What I’ve Been Up To

I’ve mostly been busy with other stuff, as you may have noticed by my lack of newsletter updates. There’s a few ideas I’ve been working on the last year or so, and I’ve decided to finally start writing them down. My plan for this year is to focus on writing blog posts and maybe eventually finish that one solo module for Cairn.

Character values

One set of blog posts is an improved system for generating character motivations and alignments using a system of 20 opposing values. For example, you could have a character who values ruthlessness, courage and honesty. Another one values humility, stoicism and tradition. I just randomly rolled them right now, but I think those pretty quickly give you an idea of the type of person they are and their motivations.

It also works for factions as well. Maybe the former character is from an order of knights that predominantly values courage and honesty. The ruthlessness is all her, though.

I talk about this in detail in 20 Virtues and/or Vices. I also talk more about my motivations for doing so, and complain about alignment, here.

Drawing

I'm trying to get better at drawing, which has mostly taken the form of quick sketches of whatever shows up in pexel's "new" feed. I'm mostly posting these to my Mastodon account. They're better than they used to be but not as good as I'd like them to be. I guess that's progress. Here's one of the better ones. I conveniently ran out of room to do one of the hands poorly.

Other

I procrastinated on writing this newsletter by making a random place name generator.

Games I've been playing

• I'm finishing up playing in a 4 year campaign of Blades in the Dark. We're wrapping up most of the loose ends with World Ending Game before our final score.
• I ran a PbP game which petered out as PbP games do. We played Try The Beetle Juice, with Cairn.
• I've been playing in a west marches style game of Wolves Upon The Coast, which is a great game for that style, as well as a PbP game of Rise of the Blood Olms.
• I playtested Tarnation, a solo game with a pretty cool engine for generating interesting story conflicts, as well as one of the more compelling Western settings I've played.
• I also played God's Gonna Cut You Down, which has a great system for playing a doomed protagonist. Both do a good job of solving a problem many solo-first games have, which is having a sense of progression in them. I wrote both up here
• I played One Breath Left and wrote up the game here.

Other things

I also improved my manually written website and RSS feed. I am starting to feel like I should have used something pre-existing.

Also, if you followed me through Substack, Substack no longer seems to show my bio saying I’m now on Buttondown. So that’s why you’re getting my newsletter through Buttondown.