I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
The deeper I get into this hobby, the more vibes become everything to me.
Vibes are just as important to a game as the rules. Rules moderate your story / adventure / experience as you tell / navigate / experience it, but vibes guide what everyone brings to the table before a single rule kicks in. A beautiful picture can inspire the mood of a whole session or campaign. The design of a pdf or even just an itch page can tell every player what kind of character to think up when called to. Is this a mechs with emotions evening, or are we descending step by step into a scary murderhole? Either’s fine by me, we should just pick ahead of time, and the Pinterest board the GM put together half an hour ago might get us all on the same page…