Life is a Rollercoaster
005
As expected, February was a busy month.
1. A Wild Ride
After last month’s tease, and as Bucket of Bolts makes it way across the world, I am preparing to launch my next project—The Slow Knife! No time to slow down…!
If you haven't seen, it's a card-based story game where you play the villains in a decades-long revenge story. I think it's really good at telling these kind of stories of greed and folly, and I'm excited to put it out in the world.
I'm also a little nervous! It's a weird time to be doing anything promotional with so much horrible news filling our timelines, and we all know by now that Kickstarter has gone through its own uncomfortable transition into something (at least) less cool and more cynical than the service we've relied on for years.
Still, I don't think things are going to miraculously break into a period of halcyon days anytime soon, and I want to keep making things while I can, so here we are. The project launches on Kickstarter next week on the 7th March, 6pm GMT, and you'll also be able to preorder it on my store if you want to steer clear of KS1.
I hope you'll take a look! It’s been a real delight seeing the reactions thus far. I’m running weekly playtests as I iterate on the design, and it’s been fascinating seeing different people react to the structure of the game. People seem to be having a consistently good time telling stories about villainous bastards getting their comeuppance…2
2. A Moment Off
It was my birthday a few days ago, and my wife and I went for a rare child-free meal, our first in what feels like decades.3
We really went all out, ordering four courses each with an incredible tarte tatin to finish. What a delight it is to be able to eat one’s food without fear of children running out of patience and turning feral. We don’t manage to get a lot of time to ourselves these days, especially in the daytime when we have enough energy to hold a conversation, but we’ve vowed to try and make time more often in future.
As we move forward into another busy, trying year, it’s important to remember to take time to pause every now and again4.
3. Good Stuff
Every month, I’ll share a few choice links that have caught my eye.
The Bucket of Bolts soundtrack is live! Chris did such a great job, and I can’t wait to hear your stories from its use in your games. I’ll be adding a bunch of stuff to the Bucket itch.io page soon, so keep your eyes peeled.
Armour Astir is live and I can’t wait to get it to the table. Very excited to listen to the new Friends at the Table season too, which will use the system. We all know FatT right?
If you need a little more rollercoaster in your life, Wet Leg did a cover of this classic. I don’t even know if I like it that much, but it sure is nostalgic 😂
That’s it for this month. I hope I’ll see some of you getting your copies of Bucket soon, and maybe even pitching in for my next venture too. Busy busy busy busy busy busy.5
I’m still working on updating my store, but it should be ready in time for the campaign!
If you’d like to be involved in a future playtest, please let me know! You can message me on Twitter or just reply to this newsletter.
Possibly it’s only a couple of years, but these last few years have been loooooong.
This is a note for myself! I’m sure you can find some other useful aphorisms on the internet if this one doesn’t appeal to you 😉
Famous lasts words I know, but I do consider myself fairly good at pacing and limits—hopefully no big impending burnout for me! I’m good busy, not bad busy.