Hello!  It’s been a while!

I’m back from a much needed hiatus to get my shit together IRL.  Now things are settled down and I should have enough energy and time to get back to what I love…

Tabletop gaming!

I’ll post about my future plans at the end, so let’s start with promoting this neat game:

Meanwhile, in the Subway is a diceless TTRPG by Côme Martin about living in a strange surrealist city using a subway map to explore.  Yes you read that right.  It is literally a fictional subway map! It is mostly system neutral and can easily be played using Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland, Troika, or any weird af rules-lite systems.

I really like how each stop points are basically prompts with symbols to represent its purpose for GM and player to interpret for their gameplay.  The color choice here is excellent too.

ITCH.IO RATINGS

Gonna try something different for this year with contributing to our TTRPG community.  I think one of the easiest thing anyone can do to help out a designer - rate their games on itch.io!   So, I’m going to work through my itch.io collection and rate couple games per newsletter issue.  So here we go:

Mothership House Rules: Management Class by Mandala Studioss : a class for players who want to roleplay as a character who likes to give orders but come with weaker stats.  I think it’s balanced because you get more skills but come with -10 to all saves which is pretty costly.  The loadout is straightforward and fits well thematically.  It’s also pay what you want!   Rating: 5/5

D6 Improvised Weapons for Death in Space by Lazarus: a collection of 6 weapons that are improvised.  Perfect fit for Death in Space or you prob could adapt for other sci-fi games such as Mothership.  Pay what you want, so can’t hurt to download. Rating: 5/5

A Winters Tale by Twelve Pins Press: a pocketmod adventure for Chris Bissette’s Under the Floorboards.  (you could easily adapt this for any fantasy system really)  Basically The Borrowers style of adventure where a clan of small folks living in the bigger folks’ house.  The map is very simple and sufficient for an one-shot type of session.  It includes several tables to roll up for items and encounters.  Yet another pay what you want game!  Rating: 5/5

DUNGEON23

At this point, pretty much everyone know about the #dungeon23 initiative by Sean McCoy. ( check out #dungeon23 on social media if you’re not aware of this)  Of course, I think it is really cool concept so I decide to jump on the bandwagon.  I’m going to design a mega point crawl for Troika! system.  I do have a big picture design in mind and will split up the mega point crawl in clusters.  I’ll make a cluster per week and it will consist 5 locations and content (hooks/encounter/etc) to connect those locations together.   Feel free to follow my Twitter thread here, Tumblr post here, or find me on Instagram.  I’ve been following this weekly routine:

Day 1-5: create a new location each day with description, NPCs, and/or encounter table.
Day 6: create the cluster map with those five locations.
Day 7: create adventure hooks, lore, or whatever I come up to make this cluster come alive.  

I think this will be a nice balance for me to follow yet keep some variety in this process.  I’ve made it to a week and I’m beyond impressed with myself lol.  Gonna just take it a day by day and see where I go with this project.  

Are you participating?  What are you doing for your project?  Feel free to comment at the bottom of this issue!

FUTURE PLANS

As some of you might’ve noticed, I’ve rebranded Dice Stew with a new logo designed by an incredible artist, Krystina Ho.  Many thanks for designing some amazing logos for Dice Stew!  

Krystina and I are actually working on a game based on the Resistance system created by Rowan, Rook, and Decard. (famous for Spire and Heart RPGs)  We’ve been working on this game for around a year and we’ve started our first playtest campaign.  Keep an eye out for more information coming soon!

I do have several mini projects on the dock, but nothing near enough to show for now.  I’ll be sure to share updates through out the year.  

Another thing I want to do more: reviews on various indie games.  Obviously, I’ll include the itch.io ratings in this newsletter and probably a review or two to share each month.  I might create videos too but those will be made occasionally due to limited amount of energy I have available for now.  

Let me know what you would like to see more of from me for Dice Stew though!  I’m always open to feedback. :)

OGL DRAMA

Damn, I’ve been sipping my mug of coffee and reading up many people’s input about the leaked OGL draft for D&D.  I’m not going to get into this issue here though.  I’ve made my feelings clear, so feel free to read my comments on social media or ask me directly.  My focus here will be on other third-party licenses to check out as alternative to D&D:

Cairn by Yochai Gal: You can check out the SRD and this game is licensed via Creative Commons, so it is super easy to create third-party content for Cairn.  The community is very active and super friendly.  

Caltrop Core by Titanomachy: Never design a game before? No problem.  Try out this system!  It’s very simple d4 based engine and very easy to build your own game.  Titanomachy is very approachable so don’t be afraid to reach out!

Mothership by Tuesday Knight Games: The community is VERY active and the system is very straightforward for designing adventures.  Pamphlet is a very common form so you don’t need to write long and complicated if you don’t want to.  Their license page is not ready yet but keep an eye since their 1E version will be out later this year.  

Honestly, there are hundreds of third-party licensed games you can check out and design for those systems.  D&D 5e is FAR from the only one available out there to design your stuff for.  Let Hasbro dig up their own grave and the indie TTRPG community will always exist to support each other regardless of corporate greed.

Well that’s more than enough for this month.  Hope you all are having a good start to 2023!

Cheers,

Root

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