In the Works

Hey guys. I wanted to update you all on what I've been up to.

The other day I got inspired to make a push to finish America's Next Top Reality Show, so it will most likely be my next Patreon release, hopefully some time this month. It's a party card game I've been working on for a while, part of my "word salad" game family that I started with Channel A. I wanted to make a game that was a bit more compact and maybe a bit more mainstream, though I did not expect the end result to wind up being quite so subversive. Like in Channel A you put words on cards together to form a title and then pitch it to your friends, but where Channel A has Premise Cards, ANTRS has Demographic Cards, which it turns out are really good at keeping the game about cynical pandering. It’s also just plain smaller than Channel A, partly because the Title Cards each have two title words on them to choose from.

Another nifty little thing with ANTRS is that I'm using stock photos. There's a whole industry that provides stock photos for various things; you'll often see them in things like magazine articles and textbooks. That in turn means there's a ton of photographers who take pictures of various things in the hopes of selling them. There's some really cool stuff, some thoroughly mundane stuff, and a surprising amount that's just plain weird. While I love working with artists, shopping for stock photos is also a really fun thing to do, and I'd like to see more tabletop games that make good use of stock photos. That's what the major expense for realizing ANTRS is going to be, though given enough time and money I could really go nuts with those.

Lately I've been saddled with the flu, plus an ear infection, so I haven't been feeling up to doing stuff like playtesting RPGs, hence the shift in focus to something I can handle right now. That said as usual I have way too much stuff cooking and recently cooked:

• Thanks in part to your support, Raspberry Heaven is now available via both DriveThruRPG and Indie Press Revolution.

• Not too long ago I was interviewed on the Who What Why Cast about Channel A, which was pretty cool. Since Raspberry Heaven came up, the conversation led to the idea of making quick chargen cards for Schoolgirl RPG, which are now an actual thing.

• I'm still working on the Dangerously Kawaii trilogy, though that's one of the things I need to playtest.

• I put out a "5.0 Alpha" version of Magical Burst, with just enough rules to be playable. I already have enough things to work on from feedback that I need to make time to work on 5.01, but I'm really happy with the core of the system so far.

• I hit on the idea to make a PDF of "anime oracles," with "oracles" in the style of In a Wicked Age for a variety of anime genres.

• I'm thinking about doing some new material for Schoolgirl RPG. I was originally thinking in terms of a supplement with even more material in the general vein of what's been in the game so far, but I hit on the idea of doing a writeup of a school with kind of a Welcome to Night Vale influence, and that may turn into a book of its own.