What are you working on right now?

[Malrex]

Hi, my first post. Thought I would just dive in. I’ve been working on a supermodule: The City of Vermilion using OSRIC rules (OSR).

Pitch: The City of Vermilion is located on a vast island in the vibrant turquoise waters of the Zontani Sea. The Zontani Sea is brimming with sea life and its murky floor littered with the sunken treasures of ages long past. Residents enjoy prosperous trade with wine and olive oil, but also suffer from ravaging pirates and ferocious sea monsters. Its greatest peril is the Maelstrom, ancient and immense beyond human imagination, whose ship-devouring currents have feasted on the wooden carcasses of a thousand ships. Once content to remain in one place, it now stirs and moves across the Zontani sea like some unfathomable leviathan of the deep, engulfing even the nearby sea town of Talpos.

Your party can explore the City of Vermilion and interact with the 6 ruling houses and numerous important groups for faction play and intrigue. The party can explore the city streets, the rooftops, to the sewers, infiltrate a thief guild, stumble upon the forgotten Pirate Lord Crypts, to the islands, caves, underwater ruins, and even to the Maelstrom itself!

Excited: I had a lot of fun putting this adventure together. I’m playtesting it and tweaking a few things. I’m also gearing up for my first Kickstarter to try and afford a professional editor and commission artists, then I’ll just need to do the layout (my favorite part). Hoping to launch the Kickstarter at the end of the month.

Hope: The goal (and my hope) of the project is to make a city adventure easy for a GM to run DURING play. I was always intimidated running a city adventure because there is so many NPC’s, buildings…and who knows what the party will do!! Dungeons are easier for me because there are walls and I can easily prep because those walls restrict choices. My strategy for the city is completely different. My strategy is to supply the GM with a bunch of organized and easy to scan options/rumors to throw at the party of things they can do–that the players form their own "walls—by not being distracted and focusing on one goal or section to play in. Through my playtesting…it seems to be working and by throwing so many rumors and interesting things, the players have said the city feels ‘alive’.

[SabineV5]

This sounds really need - I’m a sucker for redemption stories!

Is it possible for the hero to recover their powers?

[MrTrollhands]

That’s a really good point. Maybe the spirits will have a way to help the hero remember skills or heal wounds (both literal and figurative). This would make sense as a progression towards the final challenge, and make the contributions of the spirits very important.

[Samuel_Yeager]

A tarot and playing card based RPG about magicians where the challenges and performances are decided by quick and dirty hands of poker. Elements of my favorite bluffing games, super simple character creation, and easy to understand tools.
Just got started with it this past week, but I’m feeling very strongly about it. Much deeper than my previous stuff (all very micro and modular), and I just LOVE the concept right now. The tarot part also feeds nicely into the magician-centric setting I’m putting together for it, and the playing cards add a nice element of making things feel risky and exciting (I’ve grown rather unenthused by polyhedrons, honestly).
Hoping against hope that this one shakes out well, and I would love to get it published in the Codex when it’s ready.

[miguelmx]

I’m working on a new PbtA game Xantolo, which is game based on the Mexican concepts of Dia de los Muertos. It has had some considerable changes of direction already, I think the most distilled pitch right now will be: Coco meets Urban Shadows.

I’m excited about the fact that it is totally my thing—no IP, no someone else’s ideas I have to fit in… I feel free to do whatever I want!

For hopes… I hope I may find more time to work on it… I’m overwhelmed right now with work, I barely have scratched the surface of it. But I’m so excited!

[Dissonance]

I’m planning on releasing a Dungeon World supplement centered around a series of three funnel adventures as inspired by @jasonlutes Funnel World! This marks my first foray into professional publishing software and my first collaboration with an artist!

Saviors of Hogtown is my own take on the funnel genre as seen through a more narrative heavy lens. Each of the three adventures offer a players a different choice of tone, a unique starting location for their adventures and a generous selection of custom monsters, treasure, dungeon locations, and custom moves complete in a 40 page booklet format for easy printing.

Oh, and the arts really pretty

[Christo]

Totally here to playtest this, Miguel!

[elStiko]

I love it, I love it, I love it! I hope I remember to get a copy when it’s done!

[cosmicwimp]

Distance From Stone
(a Flowers by the Necropolis game)

• The elevator pitch
  I’ve been struggling to articulate this (even to myself). It’s a game of archaeological melancholy.
• Why you’re excited about it
  I don’t know if I’m excited about it but I keep thinking about it and I’m curious to see if I can make something out of it!
• What your hopes are in relation to it
  I hope that I can puzzle it out and complete a short and legible text that someone might play.

I think that this might be a game for a single player or a small group of players playing a single archaeologist/anthropologist/antiquarian.
The player holds an artefact (find an interesting stone to represent an artefact created by an unknown person at some point in prehistory) and tries to understand something about the context from whence it came.
There are three… stats?

