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Mastercard and the Online Safety Act (UK specific)

There's already a lot of info out there so I'll try to be brief, but just wanted to share my notes from a few hours of complaining this morning. Before I do, here's the best link for templates and contact details: https://anti-censorship-campaign.carrd.co/

Mastercard

I called the UK number (0800 964767) and it's a nightmare. Took quite a few attempts to escape the infinite automated loop. Specifically I pressed 1 for English, then 1 for 'current card holder' (I am, through Halifax) - after this point almost everything leads to a request for your card number. I might try actually putting my card number in next time and see how that goes.

Anyway, I ended up pressing 2 for 'lost/stolen' and then 2 again for a 'new request'. This got me through to a real person very quickly. They didn't understand the nature of the complaint at first, and can't register complaints themselves. That's to be expected though, and I at least took a few minutes to talk through it. She gave me the email address, I took a bit longer by asking for a number or to be passed through to someone, which didn't get me anywhere. As has been said elsewhere though, the point here is to jam up their customer service teams. I'll keep doing it, and report if any more fruitful routes appear. Also keen to hear if anyone else has good experience or notes on this!

Halifax

One other thing I did was to register a complaint with Halifax, who are the actual issuer of my credit card. Again it was impossible to manage to speak to someone, I was stuck on their virtual assistant. I got a link to register a formal complaint (https://www.halifax.co.uk/contactus/how-to-complain/complain-online.html) and have done so. I'll see if that gets me anywhere, and perhaps try to dig out a number to call them as well.

Online Safety Act

I checked this morning and there are creators whose work I own on Itch, whose pages I could no longer access. There's not even a verification process from what I can see, it's purely blocked. I can still download the games I own, but can't go to the creator's pages. Works fine if I use my VPN.

Remember to check who your MP is (https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP) and contact them. I did so for mine, focused on the Online Safety Act, but also mentioned Visa/Mastercard as well.

Keep calling and emailing, we'll keep causing trouble until we get these awful measures removed! Anyone who has other advice, especially specifically for people in the UK, please let me know.

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Turn A is officially the best Gundam

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So the new itch.io guidelines are out and they are both predictably bad and also quite unpredictably bad. There's so much to go over here but here are some of the highlights:

First we have the broadly worded content restrictions. So much of this is just strictly bad for several reasons (for example, you cannot have a NSFW game that doesn't even fetishize rape but has rape be an important thematic element under these new rules) but my personal favorite is that these are so broad that huge swaths of content are just banned from itch.io. You like VNs of monster girls having sex? Sorry, but your favorite spider girl VN is animal-related, we cannot prove that you don't want to fuck spiders so its gone.

(a real problem anyone thinks about??????)

Game where you can transformed by magical artifacts and sometimes fucked? Sorry, that's non-consensual content. Banned. You cannot be transformed into a maid against your will. You also cannot have your protagonist call an older woman "mommy" because likeeeee that's incestual right?

"Minor-presenting" what the fuck does this mean. Genuinely. If a grown woman wears a fetish uniform is that minor presenting??? What the fuck are you talking about.

Also by the way if they feel your content is "too bad" for their platform, which includes a list of conditions incredibly broad to contain things like "a woman who likes being gagged during sex", they will just steal your revenue. No no no not just the revenue from the work in question. All of it. This makes any NSFW work a ticking timebomb, especially since itch.io doesn't have the fucking staff to deal with all of this! There's no second chances. You are not protected against fraudulent report or our dumb as fuck employees.

itch.io right now is just not a safe platform for NSFW content, and honestly, it really should be said, a fair swath of SFW content too. Don't use it, find alternative ways to survive in the market right now.

It's not going to be easy, but it's necessary. Here's a link to an article going over some solutions. I cannot personally vouch for any of these in particular but you need to do what you gotta.

Also, harass VISA and Mastercard. Phone calls over emails. Ruin their workflow. Do it for weeks, don't give up.

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Now at IPR: The Ink That Bleeds

A zine about how to play immersive journaling games. Covers bleed, immersion, writing to find out, self care, why to write dialogue, the landscape of your unconscious, how to choose games, and more. Includes many supporting examples from the writer's own play.

From the back cover:

I've been playing so many journaling games the past two years. I learned shapechanging from a witch in the Minnesota wilderness, killed a mind-controlling supervillain with a sword pulled from my own body, had an ill-considered sexual relationship with a married woman, and more — and I learned so much about how immersion works, and bleed, and how fun and affecting journal game play can be.

