You're getting multiple posts in the same month, that's how you know I've got way too much to do and how badly I need to free up mental computing power. Sorry not sorry. Also, a quick heads up: I am sponsored by literally nobody in this post, and in fact am quite the opposite - I would argue everything I'm about to talk about is stuff I've paid for myself or received as an inclusion with something I've bought with the notable exception of The Chair, which Zach Hazard Vaupen literally hunted me down and handed me at PAX Unplugged like the world's most helpful Terminator. This will become relevant, but I'm also letting you know because hoo boy am I about to namedrop a bunch of people and supplies and I'm doing that because they're relevant, not because someone's paying me to do it.
Also, this is going to be yet another long one - if you'd like to cut the crap and get right to the actionable content without all the context, just CTRL+F "What Is Adam's Actual Vision" without the quotes and you'll hop to the end.
An Introductory Diversion: The Return of the Convention Go-Bag
I know not many people read it, but one of my first posts here was about my convention go-bag and how I'd fine tuned it for anything I'd conceivably need at a convention, because after one year at GenCon lugging around my huge heavy duty backpack with room for my laptop, extra screen, big wooden GM screen, all my books and more I had had enough. It's been long enough since my days in marching band playing sousaphone, my body just ain't built for that anymore. The thing is though, when I'm not at cons but AM running other IRL games, I find myself longing for something with a bit more storage space - not as much as the heavy duty bag, but more than the go-bag. That leads me to opting for a messenger bag and the old classic: the Trapper Keeper. (Yes, that's the South Park Trapper Keeper Akira/Terminator/2001: A Space Odyssey homage. I usually hide some link gags in these posts but I figure I'll throw a content warning out for cartoon body horror on this one. Let's not think about how long ago Season 4 of South Park was, okay?)Enter The Trapper Keeper
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| Don't you give me lip about falling for nostalgia. Just let me have this okay? |
This is great. I've got basically all the space for everything I need, I could throw dice in the pencil bag if I wanted to, the interior pocket can comfortably fit a few zines inside it (if I'm taking it with me on a trip, I will often throw game design zines in there to get me thinking, or sometimes a worldbuilding game if I think I'll need to entertain friends). It's great, and it's specifically great when I know I've got plenty of prep time to bring everything I might need with me at once. But I don't really like taking a messenger bag with me everywhere I go these days, and if I want to write notes down to keep with me for upcoming game things, it's not the most convenient. I mean I GUESS I could type them into my Notes app on my phone or throw them in a private Discord chat to myself and then copy them down later, but that's a lot of steps AND reliance on technology/my faulty brainmeat to remember to sync things up before the game. Part of the reason I wanted to get that go-bag ready is to have everything in one spot at all times, and so that got me thinking about something a little more compact.
In the go-bag, I've got the little utility bag that has the e-reader, mechanical pencil, and two Field Notes journals in it, and that's honestly just about perfect - but with the e-reader in it, it's a little fragile to just throw in any old bag/cargo pants pocket and go. I like a lot of the options the little utility bag gives me though - just like the Trapper Keeper, it's got pockets to slide things into, space for a writing utensil, and is otherwise of the correct form factor to slide into my bag without taking up much space. But also, I've found out that I write like a caveman and cannot be trusted not to constantly break and/or jam the lead, so I want some kind of durable pen and I'm not quite ready to commit to the world of fountain pens yet - I was gifted one, but I use it so rarely I have to clean when it I pick it up to use it since the ink dries on the nib. While hunting around Richmond for advice on cleaning that fountain pen, I stumbled onto a happy compromise which would spiral out into the real reason I'm writing this post. But first: the compromise.
Yo Dawg, I Herd U Liek Journals
In the not-too-distant past, I had also started trying to use some of the journals laying around the house to help create a physical backup of my Google Calendar. I like to joke that I'm the most extensive Google Calendar user that's not in a polycule because thanks to your friend and mine ADHD, I can't remember when anything is in the future. I also plan my life out many months in advance. You can see where this might begin to present a problem. So, I try to make physical backups of my schedule since it helps me visualize my upcoming time commitments and I can also do things like physically map out my days to combat time blindness. I had been getting better about this, but had also been trying to keep one journal as just my scheduler and one for all the random things I'd need to work out during the day and come back to, and this arrangement was just bulky enough that it was causing me to forget to take it with me places, which was again beginning to defeat the point.