• Physical distance - understanding the landscape, material, topography, environment etc.
• Temporal distance - an academic knowledge of the historical context.
• Cultural distance - recognising and empathising with the humanity that shaped the artefact.

The player is given prompts (possibly via cards or dice) and narrates the character’s understanding (or lack thereof) of the material

[Christo]

Can you describe your game as a mashup of two things? e.g., “It’s Indiana Jones and CSI without the colonialism.” Using well known touchstones in a mashup helps to quickly convey the elevator pitch.
From your description, I struggle to understand what the goal of the game is — what do the players do, what are they trying to accomplish? You may want to answer in a different thread and tag me in, so we don’t go off topic.

[Jacob_Wood]

[The Pitch
In Survival of the Able you’re a person with a disability living in a European almshouse when the Black Death comes to your town. Little is known about where the plague originated or how to stop it, but those who die from it are rising again—and they’re hungry for flesh. Since everyone else has succumbed to the plague, it’s up to a handful of you to make your way out of town and away to safety. You may not be the biggest, the strongest, or the fittest, but you’re determined to survive.

Why I’m Excited
Survival of the Able is a game about empathy. It’s designed to get players to walk a mile, and survive a zombie plague, in another person’s shoes. As a blind gamer myself, it’s important to me to help others get an understanding for what life with disabilities is like. It’s also important for me to showcase how you can treat disabilities in a game without referring to them as Flaws, Drawbacks, or some other pejorative term.

I’m also excited because this is my first game to feature other disabled creators. I have been working with a disabled illustrator and editor. I’m also working with Todd Crapper for layout, and he’s done some amazing work with accessible PDFs.

My Hopes
My number one goal is to reach as many non-disabled gamers as possible. I want players to get an understanding for what it’s like to have a disability and be treated like a cripple. That’s why the game is set in the 14th Century–there’s no accessible technology, no civil rights legislation, and little to no sympathy for people with disabilities. There’s nothing the players can fall back on to feel safe and no magic or cybernetic enhancements to “buy off” their disabilities. If they come away from the table feeling a little more empathy for what people with disabilities face, then I’ve done my job.

My second hope is to really launch the discussion about accessibility and disabilities in RPGs. I’ve been working on this through my game design and outreach since 2010, but I’ve always felt like I’m preaching to the choir. If I can reach a whole new audience, then perhaps I can further the discourse.

There’s never been a better time for this either. There are tons of disabled gamers who are starting to speak out, and I feel the message is starting to finally cut through the noise. I want to get this game out there so it’s loud and clear what our message is.

Lofty goals, I know. I feel like I have the background, the experience, and the team to finally pull this off though.

[Deckard]

This sounds great! I would love to playtest this!

[Deckard]

The Service sounds very PbtA interesting!

[Deckard]

*** The elevator pitch:**
Alien Encounters - An rpg inspired by The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Arrival, E.T, Iron Giant and other first encounter movies. Told in three acts, this game starts by pitting the obvious factions against each other but will include mechanics to reform the factions and create tension like in the movies it strives to emulate. The themes of this game are Individualism, Friendship, and Community in the context of conflicting needs and wants.

• Why you’re excited about it -
  This is my first new RPG ruleset creation since discovering rpgs with a heavier narrative focus. It would be the only game I know of that would emulate this style of movie. I am excited to give it mechanical support to avoid the cliches of the mindless alien invasion.

Examples of supporting mechanics:

• The rock-paper-scissors-well card type conflict resolution to start each act will mean that each faction will be trying to anticipate the wants and thoughts of the other in a sort of negotiation without language which fits 100% into the theme!

• The individuals in a faction will have secondary drivers separate from their factions such as individualism (in an alien culture where that is shameful) or needing a friend (loner kid) that may drive the individuals into creating a new faction between sympathetic characters of each faction. Hopefully, this will create a chance for Iron Giant and Hogarth/ E.T. and Elliot / Klaatu and Helen type connections as well. I am excited to see this all work together to create coherent stories!

• What your hopes are in relation to it
  I would love to get this out into a Kickstarter someday and get it playtested a bunch before that!

[marden.muller]

For he last three years or so I’ve been slllooowwly working on something called The Stranger’s Harvest. Here’s pretty much all I can tell about it so far:

The elevator pitch: The Stranger’s Harvest is a story game for 4 players, GM included. It is about characters (say, a meddling kid --a Trespasser-- or a bunch of them) who at one point break a cardinal law of their own community (like “never go alone into the woods”, “no one is supposed to hunt the sacred white deer”, etc.); it is also about the people of that community (the Witnesses) and how they have to deal with the inevitable consequences of that original law-breaking act. Now, the law is in place for the sake of the Stranger --tipically a supernatural agent who must not be disturbed. This agent can be anything the players want to make him, from a wild beast that inhabits the woods to a vengeful witch to a deity who’s just very strict about how people are to worship them.

