itch.io

It's going, thanks! We wrapped up the intro adventure (in a location inspired by a certain major metropolitan city's art museum). That was initially designed as a self-contained thing with a MacGuffin in the adventuring site, but I ended up saying it wasn't in there anymore to give us an excuse to test iterations of the travel, faction, and combat rules, visit other parts of the map, and just generally get into trouble. 

Wastoid has multiple inspirations, but my friends are very much playing it like a Fallout game, which means stopping along the way to do inane "side quests" at every opportunity. Our last session was spent pretty much entirely killing cow-sized "jumbo crabs" at the behest of some random scientist they met on the road because he promised he could inject them with a "serum" if they killed enough of them. Now a couple wastoids have soft shells, another has a claw, and a couple more have gills in their armpits.

Maybe someday they'll find the painting they're looking for. Or one of them will be the new president. That's a thing that might happen, too, apparently. We'll see.

I'm doing much better, thanks! And that's awesome—if you ever feel like sharing how the game works for you, I'd love to hear, warts and all. I'm playtesting and revising myself now!

Thanks for the well wishes—I'm doing much better! 

Long story short: I honestly can't say when the release date will be, but I'm actively playtesting (with another session scheduled tomorrow) and working on it still.

Ah, yeah, Vanda doesn’t exactly have a well stocked trading post so much as a ruined shrine, a rumor mill, and a petrified husband she will sell for 5 souls (or best offer, really). Maybe she’ll get some more in stock when you come back from your next quest, though! 😉

(Edit to add: That’s my way of saying the soul values for enemy drops were calculated based on the assumption they’re used mostly for leveling, split between a party of a few players, and if you happen to have any left over for shopping, that’s swell, but I didn’t count on merchants having reliable stock in what’s effectively a post-apocalyptic setting.)

Thanks so much! I hope to playtest a Dungeon23 adventure I made for an expanded version of the rules I'd love to share. I have some other priorities I need to sort through before I can get to that, though.

Thank you! And EACH and ANY enemy that you can imagine collecting souls for whatever reason could have [roll and sum its ability dice] souls. 

(I meant for this "tutorial adventure" to introduce players to the idea that this world's monsters pretty much all have good reason to be hungry for souls, but I suspect I confused the issue by having the first monsters you encounter already be famous for rummaging around corpses!)

Wow! Thanks for sharing—I’m glad to hear it “clicked” so well for you!

This is so nice to hear—thank you so much!

Thanks for checking in! To be honest, I’ve had so much on my plate that progress on a revised edition has been slow.  I appreciate the nudge, though: I’ve got a draft that’s far enough along that it might be worth tidying up and releasing for playtest feedback, given some free time. 

In the meantime, I encourage you to download a free community copy to take a peek if you’re curious what it’s like. Hellboy annd BPRD were indeed huge influences!

Thanks so much for the kind words! (And for bringing an Elden Ring one-shot to my attention!)

Also, thank you for reminding me to check community copy counts on my other games. Just added another thousand to some that were all out or close to it, including Grave, Exhumed, and Agents of the O.D.D.!

You’re welcome, and thank you so much for this kind message! I really appreciate it. 

Thanks for the comment! Sorry I've been super quiet around here lately; I've been extremely booked with personal commitments and job interviews. Updates to QZ should email everyone who purchased it on Itch, and you can also subscribe to my (admittedly also neglected) WordPress blog at pretendo.games, where I will post design diaries and updates when there's news.

Thanks for the heads up. I can remove the link for now; if you do create a new translation you’d like to have linked, please let me know!

Thanks — holdover from an earlier version!

Parenthood was in fact a driving force behind this game's form factor! As for short adventures, some of my personal favorites have included…

• The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 (for Orbital Decay/Cosmic Highway, originally for Mothership)
• Dead Planet, especially the one-page-dungeon "The Screaming on the Alexis" (also for Orbital Decay/Cosmic Highway, also originally Mothership)
• Ultraviolet Grasslands (for Exiles; see also Luka's "Deep in the Purple Worm," from One Page Dungeon Contest 2012)
• Aeon Wave (for Inner System Blues/Resistors, originally for Fate Core)

That’s great to hear, thanks!

Still actively playtesting, so any answer I give you now may or may not be true in a week— but yes, there’s still a trog in the package deals!

And to be honest, I’m also fiddling with ability score spreads in playtesting. We started our trog with an extra +1 Strength and extra +1 Toughness, and -1 to 2 other abilities. 

