Part of my ongoing project in not going completely mad involves writing games, and I’ve just finished one. It’s called WARRIOR-POET, and it’s a four-player game of player conflict and outlandish duels to the backdrop of battle-haiku – great spell-poems that weave and shape the world around them in service of the desires of the Immortal Ghost Emperor.
It’s on Itch.io, and you can download it now.
I’ve made it pay-what-you-want rather than free, as with my previous games, and that’s been a strange sensation for me. I suppose it’s the first “complete” game I feel I’ve released, one that wasn’t in some odd stage of playtesting, and I feel that it’s worth money… however, I know all too well that even charging as low as, say, $3 for it would significantly reduce the number of people who see and enjoy my product. So pay whatever you feel it’s worth.
(If you can’t donate for whatever reason, but you think the game is pretty neat, tell your friends about it! Stick a link on Facebook or Twitter. I’d rather have ten people play my game than one person give me three dollars.)
Luckily, I have my patrons on Patreon who support me, and my artists, too. If you’re interested in seeing more RPGs from me, you can become a patron – that means, whenever I produce an RPG like this one, you pay me a little money for doing so and you get first access to it. Here are the current games I’m working on, arranged in order of completion from most to least, so you have some idea what your money would be going towards:
ONE LAST JOB, a where you create other people’s characters for them during play by insulting them whilst performing one stupidly risky last mission that’ll set you up for life
SUPER-COOL MONSTER-HUNTING CLUB, where you wear saucepans on your head to gain armour bonuses and save grown ups from evil by hitting things with wooden spoons
SHADOW WAR, where grim agents of a galaxy-spanning inquisition see what they’ll destroy to keep the Imperium safe
THE CORRIDOR, where you play maintenance staff in the ubiquitous corridor that links every sci-fi set and try to escape into a film
FORCE-BLADE PUNK, where you are teenage overclocked cybered-up murderpop reality superheroes and you have the sort of break-up arguments that leave twelve police officers dead
Patreon is really neat, because it gives me an incentive to release stuff, and it means that I can afford to pay artists to illustrate my books for me. (Generally, I split the proceeds 50/50)
WARRIOR-POET was developed, in part, because the art style of Daunt – the illustrator – didn’t fit ONE LAST JOB, the game I was working on at the time. Looking over her stuff, it seemed like a perfect fit for her to illustrate a more romantic game that edged towards queer in how it handled those romances, and the rules were sort of borne out of that. It’s a really cool feeling to sync up rules and mechanics with art, and it’s something I’d love to do again. If you are, or you know, an artist who might be interested in doing RPG work for not a great deal of cash, get in touch.
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