So, another year over, and that I survived. A new one just beginning, bringing who knows what opportunities, challenges and trials.
It seems like it’s time to look back and look ahead, achievements and plans, that sort of thing.
The big thing that has made the past year different, and positive, for me has been that I’ve been in paid employment for the entire calendar year. This has literally never happened before in my life, and it’s meant I’ve had more money for good things and to help out a few of those in need in my social media circles, than ever before. I have bought myself many nice things and been able to afford experiences and events I wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise.
I’ve continued creating TTRPGs through 2023, even though I had kind of planned to step back from it. I just kept getting ideas that deserved development. I made 3 new games, plus the SRD one of them is based on: The Goldilocks Dice System.
Goldilocks came about through a Twitter discussion about dice mechanics and roll high vs roll low. In Goldilocks, you want to hit the middle two values on the dice you’re rolling. The extremes (1 or maximum value) are total failures and the values in between mid and top/bottom are various levels of “success with complication” or “failure with less cost”. The key thing is, a failure too high should be different from a failure too low, because if you overdo something it generally doesn’t have the same consequence as not doing it enough. Why Goldilocks? Because you want to be not too hot, not too cold, but just right!
The game based on it is Dinosaur Sleuths In Rural England, in which you are undercover dinos but also private detectives based on the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s famous creations, and so on. Your rolls to investigate the horrendous crime that has befallen the little quaint village can be too enthusiastic, too timid, or just right.
I also made a horror movie themed game (Iron Taste Of Blood) using the Iron Core SRD, in which your party find themselves in an isolated region with a mysterious killer hunting them. It plays into classic horror tropes, and requires a certain lack of genre-savvy from the characters to get things started, but relies on the player choices to prioritise between time spent, effort expended, and quality of work – if your attempt to escape depends on your making the thing work, but you have to spend too long fixing it, then the Killer might strike before you’re finished…
The last game I made was another new system, but I haven’t worked out how to make it into a generalised SRD yet. This time, you’re using a wheel of fortune approach, with different skills arranged around the wheel – rolling the dice determines where the spinner lands for each roll, with some results more probable than others (where you place each skill determines which is most likely). The game is Our Deeds Worthy Of Song (Honest!) – or ODWOSH for short. It’s inspired by the card game Braggart, in which players compete to tell the greatest tale of derring-do, but can fall foul of having the truth revealed by another player altering their story to make it less heroic.
In ODWOSH, the players are the whole party, while the GM is more of an interested audience for their tale. The party clearly succeeded and survived whatever feat they’re telling of. The game is all about how epic or farcical the adventure turned out to be, and how will the story be told of the adventurers’ amazing or otherwise deeds? That makes it a very nice zero-peril type of game if that’s your speed, when the worst that can happen to your character is that they had an embarrassing accident on their way to victory.
In 2024 I really do hope to step back from writing and creating TTRPGs. What I want most of all is to get people to play them on livestreams or Actual Plays – with or without my involvement. I’d also like to do a bit more performing or joining in on people’s livestreams and generally being more active as a roleplayer.
Speaking of – In 2023 I was also hugely involved in the Cybertopia Actual Play podcast created by Ben Newbon (writer of the game of that name). My new-age lover of big explosions who may (or may not) have imbibed some mind-expanding substances just prior to being kicked out of the police SWAT team applied cosmic philosophy and forced entry techniques to solving the various problems facing the teams on which they found themselves. There are too many great characters to mention but the whole first season is out now, and it is well worth the listen.
I wasn’t just a performer in Cybertopia in 2023. I also wrote the theme music and intro sting for the podcast. I’ve been getting more into electronica, and combining synth and synthwave styles with more natural instruments. This came together best for the “Finale” version of the theme, which isn’t currently available online. You can listen to the main version, Cybertopia Horizons, on Soundcloud.
Also available on Soundcloud, early in the year I created a synth-y set of tracks exploring the “Axis progression” or “4 chords of pop” by applying the sequence to other scales and modes than the usual major or minor key versions, as an entry in a challenge on one of the discord servers I’m signed up to. “Projections In Multiple Axes” hopefully creates a journey as well as being linked by the same underlying chord relations.
The main thing I did musically was just acquire more instruments and things to help me create the music that I love. From synthesisers to new guitars (an electro-classical guitar, a 3-string cigar box guitar and a fantastic single-coil Squier), and most recently an electric double bass (upright bass). But all of them have expanded my possibilities in recording and hopefully performing. I’m really excited to make more music in 2024, maybe even accepting commissions to write more themes and stings for performers out there to give them unique sonic signatures.
The big reason I want to take a break from TTRPG writing is so I can focus a bit more time on some other areas of creativity. I want to write and publish more stories, and have set myself the goal in 2024 of publishing some utterly filthy porn short stories on Smashwords, alongside my more feminist-themed BDSM relationship drama. I’d also like to finish one or two of my stalled WIPs in the video game creation area, and maybe finally create a 3d game that is actually playable. In 2023 the only game I made was a very short “explore the map” type game for a Game Jam with the theme “Brief Respite”. My game was called Safe For Tonight and features a top-down line-of-sight mechanic executed in a different engine than the previous game with a similar mechanic, that I made back in 2019. (One of the WIPs I’d like to finish uses the same mechanic, so it seemed worth revisiting!)
So there it is.
My 2024 goals:
- Write MOAR PORN – although new legislation may make that troublesome as far as artwork is concerned.
- Do more TTRPG performances with other people
- Finish some video game ideas
Valery North - Writer 