I underestimated puppets.
Hello darlings. I wrote a letter for you. It’s mostly about games. Contents:
1 - I’m making a game about puppets.
2 - Am I the only person who’s ever made a pitch deck for a game night? Probably not, but I can’t be in good company.
3 - Here’s a glimpse of my life, if you’d like it.
4 - I would like to write you letters.
1 - I’m making a game about puppets.
Depending on the kind of person you are, this is either exciting or unsettling. Puppets, I’ve learned, are a polarizing bunch.
Two years ago, I started writing a live-action roleplaying game (larp) about a failing children’s television show. The process of making this game has been rather like pulling an earthworm from the ground, only to find that it is much longer than an earthworm ought to be. Everyone is staring at you and the strange thing you’re exhuming. At some point, you realize that this is an awful lot of earthworm and you could really use some help.
Sock Puppets is a very silly sort of game where you yell at each other in puppet. The game is filled with messy relationships and passive-aggressive hissing and very misguided educational practices. It became a much better game when I accepted that the best part is having an excuse to make and play with puppets.
Right now, perhaps in honour of that acceptance, I’m making a puppet. Well, not right now. Right now, I’m trying to be charming while I write you a letter.
But right now — in a relative sense — I’m making a puppet. He’s made of fleece and foam. He doesn’t have eyeballs yet.
I’m making him to present my Kickstarter video for Sock Puppets, because a puppet game without a puppet to present it is a missed opportunity. But I’ve learned something critical in the process.
Puppets are actually really hard to make.
“Puppetmaking” is a convenient lie constructed to hide dozens of increasingly strange skillsets: sculpting, sewing, geometry, character design, measurement, blade handling, anatomy. Puppets have puppet hair and puppet clothes; puppet eyes and puppet nose; puppet fingers, puppet toes1. All of this must be made.
My dining room table is a graveyard of foam and scrap fabric and tools I thought were only used during Thanksgiving.
High on the thrill of making a dozen paper bag puppets during the playtesting of Sock Puppets, I assumed a fully built, fancy looking puppet would be perhaps twice or three times as difficult.
Reader, I was wrong. For my hubris, I will be punished; no one watching the video will ever know how hard it was to make this puppet.
Do not fly too close to the sun, or it will melt your hot glue.
2 - Am I the only person who’s ever made a pitch deck for a game night? Probably not, but I can’t be in good company.
I’m very lucky. In many ways, but specifically this one: almost every Monday, I get to hop online and stream an indie roleplaying game with two dear friends who are both charming and brilliant. (Too charming sometimes. I’m currently investigating if they are fairy changelings, and if you don’t hear from me again, they were.)
We generally play one-shots, which are self-contained stories that wrap up in a single tidy evening. Tomorrow is the start of a rare treat: an ongoing story which will take us a couple months to work through. But we haven’t picked a game.
Ever the overengineer, I made a little pitch deck to share the three options we might play. All of them are different. What would you choose?
These games have a few things in common: I’ve never played them before, I adore other works by the same creators, and they are deeply idiosyncratic and exciting. I can’t wait to see what my friends choose.
I’ll link our livestream in a future letter. Right now, all I offer are pretty baubles and a buzzing excitement.
2.5 Interlude: are you having fun?
I hope so. They won’t usually be this long, I don’t think. Maybe stick around and find out, just to be sure.
3 - Here’s a glimpse of my life, if you’d like it.
Right now, I am trapped on a train. It’s a nice place to be trapped, all things considered: there’s air conditioning and wireless internet and seats with enough room to stretch without touching a stranger’s hair.
But it is a little delayed. Perhaps the departure board was an omen.
I was visiting my family for my father’s birthday. In a montage of fond trip memories, you would see me:
Sharing a crossword puzzle and gimlets with my mother;
Chasing after a glow-in-the-dark golf ball that I’ve over-putted with all the control of a caffeinated child;
Pushing buttons in a darkened basement where I spent much of my youth.
At this moment, the train is passing a rusted industrial garage with a landlord-beige oven sitting in its yard. It’s for sale — the garage. Perhaps someone will be charmed by the chipped paint, or the earnest-looking headshot of the real estate agent.
The sun is setting. I’ll be home soon.
I would like to write you letters.
This is the first of, I hope, many letters. They’re about me and my art: what I’ve made, played, thought. I think you’ll like this if you like games, or stories, or Kurt Refling, or things that happen once a fortnight. (Maybe once a sesquifortnight, if I’m busy or slothful.)
Please subscribe, if it suits you. Maybe you’d also like to join my Discord server, where you can talk about this letter and share little glimpses of yourself back. The server is probably quiet at the time of you reading this; it’s a new space, waiting to become itself.
Thank you for reading.
Warmth,
Kurt
1My puppet does not have toes, but I think we can both agree it was a cute rhyme.