The Ink That Bleeds is my new, original, essential guide to the experience and practice of immersive journal gaming.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/The-Ink-That-Bleeds.html

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I've got very limited experience with solo games, but some of these issues are common for me playing them too. In a group game, as mentioned here, the improvisational load is shared. Also, as a GM or a player I'm only having to take one perspective - I'm either motivated to think up cool things for the players, or interact with the cool things the GM has put in front of us. In a solo game I need to come up with the cool things and react to them, and it can end up feeling very circular which demotivates me. I don't want pure mechanical dungeon crawling or a really linear, prescribed experience, but give me even slightly too much leeway and I'll get stuck. It's something I'm still challenging myself on with solo games, and I'm curious to keep trying different types to find my sweet spot.

Can I Solo Mothership?

Mothership is a "sci-fi horror RPG where you and your crew try to survive in the most inhospitable environment in the universe: outer space". The goal for the player characters: survive, both the horrible monster trying to eat you right this moment and the horrible capitalist universe you live in. The goal for the players: put your characters in horrible situations, and produce an exciting sci-fi horror story.

I picked up the rules (Player's Survival Guide) FOR FREE! and the PWYW one-shot "Alone in the Deep" by S Murphy Games, using two PCs. This took me...one 3-hour session, ish. More on why "ish" later.

Now feels like the time for a big disclaimer: I am not a horror enjoyer. But! @2extra asked me to review Mothership, and I've heard good things about it, so I gave it my best and fairest shot. I really wanted to enjoy this! And I do think it's a good, well-designed game.

What I liked

Character creation: it's fast and easy! Everyone says this about Mothership, and everyone is right. You can create a character in about five minutes. Probably less, actually, but I needed some time to think about the relationship between my two characters. Having the character creation rules on the character sheet is brilliant. Love that.

Vibes! People say Mothership is "cool" and "punk" and "flavorful". They are correct. The mechanics really do support this vibe well. My characters did feel fragile and stressed out, as all horror protagonists should! Plus, the design of rulebook and adventures also matches the vibe. Very sharp. Very sci-fi. Very, uh, slick. Great design-mechanics-genre harmony.

Adventures! There are many, ranging all the way from one-shots (like "Alone in the Deep") to full campaign-length things. And I'm told they're good! Quinns Quest has some module recommendations. It's a game that makes adventure design easy—the structure lends itself well to very minimalist zine-style modules.

Panic and stress! Big asterisk on this one, see my Gripes, but I think panic is a great mechanic (and less ableist than other horror games), and stress—which increases every time you fail a roll—works well for a horror game.

Examples of play in the rulebook! Every game should do this; it's so helpful.

The core rules are free!

Gripes & Wishes

Let me reiterate that I'm not a horror enjoyer. Some of my gripes will be personal to me, and you might enjoy what I didn't. But that's the point of a human reviewer!

Gripe #1: The rules for Mothership are, shall we say, stripped down. Which is very modern and cool of them, I guess. But for me (autistic), when a game's rules tell me to "use common sense" about something that is not at all common sensical, I just don't know what to do with that.

Example: when you create a character, you roll dice to get your starting equipment. Some of the equipment has firm mechanical definitions (e.g. combat shotgun). Some doesn't. My scientist character started with "one vaccine", which has no associated mechanics. What am I meant to do with one undefined vaccine? Is it a universal vaccine against whatever infectious threat the characters encounter? This doesn't make much narrative sense to me; the threats the characters encounter are meant to be new and surprising, I thought. So then is it a useless flavor item? That seems counter to the game's design philosophy, and also then why do I have it?

Neither solution is satisfying to me, either as a solo player or as a GM.

Gripe #2: [muttering] bunch of improv prompts...

Maybe you love to improv as a GM or a solo player. I, personally, need a solid foundation of very detailed, granular prep—or for the module I'm playing through to provide similar support—to feel like I understand the world I'm playing in. Sure, I might then throw out that prep or go totally off-rails, but still, the fact that the details are there if I want them helps me feel like I'm playing a real game and not Calvinball.

Mothership, unfortunately, doesn't really support this.

The game is just so...slick and minimalist. It encourages adventure design which is slick and minimalist. Many modules fit on a single trifold sheet of paper. And that's very "cool", but what if I want to know, say, what's in an engine room beyond just engines? Can my characters find useful tools in there? Furniture to throw at monsters or hide under? Mothership won't tell me, and neither will any Mothership module (as far as I can tell).

I think this would feel less bad if I was playing with a group of real people who could share the improv burden. But the game feels like a lot of work, which isn't really what I want in a thing I do for fun.

Gripe #3: Rolling is bad. One thing I love about TTRPGs with dice is that, if something is uncertain, you can let the dice decide. Does my character know anything about this weird eel? Is my character feeling more prudent or reckless right now? Does my character know this thing that I, the player, know in real life?

