Various illustrations created for the Mud Room section of Portland Monthly magazine, circa 2005-2006. Mostly pen and ink illustrations colored in Photoshop, some drawn from scratch in Illustrator.
A riff on Oregon Trail, these graphics were created using a 16-color palette to emulate the graphics on the Commodore 64 computer.
Various obstructions, sceneries, and a basic Hitchhiker:
The goal of the game: To reach the Pacific Music Festival!
Thought of a new wrinkle to add to the Grave Robber 2.0 rules: Ghosts!
Ghosts
While digging graves you may uncover a Ghost! Use the Ghost to scare the Mourner from any graveyard. Simply return the ghost tombstone-side-up to the pool, and remove one Mourner from play. This may be used at any point during your turn. Keep the Ghost face-up in front of you until you decide to use it.
Haven’t playtested this yet to see how well it works, or if it really adds anything to the play, but figured it was worth including for now. I can always cut it back out again later if I want.
This summer TheGameCrafter is having a ‘Mint Tin’ design contest! They’re adding mint-tin style boxes as a game option, and they’re encouraging their designing community to come up with a game that will fit entirely in a tin. Compact and easy to play!
Lucky for me, I’ve got a game just sitting around that will be perfect to submit: my years-old Halloween giveaway game, Grave Robber, which I’ve been meaning to update and republish anyway!
In the original Grave Robber, it was a simple dice-roller, where each player would just remove a gravestone whose number matched the dice, while trying to avoid the ghosts that haunted the graveyard. In Grave Robber 2.0, the goal is to dig up and collect body parts to make a Frankenstein’s monster, while trying to avoid digging up too many graves in a row. I also added a Mourner mechanic (similar to the robber in Settlers of Catan) that guards multiple graves in each graveyard to prevent them from being dug up.
Here’s the first draft of the rules for Grave Robber 2.0! Let me know what you think!
Grave Robber 2.0
You and your opponent are lackeys for the local mad scientists, who are having a contest to be the first to assemble and reanimate a dead body! But first they’ll need parts. As their hapless assistants, it’s your job to raid the local graveyards to find random body parts for your master. To do that you’ll have to avoid the mourners, and be the first to dig up enough parts to complete a body and win the game! But be careful, if you leave too many empty graves the locals will get suspicious and you’ll be found out!
Setup
Place all tombstones on the table tombstone-side-up, and mix them up. Each player builds a 5×5 graveyard of tombstones. Move the other tombstones aside but keep them ready – this is your pool of replacement graves. Place the Mourners to the side also but keep them close.
The player who finishes their graveyard first takes the first turn, and play continues to the left.
Digging Graves
The player’s turn begins by rolling the pair of dice. If the total of both dice matches a tombstone in your graveyard, you must dig that grave! Flip the tombstone over to see what you dug up! With luck, you’ll find a Random Body Part, and you can add that to your body. Replace that tombstone with a random one from the pool. If the grave is empty it stays where it is, and you are that much closer to being discovered!
If the numbers match multiple tombstones, you can only pick one of the matches to dig up. Don’t want to attract too much attention!
Build-a-Body Workshop
Each Complete Body consists of six parts: one head, one torso, two arms, and two legs. These parts are distributed randomly throughout the tombs in the graveyard. The first to complete a body wins the game! It’s possible you’ll end up digging up a part you already have, that’s okay — Just put the tombstone back in the pool tombstone-up and draw a new grave for your graveyard.
Mourners
After the first round of play, the Mourners arrive. Whenever you roll a seven, you have the chance to place or move a mourner in one of the graveyards. Mourners are placed in the intersections between tombstones, and stand watch over the adjacent stones (up to four at a time). Each graveyard can only have one Mourner in it, but you can move any Mourner on your turn. Use Mourners to block your opponent from digging up certain graves, or to force them to dig up graves that will expose their actions to the local townspeople!
Sometimes a Mourner will prevent you from being able to dig the only grave in your graveyard that matches the dice-roll. In this case your turn is over and play continues to the left.
Once the Mourners are in play they may not be removed from the graveyards, but a Mourner in play may be moved to an otherwise empty Graveyard.
Being Discovered
As you dig up more and more empty graves, the townspeople are sure to notice the strange activity in the graveyard. Don’t leave five empty graves in a row in any direction (even diagonal!) or the locals will discover you looting their relatives’ remains, and you will lose the contest.
One of my goals for 2019 is to experiment with storytelling through RPGs. The idea is that it might be more efficient to deliver stories as ‘episodes’ of an RPG rather than fully-developed and realized comics or graphic novels. My test case with this will be StarHustlers, based on a series of sci-fi/adventure/space opera shorts and miniseries I started planning several years back but never fully developed.
Believing that the people should be less dependent on the all-encompassing government of the Periwine Arrangement, StarHustler crews operate on the fringes of society as freelance ‘fixers-for-hire’. If the pay is right, these licensed teams are permitted to respond to calls for assistance wherever and whenever they originate, to assist in any endeavor they decide is worth their time and resources, as long as that assistance does not interfere with normal Arrangement operations. Every crew has their own Agenda and Credo to guide them, from wanting to Make The Universe a Better Place, to being In It For The Money. So, the StarHustlers find themselves traveling from system to system, fixing problems nobody else is equipped to fix, and wondering if each job will be their last.
The first thing I have to do is build up a Core Scenario book. Based on the FATE Core system, this Core book will describe the universe where the game takes place. It will include the history of the universe, classes of citizenry, potential former occupations and the Skills you might bring from that, rules and information about designing your character and your ship, and working together as a crew. I’ll be working up different alien species and their homeworlds, all with appropriate Skill recommendations. And all of these sections will include copious Aspects and potential story suggestions. So far, the main Universal Aspects I’m working with are “The Periwine Arrangement – The Shining City in the Stars”, “Universal Peace Comes at a Price”, and “One Person’s Paradise is Another Person’s Prison-State”. The book will wrap up with a sample ‘Origin’ Episode of six to ten scenes, complete with additional locations, NPCs, and Antagonists.
While I’m developing that Core book, I’ll also be developing the first Season of Episodes – I’m hoping that developing them in tandem will inform the Core book’s requirements. The plan at the moment is to create about four Seasons of six or eight Episodes each. Each Season will have a distinct story arc, developing out the universe and presenting the players with dilemmas of increasing magnitude and import. The Episodes will be comprised of several scenes, and should be playable in just a few sessions each. How each group gets through each episode will be completely unique, depending on their characters.
So far, my only rule in creating this universe has been a simple one: No Humans, no Earth, and that’s been a fun limit to think around. I’ll be posting sample chapters on the Lunarbistro Patreon and encouraging feedback and suggestions. I’ve got ideas for a number of non-episode expansions and sourcebooks (like a volume of just alien species, or homeworlds, or inventory items, or a full shipbuilding kit), and I hope to get to all of them eventually. For now, though, the Core book.
