Another Update

Hi!

It's been a couple weeks since my last post about Location Design for OSR systems . I'm trying to keep myself accountable to a somewhat regular cadence for these updates, so here's what I've been up to:

I have an NSR-ish system and setting I've been working on for a VERY long time. Think it's been about 5-ish years now? Wow that sounds entirely unreasonable!

It's been taking forever largely because I obsess over elegance, reducing cognitive load and having systems mirror each-other as perfectly as I can manage. It's not just about the way it runs, it's also about how easy it is to grasp and how many interesting decisions and flavor I can squeeze out of as few components as possible.

Suffice it to say It's been kicking my ass and I've play tested, reworked and re-designed this thing more times than I can count. It's still a fun process and side-project for me to fiddle with when I can find the time and I'll release it when it's ready (I've been saying that for years now).

And while It's not quite ready yet, I figured I could show a few work in progress spreads. I do quite a bit of sketching and layout work as I design (It keeps all parts of my creative brain working so I don't get bored by any one part of the process) and it feels like putting some of this out there might encourage me to keep going and at least get a beta version ready for people to play.

The RPG

Spreads for my Unannounced, Unnamed RPG project.

Whew, it feels weird putting these out there! I won't go into too much detail on what it's about and how it works outside of these spreads here. If you're interested please subscribe to my newsletter! I haven't sent a single thing out using that yet, as I don't want to spam people, but when I have something big or interesting, you can be sure I'll cram it in your inbox.

Some Illustrations

I've also gotten the chance to doodle a bit. Largely as part of that RPG project, but besides that too. The vast majority of what I design is for work and under strict NDA. Videogame projects are famous for taking years to complete, so I'll only be able to share some of that when we finally ship.

Regardless here are a couple Images I can share:

Went a little crazy designing a massive sheet of exotic weapons for my game. Not even sure I'll use them as-is but it was still a great exercise! I've designed so many props for games over the years, there's something really cathartic about just sitting down and churning through dozens of these.

Wheel Spinning

There's a bunch more I've done, like pages of unhinged, near-illegible scribbles on Dungeon generation, overly-complex location tables, stocking procedures and other systemic nonsense I think was ultimately a dead-end. I'll spare you the excruciating details or screenshots, but know I've sunk a weekend on what can only be described as a madman's chicken scratches.

Additionally Hostinger, the web platform I use for this site isn't natively readable by RSS. For non-nerds out there, RSS is a protocol that's set-up for a website, that scrubs its content and allows people to look at it in external readers. Many troglodytes in the OSR community (myself included) like to subscribe to blogs using RSS links and read them at their leisure on their preferred apps.

Anyway, I can't get that to behave for this website, so an attempt to migrate to Wordpress was made. It was not successful...
I bounced right off the layout tools like a brick wall, meaning I'm stuck using this RSS bereft nonsense until I can spend a weekend pulling out what remains of my hair to move to Wordpress.

Regardless, some progress had been made and just putting a bit of my game out there for people to see has been quite cathartic! I hope to do another one of these updates soon.

See ya next time!