#RPG Some old, free games you might want.

Just a reminder of these old games that exist.

The third – and probably final – edition of the Neverwhere RPG, produced with permission and available for PDF only. This is the final, comprehensive edition of the game with an improved system, more detail an expanded A-Z and advice for running the game in tabletop, online or as a LARP.

Neverwhere has been a massively influential book on my life since it first came out and a touchstone novel I return to again and again. Especially the section on Blackfriars.

Free to download

 

A personal game about depression and its effects intended to help people with invisible illnesses broach the subject and explore it in a way they can have power over it.

ImagiNation is set after the fall of mainland Britain to a strange reality breakdown. The barriers between imagination and reality, dreams and nightmares have shattered and strange things dreamed up by people caught in the event teem across the land.

Only those who are already ‘broken’ can hope to cope with exploring, understanding and combatting this strangeness for the sake of the huddled refugees that sit and wait and watch from the smaller islands around the coast.

A game of mental illness and art using The Description System (Neverwhere).

This game is available FREE so please promote, download, host and spread as far and wide as you can.

Indiecon: Rad, as always

Back from Indiecon and recovering from the inevitable con-crud that has targeted my throat and guts. The bastard.

I ran games of ImagiNation, Irrepressible, PROJECT, Machinations of the Space Princess, Blood! and Agents of SWING. Various of those adventures will be polished up and published as time allows.

ImagiNation went brilliantly, everything I hoped it would be. The mixture of whimsy and darkness, creativity, gallows humour and imagination. Especially the game with the ‘dutch invaders’ playing it. I also had at least five people come up to me during the convention and thank me for writing a game centred around depression and mental illness and to also thank me for being open about my issues. I had a bit of a wobble at the start of the con so that was a great boost for me and made me feel that I hadn’t been wasting my time.

Irrepressible also went very well. People ‘got it’ and understood and appreciated the mechanic and the way the game reflected karma, ‘right action’ and the virtues of the pilgrims. All that and it was still wonderful, irreverent fun.

Machinations is what you’re probably all most interested in. The game went great though it also helped to identify a few rules and bits and pieces that need to be changed. Overall though I seem to have been able to project the setting into people’s minds and help them have fun without Satine’s art. WITH Satine’s art the game should produce multiple nerdgasms at a distance of up to fifty feet! I should probably charge extra for that. One thing people definitely seem to want are props (dice/cards) and rules for ongoing campaigns, carving out their own empires and businesses in a savage universe.

Sales were shite at the con, unfortunately. It seems that the recession is finally biting into gamers and the traditionally resilient hobby business. That’s a worry but we can hope that things will start to pick up from here and that Dragonmeet will go better – sales wise.

Help?

I hate to have to do this but I am really, really fucking ill. My depression/exhaustion has had me floored for over two weeks now and I don’t have the energy left to really struggle through it.

The timing is massively inconvenient as we’re now into the thirty-day push to hit stretch goals for Machinations of the Space Princes and we’re into my ‘convention season’ with IndieCon and Dragonmeet coming up.

I have outlines of demo adventures for ImagiNation, Irrepressible!, PROJECT and Blood! intended to be run at Indiecon but I don’t think that between the depression and imminent drug changes I’ll be able to actually get the adventures written up. I’ve spent most of last week and all of this week staring blankly at an open Word document.

Hopefully I’ll be fit and well for the conventions themselves, but that also remains to be seen 😦

If anyone can help me out by taking my notes and turning them into written-up adventures for these games I will be eternally grateful. I’ll provide PDFs as necessary and if the adventures are subsequently polished up and published I’ll compensate you monetarily.

Please let me know if you can help out.

Email: grim AT postmort DOT demon DOT co DOT uk

I feel awful having to do this, ‘giving in’ to being sick, but it’s becoming clear I’m not going to be able to manage otherwise.

If you think you can help out with the MotSP drive in some way let me know too. I could probably manage email interviews, Q&A and that sort of thing.

Creative, Broken Brains

It’s World Mental Health Day today. This isn’t something I’d planned to have ImagiNation out for, but there it is.

