Borderlands 3 Doesn’t Care About New Players

YouTube has been pushing a lot Borderlands lore videos for me lately, so I’ve watched some of them. Everyone hates Ava and the story of the third game in the mainline series sucks. But this got me thinking: What if I hadn’t spent something like 1200 hours playing the previous games when I started this game?

Spoilers. Spoilers. Spoilers.

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You Win or You Die – Reflections on the Final Seasons of Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin’s epic has never been a personal favorite, but I’ve read all five novels and now I’ve finally caught up to the HBO series as well. Initially, my decision was to stop watching it, as I don’t find much delight in brutally killing off characters I’m fond of; but the hype around these latest episodes turned my head around.

Turns out that they weren’t worth the hype, but they taught me a thing or two about the creator’s integrity.

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Designing Eldritch Sigils

Last Sunday I published the beta version of rules for Eldritch Sigils. This is a game I have been working on for about five years. I have actually published earlier drafts over the years but this was the first time it actually has consistency and it is actually playable.

This has been a long process and one that is still in the works. But now that the rules are “out there” I thought it would be a good chance to talk about them. Since game design is quite an interesting topic I hope that sharing my process might produce new ideas or at least be curious.

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New Games by Guild Redemund

kiltamerkki_peleihinI’m cheating with the topic but at least you are reading still, right? These games are not “new” per se but hacks and adventures. There is our newest collaborative Fiasco playset, an agnostic fantasy adventure (though it does have Dungeon World threat sheet) and a game that is built on Matthijs Holter‘s Archipelago.

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Writing Cliques & Powers

cliquesnpowers3Yesterday’s ramblings about stealing and using or losing it didn’t spark from nothing. It was inspired (more or less) from last Friday’s gaming session.

For a few years now I have had a custom of gathering my oldest friends for sauna and roleplaying games in January. This year it almost didn’t happen since we had a chance of location. We ended up not having a sauna but we did have great time with my newest game Cliques & Powers.

It all started out as a joke. I just randomly asked that wether we should have a fantasy or teenage type of game. My players immediately got excited about playing teenagers and I got stuck with creating such a game. As usual I went with Archipelago. Continue reading

Creating an Archipelago Game

About a month ago I managed to get into Jason Morningstar‘s Archipelago game “Love in the Time of Khavarner“. I really liked the setting and the style the game worked and began immediately to think how I could hack it. Jason himself said that it is not as simple as it seems. And after working on a game I have to admit he was right.

Without going into details about what is needed for an Archipelago game I must admit that I used the two existing games Love in the Time of Seið and Love in the Time of Khavarner as the starting point. I did not have high ambitions about a truly original masterpiece but an idea about a game I really wanted to take part in. Continue reading

Some notes on script-writing comics

For a long time I’ve been wanting to contribute to Guilds blog. I had thought of writing comics reviews, but being a lazy guy, it’s been mañana so far.. But then Aki asked me to write something about script-writing comics and I was tempted to take the challenge. Having just finished with my third script for a comic book I am still learning my ways in this art and I think it is now useful for me to write down some of the thoughts or principles that I’ve gathered..

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