The Man, The Problem, The Solution
Who am I? What am I doing here? (I better write it down, before I forget!)
Hello, beautiful people!
My name is Justin Vandermeer. I’m here to talk about pretty things and wrap my head around game mechanics— and I’m all out of braincells.
Well, that’s not exactly true. I have enough neurons firing to carry a conversation but I have more RPG zines than common sense. I take a crack at playing almost everything I own, too! It usually goes poorly. To understand why, you and I need to get more familiar:
The Man
Who am I? I’m a guy who backs too many crowdfunding campaigns. I LOVE indie games. I live under a mountain of hardbacks and saddle-stitched booklets and often find myself pacing around the mailbox like a polar bear at a breathing hole.
I’m also a game designer, artist, and writer. I’m the driving force behind Shouting Crow.
I talk to dozens of brilliantly cerebral designers every day. These intelligent and articulate human beings make incredible games and engage in complex discourse.
Then… there’s me. I like pretty pages.
The Problem
I’m a bit obsessed with flashy design. My brain sees a gorgeous layout and short-circuits as it floods with serotonin. I own a copy of CY_BORG and I have read it front to back a dozen times over but I have no idea how combat works.
I have no idea how to play half of the games I own and I feel compelled to justify this enormous zine collection.
The Solution
This substack is your invitation to actually play some of those gorgeous indie games. I hope to make your own mountain of indie games less intimidating to play. Or… maybe you’re a game designer trying to make your content more accessible to derpy dice bunnies like me? Either way, here’s what you can expect:
Every other Tuesday, I’ll crack open one of my treasure chests and find a game I want to thumb the pages of. Then I’ll wax on a bit and tell you…
1) Who made it.
2) What makes it beautiful, and what makes it confusing.
3) Where you can get your own copy.
4) Why I didn’t really understand it, at first.
5) How it works. As in, how the arrestingly gorgeous page was constructed and/or how the mechanic part is played.
Sometimes I’ll accomplish this by interviewing the game designer responsible for the perplexing content, sometimes I’ll hash things out with a series of play-by-post examples.
You’ll occasionally hear from me on my “Tuesdays off”. Those posts will be less structured. I might take a couple games and put them side by side to compare design choices, for instance.
My posts will be peppered with fanart for games I love, like this little doodle I did in anticipation for the upcoming release of Hinokodo’s MIRU II:
Let’s make one thing clear:
We are not here to talk about bad design. Well, okay, sometimes I’ll point to my own work on Tuesday-off and show you how I could’ve done better, but other than that… when I say something is “confusing” I don’t mean that the fault lies with the designer.
The issue is that I’m an over-excited golden retriever with a ball in my mouth and I don’t understand that I can’t pick up another one until I spit the first one out. The shtick here is that I’m not clever, not that the games I’m talking about are bad.
Yes, you can design for people like me but I’m not necessarily advocating for Justin-proofing every game.
How I am defining “Indie Games”?
For the purposes of this substack, it is easier to tell you what I don’t consider independent: I will not be talking about content made for Dungeons & Dragons or even Pathfinder. The closest to mainstream we’ll ever get in this substack is MÖRK BORG. As a reference-point, I’m way more likely to talk about BASTARDS, MOTHERSHIP or something more obscure. I plan to touch on systems, adventures, and supplements in hardback, zine and pamphlet formats. We’ll talk about dice-games, TTRPGs, solo journaling games, hex crawls, you name it—but if it requires a deck of cards more custom than a tarot deck, I’m not ready to talk about it. Maybe later, when I have the brain-space.
Right now I’m just trying to figure out the basics, because that’s what I am: a basic boy. There’s no judgement, here. Let’s figure these games out together.
*buckles in*