Alas, in Mothership, rolling always risks bad consequences. Every time you fail a roll, you accumulate stress, which makes it more likely you'll panic so hard you lose one of your skills (or have a heart attack) (or start fighting monsters on sight). Plus, just statistically, you should expect to fail more than half of all your rolls. This is a horror game, so those consequences are of course interesting. But one doesn't want to spend all one's time creating new character after new character, so as a player, I found myself motivated to 1) avoid accumulating stress, and thus 2) avoid rolling, and thus 3) make decisions myself which I would ordinarily leave up to the dice, which is 4) again, a lot of work.

Gripe #4: What world are we in?

Here's a situation I encountered in play: Room A contains a guy who just attacked one of my characters. Room B is connected to Room A, so my characters go around to Room B and attempt to block the door, trapping the guy in Room A.

Now I come crashing to a halt.

How does one disable a door? Do they just, like, stick a chair under a physical handle? Smash some kind of hand scanner thing? Hack an alien computer? Does someone have to do it remotely?

Okay, well, maybe they should ask the captain to disable the door from the...bridge, or whatever. Wait, do they have to physically run all the way back to the bridge? Can they just hit an intercom button? Do they have transponders?

What world are we in?

Mothership won't tell you, and neither will a Mothership module (at least not this one!), so here I find myself having to make up a bunch of stuff myself again with very little support. What's worse, I have to do all this improv worldbuilding very suddenly in the highest-tension moments, which really interrupts play and deflates the tension.

It would be more fine if Mothership (or its modules) told me I had to do all this worldbuilding or decide on a universe beforehand. But it doesn't, and the game also doesn't make it clear what kind of world it's designed for.

Gripe #5: On a crit, "something very good happens" or "something very bad happens". What does this mean practically? I'd love even one example. Mothership does not give me that example, not even for combat.

Solo-Specific Thoughts

As I've said before, when I play a solo game, I'm looking for defined and achievable goals. To me, Mothership doesn't have this. The characters' goal is to survive, I guess, but that feels neither well-defined nor achievable—and even if they do survive somehow, they've really achieved nothing but a return to where they were before, at best. What's the point of this?

The players' goal is to tell an interesting horror story, I think. And I can see how this could happen playing in a group! But solo…

In my solo session, I stopped playing just after my characters found the big nasty problem fucking up their ship, precisely because it all felt pointless. Sure, maybe they would've dealt with the big nasty problem and lived (no they wouldn't) (Mothership is very clear about what you should expect if your character gets into a fight). But then what? The ship and the crew were still irreparably fucked up. My characters were still doomed to die, just slowly on the ocean floor instead of eaten by monsters, I guess. And none of this had anything to do with my choices or my characters' choices.

I said earlier I'm not a horror enjoyer, and that's probably where this is coming from. I've liked some horror in my life; I'm not a horror hater! But in a TTRPG, especially a solo TTRPG, where the whole point is that you're playing a game, that you (the real person) have some agency to affect the way things go...a game where your characters are doomed to fail and suffer and die just isn't very fun. Is "rocks fall, everyone dies" an interesting play experience? To me, no, and that's fundamentally the feeling I got from playing Mothership.

Final Thoughts

Did I have fun? No.

Would I play it again? No.

Would I recommend it? For group play, yes, if you're a GM who doesn't mind a lot of improv worldbuilding on the fly or is willing to do some unsupported prep work beforehand. For solo play...yes, if you like the idea of playing the doomed protagonists of a horror movie.

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⚠️ WARNING: NOT FOR PRUDES. IF YOU CLICK MY LINK PLEASE BE CAREFUL ABOUT WHAT YOU MIGHT SEE 😎🍆 😱

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Kill Credit card Companies

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I designed a role-playing game and got the best feedback from playtests I wasn't involved in

Creating a game means testing it. That is, if you want to hone it, tune it, so whatever you're designing can reach more of its potential. I've been testing a game for about a year now and with me other enthusiastic players and facilitators—I was amazingly lucky that way.

Each playtest made the game better, but looking back, I was so glad that there were playtests I didn't run, that I didn't even play in. It was those games that supplied me with a test not just of the game in my head, but of the game as it was set to paper. Read about it in my latest newsletter:

And if you'd like to receive blogs about rpg design into your inbox whenever I send out a new one, consider subscribing.

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I have a new blog post about another title in I'm with the Damned & Other Games: You Wanna Go?

It talks about how this went from an update of the Infinite Dancefloor into something new and different. And how many of that evolution came from the way a restraint can reverberate through a text.

