New Megagame - Neverwood

 

Hey folks, I'm running another megagame in Brisbane! 

Neverwood is a rules-light megagame of Social Deduction, Storytelling and Exploration. You will join 50 other players in an all-day game event, all on secret teams with their own agendas. You'll need to explore the forest, uncover mysteries, make alliances, and balance your public and secret goals to find what you seek - or become lost yourself.

Click here for the event page with a bunch of information about what the event is and how it all works. There are currently 3 tickets remaining. If you're keen and based near Brisbane, check it out :)   

High-Impact Enemies in Mythic Bastionland

There's been a lot of chatter about how combat in Mythic Bastionland can sometimes feel a bit too easy - especially when you have a larger group of 4+ knights. In a mythical setting like this, you want some entities that feel seriously powerful, mythic threats that can single-handedly destroy an entire legion on their own. Sadly, some Myths that seem like they should deliver that feeling don't measure up.

This is something D&D-style games have always struggled with. Strength In Numbers is so powerful that all too often, the dragon you hoped would feel like a mythic beast ends up being a pathetic worm, barely able to land a hit as the players bully it with their superior action economy. Unfortunately Mythic Bastionland can fall into this problem too, with some solo mythic enemies Impaired and Repelled and Deny'd until they die without ever being able to do anything. 

Chris McDowall has already posted some good ideas on how to fix this, but I personally don't think they completely solve the problem for me. Here's the house rules I'm going to try to boost up some of these major enemies.

Mythic Dungeons

 Allow me to introduce MYTHIC DUNGEONS, my new free hack for Mythic Bastionland. It includes 15 pages with:

• A full guide for building your own dungeons in the Mythic Bastionland style.
• Rules for handling dungeon-crawling in the Mythic Bastionland ruleset, allowing you to run a full megadungeon campaign. 
• 6 new dungeon-focused Myths.
• The Myths in this hack have RELATIONSHIPS with the other myths in your dungeon, allowing them to dynamically interact with each other in a system that's incredibly simple to run as the GM.
• Rules to help your players to use Glory to get more and better equipment for dungeon-crawling.
• Simple restocking rules to mix and change up the dungeon as much as you need to keep it fresh over time.
• Two pages of ways to SPICE UP COMBAT to keep your encounters dynamic and interesting.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT. 

Click here for a simple dungeon template.

Here's an example dungeon I wrote on a notecard:

This is a hack: it requires Mythic Bastionland to play. Go check out the Quickstart for free or buy the book. Huge thanks to Chris McDowall for his incredible game.

Mythic Factions for Blades in the Dark

I've been reading the incredible Mythic Bastionland lately, and I admit - it took me a while to wrap my head around what Myths actually are. 

When you read the book (the quickstart is free) you'll see most of it revolves around Myths, which look like this:

They have a chain of 6 events. You make Wilderness Checks while exploring the world, and whenever you randomly roll a Myth, you do the next event in the sequence. At first, I was baffled. Isn't this just a railroad?

No: I slowly realised that Myths are actually a genius revision of the classic random encounter tables. (Please forgive me Mythic Bastion-heads if you're thinking "Obviously!" right now.)

When you boil it down, Myths are basically a random encounter table with 2 major changes:

1: The encounters are chained together into a story of 6 related encounters that happen in order, instead of a set of unrelated encounters.

2: The encounters emanate from a specific spot on the map. You are more likely to get encounters from the closest Myth. If you go to that spot, you automatically get the next encounter in the chain.

These small revisions make a huge difference. In a classic random encounter table, each event stands alone. A good random encounter can definitely be fun and memorable and interesting - but it's always isolated and separate. It pops up, it's interesting, and then it goes away. It has no meaningful, planned connection to anything before or after. You can only advance your goals by actually getting to your destination - so no matter how well-written those random encounters are, they're always a distraction from the main course.

With the simple change of linking the encounters together into a story, Mythic Bastionland makes random encounters the main course. Now, getting random encounters as you wander the wilderness DOES advance your goal directly. And to make sure the game isn't just passive random wanderings, you always have a way to advance the story directly and get the next encounter: You can find the source and go there.

I think we can take this simple concept and use it for tons of other games. What if we took a city-focused sandbox game, and made each faction work like the Myths in Mythic Bastionland?

As an exploration of that idea, here's my idea for how to use it to improve entanglements in Blades in the Dark.

ENTITY 11: HABIT FORMER

 

Artist: Felipe Escobar Bolivar.

 

Rats were trained in a Skinner box to approach the food cup when a distinct click was sounded. Ribonucleic acid was extracted from the brains of these rats and injected into untrained rats. The untrained rats then manifested a significant tendency (as compared with controls) to approach the food cup when the click, unaccompanied by food, was presented.

- TRANSFER OF A RESPONSE TO NAIVE RATS BY INJECTION OF RIBONUCLEIC ACID EXTRACTED FROM TRAINED RATS.

