C is for Criminal Opportunities, Just Make Shit, and more!
This issue I have some pretty cool things to share with you: more City of Adventure Alphabet stuff, a manifesto, a cool way to start an adventure, and a lot more!
Weird Tales from the Old Skull
Hello, weirdos! 🤪
This issue I have some pretty cool things to share with you: more City of Adventure Alphabet stuff, a manifesto, a cool way to start an adventure, and a lot more!
Let’s get weird!
C is for Criminal Opportunities
Sometimes, in order to survive and to seek adventure another day, an adventurer must resort to less savory activities. Or sometimes they just see some job too good to pass and take the opportunity. And other times these rich bastards just deserve to be taken advantage of. Anyone, criminal opportunities abound in a decadent city such as this. How about some assassination? I bet no one will miss this abusive high priest. What about robbing the manor of that haughty noble? He has a lot more to spare. Or why not steal the coffers of the tax collectors? They are always taking more than they should anyway.
How to Use Criminal Opportunities
- A former partner, employer, or fellow adventurer might look for the characters for one last big score. They have the information, the maps, and everything. They just need some hands, and a small cut, of course.
- Rumors are spreading about a particular criminal opportunity that is hard to pass on. Criminals of all stripes are already lining up to take advantage of the situation. Can the PCs beat them to it?
- The characters might someday owe something to someone, they will come to collect, enlisting the PCs into a night of criminal activities. An opportunity came up and they need this to work!
Get letter A is for Alleys and B is for Bizarre Bazzaar here!
Become a member of the Weirdos’ Cool Club to get access to the whole City of Adventure Alphabet draft, with everything I have written so far, including each of the tables expanded to d20 results, and even more letters!
“Just Make 💩” Manifesto
I am writing a manifesto. It’s about how I make my games, my art, my work in general. It’s inspired by a lot of things I’ve learned over these 10 years I started making things for publication. I learned from a lot of people, from a lot of places, and I am trying to distill the essence of all this shit into a manifesto!
Everyone will have access to a simple text PDF when I finish this, but I will also make a fancy laid-out mini-zini of this manifesto. Weirdos’ Cool Club members will get their benefits, and I might print some copies as well. We will see.
Anyway, here’s a preview of the first 3… Commandments? That doesn’t sound right… 3 Practices of the “Just Make 💩” Manifesto.
Warning: The text below contains profanity. If you prefer, skip to Weird Discoveries below.
1. Make Shit Right Now
You don’t need much to make a game. A piece of paper, and a pencil will suffice, and I am pretty sure you have much more than that if you are reading this. Make shit with whatever you got, wherever you are, and whenever you can.     Â
Use the tools you have at your disposal, even if they are not ideal. All you really need to begin is something to write with/on. If you have a smartphone (and chances are you do), you have more than you need! I recommend you create and design on paper, and write and finish things up on the computer. But do the shit that works for you.
Work wherever you are, no matter where you are. Again, if you have a smartphone, you have more tools and resources than you need in your pocket, and you can carry it wherever you go. Also, a notebook can fit into any pocket with some pens, pencil and eraser! Make shit at home, make shit on the street, make shit as you travel, make shit wherever you are!
Finally, use whatever time you have! Life can get really busy, but you don’t need a lot of time to make shit! Work on train rides, while you are on the bathroom (much better than doomscrolling), during boring parties, on useless working meetings, on very little cranny you can find between the stuff you must do. Make time.
Make shit! Not excuses!
Free Shit
In this world of gadgets and abundance of materials and offers, we can get overwhelmed and believe we need all sorts of stuff to make your shit. You don’t! But having some cool tools, resources, and apps you can count on, and that are accessible or even free can be a tremendous help. What follows is by no means a comprehensive list of available resources, but they already provide a plethora of options and opportunities for you. So start making shit!
Free Software for Making Shit
There are a lot of high end cool looking, full of features you will never use anyway softwares out there. They cost money, and the most popular force you into a subscription model. You don’t need any of that to make shit, though! Here are some free alternatives for you!