"So this mechanic, which we’ll call Stress rather than Chill, immediately brings up the possibility of someone having a pile of cards that they’d much rather be using to resolve actions. How do those cards re-enter play? I decided by default the only way out was through and busting out would lead you to taking cards into hand and being able to play them from there. It’s a trade off as the argument that results from this will cost you time in this run. Now this mechanic has gone from something that only impacted fiction in the Infinite Dancefloor to something essential for succeeding. To give greater options for card control I decided each character should have an ability, like how Out of the Fold worked, and those abilities could all be themed around ways of managing stress, healthily or otherwise. So the need to remove dice has led to basically reorientating this game and the tactical focus around this new mechanic."

If this sounds cool please check out the pre-launch page for the whole compilation

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Unmasked - a scenario for Transgender Deathmatch Legend II

Something different to my blogging about reading TTRPGs, as I've made a little something for one! It's a scenario built for Transgender Deathmatch Legend II, which is a very fun game you can find here.

Rambling blog below, but in short you're a recently laid off employee punching your way through the office building to knock the CEO's lights out. It's just for a bit of fun, and it'd be cool if anyone who likes TDLII takes a look and shares any feedback!

My entire personal backstory for a 3-page RPG scenario...

As I've mentioned in some earlier posts, I've been toying with the idea of a motorsports TTRPG. I'm not a games designer, and I'm not being humble there, I have literally never done this before. I just like to engage with things critically and find ways to be productively creative (productively as in, something is produced as a result, that I can see in the world).

I came to a conclusion that I might like to try a hack of Transgender Deathmatch Legend II. That's very clearly not a game about racing cars, but I love 2-player games, love card games, and I love the structure of TDLII specifically as you build a narrative around a series of trick taking 'fights'.

Turns out, hacking a whole game is hard work! You really start to appreciate how much goes into a game of any size and complexity. Besides playing a bunch of TDLII, I thought a nice step might be to try writing a scenario for it, and this is the result.

TDLII is, unsurprisingly, specifically about being trans, which I'm not and wouldn't want to be insensitive to. Kayla has also spoken on a blog about how her games are very often about being an outsider. That's something I can more directly relate to, and for me that manifests most strongly in being neurodivergent (specifically for me, AuDHD), and especially in relation to work. Through sheer force of will, hard work, and a couple of decades of heavy masking, I've somehow managed to build a sort-of-career in the 'corporate' world. I use that term loosely, I'm not out here working for McKinsey or something. It comes at a cost though, and I have ... feelings about it!

That's how I ended up with the idea for this scenario. You've been a victim of a new round of layoffs, and are going to punch your way through the whole office building and confront the CEO. It's populated with cartoon character versions of the kinds of people I've met in my career, some depressingly close to the real thing though.

Just because it felt too fun not to, I actually built this in PowerPoint, to resemble the style of a slide deck, while also following the structure of the scenarios in the actual book. The hex icons are all replaced with very corporate vector equivalents - that means the icons are different (skulls didn't feel very corporate!) but hopefully it's all still easy enough to follow.

I enjoyed making this though, and had a good time playtesting it with my partner. I'm pretty chuffed that it looks like a real thing!

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Have you played SANCTUARY & SENTINEL ?

By Meghan Cross

Sanctuary and Sentinel tells the story of a place of great power, those charged with protecting it, and the threats that seek to take the power for themselves - played out over two GMless games - both of which can be played solo or with a group. While each game can be played as a standalone game, they can also be played together one after another to tell the extended story of your Sanctuary and its guardians.

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Game Reactions: Michigan Dogman (hunt for proof of a monster in the woods)

Link: https://worldchampgameco.itch.io/michigandogman

We're here! The last of the 5 zines from Adam Vass' Midnight Marathon. This is a game for 1-3 players, and has you searching the woods via a hexmap for evidence of the fabled Michigan Dogman. Return the evidence to the tavern and become a legend.

You start off picking from a list of very flavourful characters, which do a lot of working in setting the tone for the game. From there you explore a hexmap, with mobility limited by a mechanic where you must roll a d6 to figure out where you can move.

The map is initially empty - you roll a d66 when you enter a hex to determine what is there. The contents of the hexes only remain while you are in or adjacent to the hex though. Once you move beyond, they reset and you will re-roll if you go back. It reflects the shifting, menacing nature of the woods themselves really well.

As you explore you hope to find evidence, but you also risk 'sightings', which have the potential to leave you dead in the woods. Collect 3 evidence and you can return to the tavern.

