Hey everyone
We’re cruising towards a new Kickstarter campaign, for Last Fleet, in January. That means I’ve been very busy finalising the game text, working with artists to get some samples ready, sorting out media, and all the other nonsense you have to do to prepare for a campaign.
Despite this, I seem to have somehow found a bit of spare time for other design stuff and blogging. I’ve been in the #threeforged game jam[*], which has produced some pretty weird and interesting games. I’ll no doubt share them here once I’ve had the chance to look at all the versions properly.
Anyway! I wanted to share a couple of things that have gone up recently on the Black Armada blog.
The first is a copy of the Mental Health and Lovecraft essay that is found in Lovecraftesque. If you haven’t read it, I do recommend it: we bust some myths about Lovecraft, analyse how “madness” comes into the genre, and provide tips for keeping your cosmic horror games away from stereotypes around “insanity”.
https://blackarmada.com/mental-health-and-lovecraft/
The second is some thoughts about the so-called “system matters” debate. I think most people are pretty tired of this issue and it seems to go around in circles. I’ve tried to make it a bit more practical and hopefully more insightful by analysing what we mean by system, and how different aspects of system matter. It’s the first part of what will be a series getting into this in more depth.
https://blackarmada.com/how-does-system-matter/
Hope you all have a wonderful festive season, and I look forward to sharing more games and articles with you in 2020.
Cheers
Josh
[*] For those not familiar, threeforged sees designers produce a very short game, pass it on blind to another designer, who then develops it into a slightly longer game, and then passed on blind again to a third designer who finishes it off. Thus there are three versions of each game, which might be radically different from each other.