Dispatches from Nowhere

Game Design Choices fo MiniBX Hello friends, as you people probably noticed, I’m running an itch funding for my new game MiniBX here . It is an attempt to make this game, already released in Portuguese, a real thing in English as well. I ran the playtest, or the first play of it, with my kids, and also in a Neverland mini campaign with close friends. It ran well and, of course, some adjustments were made during the sessions, so the English version is a bit different from the Portuguese one. I can’t lie that it has been some time since I engaged in a big campaign of this game, or played several sessions, so I kinda forgot what my design choices were. But, the recent reviews of the game made me remember that it is kind of a cool game with some interesting design choices. So I will try to write about the most important design choices here. Of course this is an attempt to get this game funded and all its awesome stretch goals, so if you like this idea back it, it w

I was recently trying to make a dungeon for a module I was writing, but I wasn't happy with the initial dungeon at all. From the suggestion of one of the editors I decided to redo it, which brought me this thought about how to make a dungeon with puzzles related to the narrative/exploration and having it be tied to the story in a meaningful way.  Initially the idea is very simple, we would have a key that would open a door or a location in a dungeon. But in fact, both the key and the lock would be metaphors. The meaning of these metaphors could reframe this simple concept. There would then be some categories, which I will try to explore below. Some examples of keys: Lore, Power, Exploration, Interaction/Alliances , but they are vast. All these "keys" would then open "locks" of places in the dungeon to be explored, in the broadest sense of the word, and all of them would also be attached to the meaning of it’s key. The Lore Key Lore itself can open hidden or loc

  I'm pretty new to solo RPGs, and, as in conventional RPGs, my favorites are solo Dungeon Crawling ones. I am really not trying to make a discourse out of it and I´m not gonna talk about it here, but imo, generally, dungeon crawling systems are not the most narrative heavy RPGs in all its facets. But yeah, I really think that all RPGs need narrative elements in order to not become a board game, and again I also do not have a problem with them.  On my initial evaluation, all solo dungeon crawl games (my own included) are (and have to be imo) heavily procedural, and, despite my little experience with these games, I've always had difficulties implementing narrative elements in this procedural tangle. I know that this aspect is very subjective and that I may be doing a paradox of creating a mechanical procedure to implement narrative elements, but I need that and decided to share it with you. What I'm going to try to implement here is a journaling aspect along with the generat

In another short trip to the countryside of my state in Brazil, I was lucky enough to visit one of the most beautiful and isolated waterfalls I have ever seen. In my perspective, the reason for its isolation is that it is very, very hard to reach there.  Of course, my RPG mind made some parallels and tried to figure how to transfer the challenge/adventure I have lived, to a game mechanic. Most wilderness encounters in d&d-like games are monsters, some modules have some odd places, climate challenges, and of course they all make a lot of sense.   But if we consider the OS/OSR paradigm that the characters are not heroes but common people, as I indeed am, I can tell that a trail like this can be very difficult and challenging, it surely can cost the characters lives. All I am asking is for any wilderness random encounter table to have a 10% chance of A WILDERNESS CHALLENGE, and, of course, I will describe below a proto rule for it. (Yes, I am aware of the cool 4e rule of skill challen

Yesterday I finally dreamed with Tiago. For a brief moment in my current life I felt a relief, the one I was craving when he was in the ICU, which never came, instead came the searing pain. We were in a car, he was driving, this scene was repeated several times in my life. We talked about frivolities, the gossip of everyday life, things we always did. Few moments with my brother were really just ours, we always shared with other people: music, RPG, and we were surrounded by friends and family. Our rides to these places or to pick up the lunchbox on Saturdays were just our moments. That's why the dream reproduced it. I remember, throughout the dream, breathing a sigh of relief, trying to search in my memory how he came out of his illness, how he got well. And as the dream passed, I realized what it really was and more than that, how life is.  I see in my children my relationship with Tiago, how we didn't declare to each other, but we influenced each other, we shared everything a