As I have, doubtless, bored you all to tears over by now I suffer from depression and it has been particularly bad this last couple of weeks. That means all I can really bring myself to do is lay around and beat myself up for not working harder. My depression most often manifests in a bone-weary tiredness, lack of concentration and self-belief. Qualities obviously necessary in the self-employed.

Weirdly, people say I’m very productive but I would be a lot more so without these issues.

I believe gaming can help people with a broad range of issues and I know I have personally benefited from the escape and the opportunity to safely deal with some of the things that grind me down. I’ve also seen it help people with anxiety, social disorders, autism spectrum issues and others.

Gaming is many things, role-playing is many things. It can be purely a game, it can be an exercise in art and self expression. It can be taken seriously and it can be entirely frivolous. I’m not suggesting that every game session be therapy, but just that it presents a safe environment in which we – as players or especially the GM – have a massive degree of control that we don’t have in real life, and a safety net from the fact that outside the game there are no consequences.

Here’s a direct link to my game inspired by my experiences. Something I have made to explore these issues and their link with creativity. It’s a stereotype but it’s one that fitted well for the purposes of a game.

ImagiNation150

You are free to host, torrent, copy and distribute ImagiNation anywhere you want and however you want so long as you don’t charge.

Hardcopies can be bought HERE at close-to-cost.

ImagiNation: RELEASED!

Get the PDF, FREE HERE or buy the hardcopy HERE

ImagiNation presents a world in which the realms of the imagination and the physical world have been brought into violent proximity to one another. The mainland of the British Isles has become infected with a nameless ‘something’ that has caused people’s nightmares, dreams, obsessions and fancies to take a very real and dangerous form, locking
them within a landscape of their own minds.

Britain no longer meaningfully exists. What remains of the uninfected British population is confined to the islands around the mainland, a ‘safe distance’ across the water from where this strange phenomenon has taken place. Northern Ireland has joined up with Eire through necessity as much as anything else and the largest remaining, unaffected population is to be found on the Isle of Wight in the south.

Britain is lost. Its population is lost.

Lost, but still there.

The country is still there, the buildings, roads, factories and schools underneath the overlay of people’s imaginings, sometimes shaping and inspiring them. The people are still
there, too – those who survive their own nightmares, drifting aimlessly, caught up in their own fictions, living, psychic batteries giving form and personality to their dreams.

Some are aware. Lucid dreamers. Able to shape the world around them. Some of them, typically children or those with particularly strong imaginations, shape the world around them much more strongly, subsuming and controlling the imaginations of others.

Collectively, people’s imaginations are channelled and formed by the media they consumed before the disaster. One might find talking rabbits at Watership Down or any
number of local legends and rumours brought to life from serial killers and vampires to dragons and ghosts.

Britain is blockaded by a multinational task force and ex-patriots who, if they choose to return to the islands, may never leave again. What’s left of British money and power is devoted to holding this quarantine zone and working towards a solution. The problem is that very few people are immune, only the mindless, or those who were already broken in some way. Monstrous, terrible things are being done in the name of saving the country. Those few individuals who can enter the zone of effect without being warped, twisted
or subsumed, those who can control this new, mutable, amorphous reality are particularly valuable. Sent into the mainland they search for answers, try to rescue people and just try to make sense of what has happened.

You play the part of one of these scouts. Part of a team probing the worst excesses of the collective unconscious, looking for answers, looking for a cure.

ImagiNation: Imminent & Artwork!

ImagiNation should be ready very, very soon as all the art is in and done and all the text is done and edited.

Rowena Aitken who did most of the art for the game is selling the originals, so get in quck while you can to buy them!

Rowena Aitken Art Sale

ImagiNation

Much like radiation, the energies of the Monad can often be washed out of the atmosphere with rain, manifesting as strange fancies that fall from the sky.

ImagiNation

Conjured from the minds of a million children, childhood friends are left to fend for themselves and to learn how to survive in the ‘real’ world.

ImagiNation

Your imagination is not, necessarily, always under your control and your nightmares and fears can rapidly get out of hand.

ImagiNation

Artists are not necessarily the best people in a fight, but the ones that survive learn – quickly.