Why I’m excited about it: I intend this game to have two basic narrative components or levels --a backbone level and a fleshing out level. To achieve that, with the GM’s exception, all the players will create two characters each: one of them will be an Archetype character (the Trespasser(s), the Lawkeeper and the Stranger), while the other will be a Witness character (tipically a villager who lives in the same place as the Trespasser and the Lawkeeper). In the backbone level, the players will share the three Archetype roles by rotating them around the table, in order to create the core narrative of how the Trespasser gets everyone into trouble regardless of the Lawkeeper’s warnings, thus offending the Stranger, who then proceeds to do their own thing –which can vary from giving the offender (or the community) an opportunity to atone for the trespassing to straight up resorting to retaliation.

The fleshing out part of the story will be interwoven with the former, and will consist of the reactions, opinions, minor interactions and stances of the other members of the community, the Witnesses, as they acknowledge that doom is upon them all due to the Trespasser’s mischief. At this level the players will roleplay the life as lived by the non-essential cast, the extras of that tale. When engaging in this level, the players will not rotate their roles, but will restrict themselves to roleplaying a single Witness each. And, in doing so, I expect they will enrich the fiction in ways that I dare not predict.

What I hope to achieve here: I want this game to allow the players to emulate a certain range of (not necessarily pleasant) feelings related to (a) mythic narratives (think selections from Ovid’s Meamorphoses); (b) folk tales (think Gogol’s “Viy") and, more specifically, © cautionary tales (think Struwwelpeter or the Children’s and Household Tales). As for the mechanics, there are some interesting pieces in development that I would like to discuss in future threads, but honestly, at this stage, it’s all still basically a hot mess.

[SabineV5]

That sounds amazing! I’d love to play that, or playtest it, if you’re interested.

[Curubethion]

Okay, so a new idea sprung into my brain and I’ve been slowly hammering it, and I’m pretty hyped about it!

Elevator Pitch: Travel across a land, thinking up quests to do and cool places to visit! Think the quests of MMOs and open-world RPGs, but mixed with the worldbuilding of Microscope.

Why I’m Excited: This came out of me thinking about how the core gameplay loops of this style of video game are incredibly engaging, but sometimes unsatisfying, because they can amount to a lot of pointless trekking back and forth across lovely landscapes. But what if you could use that structure, and actually create something? Use it to build a world and a slowly emerging web of little stories that connect, maybe even into a big over-arching plot if you want!

AND PAPERS LOTS OF PAPERS. MAPS AND QUEST LOGS AND PAPERS FOR NPCS and honestly I’m really excited about the idea of a messy tabletop covered in papers (or a browser with a bajillion Google Drawings open in separate tabs).

And honestly the whole idea just feels so coherent but also potentially rich, with the way you can build the broad strokes of the world, then fill in more detailed elements within that, then make connections between those elements, and so on.

What I Hope to Achieve: a light and brisk game that I can bring to any group, and get them off the ground and running straight into a really cool world of their own. I’m looking to put together themed “playsets” so that you could make a world like World of Warcraft or Borderlands or MMOs/open world games that don’t even exist yet!

[Radmad]

I’m looking to put together themed “playsets” so that you could make a world like World of Warcraft or Borderlands or MMOs/open world games that don’t even exist yet!

So you’re sort of like the sets of characters that leave behind all those journals/tapes? I can dig it. I really like the idea of having a lot of physical artifacts from play, I feel like not enough games explore the sheets we use as mechanics and are satisfied just letting them be reference docs.

[Curubethion]

Not quite; you’re definitely taking on the role of the main characters (or, at least, the characters that players take the roles of) going through everything, but you’re actually building a physical quest log to keep track of everything, and building world maps, and documenting everything as you invent it. Very much starting with blank pages and then slowly filling them in with stuff. So the end product is this corpus of fiction in bits and snatches, scattered all around, but very much a full world.

Ah, I see. When I talked about “games that don’t exist yet”, it was more in the sense of “This isn’t actually an MMO/open-world RPG, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was?”

Though I like the idea of doing something with the data-logs, etc. They really are a staple of those games. Hmm…

[Jmstar]

Werewolf Health Clinic is a game about providing health care to werewolves, usually out of a van.
I’m excited about it because it does two things I really love - it flips the script on a tired old genre (I’ve thought a lot about how miserable it would be to be a werewolf), and it does something fun and new with form and format. In this case, the entire game will come as a series of informational brochures. Here’s the outside of one:

The inside has information for the health care provider, which includes clinical pearls and all kinds of stuff to prompt a fun roleplaying situation. My hope is that the complete set of brochures becomes whatever the players want it to be, from creative prompts for a tabletop game to actual artifacts for a larp. There will be a “play this as tabletop” and “play this as a larp” brochures, possibly more than one.