AquaVertigo Publishing

Catching My Breath

Here’s what’s going from this week with a singular post.

Series Playtesting

Mockup covers for Found RPG (left) and Dark Well RPG (right), David MK.

This week we are scheduled to begin series playtests of both the Found RPG and the Dark Well RPG. I’m preparing files and rules with equal parts joy and nervous energy.

I tested changes made to Found during Cortex Con Online and am looking forward to seeing how they affect multi-session play. We’ll get to see how the shared-consciousness clone conspiracy plays out.

I’ve made a number of updates to the rules for Dark Well that I am excited to test with our Dwellers, exploring the paranormal conspiracy we create.

MAU Hex Crawl Update

Due to RL commitments I’m still in the process of catching up on creating the responses for the hex crawl project. I have been posting blank templates for people to download and respond to.

Going in Quiet

Yesterday during Corridor Games on Demand’s game day we had enough people to break into two groups. James was kind enough to share Public Access with some of the attendees and I shared The Quiet Year with a couple others.

The Quiet Year is a wonderful map-making game about community. I think of it in the same area of indie games such as Microscope and Fall of Magic for reasons. You use a deck of cards with prompts and actions to add to or modify a shared map about your post-even community of survivors over one year. The game ends when a card with The Frost Shepherds shows up during the Winter season.

It was great to see the players hold discussions, discover something new, and start projects. We had many discussions. Our abundances and scarcities flipped back and forth and there were several times when it felt our community was destined for doom in spite of itself.

Our main and most important starting abundant resource was beauty and it cost us dearly time and time again. We finished the game with triple the food, and survived in a recently discovered cave with canned food and electricity, so we were okay when our saviors/new overlords appeared. Hopefully they will have better luck dealing with the deadly dog-sized porcupines than we did.

Here’s our two-sheet map, David MK.

Here’s our list of info being tracked, including resources.

Next Steps

I’m slowly catching up post RL commitments and returning to my list of creative work.

Feedback

Let me know what you think. Was this helpful or insightful?

 

Author

DMK, the founder of AquaVertigo, is a creatively curious artist, author, designer, educator, entrepreneur, and organizer based in the Midwest, USA.

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