Irons In Fires

Happy Zine Month!

I've made a goal to publish 6 things in 2026. I'm knee deep in laying out and polishing up Bolthaven Folio #3 right now, and I've got a new editing gig in the door, so the next few weeks feel very full. I've got some other projects in the hopper, but I may take a look back and rehab some old projects during March. So let's see what's on my mind lately.

The Present

I've done some testing with the Settlement System that appears in Bolthaven Folio #3. It's minimal as tests go, but I think the system holds up. It'll be interesting to see this work at larger settlement sizes. I'm hoping to get that published this week for Zine Month (#ZiMo), so stay tuned. And the aforementioned editing gig just kicked off, so I'll be distracted for the next few weeks.

NanoRegent, a Tiny Game of Countries

Here's the second game I wrote for the 200 Word RPG Challenge. You can download it (50K PDF) or run it directly from the text below.

This design springs from my love of Birthright and roleplaying a country using domain turns. It's roughly Fate-based, though in NanoRegent you burn Stats like Advantages. This could use a few playtests, as I think it would support episodic campaign play. I'm not sure the renewal rate for Cities is quite right - I originally had a City give +1 every 3 turns, but that could make early turns into more of a death spiral.

I bet it'll take another 20-50 words to explain some concepts more fully, but even that should still fit on both sides of an index card.

Feedback welcome!

Provenance, a Nano RPG

I blame +David Schirduan for making me aware of the 200 Word RPG Challenge he's running until Friday, 01 May 2015. If you're interested, write something and submit it, and go read the dozens of entries so far.

You can download a PDF of Provenance here (335KB PDF), or from the challenge page when it's up. I'll work on making a more useful/pretty PDF version and make it available, possibly pay what you want on DriveThru. Stay tuned for details.

The funny thing is, this game interrupted the one I actually spent time working on. It demanded to be let out first. So be it.

If you play, please let me know how it goes. I love to hear stories.

And yes, the section names are intentionally alliterative. Because I find language fun.

I blame Lovejoy.