Another day in Iron Country
I’ve been uhhh not great about updating this thing regularly. Has it really been since March? And since November since I actually wrote an update? Wow.
Well, I want to apologize, first of all. And admit that I’m probably never actually going to finish that piece on process-based therapy. We’ll see! I’m currently geeking out about inhibitory learning theory but I’m not sure whether it warrants a post of its own or not.
My big bit of news is that about two months ago, I released a tabletop roleplaying game that I wrote over the past year and a half or so. It’s called Bump in the Dark, and it’s a “monster of the week” style game taking place in the early to mid-90s in a fictional version of Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It uses the Forged in the Dark system as its base and highlights mystery-solving and clue-gathering as being as important as kicking monsters’ asses.
I’ve run dozens of sessions now and I think it’s a lot of fun, and I’ve gotten great feedback from others suggesting the same. It’s done pretty well so far, especially for being a game that is technically still in “early access,” and was actually briefly (less than 48 hours) the top selling and most popular physical game on the games sales platform Itch.io. I don’t know how much that really matters, but it’s kinda cool, even if now it’s dropped off the top 100. (I still get multiple sales each week, though, so that’s pretty rad!)
I think it could be fun to talk about some of the design decisions if folks might find that interesting at all. For example: why the hell is it set in 1994 in the U.P.? Why did I collapse position and effect together? What was the process of writing the game like? and so on. So maybe I’ll do that, but I’ve learned not to make promises since now every time I think about updating this newsletter I feel crippling anxiety about having to write part two of an article about process-based therapy.
Anyway! If you’re at all interested in checking out the game (and I think you should if you haven’t already), you can buy it here. I’m currently working to raise money to pay for copy editing, original art, and (hopefully) an eventual print edition.
And here’s the incredible cover art by Eddie Monotone:
Cheers!
jex