Between Two Jams
TL;DR:
Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam (now to July 8): https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2024/05/summer-lego-rpg-setting-jam.html
Barkeep Jam (June 14 to August 14): https://itch.io/jam/barkeep-jam
Prismatic Wasteland Patreon (early blogposts, ~250 pages of WIP TTRPG writing): https://www.patreon.com/PrismaticWasteland
Wonky Willie’s Authentic Interactive Extravaganza (FREE, silly Adventure from me and 11 other RPG bloggers): https://prismatic-wasteland.itch.io/wonky-willies-authentic-interactive-extravaganza
Remember Game Jams? They’re back, in a big way! Actually, they never left. According to reporting from my colleague at the Skeleton Code Machine blog, there was a 115% increase in game jams in 2020 (huh, wonder why. Probably nothing unusual about that year, and it definitely didn’t coincide with me starting this very blog), and have remained fairly popular ever since.
For the uninitiated, a game jam is where lots of people work on the same theme or concept over a short period of time. It is a low stakes excuse to get creative in a communal way. It is a collective ritual you engage in to feel closer to your fellow humans. They’re, in fact, cool. Another colleague, snow, on her YouTube channel agrees that game jams are cool (especially of the TTRPG variety) and goes into greater depth on that subject. I need you to go ahead and take her and my words on the matter because I want to go ahead to talk about the other cool stuff for which you should be getting well and duly hyped.
The first is a game jam I have already started work on: the Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam! It is being hosted by my colleague, Anne of the DIY & Dragons blog, and runs until July 8, 2024. The full details are hosted over at her blog, but the brief summary is to create a small game setting based on a few Lego sets. For all of you participating, I encourage you to tap into your toybox creativity mindset and combine things in unintuitive ways to great effect.
The second game jam is my own, the long-hinted-at, Barkeep Jam, wherein you are encouraged to create your own fantasy tavern or even your own complete pubcrawl adventure. You’ve heard of “system reference documents”, but I have put together an “adventure reference document” where you can use the full text (if you want; it isn’t necessary) of Barkeep on the Borderlands’ pubcrawl and drinking rules, along with the general format for the pubs, pursuant to a third party license. Full details on the jam, such as how to submit, are on this itch page, where you can also find all the submissions.
The Barkeep Jam will run from June 14 (the anniversary of copies of Barkeep on the Borderlands being shipped around the world) to August 14 (which just so happens to be my birthday). Please go make something for it! As a birthday present for me, one of your top 20 most favorite TTRPG bloggers. You wouldn’t want me to not have plenty of jam entries to look at on my birthday would you? But, if manipulative moral suasion doesn’t do it for you, all participants will get shoutouts on this very blog and a promo code from my webstore (oh boy, savings!), with my most favorites getting some level of highlighting and praise dripped all over them. I may even (assuming enough participation) reach out to the handful with the best pub concepts and see if the authors would like to get spiffed up (i.e., edited) and published in a compilation, with compensation, of course.
It was exciting enough to see what ten of my favorite bloggers would come up with when putting together Barkeep itself, but now I get to see what unhinged (or maybe perfectly hinged; no judgment) concepts the rest of y’all put forth. I anxiously await the opening of the submission deadline.
And, while I am in full carnival barker mode, I would like to recommend to you my Patreon. I know you are familiar with the whole Patreon game, and the way mine works isn’t dissimilar. If you throw one dollar per month my way, you get unleashed into the patron-exclusive portion of my discord server, where I post works-in-progress, solicit feedback about art I’m commissioning, and plot the downfall of the western world. You also get to see draft blog posts in advance and, occasionally, some exclusive blog posts just for the patrons.
At the five dollar tier, you get access to a trove of my works-in-progress, some old versions of completed projects, and other game stuff I’ve made that is on my backburner. This totals out to 250 pages of PDFs (and growing), including over a hundred pages of a 2021 draft of my science fantasy heartbreaker, Prismatic Wasteland (and a smaller amount of the current working draft). And if you are really fiending for Prismatic Wasteland content, at the ten dollar tier, you get to boss me around by commanding a topic about which I will muse on this very blog. Such responsibility is too powerful for most, and so far no one has taken me up on it.
With 2 game jams to start working on immediately and 250 pages of ashcan TTRPG musings to read, your summer is booked. Go ahead and tell your family you won’t make it to the beach this year, inform the local fire department that they’ll need someone else to volunteer on the 4th of July, and post the “no lifeguard on duty” sign out on your luxurious backyard pool. This summer, we are staying inside, reading, writing and playing tabletop games.
Finally, from now and until the duration of the Barkeep Jam, PDFs of Barkeep on the Borderlands both on my own webstore and on my itch page will be 50% off. If you haven’t picked it up yet, but you’ve been curious, now is as good a time as any.
While I am mindlessly promoting things, an adventure I wrote with a few blogger friends also happened to go live yesterday. It was written in the weeks following the Glasgow AI-generated “Wonka experience” as both a horrific dungeon and also an avenue to mock artificial intelligence and its low-quality output. Go check it out for free on itch. Even if you don’t run it, I am almost positive it will elicit some laughs. It is also FREE.