Thanks for sharing! (And yeah, Hulkification has proven so annoying to work with for me that it is no longer in the latest as-yet-unreleased revision.)

Thanks for your comments! I haven't tried converting from Modiphius yet, but I will have to give that a shot. When I've run it so far, I've just tried to use my own randomly generated stuff, or quickly convert stuff on the fly from post-apocalyptic OSR/D&Dish D20 games like The Wasted Hack and NUKED!

Well hey, NUKED! is great, but it isn't stopping me! And actually, I'm trying to design this one in a way that makes it easy to use bits of it with other post-apocalyptic games with similar rules, so if you end up making one too, please share a link!

Thanks for the tip!

Thanks! I am wary about crowdfunding, but it would certainly help fund production costs. I should think on it!

Thank you, and no worries: This is a safe space for puns.

Thank you for the well wishes! I am doing much better health-wise, thank you. Working on QZ and Wastoid a little bit at a time have slowly helped me get back into shape (though I still have some ways to go on both). 

On QZ, I've been replacing the copyrighted images with CC-licensed images (same artist), using full-bleed images at the start of each section, updating the layout to A5 sized pages, expanding the artifact list, updating the alterations list, and making some other edits based on playtesting and feedback. I'll be back to update with more info!

With apologies, I won’t be able to do that at present due to other commitments, but the files posted here include a Word doc with freely available fonts in case you want to rearrange the pages for home printing. 

Oh gosh! I will try to post an excerpt ASAP—hoping to share the sample adventure after I playtest it very soon. Been really busy trying to find a new day job, but still actively working on this too!

They're both traditional D&Dish games, but the specific dice rules are pretty different. (I did adapt this specific dungeon to Grave rules for Dungeon23, though—just haven't had a chance to publish that yet!)

Ummm, let me get back to you on that! I think I saved a backup of this that I could export from, but I need to find it, and I’ll be tied up with some family obligations for a couple days. There has been a lot more design work since this last version, and the working file is not ready to export from just yet. Feel free to pester me again about this shortly!

Thanks so much!

By some miracle, I found that Discord conversation and confirmed we did work something out! (Basically: You're good to go, send a link when ready.) But it looks like it was not ready, and the most recent link I have for it is not usable. If TealShadows can read this and has something usable, though, feel free to jump in and correct me!

Thanks so much! Still actively working on this!

Thanks for the heads up — just added it!

Thanks! Still coming, yes. Been putting a lot of work into it recently, including editing old pulp magazine art (now with fewer damsels in distress and more ladies with laser guns) and writing up a sample adventure this week. 

That's so kind – thank you!

Thank you!

Thanks for posting! I had to step away from this for a bit to deal with some health issues, but am (admittedly very slowly) working on finishing it up. I'll send out a message via Itch when it's ready!

Thank you for being so nice after I wrote maybe the nerdiest thing I have put on the internet since my PhD dissertation. Hope you enjoy the game!

This was a gag, and it was probably more trouble than it was worth.

Long story short: A "tachyon communicator" is basically a radio that can communicate instantly even when you are millions of miles apart. Don't worry about the rest.

If you still want the long, nerdy version: A tachyon is “a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light” (in the words of Wikipedia). The term was coined in an academic paper back in the 1960s, and made its way into sci-fi in the meantime. 

Sending messages faster than light could come in handy for spread-out space explorers, as light takes a decently long time to reach across an entire solar system. For instance, if you were to use a powerful radio here on Earth to talk to somebody in orbit of Neptune, it could still take 4 hours for your words to reach them at the speed of light. With a tachyon communicator, though, there's no such "in-system lag" (i.e., no delay in communicating with somebody in the same solar system), as tachyons move faster than light.

So what's up with the rest of that line in Cosmic Highway? ("When used in the same room, signal plays a split-second before you speak.")

The part about being in the same room is a joke based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity: If you break the speed of light, you go back in time. Or, if I may steal fromWikipedia again, "Faster-than-light communication is, according to relativity, equivalent to time travel."

Now, as an aside: Have you ever used a cell phone or a walkie talkie to talk to somebody in the same room as you? There's a funny little delay between your voice coming out of your mouth and then coming out of the other person's device. 

The joke is that tachyon communication devices have that delay too, but in the opposite direction — what you’re about to say comes out the other end a half-second before you say it.

Now, you may be wondering: Why would I devote so many words worth of precious page-layout real estate to a joke maybe half a dozen readers will even get? 

The answer is: Because I am a huge dweeb. (But I am hoping from your screen name that we share this in common.)

Thanks for the heads up! I will add the link to the list on my page!