Word Processor: Use Google Docs. You can use it from any computer, anywhere. You can use it on your phone. It is great! OpenOffice and LibreOffice work fine too. Even note apps work!
Image Editing: GIMP is an excellent software with a vibrant community and a lot of resources online. An alternative that is paid but it’s a single payment is Affinity Photo.
Drawing and Painting: Krita is probably the most famous free option, but there are others like Firealpaca and MyPaint.     Â
Layout: Theoretically you can layout with a word processor, but Scribus is the free way to go. If you want something more robust and accessible for a fair price, you cannot go wrong with Affinity Publisher. Additionally, you can even make a shit with Canva on your phone!
Vector Images: Inkscape is the way to go here. Affinity Designer is a solid choice if you can spend a little more.
Audio Editing: Audacity is the best choice here. Sometimes they fuck something up with an update, but then they fix it after a few days.
Video Editing: Apparently Olive is good. There is also Kdenlive.
Fonts
There are a lot of places to look for fonts, but not many that are good, safe, and reliable. Thankfully, the great people from Exeunt Press made a fantastic post on their newsletter/blog about Font Resources! Check it out! It is a must!
Art and Graphics
Do you need some cool graphics, illustrations, photos, and all sorts of graphic elements for your project but you are tight on budget? Forget AI, take a look at this post from the, again, the awesome folks at Exeunt Press.​​ They are so good they even made a second post with even more resources! You gotta check them out.
2. Make Shit Everyday
Make shit consistently. It’s better to work a little bit everyday than doing a lot of work one day here and another day there. Creativity is a muscle, and just like muscles, you gotta exercise regularly if you want to have a healthy creativity.
Like when you are starting to exercise, the actual beginning sucks! The muscle hurts, you feel like quitting, and there’s always something more important to do, or the TV looks way more attractive (just one more episode). Fight through that. Try to make shit everyday! Just a little shit should suffice. Start making shit for just 15 minutes per day if needed. Increase to 30 minutes whenever you feel like it. And then make shit for more time as you get creatively fit. Chances are that once you start and push through the first 5 minutes, the remaining time will not seem so daunting and you will actually want to continue.
And you don’t have to do all this shit in one sitting. I don’t. My life does not allow that. I got a day job that is kind of “on demand” so I may need to stop whatever I am doing to see to it. I am a divorced dad with a neurodivergent kid (while being neurodivergent myself). I am an adult, which is already enough work for anyone (how do you do this, people?). I try to have a social life (my friends mean a LOT to me). Anyway, time is a limited resource. I squeeze it like I am trying to make a lemonade with the last lemons on earth. If you want to make shit, grab a lemon squeezer!
Once you have a few days under your belt, sitting down and doing the work will start to feel easier. Once you’ve been doing this for weeks, you will miss it if you forget. Once you get a few months of this, you will crave making shit. It’s the best thing!
I Can’t Make Shit
You sit down to do your shit, and nothing comes out. You stare at the blank sheet of paper, and the ideas seem gone. Or you can’t quite put them into words. Or you have tried several times, but the words are not coming out right. Or this. Or maybe that. There will be many reasons you will think you can’t make shit. They are all lies. Push them aside. Turn out the inner critic, and just make shit, no filter, pour out anything that comes out. And try again tomorrow. It may take a while before the barrier breaks. Our brains have grown unaccustomed to being bored and not being constantly stimulated. Creativity requires stillness. Sometimes you will need to not make shit, so you can make shit later.
Cross That Shit Out
What really helps me is turning all that into a kind of game. Following the advice I read in Seal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon (a must read book for creators by the way), every year I get a wall calendar (I google 2020 something wall calendar), I print it out, tape it to the wall, and I cross out the days I managed to make some shit. Did I spend at least 30 minutes (now I demand 1 hour of myself) working on my shit? Cross that out! And the game consists on accumulating as many consecutive days as you can! I got 124 consecutive days in 2024. Just before Gary Con. I am at 81 continual days as of this writing. Will I beat my record? That’s the game!
Another great advantage of doing this is that you will have a visual representation of your effort, of your consistency, and you will see how your work grows from that. It’s incredibly motivating! You gotta do this shit!
