Inspiration
It comes for us all.
I know last month I was talking about writing fantasy TTRPG adventures and sci-fi mech skirmish games, but this month, something happened. Inspiration struck, quite unexpectedly, in the form of a youtube video about a man and his map. I’m still making those other things, but my mind has been swimming since I learned about Jerry Gretzinger.
Inside
Plans for The Green Ooze King and beyond
Inspiration
June Production Update
Plans for The Green Ooze King and beyond
I first mentioned The Green Ooze King (an adventure for Cairn/OSE) back in February of this year, when I went through the dungeon design process I used to make that adventure. Since then, the adventure has been written, laid out, and illustrated, and the press-ready file is sitting on my laptop waiting for its big day.
I’ve been running crowdfunding campaigns for my games for the last 2.5 years. While I’ve certainly had my share of success there, I have also grown tired of the grind of constantly needing to be promoting my next campaign while I am in the process of completing my last one. Crowdfunding is great of certain types of projects (big ones), but I feel like it has pushed me away from making little things like one-page adventures and short zines.
The Green Ooze King is one of those little things. A 36-page zine adventure based in a single location, written for a niche indie TTRPG system. I made it because I was inspired; it does not need a Kickstarter campaign.
On account of this, I have been sitting on this game, trying to figure out what to do with it. But now I think I’ve got it. Starting later this summer, I am going to be trying out running a Not Kickstarter on my website. I’ll be ordering these zines shortly, and I’ll be opening preorders for The Green Ooze King on August 1. When the zines arrive, I’ll close the preorders and ship the zines. No pledge managers. No stretch goals. No FOMO gimmicks.
My biggest concern is reach. Can I get attention to those preorders if they aren’t on a website like Kickstarter or BackerKit? To help out, and because I won’t be offering add-on bundles like I usually do, every preorder of The Green Ooze King makes everything else on my web store 30% off.
If this works, I’ve got 2-3 other little things in the pipeline that I would love to release in the same way. We’ll see. In next month’s Ink & Dice, I’ll include the links so you can find the preorder page and get notified when The Green Ooze King drops.
Inspiration
This video showed up in a game design discord server a couple weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
I love everything about Jerry’s project and his process, and it has the gears spinning in my brain for how I could create something that feels similarly organic. I have an idea for a game, much more limited in scope than Jerry’s map, that tries to capture the spirit of his deck of cards. We’ll see how that works out.
June Production Update
We’ve got a few big moves on the production schedule in the past month.
UHF Contact is out in the world!
I finally buckled down and wrote the rules for my upcoming solo supplement for MAZES Fantasy Roleplaying by 9th Level Games.
Out of the Iron Labyrinth is moving along. The text is nearly finalized, and Jamie is cracking away at the illustrations, so that should be ready well within my expected timeline.
Three new projects have been added to the schedule:
Diegesis 1;1 is possibly the first entry in a series of diegetic publications. This one focuses on event posters found in the Ports district of Cy (from CY_BORG). I’ve got a fair bit of the game content written, but the visual design will be the heaviest lift I’ve attempted in a while, so we’ll see how that goes.
XXII: The Dragon is a tarot-based journaling game about a dragon facing their true nature. I’ve got some preliminary prompts sketched out, but I’m still working on the mechanisms and gameplay loop for this one.
The Story Thief is another solo journaling game, this time a junk-journaling game roughly based on Jerry’s deck of cards. Lots of development work to be done there, but I’m excited about what it might turn into.
Thank you!
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I’m hoping to wrap up my outstanding freelance work in the next couple of weeks so I can dive head first into some of these new projects. Who knows what other inspiration will hit between now and then, though.
—MAH
This insane map video has me fascinated. What a cool guy, huh?!
Looking forward to the Ooze!