While I was bouncing around various stationary stores in town trying to get advice about cleaning the pen (spoiler, I was basically just told to use soap and water and to just dry it thoroughly and quickly after cleaning so it didn't rust), I began to see certain accessories pop up in multiple stores and one in particular caught my eye and really started locking this into place for me - the stickable pocket. Leuchtturm 1917s have a pocket in the back already, but it never occurred to me that someone might make replacement pockets - or, for that matter, pockets for journals that didn't have them in the first place. The fact that it also came with a pen loop was all the better - I had gotten a nice Sharpie gel pen during a trip recently as well as some tiny Bullet Journals to use for keeping inventory for merch at a music festival, and THAT meant I could slap one of those in one of the pockets, stick a second pocket into the journal just in case, and as long as I could find something I could use to make a straight edge with when I needed it I'd be good to go. I ended up grabbing a brass stencil and another slide-on holster for it - overkill, sure, but until I find another one that can go in one of the pockets it'll do. I've managed to keep this with me every day when I've gone to work and it's always nearby at home, so I consider this a success. But we're not here to talk about my journaling habits - at least, not exactly. Put a pin in this because what we're actually here to talk about is...
Gameable Ephemera
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| An assortment of games of various formats, plus related bookmarks & business cards. I have more, but lord knows where they are |
I loathe single-use objects. I rarely use bookmarks, but they're always included as special bonuses with books when you order from places because hey, it's free promo right? Usually, they end up in the garbage can. Likewise with business cards - after I've made contact with the people after the event I've received them from, unless they're really spectacular I very rarely have a need to keep them. This is something the TTRPG community has realized and has thankfully started to combat - whether you're Yochai squeezing whole keyed dungeons into specially formatted business cards, Reilly Qyote including instructions and some statblocks on a bookmark so you don't have to keep flipping What A Horrible Knight while you're using it, or the birdman himself giving you optional IRL drinking game rules + some cocktail recipes to go along with the in-game drinking game rules, these can serve as anything from additional marketing for yourself to standalone gameable content. They sure can be troublesome to keep up with, though, especially if they were to fall out of the book or zine you're keeping them in. Sure, you can just paperclip them in I guess, but unless you're stealing them from your office job who has paperclips these days? Plus you run the risk of damaging them or the book.
All-around cool kid and well-known maker of keepsake games Shing Yin Khor has an answer to this in the form of their a short rest series of randomized game-enhancing booster packs. These have long-since sold out, of course, but the idea here is solid - you take your little bonus stuff, slap it in something labeled to keep it safe and then you just keep it with whatever game materials you want to use it with. This is the more minimalist approach to something rather than, like, one of those huge packs that Beadle & Grimm's sells, and significantly more system neutral.
Actually, hang on a second. The cool thing about all of these bookmarks and business cards and booster packs is how interchangeable they are. In fact, I know I've seen people put whole games on business cards and bookmarks before, to say nothing of just the abundance of one page RPGs. And what are all these microRPG elements if not basically the same as the joesky tax? People love writing little things to stick into games. Hell, people love writing little games to twist other games. Once you become enough of a gaming sicko, you practically have to start making little bits of homebrew or you start to lose your grip. It's like some kind of law of g-
Ask Not For Whom The GLoG Calls To...
I'm not explaining the Goblin Laws of Gaming. You can listen to the Dead Letters folks talk about it if you really don't know, or you can read Arnold Kemp's original post linked above, or you can visit the subreddit, or go watch Hexed Press or any number of other YouTube people talk about it. There's probably a thousand other online communities for the GLoG I don't know about, and it's because
People
Like
Making
Weird Little Stuff
And
Sharing
It
Particularly those of us with terminal cases of can'tshutthefuckupitis.
