It's a Hot Goblin Summer.
It's (Almost) August!
I don’t have a lot to say for myself this time - just landed a new job and all my brain cycles are tied up in that. I do think I have a real nice collection of links for your perusal, though.
Here’s what’s going on.
On The Docket
VOID 1680 AM is nominated for Best Solo TTRPG in The Crit Awards. The show airs August 14, and I’ll be watching. Hope to see you there, in the sense that we are both in a chat together or however it’ll work.
Chase Carter wrote up a real nice review of No-Tell Motel at Rascal, and it feels nice to be so clearly understood. The mystery drives the story, but ultimately isn’t the point of it. It is, as they say, the friends we make (or spy on) along the way.
I did a couple interviews for No-Tell Motel, and I’m pleased at how much different ground they covered. First was the interview with Marsh Davies of the Teeth newsletter (which I highly recommend subscribing to), where I got to talk about creating an exhaustive engine for noir-flavored vice and my personal approach to writing and playing solo games.
The second interview is with Brent Jans, where I talk about my origins as a player and game designer and get a little nuts-and-bolts with how to make and market a game. The gist: what “the pros” know that you don’t is the stuff you learn by doing, so just get started.
P.S.: Keep an eye on Brent’s Twitch page, he’ll be doing an Actual Play of No-Tell Motel soon.
There are also a couple Actual Play series coming based on my games!
Do You Validate will be breaking in their brand-new studio with a Killer Ratings series called The Avarice Hotel, featuring three stories and 15 cast members all investigating the same haunted hotel at three different points in time. It’s a hell of a concept. Sessions record next month and will release weekly in October leading up to Halloween. Check out that cast!
So cool!!! Tales Yet Told is creating an expansive Actual Play series using VOID 1680 AM, called 2048 AM Voices in the Wood. They’re planning to release five episodes (!) featuring 17 cast members (!!) and songs contributed by 28 music acts (!!!) starting August 14. Check out the press release on Rascal, and DO NOT miss the trailer. It’s cool as hell.
If you’re interested in that series and haven’t yet subscribed to the Bannerless Games YouTube where I broadcast all VOID 1680 AM player submissions, you should do that. Trust me on this one.
When I said it was going to be three weeks long I meant more like 2.5 months. The Disc 2 Jam was a big ol’ success, and it was gratifying to see a lot of game designers revisit old ideas or bring new ones to life. I’ve put together a collection of some of my favorites here, and must give a special shout-out to Lady Tabletop’s How Many Cooks Can Fit In This Kitchen? More Than You Think, a star-studded magazine article about a TTRPG that does not actually exist. That’s some next-level Disc 2 thinking, right there. It’s also a blast to read.
For Your Consideration
Here's some stuff I've been into lately.
“The Past Is Never Dead: On TV’s Backstory Problem” picks away at a burgeoning - problem? tendency? - in prestige TV; namely, the increasing weight put on traumatic backstories as “explanations” for a character’s current behavior. I’m less bothered by this than some, but I do think this trend (and its usual storytelling method, constant timeline jumping) can be kind of a lazy shorthand for pathos, and as often as not it feels like it’s trading on the symmetry-craving frisson of a prequel - how do we get from this scenario to the unlikely result I already know to be true? Which is a meta-pleasure, not one derived from character. I do think it’s a problem when “trauma” (yet another once-specific word now bleached into meaninglessness) is used to suggest the deformation of a character into their current state. Generally speaking, I prefer action to reveal character rather than create it, in passively received fiction as well as in interactive game spaces. One reason I resonate so strongly with horror, crime, and westerns is that they often begin with a stripping-away of civilizing pretenses to reveal who a person really is when the chips are down. That’s my cuppa.
I love to hate on generative AI, and I don’t think I’ve seen a better and more cutting piece doing just that than this one. It gets right at the heart of the problem, especially with the marketing: seeing instances of raw and beautiful human expression and connection as something to be automated and “perfected.” I simply don’t know how to reach people who think this way; their idea of what living is about is, as expressed in this desire, completely antithetical to my own. That said, I don’t think anyone really believes this shit anyway. It’s just the best use-case they could come up with after two years of stewing on it, which ought to tell you how thin the gruel really is.
This is just cool as hell: archaeologists have found concrete evidence of strong mingling between Rome and eastern civilizations of its time. I’m talking “Egyptian port with a statue of Buddha and a Greco-Roman carving of Indian gods” stuff. I also like that a lot of this evidence was found in ancient landfills and administrative detritus; just more evidence of humans doing their thing.
We just wrapped Vikings: Valhalla, which I actually liked more than the “main” show. I admire them both for a similar reason, which ties into the above article: they love moving their characters through other decidedly non-Viking cultures of the time. I don’t know if this is the way I was taught or simply how I received the information, but Young Ken tended to classify ancient and even medieval cultures as discrete and distinct worlds unto themselves, with their own laws and cultures and hard geographic boundaries that were rarely crossed (save for the handful of acknowledged conquerors). But it just wasn’t that way: we’ve always been wandering around and mingling, creating interesting new fusions of culture at more touchpoints than even the experts were imagining. I find that hopeful.
Like everyone else, I’m in love with Clayton Notestine’s “The 1 HP Dragon.” Plunking away at a mountain of HP with the same few moves is boring to me in tabletop and computer game spaces, so setting up boss battles as something more like puzzles to solve, using anything from weapons to political pull, is way more appealing. In some ways I think this makes the GM’s job much harder, or at least much more hands-on. But the results sound incredibly memorable, and the achievement felt by the party (provided they succeed) a lot more earned.
I really enjoyed this meandering essay from McMansion Hell called “the motel room, or: on datedness.” I’m about to quote from the piece at length (sorry), but you should really read the whole thing for a dreamy meditation on the transience of physical spaces, how much stuff disappears (and how quickly) because it falls short of nostalgia bait, and what hints of bigger ideas lay in the design of an utterly banal hotel room designed to be forgotten as soon as you walk out of it. These spaces are no one’s idea of beautiful or even worth preserving - call them a Platonic median - but they still act as a culmination or convergence of many ideas. They’re just not particularly noble ones.
The quote/definition: “Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.”
It’s even more beautiful in person. I got a tie-dye Hot Goblin Summer tank top from Inkling Press and I think it may have changed my life.
The “Songs of Summer ‘24” playlist continues to evolve - there’s 36 songs on there now! Throw it on, hit shuffle and go float in a body of water somewhere. Fall’s coming.
That's it.
See you next time.
