One Year of TTRPG Stuffmaking
MONTHLY FREEBIE: Mothership Class - THE ALTERED
The Mole on PIRAD ONE, my very first self-published adventure, went live on Itch.io on September 15th, 2021 which means it’s nearly been one full year since I started creating stuff in the TTRPG space.
Looking back on that time, I’m honestly very proud of what I’ve accomplished. That is not to say that I believe my work is top-tier or that I wouldn’t do anything differently if I could do it again, but given the rigors of my full-time day job and the rest of life over the last year, I am really pleased that I was able to stick to my goal of actually completing and releasing projects as much as I did while working on these projects along the periphery of the rest of my life. It helps, of course, that it is extremely fun to make things for games I love and that seeing even one person have fun at their table with something I made is extremely rewarding.
Over the last year, I’ve released 14 titles on Itch (some of them quite small like a Mothership class or an enemy encounter for Mork Borg, but some of them fairly large like the 40-page Bloodfields zine). I’ve submitted to 8 game jams. I ran my first Kickstarter and it was so much more successful than I ever could have imagined (and it’s finally about to be totally wrapped up). I got to take part in another successful Kickstarter as part of a large group of wonderful creators. I started an LCC! I spent hours learning rewarding new creative skills like layout, graphic design principles and more. I got to know dozens of kind, creative and really interesting new people. And very importantly to me, I stayed focused on releasing nearly all of the projects I started.
I did overestimate my time and mental bandwidth from time to time (like the mockup above for LOZERS, a project I never had time to finish). I hate having put this mockup in particular out on Twitter and elsewhere without ever having completed it. It makes me feel dishonest in that it got the initial attention but I didn’t do the actual work to deserve it. It’s not something I hope to repeat often. Now, when I post a mockup or a tease for a future project, it’s a promise. It means it is on my schedule, I’ve got a deadline and it’s going to happen one way or the other (it may just take a bit longer than planned).
I’m 34 now and spent the last two decades of wanting to write and create and never ever sticking the landing on anything, never focusing enough to get things done and out the door. About 6 years ago, I went through a pretty considerable mental health episode/breakdown/whatever you want to call it, and had to build myself back up much more thoughtfully and more intentionally than I ever had before. I only think it’s because of those two things that I find myself feeling as focused as I am now (and I owe so much of the ability to even still be here to my wife and parents and friends who supported me through that). Still old habits die hard, and there’s nothing quite like that initial excitement for the potential a project holds in your mind. So still, I overshoot from time to time.
Kirby from Disaster Tourism also just recently hit their one-year anniversary and had a lot of smart and interesting things to say, both about their own work and the indie TTRPG space in general. It’s a very solid read and had me thinking about my own anniversary post before sitting down today to write it.
I don’t always feel like I have the best bits to add to that kind of wider conversation, but I will give some brief bits of serious sounding advice to anyone else starting out:
Immerse yourself in community—whether that’s a Twitter hashtag or active Discord or Itch comments. Wherever the kinds of things you want to create, the things that inspire you reside, find a place for yourself there. If you can’t find one, make one.
Be humble. No one owes you their time or their money or much of anything at all. Every download, rating, play report, etc. is something for which to be thankful.
Share feedback with other creators and seek feedback from them in return. Reflect seriously on what they tell you and be thoughtful but critical in what you tell them.
Be consistent and pace yourself. The specifics here will vary from person to person but building a creative schedule for yourself is extremely helpful. Write for an hour a day after work or set aside a chunk on your regular day off. Pay attention to your own processes and find what works and what doesn’t and plan around that. A little bit of writing every day will build a whole world in no time at all.
Be to others the kind of peer in the space you’d like to see, that you’d wish you’d had when you started. This is, of course, trite general life advice, but it’s very true here too. The number of times a single excited comment or a retweet or a thorough rating gave me the extra motivation to make something just a bit better is really too many to count at this point.
Get an editor.
With all that said, I have bigger plans than every before for MeatCastle GameWare’s Year Two. I’ll have more on that in a few weeks as I get some of the last few pieces in order, but for now I’ll just say that the last year has helped me see a path to doing more of the work I’m most passionate about than ever before going forward.
So here’s to Year Two!
MONTHLY FREEBIE - THE ALTERED
This month’s exclusive freebie is a new class intended for use with Mothership 1e. I put out The Voidtouched several months ago as first foray into doing a standalone new class for the game. It’s a weird one where failing at something actually helps your character in another way - ideally enough that you would, at times, try to put yourself into bad situations for your sanity in order to heal your body.
THE ALTERED is another class that looks to work outside of the game’s default mode of trauma responses. As an Altered, you went missing for quite some time before mysteriously reappearing. You were taken, whether it be by a group of xenos or a shadow corporation or something stranger still, and changed. Now, you are back and more powerful, more bestial and perhaps even more alien than before. Because of your no-longer-just-human form, when you succeed at Body saves it actually stresses out nearby players, making them remember how you aren’t quite human anymore.
“If you could survive that, what else can you do and what if you do it to me?”
OTHER COOL STUFF
Read the Fucking Manual (RTFM) continues to be my favorite TTRPG podcast! There most recent episodes looking back at Agone and Fiasco have been filled with great conversations and smart (and funny) re-examinations of older games. A great way to build up your knowledge of older games in the space without actually having to read them all yourself.
Goblin Archives is running a game jam for Liminal Horror, a modern day horror RPG, from now until the night before Halloween! I’m planning to get in on the action with a 6-10 page mystery titled Tunnels in White. Here’s the teaser:
Old money siphoning new money from every corner of your city. An aging mansion, well-kept but worn, shifting its gaze from development to development, always hungry for more, always growing.
A warehouse, small and unassuming in one of a hundred industrial parks just like it, now bearing the name Singleton Solutions takes in truckload after truckload but never sends anything out. It’s the same for the people. Sometimes, they arrive in towncars, other times in shuttle vans. None come out. Ever.
What you know is something strange is going on inside that warehouse and you are determined to discover what it is. What you cannot know is where and how far the mystery will take you.
It’s a continuation of my own personal mythos first starting as a Call of Cthulhu mini-campaign for my past podcast Encounter Time which then extended into Mothership both with a mini-campaign there as well and then later say some references in PIRAD ONE and even the upcoming The House Always Wins and Corpo Culture Killed My Dog - Vol. 8 with the appearance of the big evil corporation Dextro-Singleton. I’m excited to get to bridge the gap between the 1920s and future timelines (even if just for my own headcanon’s sake).
Speaking of Liminal Horror, I also recently did a read-through thread of the rulebook.
Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive - Issue 01 is out now, and it looks incredible. Been one of my most-anticipated projects since ZiMo. It appears to be the Morrowind and Dark Sun hybrid I’ve been craving for a while now.
My lo-fi zine for the recent Mothership jam arrived in print and look great. I’m really happy with how this project turned out. They’ve been sent off to Tuesday Knight Games for sale on their store. After they go live there (hopefully next month), I will also be making a digital version available via Itch and offering them up to other retailers out across the greater internet.
Watt recently re-named and re-announced Cloud Empress (formerly titled MOTHERLOAF) and it continues to be one of my most anticipated titles in the space. The art and vibes are just beautiful and I’m really intrigued to see how it all takes shape (plus the sample character sheet on the Itch page looks REALLY interesting). It’s build on Mothership but clearly going to be quite different.
I have some big, exciting life changes coming down the pipeline so prepare to see more stuff from me more often and in more places soon! I’ll have more to say on that in a few weeks though.
For now, thanks so much for reading!
- Christian