3. Make Bad Shit
Make bad shit, but make it. Some of the greatest writers in history have already confessed that everyday they need to write 500 bad words as fast as they can, so the good ones can come out! You have to make bad shit so you can make good shit! It is really the only way to make good shit.
The real distance is not between good shit and bad shit. It is between making shit and making nothing. If you are making bad shit, you are still in the game, and you can get better the more you make shit! And you know what? You will get better at it! You just have to make bad shit first, and keep making it.
Also, what is shit for you might be gold for someone else! We are the biggest critics of our own work, and imposter syndrome is prevalent, especially among people who are doing really good stuff. Ask any of them. Most of the time they don’t know what is going on. They just make shit. Whether it's good or bad is irrelevant.
Become a member of the Weirdos’ Cool Club to get access to the whole Just Make 💩 draft, with everything I have written so far for it!
Weird Discoveries
I have some cool stuff I want to show you weirdos! First a couple of games, then a movie, and a podcast!
Urban Decay
I’ve been beaten to it and someone made a Beat’Em Up TTRPG before I did (although it’s pretty different than what me and a friend were planning). Play a game like Streets Of Rage, Final Fight, Double Dragon, and so many others at your own table! Very cool modular character system and the nostalgia I got from going through the book was tasty, I gotta say! I want to try it out, but it looks promising!
Corp Borg
A rules light, vibes heavy office crawl TTRPG inspired by Mörk Borg and the horrors of corporate life, with a little bit of Horror and Fantasy thrown in there! Your boss is literally summoning a demon in this game! Time o break the machine down!
The Running Man
This action movie from 1987 with Arnal Shwarzenegger is set at the USA in a dystopian fascist future of 2017. Enemies of the state (pretty much anyone who disobays the state, or asks questions) are thrown into a reality show where they are hunt by professional killers on national television. There is fake news, corrupt media which server the state. Any resemblance to reality is just a coincidence… or is it?
Blogs on Tape
Ok, this might not be a discovery. But I didn’t know Blogs on Tape was back with new episodes! Nick is a busy person and can’t always record episodes (you can actually record some for the show yourself), so I am pleased to see there’s a lot of stuff in there. This is basically one of the best podcasts about RPGs out there, as it is basically some of the best TTRPG blogposts out there read out loud. FANTASTIC idea!
Get Weird with WG&WP
Two other great guests have appeared on Weird Games and Weirder People! Get weird with us, as we talk art, creativity, process, inspirations, things we learned, weird experiences, and a lot more.
Philip Reed
Philip Reed loves to create stuff and things, from roleplaying game supplements to music to whatever sounds fun at that exact moment in time. He can often be found working when he should be sleeping. He has been doing this for more than 30 years, and chances are you have played something he had his hands on. I feel in love with his work through Frag, and I've loved his presence since he was super kind to me years ago! Enjoy!
Jim Pinto
jim pinto is a nearly 30-year veteran of the gaming industry, having written roleplaying games, board games, card games, a novel, comic books, and even screenplays. He's even won awards for writing, graphic design, art direction, and one dog show. His career includes roles in art, design, production, publishing, and writing, covering nearly every aspect of game design. In this chat we talk about making games, influences, how good guys finish last, and a lot of other weirdness!
Weirdos’ Cool Club Report
So, what’s going on in the club this week?
WhatsApp group!
Yeah, WhatsApp. Not Discord. Sorry. That’s what I use. I don’t know why, but I can’t grok Discord. I’ve tried it many times. It’s too much. WhatsApp isn’t great, but it works, it’s simple, and it gets the job done. We can talk there, I can record messages with weird Ideas (since I already do that anyway), we can schedule the meeting there, and all sorts of stuff.
That’s All Wonderful Weirdos!
Thanks for reading Weird Tales from the Old Skull! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. If you have any coins left from your latests adventures, please, consider contributing to this newsletter by joining the Weirdos’ Cool Club, and get even more wonderfully weird stuff!
Keep it weird everybody! ;)