This week has been devoted to getting my playtest document ready for Metatopia. Last week, I finished off the most fun part of the design process for me: getting the mechanics in order. After that, my task became to flesh those mechanical ideas out into bullet points and then into actual sentences and paragraphs. In addition, I realized that this part of the game would require an additional degree of player guidance.

I split that guidance into two categories. The first was the same sort of player guidance that most games use to bring the participants onto the same narrative/aesthetic field: setting information. I had been thinking about the setting for a while now, and the broader strokes are pretty familiar to anyone interested in the sorts of horror that I was drawing from. However, the specifics are distinct to my own world, the various horrors and the rules that they operate by. These will need further fleshing and some revisions out before a final release, but it’s good enough for a playtest.

The second kind of guidance was prose-writing advice, specifically aimed at helping to navigate the strangeness of a literary exquisite corpse. I have mostly played exquisite corpse in the context of poetry, which perhaps is easier to translate into the form, thanks to the neat division of lines. Players in that form of the game get to see the last line written by the player before them, functioning similar to the dividing lines of the drawing form. In my model, though, players are writing sentences independently, and then they’re collated and ordered by the GM, i.e. me.

The particular strangeness of my form requires additional restrictions and additional guidance to help make sure that the players are able to generate something that they can feel satisfied with. I think the combination of surrealist art games at play will help to generate something really weird, and have a play experience that really stands out from most TTRPGs, while the restrictions will provide a comfortable scaffolding That said, only the playtest will tell.

I’m definitely going to need to run further playtests in a digital format after Metatopia, though.

One additional wrinkle for writing this document is that I decided to write it in the first-person plural. It’s unusual for me to be playing the games that I write directly with the people I’m handing the game text to. That said, there’s something to the perspective that is oddly comforting. I feel like I’m inviting in people to play with me, rather than giving a gift for others to enjoy. There’s a welcoming energy to the first person plural that I might need to explore in the future.

I still need to try to put together an oracle list for No One Emerges Triumphantly and put some finishing touches on When the Strings Are Cut, but the most important parts are ready for Metatopia, which is what matters.

I also was in a video on my girlfriend’s youtube channel! We talked about spooky books while playing a spooky game. I highly recommend that folks check it out.

Girl Frame - Girl Frame has dominated my thinking for this entire week, really preventing any other reading from taking its place.

Genre emulation is a big topic in the subject of TTRPG game design. In some ways, it felt like the most powerful thing that a TTRPG could do, to try to be something else. Obviously, this isn’t true, and I’m glad that genre emulation is now no longer as important in a lot of the indie sphere. Genre emulation instead has become a part of the broader conversation around what TTRPGs can do and what they’re best at.

I bring this up because Girl Frame is very much in conversation with its genre. Mechsploitation, though, is a very young sub-genre, with the foundational work in the genre (Warhound) being originally released in July of 2023, less than three years ago. Since its release, Girl Frame has exploded in popularity, tapping into a vein of latent interest in the sub-genre. I believe that, instead of genre emulation, Girl Frame is engaging in the vital activity of genre codification.

Girl Frame’s systems take the basic core of an Apocalypse Keys style PbtA, where rolling high can have disastrous consequences in addition to rolling low, and infuses it with additional systems and specifics that really make that core sing. The combined mechanical impact really captures the flavor of the sub-genre, codifying its elements into easy-to-understand systems. Anyone writing a mechsploitation story in the future would do well to read Girl Frame first.

In addition, I learned a lot from the Assets of both the girls and the frames. Normally, I’m a bit wary of equipment-adjacent stuff that doesn’t have any specific mechanical impact. I’m thinking in particular of how the lack of definition for powers in Masks really flattens their impact on play. However, Girl Frame’s Assets are specific, but narratively rather than mechanically. What’s more, they’re so aesthetically evocative that they don’t require bespoke mechanics in order to be impactful on play, which provides great examples for how to do these sorts of lists in other games.

Girl Frame is good. Buy Girl Frame. Read Girl Frame.

Contact me at [email protected] for any queries regarding writing, mechanical design, editing, or podcast appearances.

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Thank you for joining me here in the Goat Song Workshop!

Until next week,