Saving Throw and an Update

Things have been kinda weird for me, but then they’re always kinda weird, so it feels redundant to say that. This time I’m coming off of a massive freelance localization job that largely monopolized my time for about 6 weeks, and involved a lot of 12-hour days. I did squeeze in a surprising amount of RPG writing all the same, and since it’s ended I’ve been sort of stuck in high gear. I’m also trying to get back on track with planning out a Kickstarter for Dragon World, which will be Star Line Publishing’s first original game.

Saving Throw

I decided it was time to finally release Saving Throw. It lives up to the “weird little games” moniker even more than usual, which is saying something. Jack Chick is an incredibly prolific creator of little evangelical Christian tracts, tiny comics espousing a very particular worldview. Depending on where you live they might be a regular sight, but even here in “godless” California I’ve encountered them a few times. There’s also a tiny subculture of people who study and collect Chick Tracts not because they’re convinced that the contents are true, but because they represent a fascinating work of outsider art. He employs some fantastically talented people (including some who the mainstream comics industry totally ignored), and particularly due to the influence of the virulently anti-Catholic preacher Alberto Riviera, Chick’s views are seldom boring.

The idea for Saving Throw came from a friend of mine named Grant Chen, who hit on the idea of making a Chick Tract RPG with the same form factor as an actual tract. For the moment Saving Throw is going to be a letter format PDF, but I do want to get some copies printed in tract form, once I can figure out the logistics of actually doing so. (It’s tricky because I’m not printing millions of copies like Chick Publications is.) It’s a weird game that produces weird play, and the title is a precious pun that even I roll my eyes at, but rolling a d20 to see if your character’s soul is saved makes entirely too much sense given the source material.

I knew that this game needed artwork to really pop visually, and I wound up commissioning Jason Thompson to do it. I first became acquainted with him when he asked me to run Maid RPG at the launch party for King of RPGs volume 2, and he generally does all kinds of impressive stuff, and his take on Chick Tract art is no exception.

So that’s Saving Throw, for which you’ll be getting a download link momentarily. I’m also working on some other games to get Patreon releases, which are a little more ambitious, and a little more like normal(ish) RPGs.

Spooktacular

I wrote a good amount about it on my blog, but Spooktacular is basically a sorta-retroclone of the 1986 West End Game Ghostbusters RPG. I made some important additions and tweaks, but I’ve tried to stick to the original edition’s elegant simplicity as much as possible, even as I put my own stamp on it. There are optional d66 tables for most parts of character creation, very simple rules for making your unique ghost hunting company, and short guides to what it’s like to be paranormal investigators in certain cities (with some contributions by Amy Veeres, whose name you might recognize from Onyx Path). It’s been a really fun game to playtest, and I’m aiming for a Patreon release followed by PDF and POD, and having James Workman (who illustrated Fantasy Friends) do some artwork. I even went as far as to order custom “Spooky Dice” from Chessex, which proved to be pretty easy and affordable to do.

Kagegami High

I’ve been putting in a lot of work on Kagegami High, and it’s looking like once I finish it up the book is going to be something like 150+ pages. You play as students at a surreal high school, sort of a mashup of Welcome to Night Vale and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei and some other stuff. It uses a variant of the Maid RPG rules. In particular I integrated the dice pool system from Ghostbusters (so I’m likely to wind up ordering custom Weird Dice from Chessex) and Apocalypse World-inspired principles GM moves, and I’m generally doing a grand experiment with using d66 tables to evoke a setting. At least 2/3 of the book will be tables, and a large portion of the non-table stuff will be set up so you can make d66 rolls anyway.

Although the rules are pretty simple, I wound up setting myself a pretty substantial amount of writing to do to flesh out the setting and the many tables, which is probably why as I write this the manuscript weighs in at 38,000 words with plenty more left to do. Getting into that weird of a headspace has been a lot of fun, and it provides a unique lends through which I can look at just about anything.