The Queen is Dead
Out of the Woods
It's been a while, I know. A switch flipped, some things shifted, and I ended up having a pretty dark Nov-Dec. Lots of internal changes, Kickstarter making moves that shifted my entire business model... it ended up being a lot to take in. I'm feeling a lot better now. Depressions like this tend to come in waves. I'm still functional when they come but they dampen down my ability to do much but exactly what I need to.
Now I feel like I've got space to breathe. There's still a lot to figure out but I'm on more firm footing. Let's go through some stuff, yeah?
Kickstarter's Crypto Shenanigans
Back in December, Kickstarter announced that they're going to be moving their entire platform over to a blockchain-powered infrastructure. This is, in a word: bad. Blockchain hasn't proven to be anything but a technology that's driving a pyramid scheme-like setup where early adopters are hoping to cash out and leave latecomers holding the bag. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, the whole lot is a scam. Moreover, Kickstarter basically gave a huge non-response of a middle finger to anyone who asked them for real reasons, or to reconsider.
My entire model of how I wanted to work on my own projects was built on the idea of doing quarterly Kickstarter projects for infusions of capital, while driving traffic to my Patreon. It had been working! Then this rug got pulled. Really threw me for a loop, the entire thing. This, on top of reevaluating the kind of work I wanted to do, well... it was a lot.
Speaking of reevaluation...
Games, no More?
In early November, I had an amazing session of Iron Edda Reforged for the Puppet Strings podcast. I had this realization that the Eddic Engine (the system behind Reforged) was accomplishing everything that I'd ever wanted a tabletop system to accomplish. It was one of those weird moments that I have sometimes. I get these flashes of insight and revelation that feel like permanent, life-altering change. They rarely are exactly that. They're impactful but there's a lot in them to unpack.
This particular moment made me feel like I'd accomplished what I set out to do in games. A rare thing, and one I'd never contemplated. I thought through it for a while and decided that I was going to phase game design out of my creative career and begin to focus on fiction. I'd still make games to bring in some money while I did that. Seemed a good plan.
Then Kickstarter made their decision and everything went into a tailspin for a little while.
So what does the future look like now?
Midnight's Chains and The Queen is Dead
I'd begun working on a setting for the fiction I wanted to write. I plan to make an Eddic Engine game based in that setting. It's a fantasy noir setting called Midnight's Chains and it features:
The moon chained in place
A city locked in eternal midnight
Neighborhoods divided by warring criminal gangs
An elite ruling class of vampires
Plenty of werewolves, stuck in wolf form
Hosts of people trying to figure out how the gods died
My plan is to make the game and continue to work on a novel placed in this setting. I've got a lot of the groundwork laid. The thing that's uncertain is the how of all of this. I might end up doing crowdfunding through my website. I might end up doing something completely different. What I know for sure is that, as long as we don't have to scramble for money, I'm going to take it easy on the crowdfunding. A quarterly project is a lot, especially because taking care of Bebe isn't going to get less demanding as time goes on.
The Queen is Dead is a new idea, one that's only started to come together in the last day or two. A small game about the various groups of monsters, cultists, and traditional D&D-type enemies who live in a massive cave complex when the dragon at the center dies. I thought it would be fun for groups to explore the social dynamics of these often-overlooked groups as they all work to find a new center for their existences. Don't know when that'll be out but it's moving to the front of my work brain.
The Out
All in all, I'm happy right now. Content. I have a lot going on still and a lot going for me. The biggest challenge is that, somewhere along the way in life, I gave over to a worldview where I think everything is going to come crashing down. At my lowest moments, I'm an agent of that destruction; negative, sorrowful, someone who'd rather pick and argue than help and uplift. Realizing that is a very good thing. It gives me a framework to push back against the negative feelings, to re-frame my own worldview so I can help others do the same for themselves.
Did I want to go through a multi-month depression to get here? Nah. I'd pass, given the chance. Am I glad this feeling is on the other side of it?
Definitely.
See you next month,
-Tracy