Quindecim Timores

People really seem to like pictures. So, here's a picture of the first page of the fourth mechanics document in my game.

I'm staring at a pile of only a couple hundred pages of documentation the now coherently describes a game system in which a player gets to steer a character who progressively becomes less human and more monstrous. This is what I've been aiming for this whole time.

"Forms are an option at Eidolon that allow a Weird Stunt to have multiple mechanically distinct configurations. Weird Stunt effects are distributed among those Forms, and regular Stunts may require particular Forms as prerequisites." Getting even Weirder now.

Weird Stunts in Quindecim Timores is an optional additional build system for players who ask whether their shadow can have hands, whether those hands can Grapple, and whether the shadow should scream when they take Soul Stress. I'm not a coward, so I'm not going to call it Weird if it isn't weird.

it turns out that sometimes, the answer to a complex subsystem in a game is to slap a big 'OPTIONAL' label on it and just let it be what it is. #TTRPGwriter #horrorWriter #TTRPGdev #soloDev

Seven hours of documentation revisions later and one whole ass chunk of the system now reads like something that might be understood by someone who isn't in my head instead of deeply cursed word salad pinned to a cork board and connected by red yarn. Anyone interested in beta reading?

So how do any of you engage an audience for your games? I see that most of the material on here is screenshots and artwork, which works great for video games, but not so great for text based TTRPGs. #indieGameDev #indieTTRPG #TTRPGwriter #horrorTTRPG #soloGameDev #soloTTRPGdev

I swear to every god, my inability to accept 'good enough' is going to make this shit take another year and a half to finish.

If a game feels like any player character could be swapped out for a different player character without changing the shape of story advancement or outcome, I'm out. I'll just play a video game or write a story instead.

"Think of Affinity as inoculation. A high Affinity in Violence doesn't mean your Character has become brave, it means the alarm that used to fire when violence was present has been worn smooth by exposure. They don't flinch the way they once did."

"Something patient, inhuman, and wholly beyond comprehension pressed against your life. For a moment you were visible in a way you had never been before. You saw something you never could have imagined was possible. Worse, something impossible had an opportunity to notice you back."

sorry for the month of dead air. I had a prophetic dream and rebuilt a chunk of the game system into something exquisitely more elegant that does its job better than the previous iteration did. #ttrpg #indieDev #horrorWriting #horrorTTRPG

now it's time to put real work into fleshing out the starter adventures. I'm deeply looking forward to offering a set of four parallel 5-session modules for people to play with. #QuindecimTimores #horrorTTRPG #soloTTRPGdev

my Tier 1 material is.... finished. Like, legitimately finished. I even built out the glossary on Core Mechanics I, and I fucking hate glossaries. I have tears in my eyes. It's beautiful, and I'm proud of it. #soloGameDev #indieGameDev #horrorTTRPG #horrorWriting

I've entirely thrown out any attempt to reduce my prose to the 10th-ish grade reading level expected in a TTRPG rulebook. Haters can pry 'actuate', 'imminent', 'ineffable', and 'confounding' from my cold, dead hands. I will meet them in hell. #indieDev #soloIndieDev #TTRPGdesign #horrorTTRPGs

That other feeling, when you find exactly the perfect thing in your game system, and then start angling the design of everything else to show up in the same register. Unf. I need a cigarette after today's work session.

That feeling when you rebuild a subsystem for the fifth time and it finally locks in with the satisfaction of symmetry to the rest of the game. #feelsGood #IndieDev #TTRPGDev #SoloDev

The craft difference between a jump-scare and fridge horror: The jump-scare crosses the line AT the player, uninvited. Fridge horror crosses it by letting the player walk over the line themselves and only later notice their own footprints. On their own time.

There's no diversion quite so diverting as peeling apart the Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum (1619) to build an in-setting cosmology correspondence chart inside of a game you've written, and realizing that you have more than enough cosmological correspondences to produce such a thing.

Today I realized that I have a very specific shape of storytelling, and that's shaped how I've been building my game system and setting. I'm now a bit worried that other people are going to pick it up and find it incompatible for a reason I can't even see, and discard it for reasons I can't explain

the downside to running a game where character situations generate big feels, is that I have to then be mindful while handling players who are having big feels.

there's something strange and delightful about how the pacing changes when a system nears completion. there aren't as many different tasks for me to split my attention between. the list of what's left is short, and most of the entries are deep rather than broad.

Last night and today's task: build out about 4 dozen different potential 'specialist' character builds at various anchor points to stress test the system for powergamers without screwing over casual-build players. #SoloTTRPGdev #TTRPGwriting #GameMechanics #SoloIndieDev

nothing like combing through 200 pages of documentation in a single day to change just five words. But find-and-replace doesn't account for grammatical usage. #soloDev #TTRPGwriter

I'm trying to tilt the vocabulary in the game so the first-encountered, most-common, lowest-power terms are familiar words; and increase in unfamiliarity and esoteric weight at the top where end-game content lives and those novel words have context to land in that helps them hold significance

escalating power/strength levels inside discrete categories: Mundane -> Marked -> Supplicant -> Eidolon The four tiers of gameplay, the character types Echo -> Lair -> Temenos The three types of territory in the Real, in increasing degrees of saturation of influence

spreadsheets. I fucking love a good spreadsheet. I never see them in rulebooks (always tables or charts), and I can't figure out why - which makes me think that using spreadsheets for data organization might be some kind of mistake I'm not aware of? #indieTTRPGdev

What's up, #ttrpgdesign ? Looking for more mutuals that I can read and respond to. I'd love to see and support what others are doing in this niche. Especially #HorrorTTRPG