Chris Swallow ➡️ Where Fields Go Fallow

Public Kickstarter update for Where Fields Go Fallow: www.kickstarter.com/projects/emp...

Issue #1 – The Weight of Emptiness Design thoughts, a new corner of the Lower Princedoms, and tables for your next session.

I've started a Substack! Check it out here: open.substack.com/pub/empathch...

We have now sent out our Backer Survey! Please check your email address used on Kickstarter or our latest update there for more information.

Some of the illustrations I made for the Sickest Witch's wooden minis and upcoming adventure by @justinsirois.bsky.social. Looking forward to seeing these in woodflesh!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/jus...

Sign up to the Cosmic Dark alert page here, which is a fascinating game of weird sci-fi horror. Tarkovsky, Ballard, Vandermeer: the good stuff.

My scenario is called Umbilical, and is basically Superman's origin meets Annihilation.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gra...

I player Sorcerers & Sellswords with my kids on one vacation, and it turned out my at the time 5-yo daughter was secretly a murder hobo. It was superfun! Extremely short prep and got into play in just a few minutes.

Where Fields Go Fallow One-Pager RPG by EMPATH CHAMBER A storygame about villagers defending their home from a monster.

The ones I've looked at that inspired me are:

- Sorcerers & Sellswords (a L&F hack)
- World of Dungeons
- 24xx
- "Warrior, Rogue, Mage" (only a character sheet)

My own additions to the pool are:

OGREISH - empathchamber.itch.io/ogreish
Where Fields Go Fallow - empathchamber.itch.io/wherefieldsg...

That makes feedback easier to manage, and the trajectory of a smaller project is easier to adjust and calibrate. End of rant :) 14/14

...the smaller a project is, the faster you can learn if your idea flies with the community, or if it is only great in your own head :) And as a solo designer, I can only say this: don't be afraid to try your ideas, but start small and release often. 13/x

...formatted into a tiny little thing, other players can digest and try out with little effort and time. For me, they were crucial to dare to try to run a Kickstarter again. It's fucking superscary to throw your ideas out there as an indie designer, and...

So to answer your question, @squadronuk.bsky.social, for me, one-pagers have been instrumental to channel my creativity into manageable projects that balance risk-taking and design fun. So to me, all one-pagers are valuable, more or less. I see them as expressions of an idea... 11/x

...upcoming project that will coexist, side-by-side with our zine, as a second installment of the engine/framework underneath the game. 10/x

...the beginning. Our bigger monster-hunting game is still in the making, but it had to take a pause production-wise to make room for this little gem of an experiment. And it all started with a one-pager design and our curiosity. Next, I'm soon planning to reveal the next... 9/x

So now, our spinoff design experiment for the one-page jam led us to do a Kickstarter, which funded this game in a Zine format. We're currently working on getting the game ready for print, and I hope to send it out to the backers during the summer. And the cool thing is, this is only... 8/x

We got some really good reviews, and in some player conversations, we learned that we were on the right track. The concept was interesting enough. Besides playing it with my family and some friends, it caught some eyes out there, which made us run it as a ZineQuest Kickstarter this year. 7/x

But what happened next was both something of the most inspiring thing I've done in many years, but also the most challenging. Could we pull it off? It turned out, yes, we could. We submitted the project, as a one-pager, under a name we later had to change. Anyway... 6/x

(ohhh, by the way, I forgot about one thing... the year before I released my ashcan quickstart rules on itch.io, which was a promo thing for the upcoming monster-hunting game, in a very compressed version, inspired by the one-pagers I mentioned earlier. This had some influence on our decision) x/x

We asked ourselves, could we compress a standard-sized game into a one-page playable solution? We had five weeks to do it, and we both had other work and family things to do aside from the game design projects. But something made us jump into the challenge. So we started out... 5/x

So when writing on my next "big" project, I ran into itch.io's yearly One-Page RPG Jam last summer (2024), and got an idea when discussing with my illustrator friend Steven. What if we did a micro-spinoff of our ongoing monster-hunting project, and submitted it? 4/x

But with lessons learned and a few years wasted on a "dream project", I found smaller games really satisfying, both the little I played and also when designing. Inspired by 24xx, World of Dungeons, Sorcerers & Sellswords, Lasers & Feelings, along with Trophy, I got into experimentation. 3/x

...when I got some time off. I did house rules, hacks, cooler thematic stuff. Most were smaller stuff for my own creative satisfaction, but one ambitious project was expensive, in time and effort. That failed miserably (in the early Kickstarter days), even though it turned out really beautiful. 2/x

@squadronuk.bsky.social asked some great questions about #onepager #ttrpgs. Many years ago (about when I became a parent), time for playing games was reduced to almost nothing. I missed playing, but didn't get more than an hour over for my own hobbies. Instead, I started to design games... 1/x

I have strong opinions ont his topic, but of course, I'm biased :)

#TTRPGTHOUGHTS

1

Minimalist/One Page RPGs - clever or throwaway?

There are loads of these one-page #TTRPGs around. There are probably 5 more in the world now than when I started typing this sentence.

When creating/writing these games, do the authors develop the rules, test them….

1

A happy man says "show me the good stuff".

It's #SelfPromoSaturday which means I want to see the #ttrpg stuff you've got available today, whether it's #dnd #pathfinder or #indierpg

As always, don't forget;

👍 Like cool stuff

🗨 Engage with folks

🔃 Repost your favorites

🚫 No A.I Though

go.bsky.app/P49WMrb

Here’s the starter pack! Please share, boost, and follow these folks!

If you are Asian/Pacific Islander pls respond to the post above to be added! If I don’t know you, please link your work! Art/writing/game design/layout/editing/actual play/poscasting/etc all valid!!

A Where Fields Go Fallow Production Update: I just finalized the final raw text draft for the core of the game to be handed over to my editor, and @stonedrunkwizard has had the illustration brief updated! Now the refinement of the playbooks starts 😀 #pbta #fitd #fantasy #zinequest #gamedesign

TTRPG Question of the Day

You want to play a "traditional" fantasy game. What system are you using?

For a lot of people the obvious answer is D&D, which is certainly an iconic game. But there are many other systems out that can handle the fantasy genre in different, interesting ways.

I designed my own minimalistic game, OGREISH, after playing PbtA and FitD games for a few years. I wanted a more slick, streamlined engine with conversation-friendly challenges, that was easy to pick up and learn. Today I based my first game on it, Where Fields Go Fallow, which was just Kickstarted!

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