Andy Pressman

Finally published a game! It's called Echo of Ghosts, and it's short and free: https://andypressman.itch.io/echo-of-ghosts It's a hack and narrative inversion of John Harper's GHOST/ECHO. In Harper's game you're playing a crew that loots the ghost world; in this game you're the ghosts, stealing your shit back.

I've been thinking seriously about game design since the start of the pandemic, and for the past year or so it's been all I've cared about creatively. This game took a couple months, which is fucking ages given that it's two pages long and a hack of another game, but so so satisfying to finish something.

A couple weeks back I stepped away from the Home game to work on something else. Wanted to get back to my original design intent of a system with rapidly escalating chaos, something which disentangled success and consequences from the standard PbtA/FitD roll.

Someone recommended I look into Vincent Baker's Otherkind Dice, which led to John Harper's GHOST/ECHO, which I'm now working on a hack of it, tentatively titled Gun Magic Technopop. It's inspired by Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, or anyway my decades-old memory of it.

You belong to the School of Liquid, a militant organization fighting an ancient, secret war against the interdimensional Static Church. The Church and their human collaborators use governments and civic institutions to keep the world from achieving physical, psychological, and spiritual liberation.
"You and your comrades make up one of the revolutionary cells within the Liquid. You’ve taken bad beats, won small victories, lost good friends, and shared visions of a better future. You use violence and magic and you look good doing it.

GHOST/ECHO's dice system is really fun. Instead of the roll mentioned above (which uses the same die to determine whether you fail, succeed with complications, or succeed without complications), you effectively roll two dice and assign them to either success or complication. You can fail to reach your goal but suffer no consequences, or succeed at great cost, etc. Feels wide open to hacking and I'm surprised there aren't more games built around the idea.

Guides fully drawn. I had to pump the contrast up for legibility, so there's a bunch of artifacts ghosting through from past versions, but should be mostly readable. I'm a bit uncertain about the placement of the bottle room (the round-topped brown thing in the middle-right), because if I draw much inside it'll end up blocking the view of the staircase, which is pretty crucial to understanding the dungeon. It's the right place within the fiction, but I might need to repurpose the room shape and move it elsewhere.