As part of my session 1 prep for a new Girl by Moonlight campaign I'm running, I wrote up my first-ever set of love letters to use as a framing device for the protagonists' mundane Obligations - when not fighting a rising solar evil, our moons-blessed magical girls (which include a vampiric Guardian, a necromantic Time Traveler, a princely Enigma, and a monstrous boy Outsider) are servants at a skyscraper-sized spiral lunar temple in the middle of Space Casablanca¹, with the twin moons of love and artists hanging in the night sky above.

The premise for this campaign, titled Shine as One, which takes place in the Pearlescent Expanse, our group's collaborative sci-fi setting that's 3 years old as of this month, is that of an actual in-universe magical girl TV show, produced by one of our seven major cultures, the Thousand Moons' Creed - a vast federation united in their shared faith of Satellism, where various moons across the galaxy are venerated as patrons of various aspects of reality.

I cannot wait to see these girls (and boy) in motion, in both touching Downtime and cool Mission sessions. (We're starting with the former, as per GbM's rules, unusually for a FitD game.)

I might keep posting about this if there's interest! (Plus there's some setting jargon in these love letters, which I'm happy to elaborate on.)

1. Embarrassingly we did not name the city in our session 0 yet, but it's a nocturnal far-future coastal metropolis on a planet with a sort of North African climate, built atop ancient ruins of a prior sun-worshipping culture, which I'm sure are nothing to worry about.

First pass at a list of Action Ratings for Advanced DNGN FKRS / Dwindeltol.

This is really something I've been riffing on for awhile, so it's just a matter of tweeking what I've already done.

For a Long While now I've been working on a TTRPG I've been calling Capes in the Dark. It's about having super powers and trying to make your way in a city full of other people with super-powers. I've had a great time working on it, and I hope that someone has as much fun playing it sometime too!

https://seasidesepulchre.itch.io/capes-in-the-dark

I'm excited to be working on my weird space fantasy sports game Novacross once more! Imagine if you mashed up Haikyuu, Star Wars, and Shaman King. Exploring sports as ritual practice, commodification of faith, dying faiths, neopagan movements and a bunch of other stuff I'm so excited to dig into! We're starting with a Forged in the Dark base, but definitely mixing it up in interesting ways. Hopefully writing about it here will help me more actively engage with the design process outside of our design sessions.

To start, we wanted to make the sports matter, so Sniperserpent and I are considering adding an entire phase dedicated to the sports game, called Trials, alongside a more traditional mission phase called Intrigue. Currently considering either a Trial-Intrigue-Downtime, or a Trial-Downtime-Intrigue-Downtime model for the play cycle.

Another thing that I'm super excited about that we came to during our last design session when thinking of ways to introduce dramatic hooks into the Trials phase is Complications. In essence, it's a combination of entanglements and engagement rolls. Depending on how an engagement roll for a phase goes, the GM gets a number of Complications they can introduce to a phase at opportune moments. We're considering either a predetermined list, leaving it up to GM discretion, or a random table of sorts. Either way, we think this is a super exciting mechanic for the GM toolbox! Something akin to rival moves in Beam Saber. Also, I've never been a huge fan of entanglements as they exist in most FitD games. They feel a bit aimless. I get what they're there for, but at the same time, they can feel really bad from both the GM and player perspective.