Started a new campaign on Sunday, running Urban Shadows. My hope here is to learn from the mistakes of the first game (and the last time I tried running an intrigue-driven PbtA game with The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power) and start the characters as something at least resembling a party, all pointed in the same direction. Given where we are in Session 1 this seems to be working, with both the characters sticking together and still acting on their own motives and mucking things up for each other.

As I reread the notes I shared with the players on Sunday, it occurred to me I’ve created, essentially, a half-built Jenga tower with all the factions I’ve written. If nothing happens, it will keep standing, but we’re only an action or two away from everything falling down. It’s a good setup for the game’s faction mechanics because if you think about it, everything being somewhat in balance makes sense for groups that are potentially centuries old. It takes a new pressure or stressor to throw things out of whack and get everybody at each other’s throats. Starting the campaign with a single inciting incident is a good way to see organically who comes to the fore and how the faction mechanics are going to be used, and right now I don’t exactly know how everything is going to land.

The Jenga metaphor is apt (if perhaps a bit forced) because I’m also in the process of writing a game using literal Jenga. For my group’s Beach Weekend I’m going to be running Mothership, but instead of the traditional rules it’s going to use Dread. Yes, Dread, the horror game built around pulling bricks from a Jenga tower. I’m still trying to write my hybrid system for this (there will be a Cannibal Halfling article in the near future), but the basic idea is to port over three main Mothership concepts into the Dread format: Stats and skills, saves, and stress and panic. This may mean that my version of Dread doesn’t necessarily permanently remove a character from the game when the tower falls; my current idea is that for sanity and fear saves, a collapsing tower will trigger panic and remove the character temporarily until the panic effect resolves. Given how I plan to use stress, this is still likely to evolve into removing characters permanently, but allowing for collapses to not be the complete end will at least slightly lengthen the game. This sort of change to the core principles of Dread does remind me that ‘Dreadship’ hasn’t gotten much in the way of playtesting (none. There has been no playtesting), but if the game goes well this year, I may tweak it and try it again next year.

To keep the forced metaphor going, the tower that was my interest in cyberpunk seems to have completely collapsed. I talked about this a bit before, but now that our Cyberpunk game has concluded my interest in returning to the genre has really shriveled up. I’ve noticed this most starkly in my reading habits, and unfortunately that means that the collection of cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent books I’ve acquired but never read is remaining unread for the immediate future. As I note in the article above, the reality of the present we now live in has made reading cautionary tales about a very similar future not only not entertaining but also depressing and exhausting. I think one author I read very recently reflects my current desires for genre fiction; I devoured the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, as well as both Monk and Robot books. Her brand of optimistic sci-fi paired with worldbuilding that does not discount or diminish the troubled legacy of human history is exactly what I feel my brain needs right now. To that end, I’m searching for more optimistic science fiction and fantasy, with the caveat that optimism must be earned for it to hold my attention. I’m a notoriously picky reader, but even in spite of that I would like to read more fantasy than I have been.

A short (and late) update for this week, but there’s a lot going on between work, hobbies, and the generally bleak state of the world. Hopefully as I get back into the writing swing there will be more to share and discuss here throughout the rest of September.