October Catch-Up

Hey, hello! It’s been a minute. Great to see you again! You’re looking marvelous today. Yes, you! The one reading this!

Today’s update is a little more newsletter-y, talking more about what’s in the works and what I’ve been working on. It’s been busy around here, so let’s dive-in and catch-up!

In escalating order of busy-ness, let’s talk about…

Games I’ve Partially Reviewed And Need To Return To

I’ve played, and written partial reviews for, Apothecaria and Daggerheart. Alas, these articles are incomplete, and for the quality I want, it might be a minute before I get back into them. They were fun! I can’t wait to pull them out again and finish taking pictures and writing words. The downside is, I may have to start halfway-from-scratch, as I re-read the dusty tomes and manuals. The upside is, it’ll be good to review them from both the first-run, and from an experienced-returner perspective.

Games I’m Reviewing Now

Anna Blackwell, the same writer of Apothecaria, has written a smattering of fun games and zines. If that game is a manual for brewing potions and curing cases of Dwarven Lung and sudden-onset Restless Bones, then For Small Creatures Such As We is an exploration of the cosmos, complete with bounty-hunting and xeno-dating. It’s Mass Effect on paper, with 52-cards and a d6.

I actually bought the physical book on this one — I can’t wait for it to come in, so I can take tons of pictures. (For now, my crew is getting along with just the PDF.)

Games I’m Reviewing Soon

But wait, there’s more!

Hot off the press, Elegy just launched the beta for version 4. Think Vampire: the Masquerade meets Ironsworn. Fun fact, my time playing version 3.5 is a big inspiration for the format of this blog. I’ve gotten to know the writer a bit from his Discord server, and I can’t wait to dive into the all-new system. Moro’s a dang artiste!

Also — myeditorsaidIneedtomakefewerpromisessothisisexplicitlyNOTapromise — there’s news in the works regarding a rather-popular old-school-themed solitaire dungeon-delving-on-pen-and-paper game. I can’t say much more yet, and I don’t have an exact timeline other than “soon”, but my fingers are crossed for the announcement, and yours should be too 😎

Games I’m Running

I’m so, super, mega-excited to talk about this one.

You know our sun, right? Like, you know of it, at least, I hope. That big glowing ball of fire? What if it… exploded? And, like, it stopped being there. That would be weird, right?

Lately I’ve been hiding out after-hours, cooking up a “West Marches”-inspired Daggerheart campaign called The Starless Marches, set in a world with, you guessed it, no sun nor stars.

The sun exploded, the gods abandoned the world, civilizations collapsed everywhere. A hundred years and a couple generations later, it’s time to rise up once again!

Right now, the main times are on Monday nights (American), Tuesday nights (European), and Friday nights (also European), with Thursdays for the introductory sessions. I’ve been running an introductory one-shot called The Lighthouse of Old Astralon. It’s totally beginner-friendly, too: learn Daggerheart and have fun while you’re at it!

• Thursday, 16 Oct (Abre numa nova janela) (America evening)

• Thursday, 23 Oct (Abre numa nova janela) (Europe evening / America midday)

• & even more Thursdays after that!

And that’s a wrap!

I’m gonna try and hold myself to getting FSCSAW posted in the next week or so. Sooner would obviously be better, but that review will be look so much better if I can take gameplay photos alongside the physical book, so hopefully the international shipping lanes aren’t too busy. I think it’s coming from the UK, so who knows, really?

Also — I can’t believe I didn’t say this yet! — I’ll be getting my hands on a physical copy of Cartograph in the near future. Again, shipping-dependent, but to celebrate, I’ll be reviewing that game too.

Take care, see you soon, stay safe, play games, good luck, have fun!