It's uncomfortable to admit, but many of our behaviours are ultimately controlled by simple chemistry. Love, fear, depression, loathing. They're all born from a cocktail of chemicals bubbling away inside the brain. This is the principle exploited by the Habit Former - a small insect about the size of your fist. By injecting you with a cocktail of specially-curated ribonucleic acids, it can completely transform your personality.

First Impressions: Brindlewood Bay

Brindlewood Bay is a RPG written by Jason Cordova where you play as the Murder Mavens, a club of old ladies solving cosy mysteries in a small fishing town. Little do you suspect that there's a dark conspiracy connecting these mysteries, tying into the lovecraftian horrors that lurk beneath the waters of this town...

It's Murder She Wrote mixed with Lovecraft. The most unique thing about it is the way you actually solve the mysteries. There is no pre-planned solution: Even the GM doesn't know who actually committed the murder. 

When they've gathered enough clues, the players put forward a theory of who they think committed the murder. They make a Theorize roll, with a bonus for each major clue they've tied into their theory, and if it succeeds - they were right! That theory they put forward was correct, and they now have to bring the murderer to justice.

To make this work, the GM is meant to deliberately keep things a little vague until the players make that decisive Theorize roll. The clues aren't meant to point to any particular suspect. You may find a note saying that someone was removed from the will - but the last page is ripped, so you don't know who exactly it was. If the killer attacks you, they'll be veiled in shadow the whole time. 

It's a really interesting trick. I've played 2 sessions of the system now, so here's some of my first impressions of how this unique approach plays out in practice. 

Some praise for The Thief, The Witch, The Toad & The Mushroom

My game is officially out and it's reached a Very Positive rating on steam, with 100% positive reviews so far. Releasing this game and seeing such a wonderful response has honestly been one of the most joyful and affirming moments in my life. Please give it a go if you haven't played it yet - it's 100% free! And please join me on my new discord server if you want to chat about the game and get announcements about upcoming projects.

Play the game for free on Steam here. 

Play on Itch.Io here. 

Join the discord to chat about the game here! 

The website is over here.

And we got a facebook page here if anyone still uses that.

Below are some of my favourite reviews and comments from people who liked it.

I will always think about this game when I think about visual novels or even writing in games that really blew me away, Well Fucking Done.

- Scrap Princess

This game has absorbed me and my neighbour since we found it yesterday. It is so good. It is currently 3 am and he just finished his playthrough. We are literally unable to sleep. Masterpiece. Absolutely gorgeous. I cannot properly express how we are both feeling right now. You cooked. 

- Parthikleon

If you were ever a little kid reading late into the night, and you want to feel the way it felt back then again, even just a little, give the game a go.

- Lemongrab

Fantastic game. I don't know if I have ever played something so wonderfully ominous. The story is so much larger than it initially appears, and the journey to uncover the truth is wrought with so many delightful, yet horrible turns. The characters have a lot of depth to them; just when you think you know everything about them, something else is revealed, even darker than anything you had learned before. This game manages to perfectly deliver the sensation of spiraling downwards into a dreadful and inescapable fate. It is so rare to find a story that can hit all those notes perfectly, but this one does. Congratulations on the game, and thank you for sharing this story.

- Brianna

When I first saw the developer of the game, early on while playing this, I figured it was some sort of meta joke; a, "I'll come up with a real name later", and just wrote it off as the humor of the game. The more I played it, the more I appreciated that humor, with styles, and ideas ripped from dozens of stories we're all at least a little familiar with. When McNamee is being playful, he's fun, taking you into a world of endearing characters who all have something fun to say, characters who come to life in their little idiosyncrasies, from the Frog who will never stop reminding you how he has never lost at anything in his life, or the Mushroom who thinks your attempts at art are just dreadfully boring, the author manages to keep a smile on your face throughout.

But the Author isn't just trying to be playful, as the story unfolds, or really, is retold, he brings new texture to all the words he wrote earlier, little moments you didn't realize you appreciated. A sense of wonder, the smell of mystery, a feeling of dread. And by the time the story comes to an end, regardless of how you have chosen to end it, you're left with a sense of longing, to read those words for the first time again, to spend more time with those characters, to see more of this world that McNamee had so lovingly, and skillfully put together. It is rare you can finish a work of fiction, and be left only with that bittersweet feeling of loss, but McNamee manages it.

This is likely the best Visual novel I've ever read, despite its shorter length, despite its shoe string budget built on public domain art work, this is a story I will not soon forget. And Jack McNamee, is a name I will be very sure to remember, because I very much want to know what he does next.

-  Zenning

everything is perfect about this game. One night i couldn t sleep and just decided to open this game, and after playing for an hour i felt too cozy and relaxed that i only wanted to hit the hay.. 10/10

ps: it made me cry in the end..

- Antig0ne