#aaron king

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

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I'm transcribing an interview Aaron King did with me about Detente for the Ravenous and I had to stop and clip out their answer about what they think constitutes good writing. With the story breaking about NaNoWriMo supporting AI text generators, I was just reminded how fucking good it feels to hear someone talk like they give a shit about the craft.

Transcript below the readmore.

"The first time, no, the second time I dropped out of college, I moved to a different town and I was working at an old timey confectionery and ice cream place. So four to five days a week, I would go in and put on black pants and a nice white shirt and an apron and a paper hat. And I would either be scooping ice cream or washing dishes or helping the owner's dad, an 80 year old man named Oscar make homemade chocolates and stuff. So we were on a main floor of a building. We had the ice cream shop, we had a coffee shop, and then we had a basement where we stored all this bulk candy that we ordered from people. And we had the place where Oscar would make these chocolate turtles: almonds, caramel, chocolate. And one day Oscar was like, “Hey, look at this.” And he took me to the basement stairs and he pulled down this plywood slide that he had constructed on a hinge that would cover the right half of the stairs. And he took a big box that we just received and put it at the top of the slide and shoved it down. And he was like, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “Well, that saves me a lot of time carrying stuff down the stairs.” And he was like, “Yeah, every day you try to improve a little bit. You try to make this place a little better.”

And I just like was almost crying because this man that could you know, not lift anything was so old, was still just like making these weird little changes around here and thinking of other people other than him. That's one of the things that I just carry forward in this process of making stuff is just like… I will never be a Will Jobst. I will never be “insert name of my favorite writer here.” But I'm driven to make these things. There's no reason for me not to make them. I might as well try to get a little better every single day. And sometimes that means reading and sometimes that means sitting down and doing some hard self assessment and figuring out where the weaknesses are. Or how to get better or how best to spend my time. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's really hard. But I don't… I'm not going to become fucking William Faulkner, you know? I'm not going to become Louise Erdrich. But that's poison brain, to try to like become and overcome them or whatever. I think it's just, if this is something I'm going to do, no matter what, I would like to get a little bit better at it every single time I practice it. Then hopefully someone will put that on my gravestone. “Tried a little bit every day. Here lies Aaron King.” "

[christiansorrell]

TTRPG Read-Through: Patchwork World

Here is a read-through I did last year (originally posted on Twitter) of one of the most unique PbtA games I've ever read: Patchwork World by Aaron King! - Christian

Credits up first. I know a lot of these folks and they are really cool! Excited to dig into this. I've heard good things, and it's been a while since I've read or played any Powered by the Apocalypse.

This is a cool, strong set up for me. I really like settings that ask characters to face a changing world and either take up change themselves or work to restore the old way of things. It's a headspace I find myself in a lot IRL these days so it's fun to explore.

I'm interested to see how the no stats, no playbooks angle of this game works, considering playbooks are typically such a staple of PbtA games.

Standard three-tired success, mixed success, fail forward resolution for rolls here and questions on the moves determine your bonus to the roll. Easy peasy. +2 is the max bonus.

Other types of rolls are described here. Interested to see how they come into play. I also love clocks and use them in pretty much every game I run so it's nice to see those laid out here too.

We just love a lil guy, don't we folks?

A good chunk of the opening here is spent on laying out a lot of solid foundations of roleplaying generally. It feels like a book (so far) that would work for entirely new players. It doesn't feel essential for me, but I never mind a game that supports varied experience levels.

Character creation is wide open, especially since there aren't playbooks and the text stresses that character creation is very much worldbuilding because of this. Fate-like concepts and tags are in here too which are things I generally enjoy. I like the Drawback mechanic.

Moves are in the playback I set in the other room so I'm gonna go grab those. You get two chosen moves and everyone has access to a number of default moves. You've got three other life/XP things to keep track of too. I'm especially interested in Hex.

There are a lot of moves! They seem quite varied and often very weird, fitting well with the titular patchwork world. You can have a duck's slick soul to dodge more easily or a magical space suit or speak to birds or be good at cartography. Overwhelming, but in an exciting way.

You also choose a community as a party. While PCs all have their original homelands (before the end of the old worlds), you know have a community that gets its own little sheet. This is a cool reshaping of the Gangs from Blades. I also like how the community can change over time.

Coming back to a PbtA game after months of more OSR-minded stuff, I think a lot of what these games contain are things that experienced players would say you could just do in any game at any time that it makes sense in the story, but I do find value in stating what's possible.

Esp since many players come to games with artificial limits on their options (whether that's from video games, more traditional RPGs, etc.). I just think good GMing here requires making sure that the players don't limit themselves just to the bevy of explicit options either.

GM moves (mostly to guide the response to failed rolls). I really think the community aspect of this set up is one of the biggest appeals to me so far. That and the wild list of moves, which I'm sure makes for amazing parties of characters.

