A few days ago I stumbled on a terrible thing. DriveThruRPG is hosting a game jam, targeted at people who might be interested in getting some time on their front page. Oh man. As you may have seen, I probably spend too much time on board games, and this caught my interest.
I came across the site when first looking at the Ironsworn print-and-play TRPG. Since then, I had also backed the Ironsworn: Starforged Kickstarter (really cool game btw), which is also distributed via DTRPG. They seem to be one of the major print-and-go sites out there, and of course it was a random run-in with their home page that had me noticing their game jam.
As much as I don’t really feel like I need to develop a game, of course this ends up in the back of my mind. Their theme is “Summer Camp,” and it has to be under 20 pages, including front/back matter. The first that comes to mind is the mystery of what lies beyond the light of the camp fire… whether it be a seemingly infinite swarm of raccoon eyes or a wolf or a shambling… well… maybe we save that for another time.
I kick this all off by downloading the DTRPG starter pack, which has some templates. Of course that pushes me to learn a new program, Scribus. I think I get the basics after a few minutes messing around, but, I can’t seem to figure out what’s up with the template. The templates that come with Scribus all seem to behave well, but the DTRPG one just doesn’t want to allow me to add in text or edit anything. Probably some weird locking “feature” in the program that I don’t understand, so I’ve started from scratch. Like any person who apparently wants to spend more time on tools than the product.
At the moment I’ve managed to create an intro, general outline, and a character sheet. A couple things I came across as part of doing this – most importantly, never put me on a quest for an interesting font. There are a lot of fonts in the world, and of course, a FontSquirrel (…what?). I found exactly what I was looking for in Beth Ellen. This was authored by Rob Jelinski in memory of his mother, whose handwriting was the inspiration. I’m sure there’s a better use for this font so please use it for your projects — but it also looks good as a creepy note from your ancient camp councilor… sooooo… boom. Also, grabbed the same font used for this site, Bitter, to reduce the amount of pain most people would have from reading 20 small pages of handwriting. As a person who writes primarily in cursive, I know how low the modern tolerance is for “longhand.”
Here’s a sample of where I’m at — obviously, work in progress:
Funny, I’ve spent a couple hours fiddling with the character sheet with only a vague notion of the game mechanics. However, I feel like I’ve played through a few times in my mind? And I didn’t win… but maybe that’s half of it, why would you want to win a creepy summer camp game where your friends are consumed when you fail? Seems like the object is for the creepers to win.
Ok, more to come!
