It is becoming a strange trend that we release multiple games in February. I suppose the post-new year motivation helps me to get stuff done. Or maybe its the pre-holiday rush to clear my workload? Who knows!
Currently our release schedule has all 3 For Small Creatures Such As We Expansions and the long awaited Dragon’s Lair Expansion for Apothecaria.
We’ll also be re-printing copies of RISE and UMBRA, the sister games of DELVE which expand the map drawing gameplay into the realms of dungeon building and space colony management.
We’re also doing a reprint of Apawthecaria! We’re going to order 200 copies while we make plans for Apawthecaria’s future and you can pre-order yours now at https://www.blackwellwriter.com/products/apawthecaria-a-poultice-pounder-adventure.
Until then, I’m desperately trying to get some boards down in my attic to hold some of the 8000+ books that will be descending on my house next month.
Just need to wait for a dry day in order to cut the boards to size as they are too long to fit through our little attic hole.
Patreon Highlights
Over on Patreon I’ve been posting up some dev logs for Spirit Tea, my Apothecaria hack that puts you in charge of a tea house in a fantasy world heavily inspired by Chinese mythology.
This has been a really interesting project to work on as it has involved a tonne of different deep dives into things like Feng Shui, Buddhism, Taoism, folk lore, history, tea culture, language, and fiction. And while the game isn’t intended to be actual chinese mythology, I want to do my best to create something that captures the same feeling as that mythology.
One of the things I’ve been working on this month has been the Spirits themselves. As the game has customers come to you with a Request and your job is to summon a Spirit that can help by Brewing the right Tea, I wanted to give you a selection of Spirits with some personality.
The Money Frog is a type of spirit that loves money and is thought to be a bringer of wealth. To attract one of these money hungry Spirits, you’re going to need to drop a coin in the Tea.
Once it arrives, it will help the customer with their Request. Perhaps fulfilling their Request for Good Luck or to Help Their Business. Of course, being a journalling game, you get to decide exactly how that comes about.
The difficult part of Spirit Tea is finding the Ingredients for the Tea as you will have to head out to the various Locales in the game in order to Forage for Ingredients. To capture the feeling of a cultivation story, your character starts off with access to places like The Jade Cliffs and the Hungry Jungle and eventually end up able to visit the underwater palaces of the dragons or the Starlight Palace in the celestial realm!
Then of course, you have to Brew the Tea which can lead to… unexpected results. If you fail and make an Awful Brew then the result is that you attract a Dark Spirit or Yao Guai that will make things worse or help for a hefty price. That luck the customer wanted? They’ll get it but only because the Yao Guai that was attracted by your Tea stole the luck from someone else!
On the flipside, if you make an Exceptional Brew, you may attract an even more powerful Spirit. How happy do you think your customer with their failing restaurant would feel if the Starlight Sovereign - the head god - themselves came to help?
As always, I’m trying to keep all named characters gender neutral unless it is absolutely critical to their character concept.
If you want to keep up to date with Spirit Tea’s development, consider following along over on Patreon.
Media Of The Week
I’ve been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this month and I think it has changed me. It is so refreshing to see a setting that doesn’t fall neatly into any category. From the premise to the enemy designs and the beautiful levels to the so human moments, it has given me a new height to aim for with my own designs!
I’ve recently started tinkering with a Card based combat system that feels like a turn based JRPG and I really want to put it in a setting as creative and unique as Expedition 33. But there are issues with that which I will go into in the next newsletter ;)
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