Gregory Avery-Weir

I genuinely like getting emails asking questions or issuing surveys about game development work. It's also charming just how seasonal it tends to be. Professors clearly find this a valuable assignment (or research topic option); I hope the students find it useful, too!

Designed for when a group of queer friends wants to play a game but no one feels like doing campaign prep, Fusion Time is my tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Voltron, Captain Planet, and most of all Steven Universe. What does it mean to protect your Home? What are the Clashes and Bonds that affect whether you can Fuse into something greater than your individual selves? Even if you lose a battle, can you learn something about your Opponent and begin to think of them as a person?

Fusion Time has no game master; it's a collaborative game where the players work together to generate and run the world, then roll dice to see how it proceeds. Characters have scores for Struggle, Chill, Sing, and Cry, and you can't be good at all four. Every roll has an interesting outcome, and sometimes you'll try to Sing and find yourself Crying instead. Your campaign might be the intimate story of a single magical neighborhood or a galaxy-spanning story of warring mecha. All you need is a group of a few friends, six-sided dice in a couple of colors, pencils, paper, and your imagination.

Please take a look at the game! I care a lot about this one, and I'd love to hear what people think. It's available on itch.io!

I got an email from a communications professor about my project Tracery Live, an implementation of Kate Compton's Tracery that lets you link someone directly to a dynamically-flattened grammar (via a query parameter that's either a compressed version of the grammar or an external URL). It will generate a shortlink for your creation upon request. This is the same tech once used by Cheap Bots, Done Quick and still used by Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet.

In the process of answering some questions, I noticed that some things about it were broken, so I've updated it!

It now loads URLs properly again and has some more help text and other usability improvements. Here's an example of it running the Night Vale example grammar from the Tracery site! You can probably do some wild stuff with HTML in it. I haven't tested it with a chiframe, but I bet that'll work, too!

It's still running on an ancient version of Ember and requires Node 14 to deploy, but that's only relevant to folks who want to host their own instance.

The latest Exceptional Story for Fallen London, "The Bloody Wallpaper" by Chandler Groover, is really good. This is Failbetter's 100th Exceptional Story¹ and it feels like they pulled out some stops. The plot itself is super cool, with plenty of shout-outs for Lore Heads but also just some creepy imagery. What is sticking with me, though, is the mechanical cleverness.

Fallen London is made up almost entirely of Storylets, Qualities, and Opportunity Cards. Each Location has a set of Storylets with availability based on your Qualities, plus an Opportunity Deck from which you can draw random events. Most Locations, at least in the early game, use the same London Opportunity Deck with certain cards added or removed. Sometimes you get sent to an area where you do a simple repeated "carousel" with a small set of Opportunity Cards.

But "The Bloody Wallpaper" has a whole building you're navigating, all in one Location; switching floors adjusts a Quality that determines what Storylets are available, and most floors have just five qualifying Opportunity Cards, enough to fill your hand. The story also lets you navigate the space without spending your time-limited Actions. It feels like a little IF map-exploring puzzle thing that they managed to massage into a Fallen-London-shaped box. It's very cool, and the finale is a true delight that retroactively justifies the complexity of the exploration. Just real good shit.

1. Short monthly stories that come along with their premium membership.