games designer and took a crack at putting out some stuff. 

Regarding my Black Hack content: I am slightly ashamed to say none of that stuff was every play tested in any comprehensive way. I wrote a lot of it while disassociating through grad school. Always assumed that someone who downloaded it would've provided some level of feedback but...that never happened. Sadly I was never one of the cool kids on G+ who got that kind of attention.

The Hero Hack is absolutely my heartbreaker. I've never been super satisfied with most published superhero ttrpgs. There shouldn't be crunch! Building a character shouldn't be like doing taxes! It should be fast and fun and able to get you playing a Saturday morning cartoon or 70s era DC Comic style adventure as quickly as possible. 

I dunno that I really succeeded with this. 

There's definitely one or two good bones, but the layout is absolutely a mess. I don't even think I knew what InDesign was when I made this, it was all scrambled together in Word. The karma metw currency doesn't really work - now I would want to go with something that empowered a GM to add complications to a characters life.

I will say that once at a bar a friend introduced me to someone who was actually playing in a Hero Hack campaign as a Batman style anti-car vigilante (his parents died in a car accident.) This is probably the most memorable thing that's ever happened to me in a bar.

A part of me really believes there are other people out there who've played this game. There have to be. I've received so many Google Drive requests for the file over the years, somebody somewhere must've run a game or two. I would love to hear about them.

Anyway, I always tell myself I'll come back to this at some point. I'd like to really boil the game down, improve how it looks, add Iron Man style characters, etc. Will that ever happen? 🤷🏿‍♂️

ESP & Eyeliner was a neat little idea. Why not turn Stranger Things into an OSR game? Stuff like Kids on Bikes is cool, but at its heart ST was never really about kids solving a mystery - it was about hapless townies attempting to survive a conspiracy. I think this game provides a good framework for creating that kind of adventure.

Again, it's another project I've debated revisiting. I think with some art and a pre-written adventure or two, this could cook. I would also probably need to distance it Stranger Things given the way that show completely shat the bed. I've debated completely shifting the timeline up, given that I have zero 80s nostalgia. Psychic conspiracy nonsense in the early aughts could be fun. 

Skyskimmer feels like the most coherent & complete package out of all my Black Hack efforts. Is it a perfect OSR take on Spelljammer? Of course not, but it did what I wanted at the table. 

I think this project has the clearest path to an update. I would like to do art for all the player races and have a more compiled enemy bestiary.

Besides art, the biggesr change I would make is revamping ship creation and fleshing out combat. I think I would just wholesale rip off The Mecha Hack. Also I think I would just call all starships sky skimmers. Maybe Star skimmers? There's wiggle room there. 

About my 5th Edition Material: 

WILD HUNT: WATERDEEP was an adventure I wrote while participating in the RPG Writer's Workshop. It is essentially The Running Man as an urban crawl in the Forgotten Realms. 

While the urban crawl procedure (and maps, maps are always my bane) could use some work, I think I was really cooking with this. There are a lot of fun monsters and encounters - every time I've run it we've had an absolute blast. 

The only big thing I would change about this adventure is that it is just a bizarre fit for 5e. It really needs a system where fights can be faster and more brutal. Players should absolutely have multiple characters and lose them in this crawl.

EXCAVATION OF GLITTERHOLD GALLERY is the last adventure I produced for 5th edition. It is essentially an inverted tower crawl, with the players descending deeper instead of going up. 

Pretty much every lesson I learned about adventure design from my previous efforts went into this one. I'm pretty proud of it but would change quite a bit looking back at it. I keep toying around with doing a version for Cairn or Shadowdark or WYRM but I think that's just me hoping this adventure finds the audience it never did more than really needing a complete conversion to be playable in other systems. 

What, if anything, is next for me:

I was working on a pixel art, Zelda inspired adventure for the WYRM JAM. My participation got a bit detailed when my wife started having contractions. The map and rooms are done for the adventure, I really would just need to plop it all together and give it a play test before putting it out into the world.

I also have a pair of pamplet adventures I'd like to publish for Stay Frosty and GENERIC SPACE BASED SCI-FI HORROR GAME if I can find the time to get better InDesign. Not sure if you're aware but newborns are very time consuming. I only had the time to write this blog post because she has been sated with milk and a blood sacrifice.

Hope all is well on your end.