This update is primarily about the recent playtests run at the mini-con sponsored by the Dead Gamers Society gaming group in Orange County. These folks are good people – they have a consistent player group that normally focus on White Wolf-based products such as Vampire: The Masquerade, but have been a friend to Monkeyfun since we first started running playtests … Read More
Update: A Town Called Malice 2018.07.10
As we continue to develop A Town Called Malice, we’ve been running multiple playtest sessions to try out different scenarios with different types of player types. Luckily I have a pretty big swath of people I know willing to test things out. This past weekend, I did a playtest with an eclectic group that would not normally game together, so … Read More
Survey – What non-RPG book has most influenced your gaming style?
A few days ago I asked on Facebook what non-RPG book has most influenced the gaming style of my friends. You can probably guess some of them right off the bat – Lord of the Rings, Dune, Discworld, etc. But a few of them were a little interesting, enough to where I wanted to share them with you as possible … Read More
Behind the Scenes: Return to the Cruise Ship of the Damned
This year’s Spirit of 77 Day (July 7, for those of you wondering) we will be releasing our first sequel to a Spirit of 77 adventure, our first adventure Cruise Ship of the Damned. Cruise Ship was more than our first adventure, it was our proof of concept to confirm the modifications to the original Apocalypse World system actually worked, … Read More
Malice Playtest Report – Calling Malice Station…
Today’s playtest of “A Town Called Malice” served a couple of purposes, not the least being a test of new playset setting Malice as a lone mining station of the moon of Io, “Calling Malice Station”. Technically it should make no difference, as long as the Town still served the definition basics. (And it didn’t). Christopher played the Chief Constable (The … Read More
Puzzles vs. Mysteries – Musings for the Hustling GM
“That’s the real question isn’t it: why? The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, The Mafia, keeps ’em guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents ’em from asking the most important question: why?” – JFK This weekend, I spent some time reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, What the Dog Saw. If you’re not familiar … Read More
The Joys of Updating Your Website
“I’m too big for muh britches…” As you can see, we’ve been adding new stuff to the site and updating things all around. It was pretty obvious the infrastructure needed some TLC and some added items all around. New websites feel like new cars – they depreciate in value the second you drive them off the lot and into the … Read More
Monkeyfun Recap: Gamex 2018
Gamex is historically the smaller of the Strategicon conventions, but we were still kept busy with our playtests of “A Town Called Malice” and “Spirit of 77: Return to the Cruise Ship of the Damned“. (And of course our little corner in the Dealer’s Room.) Many things occurred, here’s some of the highlights – On a designer/industry level, it was … Read More
A Town Called Malice – A Nordic Horror RPG coming soon
A Town Called Malice explores the world of “Nordic horror” – a combination of Nordic Noir and lurking horror. Set in the small, remote town of Malice, players take the roles of citizens within the town, complete with back histories that complicate working together to solve the bigger problems of the town. Malice utilizes the Story Pillar System, originated by … Read More
Tales from the Table: Competitive Gruel Truck at QC Game Fest
When we were first putting Gruel Truck together, playing it with two to three trucks was not the original plan. It was a spontaneous sort of thing because of a large number people who turned out to playtest the original game. Based on the amount of fun shared by everyone, we knew we had to include rules to allow people … Read More