I always feel like it's never something I should be in my own writing (for some probably unnecessary reason), but I enjoy the first-person, casual writing style throughout the book. Makes for a very chill read.

Good to see this game employs the Branson Reese style of NPC naming.

Stress acts as a single catch-all health and challenge rating for NPCs. Ideally, I'd hope this would help lead to the PCs approaching encounters with more than just violence.

Sections like this are what I'm referring to when I say this book feels very friendly to new players. It's got little anecdotes and thoughts like this throughout.

Look, it's been a while since I've seen A Christmas Story but... it didn't have ghosts in it right?

There's a sample adventure in the back (which I'll skip for this read-through) plus loads of random tables. Some wonderfully bizarre stuff in the characters and faction tables. Really gives you a good idea for how gonzo you can go with the setting.

Love these two in particular

Optional rules include hard mode (which I just think is kind of funny to see in PbtA, but could be cool if you lean heavy into the post-apoc setting) and some optional moves. I like that some moves focus on romance, something I enjoy IRL but never think to focus on in games.

I was wondering why this was the sixth edition!

That's all for the book itself. Going back to the packet to dig into the things I missed. Some expected bits in here but always one or two unique options I really enjoy. Leaking hex is cool (and could have some troubling cascade effects in certain situations).

I definitely wish, at least in sitting down to read like this, that the contents of the player packet was also in the book itself. I think PbtA has this tendency of leading to loads of pages on the table, but it can make them very easy to pick up and play or to learn as you play.

That element is definitely here, but I think the vast number of wide-ranging moves and the excitement that would drum up in my player group would more than makeup for that initial overwhelming feel of "whoa, that's a lot of papers out on the table".

Overall, it's the most I've wanted to play a game in this style in a while. I like that the base setup for the world is very much up to the players to determine via the characters they make. I like that PCs here will probably feel unlike any other folks have played before.

The community aspect feels like where I'd want to center my story around, as a player. Seeing that shift and change over time feels like it would be very rewarding and would help lean into the "the old world is dead, what do we want the new world to look like?" theme I enjoy.

Because Aaron King is cool and recently hit a lot of Twitter followers, Patchwork Worlds is now Pay-what-you-want over on Itch.

I'm not sure if physical copies are readily available. For full disclosure (guess I should have said this up front), I got this copy for free from Aaron! Not for the purposes of this thread or anything, just for fun a while back.

Thanks for reading more ramblings from me! If you like to do that sort of thing, check out my newsletter - Missives from the MeatCastle. It's got writings on my work, cool stuff I've run across the web in the last month, and exclusive rpg stuff! https://meatcastle.substack.com

[andiree]

My city kids 🌸😈🎶👽

[vintagerpg]

Heartless Princess is a box of zines. The very sturdy box looks like it maybe is meant to be for handmade candies, perhaps, or maybe bath products. That it is decorated with a stamp, the title hand written with silver marker and the box lined with rolling matrices pasted in, is absolutely delightful. The ten zines inside are wrapped in covers bearing collage art that adds the DIY feel of the box while also establishing a patchwork quality to the world they detail.

That world is the Icy City, which thematically rhymes with the Rainy City. The Icy City is the abode of the Heartless Princess, who, when the universe ended, used her power to save what she could, which she stitched together into a patchwork world. The remains of what she did not save, or rejected, form the surrounding galaxy. So you have a strange city, a strange world and a strange cosmos, the last of which explicitly evokes the charms of Spelljammer.

This universe is primarily sketched out through adventures, though a few of the zines are dedicated to toolkits to modify or add to existing D&D 5E rules. The adventures assume you’re using D&D 5E as well – though conceptually advanced, the material is meant for beginning players. Which is great! Usually introductory material is painfully generic. It is heartening to see beginning material that fuses truly weird ideas from Spelljammer and Planescape for newcomers – it really changes the parameters for what new folks see as being possible in RPGs. Easily the most interesting 5E material I’ve come across to date.

Its so casually weird! The princess doesn’t have a heart because she had to take it out to sort of act as the lodestone for the rest of the world and it is right there, acting as a viaduct for the Icy City’s water supply and, because her essence lingers in the water, the population of the city is more disposed towards her rule than they otherwise might be. Literal brain washing. And, of course, there is an adventure set in the heart. It is great.

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

Game designer @aaronsrpgs's graciously gave me the opportunity to talk about my upcoming game and novel, Detente for the Ravenous! I'm launching the game September 24 and I'm so excited to get it in folks' hands. Aaron was a great host, and we chatted about the struggles of the traditional publishing industry, to my challenges in converting the Resistance System into something more grounded, to what we think makes "good writing." It's a great conversation, and I hope folks will listen in!

Transcript here.

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

For @aaronsrpgs' SpeedRune jam, I wrote a little campaign module! It's free, something quick and easy for a holiday pickup game! It's also got furred worms and mercury rivers if you're into that sort of thing

[res33011]