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I'm down to about 3 tasks remaining! Currently set for a release on Friday, provided nothing goes horribly wrong.

I've had this game in me, slowly making bits of progress, doing some beta tests, then stopping for ages, occasionally tearing it down to rebuild again, for like 2 decades. This feels so good. And I gotta say, I'm really liking the game that's actually come out of it all. I think it's really good.

I hope someone else agrees. And if there's one queer person who looks at the mostly queer premade characters and feels invited in, I swear I will die happy.

I'm so glad I spotted that post on bsky and went for it!

I know I missed the official deadline, but I kept going anyway and I'm getting there!

Oh I'm doing pretty well actually! I'm down to proofreading before I put all the text together and finish making the editable character sheets. My wife will then give it a final read to mark any clunky text for me; meanwhile she is proceeding with all the art! I think I'm ahead of her but we're on track 😁

Now I'm not great at making pdfs look good so it won't any more fancy than my others are, but I am good at making text and rules easy to follow, so I tend to just hope that comes through and I am forgiven for the simple nature of the design work.

I did a whooole buuuuunch of writing today. Mine is a dark fantasy ttrpg I've built from the ground up, systems and everything. Long story (I'm gonna write blogs maybe? It's fun to actually dig into stuff even if I'm just talking to myself). And my wife, who also does great work as my artist for everything, ever, gave me the logo stuff I need. It's feeling genuinely doable. There's a lot left to pull together but I'm seeing how well, and how quickly, the parts can come into a whole, and it's less work than it looked like when I was standing at the bottom of the mountain looking up.

Anyway here's some of what my wife finished for me today.

How y'all doing out there?

I am fully focused on this now. Today I finished pulling everything into organised folders for the sake of my tiny, fraying threads of sanity, and wrote up the first new section.

There's a bunch needs writing up yet but a lot of it is smaller stuff. The Traits, which are this game's version of Classes, each need a bit of background, but not all of them need much. I just need to move the intro text currently sitting on the character generation section and keep that clean as just the Traits, Skills, Bonuses & Penalties, and put the background in a separate section, expanding on some of it as I go. And when I put it all together everything will link to each other!

This is a big task. But I can do it!

Ooooh, I love this 😁

That sounds like a really weird but potentially amazing genre splice 😁

I've not gotten properly started yet, but I've been rolling a couple of system tweaks around my head.

I think I've hit on how the change can work, I just need to run lots of test rolls and stuff (it's a ttrpg). The dice system is based in tiered difficulty (which tier is GM discretion), and it's heavy RP rather than crunchy rules.

So, I have the idea that rolling upwards of X number of successes beyond the max difficulty will potentially cause problems. So, if you're trying to punch through a wall, and you over-succeed the difficulty too much, maaaaaaaybe you just burst the city water pipes, that sort of thing - and it's limited only by the inventiveness (and cruelty) of the GM.

So that's where I'm at for now. After the end of this month it'll become my main project, so I'll get going properly!

Okay! This should be interesting.

1. Project name: Void Watchers (may change, I've never been entirely happy with the title), a dark fantasy TTRPG.

2. Description: A group of people, some human, some human plus, some not human at all, attempt to guard this dimension from the threats from this world, other worlds, and the spaces between.

3. When you started the project: Uhhhh...mid-00s? It initially grew out of some books & stories I wrote, then it kept getting bigger, eventually I accepted that it had become its own thing, and began to rebuild from scratch a decade or so ago. It was last touched about 4yrs ago when I did some beta sessions.

4. Your personal due date (can be the end of the jam, or earlier): March sounds good tbh. I'm gonna try to plan ahead and set aside some time weekly. The structure is ready to go, aside from proofing, I have a character sheet etc all ready to go with some minor tweaks, and I believe the balances and the dice system are also ready because they all got lots of testing. But it's a bit of a monster so putting it into readable format, complete with art (which my wife will continue to do), is gonna take some time. I'm not great at design work so it'll be fairly basic, but hopefully clean and easy to digest. I'd love to also have characters and a short campaign but that'd still be a LOT more work to take what I already have an expand on so that's all secondary and can come later.

I deal with chronic pain and fatigue and brain issues, so having a solid external deadline is very helpful 😁

OK, let me try!

The deck of 52 cards plus the rules and another person are all you need to play.

If you follow through the rules it should get a bit clearer, but the essential steps are:

1) Both players draw 5 cards each and add the numbers together - that's each player's HP.

2) To decide play order, each draws a card - highest number goes first.

3) Draw 7 cards each. This is your hand, and at the end of each turn you must draw enough new cards to keep it at 7.

4) To battle, the player whose turn it is plays a card they think will win. The other player then selects a card to play. Whoever has played the highest number wins, and that number is the amount is damage the loser takes.

That's your basic rules, if you get that order of things in your head the rest is much easier.

Each suit in the deck has a different role, when played, but the main point of that is the roleplay. If you're playing as part if a roleplayed scene, then the type of card played by player 2 should make logical sense against the card played by player 1. It adds some tactics in but they're optional.

The only other bits to remember are that a suits card (Jack, Queen or King) can be played at the same time as another card, and will add 1 point to the attack. So if Player 1 plays an 8, and Player 2 plays a 9 with a Queen, Player 1 will take 10 damage - thats the 9 plus the 1 from the Queen. And that +1 would still count if the player who put it down loses the draw.

The last trick is the Joker. Play one of those on your turn with your attack card, and you have an automatic win.

I hope this helps? The group rules are a bit more complex, so if you're new to this sort of thing and want to give it a try it's easier to start with just 1 other person. You can also take out all the suits, picture cards and Joker rules as well, which strips it down to the very bones, while you learn.

Hi Sarainia! This is a battle-resolver specifically for tabletop rpg games, so it's a little different if you're used to video games 😁 

But, you don't need a printer (we made it so it could be printed and carried around, but it's not necessary), just some playing cards and someone to battle!

Thanks for buying the bundke, and for checking this out 🙂

 Thank you! 🙂

http://leekhulme.itch.io/gambit-suits