To the Mechs!

In between work wrapping up a couple of OSR fantasy adventures, I’ve had mechs on my mind. Big, stompy robots with futuristic weapons blasting each other across the scorched remains of dead planets. Or something like that.

• Out of the Iron Labyrinth is funded!

• The Green Ooze King is done!

• Auctōrātus is back on the menu!

• May Production Update

I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with Out of the Iron Labyrinth, which is still crowdfunding on BackerKit. If you haven’t checked out the campaign, take a look!

OotIL on BackerKit

I’m excited about this one. If a 30-room dungeon can be a sandbox, that’s what I was trying to make here. There are several different ways to start the adventure, one of which is rolling a d30 to pick which room you start in. There is no expected order to the exploration of the rooms or the NPCs that you meet, so everyone’s adventure is going to have a different tone.

• Did you first meet and join Lys, the cleric that’s trying to free the imprisoned angel?

• Did you first meet and get hired by Beulah, the witch that’t trying to steal from the dragon’s hoard?

• Did you first meet and get recruited by Nyulura, the erinyes that is trying to overthrow the dragon she has been assigned to serve?

• Or did you first meet and team up with Grrz, a chain devil that had his chains removed and is now trying to reveal the erinyes’ treachery to regain his station?

Lots of options and lots of opportunities to negotiate your release from hell.

Back in February, Junk Food Games hosted the Lean Green Zine Jam on Itch. While the prompt amounted to “the color green,” I was inspired, and I dove into writing The Green Ooze King.

This adventure starts with a small hex-crawl that leads to a 20-room dungeon. It is primarily written for Cairn (a fantasy TTRPG by Yochai Gal which for some reason my brain labels as a green game…maybe because it’s got lots of forests?). Because I’ve been in the OSE mines with Out of the Iron Labyrinth, I also include stats for Old-School Essentials.

My plan for this one is a little change from what I’ve been doing recently. Since the adventure is done (writing, layout, and art), I am not going to be running a Kickstarter/BackerKit campaign for it. Instead, I’ll be doing a special release sale on my web store. Buy The Green Ooze King and get 30% off everything else in your order! This won’t happen until I get the books printed, so maybe September-ish. More details to come.

Now, I definitely missed the deadline for the jam, but I still attribute this adventure to the inspiration from that jam, so, thanks Chris!

Almost 2 years ago, I released a little 1- to 2-player mech battling game for the One-Page RPG Jam 2024: AUCTŌRĀTUS. I wrote that as a way to explore the use of the rondel to represent a mech, mashing everything that you expect from a mech game (customizable mech builds, heat management, weapon cooldown) into a single mechanism. And it worked great!

That one-page game is one of my most-dowloaded projects on Itch, so it makes sense to circle back to it and try to beef it up into a zine or full book. So, that’s what I’m doing. There will be some thematic changes (no longer fighting animals for sport, even if I was calling them “monsters” in a “gladiator arena” setting) and some significant mechanical changes (no more hexes!), but the rondel mechanism remains the engine of the game.

You might argue that the original game isn’t a roleplaying game, and I would not fight you on that. The new game is absolutely not a roleplaying game, but rather a skirmish game, with each battle requiring a handful of mech models, a 2-3’ square battlefield, and some terrain.

After much deliberation, I decided to drop the hex grid/map. By switching to an open board with distances measured in inches rather than hexes, it really frees up the players to design a battlefield that feels inspiring to them. It also brings the game in line with most modern skirmish games (as far as I can tell, classic BattleTech is the main game played on a hex map), and it means I won’t need to produce and ship poster-sized hex maps (phew!). All you need is a flat surface and you can play (see the toy blocks we are using for terrain in our test plays).

So far, the other major change from the original game is to get rid of the currency. In the one-page version (Auctōrātus Prime? Auctōrātus Arena? Not sure about the rebranding yet), each component had a cost (in credits, since it’s a sci-fi game), and you earned credits to spend on new components with each battle. I decided that was too much math: now, all components have the same cost. You get 4 level-1 components and 1 level-2 component per mech. Pick whatever you want. That’s all there is to it.

Where the price of the components was part of the balancing in the one-pager, I’ve had to rewrite many of the components to make them more equivalent when they are all available immediately for the same cost. This has been a major focus of the test plays.

I’ll be posting more updates here as development continues. I have no idea how or when I’ll release the updated game, so be sure to subscribe to Ink & Dice for updates.

Here we have the May production schedule update! I touched on some of these projects above, so the only ones that need an extra mention are:

• UHF Contact has been printed and is being shipped to me.

• The solo system for MAZES will become the main focus of my writing time next month.

• I still intend to get Wizard Mind Palace finalized and printed before PAXU this year. I will dive back into that one as soon as I finish the MAZES book.

That’s it for this month. I’ve been really focused on wrapping up Out of the Iron Labyrinth, but I’m excited to do some different sorts of projects after several months of adventure writing (since starting The Baron’s Grip way back in August!).

—MAH