No Map, No Plan, and a Revolutionary Development

WELL it’s been ages since a proper Dispatch, I know, but despite all the silence 2024 has been (by my standards) an extremely busy and productive year so far!

No Map, No Plan

DriveThruRPG’s annual game jam, PocketQuest, had its third event earlier this year with a theme of Heists. As you might recall, getting something done for PQ24 was one of my big goals for the year, so it wasn’t looking very good when we were two weeks into the make-the-actual-game time frame and I had absolutely nothing done.

I got the vague idea of a stapstick-ish thief bumbling around a heist without knowing where anything was, and eventually the lightning bolt hit with the Carta SRD from Peach Garden Games. I was off to the races – to iterate on the core mechanics and then write 52 unique prompts. Oi.

I got it done, though! No Map, No Plan actually stayed in the top five of hottest-selling PocketQuest ’24 products throughout the entire event’s run, quickly becoming the best-selling of my self-published games. More importantly I’m quite proud of having made it, and I’ve gotten reports from actual players that they had an enjoyable time with it.

Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage at IPR!

My 1-2 player journaling/storytelling game of war, loss, hope, and reflection from the cockpit of a deteriorating giant robot is now available for sale in both PDF and Print form at Indie Press Revolution!

Some credit actually goes to Kage of the DTRPG discord community, who pointed out their own successes at taking DTRPG Print on Demand products and sending them off to IPR. I’d thought of it as something I wanted to do but that I wasn’t quite ready for – Kage convinced me to just go for it, and LATSW passed the review process and was added to the catalogue by working with the extremely helpful IPR staff.

At first glance and if stock numbers are to be believed (IPR pays out quarterly, so I won’t know the full accounting for another month) I’ve already moved half again as many copies of LATSW through IPR in a month and change as I’ve sold on DTRPG in almost three years – and that’s just out of the print copies I sent them! That’ll slow down dramatically, and it already has a bit, as LATSW gradually leaves the front page of their site. Still, for me it’s a rousing success and a sign that this is something I’m going to want to keep doing.

Maybe even more importantly, for me, is that this means that Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage will be found on actual shelves – several online purchasers were retailers, and IPR will be selling it at Origins Game Fair 2024 this weekend! That’s pretty far up the game design bucket list, and my only current regret is that I won’t be there to see them myself – so hey, if you’re in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, take a picture. I’m hopeful that’ll do well enough that I’ll be able to keep feeding IPR copies so that it’ll be at other conventions like GenCon and PAX Unplugged as well.

Planning Ahead

For the rest of the year, I’m planning three modest upgrades and one long shot!

Transit: Aside from continuing to run it at various PAXi with Games on Demand, I’m actually running a campaign these days, so I’ve got mission ideas on the mind. I’d like to write at least one more mission by the end of the summer, a bit bigger than Ghost Ship (and, at the same time, beef Ghost Ship up a bit).

Tales from the Cockpit: It’s been “done” long enough, but now I want it to be done-done. That means properly proofread and edited by someone who isn’t me, get some professional art for the cover at least (this is already in the opening stages), and maybe some layout work done by anyone who is not me.

A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase: Get an example campaign done – enough locations, with some branching paths, for a Fleet to go through the full range of Progress to The End. Partly because there’s a adventure trade thing brewing over on the Sprinting Owl Bundle Club discord server, and the notion of both participating in that and making ASCiaLC a line of such campaigns is appealing.

National Game Design Month: The second white whale green snake demon thing of the year. NaGaDeMon got away from me last year, I was still helping moderate the Discord server, but I completely played myself by using up my idea for TftC for PQ23. With PQ24 having been a lightning bolt, and earlier in the year, I’ve got time to brainstorm a new idea – or pull an old one out of storage.

Until you catch the next Dispatch,

Seamus