New Games, New Quests, New....Eels?

I have two new games out. They could not be more different.

Hello. It has been a while since my last post. I have been busy, I have been depressed, I have been broke, I have been stressed, I have been cooking, I have been travelling. I have been doing a lot of things, some good, some bad, all of them unconducive to writing a good Substack piece.

I’ve been slowly making my way through Aaron Voight’s new novel and TTRPG game, Detente for the Ravenous - expect a review soon - I’ve also released a few games of my own, and I am severly underutilizing this Substack if I don’t make time to talk about my own games, too.

If that doesn’t interest you, fair enough, but I’ll leave you with this: one’s a 2-player romantic bluffing game about eels in diguise, and the other is a solo-journalling game about being the single NPC who keeps giving adventurers their quests…and their secret, dark reason for doing so.

For those that does interest…scroll on down!

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The first game, is, well. It’s a silly pun. My partner, the illustrious Poorna M., loves Dean Martin’s That’s Amore, and sings it fantastically. I, on the other hand, enjoy making silly little rhymes, and one evening after she sung it, made up a number of such rhymes, singing things like
When you don’t know what’s real, and they might be an eel,

That’s a moray.

When you start to suspect something’s not quite correct,

That’s a moray!

When they smile and their teeth make you squirm in your sea -

That’s a moray!

It irked Poorna to no end, in the ways puns do, so naturally I could not stop giggling about it all evening. Which is probably why, at 3 AM, I jolted out of bed and texted her that I had the rules for such a game fully formed in my mind and would be making a TTRPG about it.

At 4 AM, her heart swelling with equal parts love and annoyance, she sent me this:

I would like to stress that I did not ask her to make me a cover at 3 AM, but when an idea strikes you late at night, sometimes, you just have to work on it. Poorna also did layout for the game, once I was done writing it, and what she’s done with it brings me more joy than even the pun did! The game is now out, and you can purchase it here.

I have a lot of love for bluffing games - games where you know something your fellow player doesn’t, made all the more exciting in the knowledge that they know something you don’t, too. All the secrecy, and lies, and bluffs, and double bluffs - there’s nothing quite like it. Of course, in this game, the stakes are relatively low - like all TTRPGs, there are no winners, no losers, only stories to be told. Nonetheless, I think that as written, there’s just enough paranoia sprinkled in to make me, at least, happy with it.

This two player game sees players take on the role of two people who go on a series of dates with each other with the express purpose of determining whether or not the other person is a moray eel in disguise. At the start of the game, each player will determine whether they are a human, or whether they are a disguised eel - and it’s up to the players to determine what kind of clues they’ll be looking out for, either way.

For all its silliness, it’s a game that also leaves the door open for love. For players to examine, with full sincerity, what signs they look for in someone they hope to be with - to note down as many green flags as they note down eel suspicions. In many ways, it’s a fun little spin-off of Weave Game’s Love is on the Cards, a 2-player romantic comedy game that plays things a lot more straight.

This game, however, has 30 different endings, depending on how good or bad you are at seeing through your fellow player, and writing those down was almost as much fun as coming up with the game in the first place!

Most importantly, it’s got an image of an eel with a fake mustache and fedora. If I have no legacy other than having contributed to the creation of that image, then I will have died a happy man.

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The other game I have coming out is a lot more serious, though I came up with the idea around the same time I came up with That’s A Moray. I was bored, but restless. Playing with the dice app. I wanted a…micro-RPG, of sorts - some quick and easy way to tell a story.

What I ended up with was the opposite of that. At 74 pages and over 12,000 words, The Questgiver is the biggest single TTRPG project I’ve ever done. You can purchase it here!

The Questgiver, as you might infer from the cover, is the story told by someone in the background, someone writing not about their own adventures, but about the true protagonist. It’s about the NPC you may look past a thousand times, but who is invested in every single one of your adventures. It’s about the titular Questgiver - and they have a secret.

In this game, the Questgiver is aware of a prophecy concerning the party - one that says one member of the party is destined to end the world, and that only the other members of the party will be able to stop them. It is the Questgiver’s duty to set this party on one adventure after another, to test them, to see them grow in power - so that when the time comes, they can put an end to one of their own.

The system uses a deck of cards that helps you understand each party member as they perform their quests. It also uses a system of dice that level up the more you get to know the party. Their successes, their failures, however - those are randomly assigned, because without stat modifiers it doesn’t matter if you roll high or low. The kinds of successes or failures any individual party member might have is up to the player - and flavours the story, as the game goes on.

While it’s a solo-journalling game, it’s also a game that can work well as an “off-week” game for your regular campaign. If your GM is tired, or scheduling issues make a regular full game impossible for whatever reason…The Questgiver has got you covered.

I’ve been playing it all through development, and this is a long game. I still haven’t reached the end proper (though I’ve playtested endings a few times), and I’m about 25 quests entries in. There’s something about the slowness of the game that I’ve been enjoying, however - there are 53 different questions you can ask for each character, so in my party of five, that’s 265 possible questions to uncover about them. Slowly getting to know them, as they adventure, as they grow, has been a delight. Well, a delight and a tragedy - the game allows for a very slim chance of talking the traitor down at the end of the game, and through all my playtests I’ve not yet managed it.

As I say in the game’s introduction…one way or another, this all ends in heartbreak.

I would like to take a moment to thank my playtesters, for both games - they’ve provided valuable insight into ways both games could be made better. It’s humbling just how much you miss in your initial excitement for a game, how much you can overlook very simple things - or how much a simple suggestion from one of your playtesters can become an invaluable part of your game.

So there you have it. Two games, out now - I hope you like them. I worked very hard on them, and while I of course am hoping for utterly absurd levels of success…I’ve realized that ultimately, I only really need one player. One player, who buys the game, who loves it, who enjoys playing it as much as I did making it.

If that player is you, please, write me back. It’s what keeps me writing.