Click Nothing

Dev Game Club Podcast Interview

A few nights ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim and Brett at Dev Game Club after they had just spent the past five episodes of their podcast playing and talking about Far Cry 2. The series starts here, and the interview is the last one.

I worked briefly alongside Tim at LucasArts, and have always had a ton of respect for both his and Brett's work, so it was a real pleasure to get to talk to them about mine. It's also interesting to get fresh takes on the game so long after it shipped, and to revisit with a more modern eye and in the context of current sensibilities.

Anyway, if you're looking for good, frank discussion about specific, important games, the podcast is great. They've provided many deep dives into some of my favorite games of all time, including X-Com, Civ III, System Shock 2, Bioshock, GTA III, Thief, Deus Ex, DOOM, and many more - including interviews with their creators in some cases, which is a special treat. If, like me, you're looking for thoughtful discussion about engaging media to listen to while you're making dinner or walking to work or whatever, I can't recommend this podcast highly enough.

Now that I type out that list (which is only a subset of their content) I realize how profoundly humbling it is to have Far Cry 2 added to that list. So thanks Tim and Brett!

Wonder and Madness

Back in the summer I mentioned that I had submitted an entry to the One Page Dungeon Contest, which challenges creators to make a table top RPG adventure or dungeon entirely contained to a single page. Of course, I thought 'one page?, pffff... that sounds easy.' Turns out, not so much. On top of that, this year's theme was 'Wonder', so I needed to come up with something that was more than just a map and a list of monsters - I needed something that would make people go wide-eyed, and give them an 'a-ha' moment.

I wracked my brains for a week or so, before finally asking myself the right question; 'what is a design that can ONLY work on a single sheet of paper?' That's when the idea for "The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad!" popped into my head.

Inspired by the work of cartoonist Al Jaffee of Mad Magazine fame, my One Page Dungeon works like a 'fold-in'; you need to fold the paper in different ways in order to access different parts of the dungeon. That made it extradimensional, and inspired the story of a wizard driven mad by his magical study of all things extradimensional, eventually drawing him into conflict with the Infernal God of Madness, Awhout-rout-yuth (pronounced in the way hyenas would howl it).

From there, it was easy (not really). All I had to do was figure out a progression in the story and challenges that would allow the dungeon to be folded and unfolded in a way that would lead players through it. As they figure out how the dungeon works, they confront Jaffee's pets, inspirations, failed experiments, and the three servants of Awhout-rout-yuth - all imprisoned in the dungeon. - before finally facing Jaffee himself - now possessed by the Mad God, who they can defeat in different ways.

Anyway - here is my One Page Dungeon for you to download and play with your group. Note - because you need to be able to fold the page, you will need to print it out to use it (or photoshop up the different configurations). The adventure is game-system agnostic (one of the rules of the contest), though it should be pretty easy to adapt it at run time if you play DnD or Pathfinder, or pretty much any fantasy RPG. I have also uploaded four characters that I used to test the adventure with my different gaming groups. The characters are made using a game system I have been developing for the past 10 years... COMING SOON!). While you won't be able to use these characters without my TTRPG rules, you should be able to roughly understand how they could translate your favourite system if you want to use them. Also, they include a little bit of individual backstory that connects them to the plot and gives more context to the story.

If you like this format, you can PWYW for the Compendium of all the 2022 One Page Dungeon contest entries (there were 84!). Even if you played one a week with your group, they will last you easily until next year's contest, so that's a good deal. I've only had a chance to skim through the book, but there are several in there that look really cool. My own entry made it into the Winners Circle, which, after looking at the competition, I must say I am proud of. You can see the list of the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions here.

Also worth noting, this would not have been possible without Dungeon Scrawl by @ProbableTrain. This is just a fantastic tool for making quick and easy underground dungeon maps to a high level of quality. In general, I don't make dungeon crawl style adventures, but that was what The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! needed to be, and I couldn't have done it without a tool that allowed me to make and test a lot of different iterations quickly... even working on graph paper was tricky as I went through about 40 iterations before I even figured out the basics of how the dungeon needed to fold - so the digital tool really made that more efficient and less wasteful.

Perhaps I'll post more another time about some of the many online tools I've been using to build up my RPG game rules and content.

A final thanks also to my own playtesters... you know who you are. I couldn't have gotten this dungeon together with your skill and passion.

Anyway, hope you enjoy playing, and feel inspired to submit next year!