Andy Pressman

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.

This is the Book of Gaub, sold by Lost Pages. It looks great, and apparently is worth the purchase, but I'm going to use it to pick on a pet peeve of mine: game books are reference manuals, and should lay flat when opened.

Unfortunately, due to corporate consolidation and the advent of on-demand printing technology, very few printers are able to produce lay-flat hardcover or paperback binding. It's a laborious technique, usually requiring sewn sections and the application of cold glue during binding. All the North American or UK printers I know of have long since moved on to faster, cheaper techniques, usually involving hotmelt glue.

Given the game industry's minimal (often negative!) profit margins, cold glue binding is prohibitively expensive. But there are two production methods still available to us: saddle stitch and coil.

Saddle stitch binding is, put simply, staples down the spine. Think of magazines, or (if you've held it) the Mothership game book. This is perfect for shorter games. The book can be opened wide or folded back, and feels great to hold.

For longer games, it's all wire bind, baby! Wire bind is the absolute best for reference manuals — equally good at isolating a single page or laying a spread out in front of you, and works especially well for big books. It tends not to be used because there's no easy way to label or print on the spine, which is a bummer when books are shelved and displayed spine-out.

For more on binding processes, read the article Books that lie open by Robin Kinross.