RPG Insights #24: 2024 Review and Beyond

Hi folks, it’s been some time, right? I just checked and my last letter was in September! As usual, life keeps happening to us and you can’t always escape to our beloved dark underground tunnels. In this edition I’ll try to wrap up this last year of gaming and blogging, while also pointing some new directions forward.

Last Year Publishing

The year of 2024 began on full speed as I just had released an adventure in the DM’s Guild with a well-known Brazilian community organizer, for a series the Brazil chapter of Adventurer’s League was commissioning. The Dark Hunger is the third of six adventures for D&D 5e Spelljammer setting. It’s a mix of Cowboy Bebop, Contra NES games and the Akira movie, sort of. It got Copper medal, which means 50-something sales.

My next move was to try my first crowdfunding, and I tried to hop on the Zinequest wagon with The Colony, a new improved edition of an old game of mine. It was supposed to be a complete hexcrawl setting for old D&D and it reached 10% funding. I also tried to deliver something for #dungeon24 and gave up mid-April.

By the end of February this would be my last activity on the publishing arena, apart from this newsletter, until the release of Demigod last week.

Things started getting a little hectic here at home and time was short this year. On my day job, responsibilities kept growing as I got promoted (yeay!) and had to start doing some managing duties. Even my personal projects there suffered a bit. Also, we got pregnant (yeay!) and that took a lot of time and effort too. The baby was born on 21st December and it’s a challenging job, to say the least. So, even as I kept up with community content and gaming, having ideas for posts, notes on podcast episodes I’d like to comment, etc., I could not get myself the time needed to put things on paper.

Last Year Gaming

On the gaming front, some things were slowing down as others were growing. My main group has met less frequently. We were in the final stages of our years long campaign. It began with Phandelver, moved to Tyranny of Dragons and then mostly homebrew. One of the players quit, so we had to put this on pause. The rest of us began to think about strategies to keep things going, as I had less time to prepare.

The first one was episodic play. We were still in the same setting as the “main group” but following other adventurers. The main party had established a base, and these were the adventures of their retainers. It went well, using adaptations of pre-made adventures I had around (thanks DM Dave!) and pre-made characters. But 5e was still too demanding to prepare for, with the time I had.

We decided to change to other games and have rotating GMs. That way, the “burden” of prep would be divided among all. We started a space themed Savage Worlds game, which had an interesting start. We planned for an anything-goes game of 3DeT Victory, the new edition of a classic Brazilian game. But what really went well was the Monster of the Week games I started narrating.

For those who don’t know, MotW is a “PbtA” game, a game in the lineage of Apocalypse World, which USUALLY means most rules are described as “moves”. Each move must be narratively triggered by a specified condition. Then your roll dice and get a success, a success with a cost, or a failure. Failures trigger GM moves, which are more freeform. In MotW, GM never rolls dice. It has been a wonderful experience to adapt my narrating skills to this and a challenge for me and for the players.

The players got the hang of most basic moves extremely fast but were intrigued by “Kick Some Ass”, the main fighting move. With it, you deal your damage to the adversary, but they also deal their damage back on the PC (almost) every time. That confused some heads. I improvised that, if you could justify, they didn’t hit you back (as in, I shoot from a long distance). They also kept forgetting their “class” moves. Another difficulty was to remember to use resources, “Luck” in particular. They really liked the adventures though, the “countryside terror” and the “stained glass Saint George” were great monsters.

From my side of the screen, I was very satisfied that I had the tools to implement the pacing of the story as I wanted. The way the pre-made adventures are written is a bit confusing, it takes some time to get used to it. It strictly follows the sections of the “how to create adventures” chapter from the book, but they could be re-written in a more natural language, less schematically. Not being allowed to roll dice also confused me a lot in the beginning and I had to keep pushing the players more with “how do you react” and “what do you do” to get things going. I feel that sometimes they felt under pressure, as if I were asking them to use muscles they don’t usually need to (for 5e). Hope to develop the mythology of a series with more games going this year.

Finally, I joined the tabletop games group at work. Tabletop as in Monopoly, but good. You can read the details in the latest letters, but I had lots of fun, met great people, experimenting new games and bringing stuff back to RPGs later.

Next Year

For 2025 I begin with lots of intentions but knowing that not everything will be possible. I’m trying to manage expectations here.

First for the newsletter. I won’t promise any regularity. Between the baby, the job, and the new post-grad (future studies yeay!) things might not be regular at all. This post took three days to write, with the computer turned on and typing five minutes at a time, when I was free. That is after I had it all planned on paper.

I’m changing direction a bit though. The name still says it all: “insights”. These are my thoughts on the tabletop RPG games and community and the relations I can draw between this and broader themes. I’ll dial down the pure theoretical posting. We’ll see more commenting on other people’s ideas (as last time in September). I’m also changing the tone to this more conversational style, instead of a more academic or professional voice that I may have adopted in the past. It fits better with my style and I’m reading it’s some kind of trend now.

Some ideas I’m thinking about for the year:

• Making a “zungeon”. A dungeon zine.

• Write that “Travellers of the Caribbean” game.

• In Portuguese, write the real Brazilian OSR experience, based on what we REALLY had available to play.

• Test some of these in a new playing group, with people from the day job.

Tell me what you think about this new direction and ideas!

Thanks for reading GaboKerr’s RPG Insights! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Demigod

Demigod is my just-published entry for the 36-word RPG Jam. Check it out!

https://gabokerr.itch.io/demigod