I read the Midnight Marathon zines in a completely random order, but it worked out well by ending on this one. It's the most like a regular game out of the 5, and feels like it ties together the whole series. I like the structure and mechanics of exploration, giving replayability and getting a lot out of a small zine format. Returning to the big theme of these 5 zines, the prompt writing is fantastic. The more I read and play, the less I take for granted when writing is really good.

All the zines are great, but this is probably the one I'm most excited to bring to a table, closely followed by Blood Lock and Spin the Bottle. They're all worth reading though, I love them.

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Game Reactions: Rites of Exorcism (36-word horror microgames)

Link: https://worldchampgameco.itch.io/the-rites-of-exorcism

Zine number four from Adam Vass' Midnight Marathon. I questioned at the end of my last reaction whether there was intentional experimentation with levels of specificity and different horror vibes. I feel vindicated immediately with this next one!

Rites of Exorcism is a collection of 8 microgames, each 36 words long. They were initially created for a 36-word game jam. Each one will list at the bottom of the page how many players it is for.

Obviously, 36 words is not many words. What this zine demonstrates is how much you can communicate with a small number of words and good design (both rules and the visuals). Think 'baby shoes, never worn' except giving you the creeps, and it has to communicate game rules at the same time.

Through these games you might be rolling some d6 and responding to prompts, but you also might be rolling those d6 on a spirit board, or flicking them into a soul circle.

Fantastic exercise in design, efficiency, and vibes.

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Had a session of Brindlewood Bay last night. Fourth session overall and we wrapped up our second case. One player had been rolling like shit all night. When it came time to do the big roll to solve the mystery, I suggested we believe in him and ask him to do it. I gave it a really solid pitch and I think we all convinced ourselves it was going to be great.

He rolled snake eyes. It was hilarious.

We'd diligently worked so many clues into our batshit theory that it passed anyway, but still. The killer tried to flee and this same character attempted to block her escape... and failed again!

It all worked out because somehow our group of grannies ended up chasing a speedboat down on jetskis, which was incredible.

I love TTRPGs.

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Game Reactions: Letters from the Liberty Motel (solo horror journalling)

Link: https://worldchampgameco.itch.io/letters

This is the third zine I've read now from the Midnight Marathon series by Adam Vass. Change of pace as this is a solo letter-writing game. You play as a housekeeper in a very surreal motel. As you go into each room to clean, you'll find some bizarre scene, roll for a result, and react to the resulting prompts. Many of thoe prompts ask you to write a letter, either from your own perspective or that of one of the people involved in whatever mess led to the room you find yourself in.

Firstly, you create your character through a series of prompts. These add a good amount of texture immediately, asking things like 'what secret are you keeping?'

Each room you enter after this gives you some weird and usually unsettling scene. They're all described well and have interesting prompts. This is still a 20 page zine though, so there's only so much to go on initially. This is maybe a running theme more about me than any games I read, but I would worry about matching the game's energy in my responses to prompts. Where Blood Lock was very specific and made me feel comfortable, and Spin the Bottle was vague in its prompts but so specific in its premise that I still felt good, this game is so heavy on the surreal imagery that I don't feel like I have nearly as good a grip on it. For someone else though, it might give them the opportunity to just get really fucking weird with it.

I don't know if playing with levels of specificity and different horror vibes was an intention with the Midnight Marathon zines, but with 3 of the 5 read, it feels like a consistent thread.

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new blog who dis

hey there! i'm wendi yu, a travesti monster from Northeast Brasil who makes trouble out of words and images.

i make ttrpgs and have released 3 of them so far:

here, there, be monsters!, a punk response to monster-hunting Urban Fantasy media from the monsters' point of view. available in print and pdf from SoulMuppet;

Marvelous Mutations and Merry Musicians, a weird fantasy about mutated musicians touring the post-post-apocalyptic not-wastelands and getting in trouble. available in print and pdf from Exalted Funeral and as a pay-what-you-want pdf here;

and Apotheosis Janitors, a satire about creating a cult and getting rid of the evidence that your deity was once mortal. available as a pwyw pdf here.

i've also worked as a freelance writer, sensitivity reader, artist and designer for other games. i'm currently available (and looking) for work, so hit me up if you're interested!

i have a master's in contemporary media and culture, and i'm currently doing a phd in the same area. other times, i've been a screenwriter, poet, filmmaker, designer and editor.

for more info, you can check my page or wen_di_yu at the social network formerly known as twitter!

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Some thoughts posted on our bsky yesterday that I think are relevant to share here as well. Please talk about the things you like!

If you've got a reddit account talk about games you like on r/rpg. They hate self promo over there but love hearing about new games.

Also QRT self promo posts with your own opinions / pitch.

Also also, play the games! It's fun and shares the experience of new games