2021-03-24 12:44
Finished up a v0.1 version of Hadleyville: Rules Free RPG in an Old West Town [Edit: And now I'm up to v0.3]. There are a few empty spots in the tables and a few more suggestions I'd like to add in as well as figure out Scribus well enough to layout a short printable zine format of it. The whole process has been really fun so far. Working within the limitations of the challenge is right up my alley, and I quite enjoy brainstorming random tables that are very focused on a specific setting/milieu. I feel like I could happily make a few more of these based on some other settings I've been wanting to put into a game (like Ancient Greece). The focus on setting/tools/inspiration is what is missing so often from RPG products which too often are filled with rules and then add a few things at the end as an almost afterthought about what to actually do with those rules or are often tools that are so generic as to be useless.
Lots of comics showing up in the mail lately. I guess my interest in making some new comics also found an outlet in me ordering more comics (though a bunch of them were from the online Printed Matter fair from a few weeks ago, and some are just a coincidental confluence of things pre-ordered coming out near each other). I should try to write about some of them soon.
A bit adrift as far as non-comics reading goes right now. I read Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel the other day, a fictionalized story about Herman Melville before he wrote Moby Dick that was used as the introduction to the French translation of that novel which Giono worked on. In it, Melville, in England to deal with his publishers, takes a carriage into the country anad meets a young woman who he ends up spending some enjoyable hours with. Not much happens exactly, but... I enjoyed it. Giono has a way of telling the simple narrative that was engaging and expressive but also didn't linger too long (it's a very short novel). Going to hold onto it and reread it at some point. (I really should reread more Melville for that matter Moby Dick or The Confidence Man.)