Debrief: Eternal TTRPG Jam

I think a good way to continually expand my craft as a designer, whether systems or narrative is to try to take up small projects in the tabletop space, whether that's card games, game modules, or board games. Writing my own board games naturally shows improvement in my own craft, but I think a real challenge for me as a game designer is to write for another system, as that requires experience and knowledge of the system itself in order to accomplish in a competent manner.

Fortunately, there is a jam that runs every month exclusively for writing for tabletop games. It's called the Eternal TTRPG jam. Every month, people submit short-term tabletop game projects to receive constructive critique, whether that's a solo rpg, a module for another system, or a simplified rpg meant for a group. This also helps me in submitting more work onto my itch.io, as I have a bad habit of starting things and always failing to finish them.

For my first submission to the jam. I released a module for a game system known as Liminal Horror which I called Inclimate Weather. It tells the story of a group of storm-chasers created by the players as they attempt to enter the eye of a storm which occurs every five years. It's six pages long, and uses stock-photos converted into pixel art through the use of shaders as illustrations.

I'm just proud to have gotten something out of the door first and foremost, I mostly used this project as a means to mess with some software I intend to use for higher-scope TTRPG projects, that being the Affinity Suite. Actually working it within the Liminal Horror system was a little more complicated than I would have liked. The SRD specifies being able to use the base system, but NOT the investigator's edition. I'm not used to reading these sorts of documents, but that meant that things like classes and such had to use the more basic implementation in the first edition.

There are a lot of things I could have added, such as pre-defined NPCs, and I could have defined the rules for storm-travel a bit better. But I'm glad I managed to actually release something in order to break into this space.

Check out Inclimate Weather here!