Mud Men of Moresby

I submitted my entry for Frontier Scum’s Summer Jam and I think it just might be the best thing I have ever written (so far). The layout and art are a little shaky but I think the core is solid. Go download it and tell me what you think.

Now I wanted to write a little bit about what I learned. For one I am still learning the art of putting out my game material and want to get my head straight on what was actually learned here. Secondly, it might help someone else in my position or even prompt someone more skilled to correct me.

Lesson 1: Ask & Answer

This module got to the state it is in because as I was beefing out my original scribbling I kept asking unanswered questions. Even something as simple as “why would a saloon in a town this shitty have a self-playing piano?” prompted me to add Pachonkle the imp. This simple loop of finding and answering questions in the text added so much texture to the core concept. This was also helped along by starting from a first draft with so much potential to begin with. If I didn’t need to publish it I could have ran it from that draft alone.

It’s important to note that not every question needed answering. Ambiguity is where the true genius lies with this stuff after all. For example any answer I could provide to the identity of Death’s Emissaries would have sucked compared to the answers GMs come up with themselves (if they so wanted). By leaving that dangling thread each table can reach something personally satisfying should they ever choose to pull at it, rather than something tailored to my sensibilities.

Lesson 2: Keep Your Darlings

I stole this from one Joseph R Lewis because if it is good enough for that hack (read as amazing and prolific designer) then it’s good enough for me. There is too much shit out there for everything to be a slick mass appeal product. Disney alone pumps out enough uninspired slop that you are better off keeping the weird stuff that only you like in. It’ll stand out that way.

The truism “kill your darlings” really doesn’t apply to TTRPGs anyway. In a novel, where you can and should point your readers towards specific themes, silly extras made just for the author’s amusement can distract rather than enhance the work. In titterpigs GMs want all those silly little details so they don’t have to come up with them when the players prod in that direction. Not only that but DIY is the name of the game in this hobby; GMs will remove the stuff they really don’t like.

Lesson 3: Layout, Early and Often

The last to lessons were also me tooting my own horn because I am a filthy attention whore. This one is a legitimate mistake that I didn’t and really couldn’t take my time to correct. I left layout til the last minute, didn’t really think through having the right text to fit said layout and so just bodged it together. With no time nor inclination to try and fit this project into a desktop publishing app I stole another trick from the fraudster (read as nice guy) Joseph R Lewis and laid my text out in LibreOffice Writer¹. It came out passable at best.

To avoid this in future I think I would probably just start laying the thing out after the second draft, or be less ambitious and just go for the classic 2 column approach Shadowdark takes. If I had started layout early I could have modified my writing decisions to maximise the layout use rather than trying to cram my little Markdown² doc into something readable. Of course this could just be how I have to do things for jams. My little WIP CY_Borg dungeon, Zettelkasten, is too far along writing-wise for this approach for example.

Let’s see if I follow my own advice for Appendix N jam here

Conclusion

Sans any feedback from other people, it was a successful jam for me. I made something, it pushed me as a writer and I am happy with the resulting adventure. A solid little powder keg of a western with plenty of weird to go round. I think I might try write more for Frontier Scum in future too as I often find myself falling into the post-western/spaghetti western milieu. Disillusion with civilisation as a theme is resonating a lot more with everyone these days.

Hopefully I will be back here doing the same thing about my Appendix N jam entry. See you then!

1. Microsoft Word’s free and open source cousin ↩︎

2. If you don’t do most of your writing in Markdown I would consider it. It allows you to get basic formatting done without taking your hands off the keyboard. ↩︎