You may have heard that NASA released a... what we'll call "passable, but uninspiring" TTRPG adventure earlier today about the Hubble Space Telescope getting stolen into a fantasy world. Not to be confrontational about it, but I think the indie TTRPG community could do much better, and really nail the thing about NASA that has kept us enthralled with space over the decades: their gorgeous, glorious space images. With that in mind, I'm organizing a game jam for writing a TTRPG adventure in your system of choice (or no system at all), using the many public domain images of space as inspiration. Want to write a tragic romance inspired by the transit of Io across Jupiter (as captured by Hubble)? Think Chandra's image of SN 1006 looks like a Forbidden Yarnball McGuffin? Now's your chance! Submissions are open for the next 3 months, so get to writing, and I'm excited to see what you make. :)
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I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.
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in reply to @Inumo's post:
I was thinking of making one of these but figured someone else would have my back on it. Glad to see I was right!
Someone in my TTRPG study server said "this would be a good game jam" and I went, "Sure, I've got the time & energy to figure out how to run one of those!" :P
I initially misread this as "create a ttrpg" instead of "create a ttrpg adventure" and I'm amused at how much more difficult the latter seems than the former, I figured it'd be the other way around 😅
Right? Like, on the one hand, it's a lot less technical work to say "how do I fit X story into an adventure structure," but on the other hand I'm such a chronic game designer that "write a game" feels so much more in my wheelhouse than "write an adventure." S'part of why I wanted to explicitly make it about adventures, though – can't get better w/o practice, and it certainly feels like the indie scene just kind of assumes adventure writing is "the easy part."