A Tangent About Convergent Evolution: Artist Trading Cards
Whilst chewing on everything that has/will go(ne) into this post, I discovered a whole other community out there - artist trading cards. I knew nothing about them before today, but this video goes into the whole ethos behind them as well as some basic techniques for making them - and since so many TTRPGs I know involve altering playing cards, I thought this might be a welcome inclusion for those of you who also might not be aware since there's a lot of overlap in goals. But this, too, appears to be a scene who loves making things for making things' sake and trading them around with other creators. Also, critically, according to this video the scene is staunchly anti-compensation - that is to say, the goal of these is to make a thing and spread joy, not money. Again, if this video is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it, of course, other than it's the first thing I've seen about this scene so I haven't gone and done further research because holy shit this post is long enough already), buying or selling ATCs is a pretty big taboo, and I want you to put a pin in that as well.
Capitalism Is Always The Bad Guy
So, let's thread all this together. While trying to find a way to minimize the number of notebooks I'm carrying around while also making sure I've got enough supplies with me at all times that I can jot notes or run a game at a moment's notice, I simultaneously realize that I've got a bunch of random gaming ephemera that I don't really have a place for but does seem to be made to be stored in something like what I'm slapping together. I also realize that people love making these kinds of things, they can either be pure game mechanics or gameable content plus marketing, and that if someone were so inclined they could create little packets instead of just single objects but ultimately you could still keep everything together to mix and match however you liked, and if these things were made cheaply but abundantly enough they could be traded around, collected, and allow people to have whole bespoke systems unique to each person depending on what you did and didn't want to keep in your notebook folder. All at once, I saw three possible futures: a world in which I started Yet Another Game Jam and maybe got people trading things around at events or maybe even encouraged creators to start making event-specific content to pass out as promotional material; a world in which I worked with people to make some seed content packs (i.e. a pack of fantasy rules, a pack of sci-fi rules, a pack of system neutral monsters, etc) and sold them as little collectible doodads; and the world where I walked up to John Leuchttrum or Mr. Simon Schuster and went "Hello, I have an extremely marketable idea that already has a community around it, please give me your big time printing money to coordinate a product about this." With visions of gaming communities and dollar signs dancing in my eyes, I did what any reasonable person should - drove 8 hours to talk to Shing about it.
Disco Business
OK actually I drove to NYC to see Nicky Siano DJ, BUT Shing was happy to get lunch and chat with me. They had a lot of really good community-centric ideas - things like having LARPs codify event-specific rules in little cards along with your character-specific rules, or creators at cons collaborating ahead of time to create a multi-part adventure that you'd only see the full version of if you visited each of them not unlike a stamp rally. They were also super into the idea of, if the form factor was more in the playing card size, having binders of rule cards to show off and trade with people like Magic cards. I brought up the idea of the game jam and providing people templates so people could print at home, and they mentioned if a bunch of people ended up wanting to go in on it, getting bulk printing made of each of the projects and then distributed to the creators either by mail or at events would be a really fun way to encourage people to trade things around and keep costs generally low while keeping the quality consistent.
(Also, I sadly did not get to see Nicky DJ, the venue lost power. I did take the time to finally visit the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, however, and ran into quite a few people I knew as I was buying games, so that was an unexpected delight. Also Shing gave me some of their games?!)
He Is A Real Blogger, Not A Real Worm
As luck would have it, Mr. His Majesty The Worm Josh McCrowell visited Richmond very recently and I also had a chance to talk about this whole concept with him. As someone who's much more tapped into the Blogosphere (and the GLOGosphere, for that matter), I figured he'd have some thoughts about this. We had as many intelligible ideas as soju and fast-casual Korean food would allow us that evening - mostly in the context of His Majesty The Worm. I feel like the way the GM builds Wormgame's behind-the-scenes functionality could work very well with something like this - whether that be detailing whole floors of The Underworld or just single encounters. And as I type this out, I realize that as long as your entire stack was the same form factor, this would be a really fun and tactile way to stock your Meatgrinder table for each level of the Underworld - with players getting to keep certain cards once they defeat them/find the item on them/otherwise remove it from active use. But regardless - I think that if you're the kind of sicko that loves making dungeons and fiddling around with little bespoke mechanics, as I know you have to be if you're running HMTW, this kind of thing would be right up your alley. The quasi-official HMTW fan Discord already has all kinds of projects on it including bestiaries and converting various megadungeons to be usable with it, there's no way an IRL meetup of Adherents of the Worm wouldn't be made better with swapping around tiny pieces of homebrew.
What Is Adam's Actual Vision
(And More Importantly, Do We Need To Beat The Capitalism Out Of You)
OK look, as cool as it would be to have like...bespoke A5 notebooks with art that I've commissioned from people with enough pockets and accessories that you could carry one notebook stuffed to the brim with gameable content from everyone I meet at conventions and get to quit my job because everyone paid me to be the middleman to get all of this done for them, that's not actually the thing I want. That's just the dream of being able to bring joy to people without having to worry about finances. And in the unlikely event that one of the like three people I know who could somehow begin the process of making something like that happen both read this blog post this far AND wanted to get a project like that going, it's something that would still largely have to be free and open source regardless, so no need for the pitchforks yet.
No, what I'd actually like to see and maybe can try to facilitate would be something like a series of interconnected, themed jams to start - giving people specific prompts as well as templates to allow folks to start building up a body of work and then organize meetups IRL to trade them around, maybe coordinate with some friends who have their own companies to get them to give out little booster packs of event-specific content to encourage people to come to those booths, and if I was feeling like a real sicko, maybe get some buttons made to denote people who have stuff to trade at cons. I uh. I have a reputation with giving out buttons.
I'm exaggerating and invoking a lot of negative buzzwords for effect here, but the point remains that I guess somewhere in the heart of this idea, there's grappling with the fact that the closer something like this gets to mainstream viability, the less it feels like there's a community behind it, and frankly I don't know how to grapple with that. It's something that seems to be in all the other parts of the hobby, and it's so easy for a new idea to succumb to being morphed and changed in ways that seem good at the beginning only to have them secretly be cursed the whole time. I'm gonna chew on this for a while - I'm certainly not in the place to start a whole jam movement right now, but maybe someday soon with some thoughtful help from other folks who know what they're doing. Is that you maybe? Reach out.
Outro & Citations
I've talked about a lot of people here today. I try to be meticulous about in-context hyperlinked citations on these things, but from my old college chiptune blogging days I still have the urge to provide a bibliography for these things, particularly since a lot of folks whose material showed up in pictures didn't get talked about. If you're interested in anyone whose stuff you've seen me reference but you don't want to try to flip back up for it, never you worry.
In the meantime, stay weird out there, and if you're not already working on an Appendix N Jam entry, maybe you should go look at some of these other jams.
Stay weird out there.
Mentioned Above:
- Zach Hazard Vaupen/Emo Sludge: Bsky | Website
- Josh McCrowell: Bsky | Itch | Blog | editor for KNOCK! mag
- Reilly Qyote: Bsky | Itch
- WF Smith/Prismatic Wasteland: Bsky | Itch | Website
- Bo Ryan Crum/Gravy Press: Bsky | Beneath The Muckfort on Itch & Cairn Press
- Adam & Jamie/72 STATIONS: Adam's Bsky | Jamie's Bsky | Infinity of Ships on Itch | Website
- Yochai Gal: Blog | Ludography | Between Two Cairns | Cairn Press
- Shing Yin Khor: Bsky | Website
- Arnold Kemp/Goblinpunch: Bsky | Blog
- Dead Letters Podcast is Sam, Misha, and Walid
- Feral Indie Studio: Charlie's Bsky | Alex's Bsky | Into the Wyrd & Wild Itch | Website
- Johnson² is available through Peregrine Coast Press, which has all the links
- Thrill of Dracula is by Kenneth Hite via Pelgrane Press
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