Free Game Download + Iko Interview for The Lost Bay
Solo-journaling game inspired by creation myths and a great interview with Iko!
Howdy from beautiful Kansas!
I hope February has been treating you all well!
It’s been a busy month over here, but the pressure and stress is waning since the Greenhorns Kickstarter ended. I’m happy to be able to focus on creating again and have made substantial progress on both Greenhorns and Incorporated since. A few things I’m ecstatic to share today
Firstly, my interview with Iko from The Lost Bay! I had a blast working with Iko in the Outer Rim Uprising Bundle and I really love their approach to creating games. This time our interview is about The Lost Bay which is going live soon in March!
Second, I carved out a little time to make my first solo-journaling game, Born of Pine. The idea stems from creation myths and the Mayan creation myth from the Popol Vuh in particular. It takes about 30-45 minutes to play and explores grief, loss, and prevailing past assigned worthlessness. Born of Pine is free to download for everyone reading this!
Lastly, more love for Zine Quest/Zine Month projects which are inspiring me! Now on to the meat!
The Guac 021 Docket
Beautiful ZineQuest Projects
The Lost Bay Interview with Iko
Cool Links
Born of Pine, a free solo-journaling game.
Beautiful ZineQuest Projects
Hecate Cassette Archives by Joshua Justice
This 36-pg Mothership module presents a heist to obtain Cassette X. A number of factions provide internal corporate conflicts for the crew to navigate. This is one I got early access to the manuscript and I really love Josh’s worldbuilding for this module and it’s pounding theme oozing throughout the scenario. I’m going to avoid spoiling this, but I will say it has some awesome surprises for you and the crew!
I also got to playtest the prequel adventure, Radio Free Hecate, last year and I highly recommend snagging that up if you’re picking up Hecate Cassette Archives.
Outliers by Samantha Leigh
Outliers is a solo-jounaling game where you play a lab assistant in an absurd lab. Mix fighting for a grant with cryptids, eldritch participants, and time travelers and you’ve got a hell of a job ahead. The game uses the Wretched & Alone system by Chris Bissette.
This is another game covered in theme. Sam’s work is complimented by Carly A-F’s killer illustrations and James Hanna pinpoint graphic design. The whole team came through to make this an amazing looking game.
The Lost Bay Interview with Iko
Hi, Iko! I’m excited to get another interview with you here on The Guac! This time, about the highly-anticipated The Lost Bay RPG (Kickstarting 2024 Q1, you can sign up to be notified on launch day here).
For this interview, I want to do a bit of a condensed deep-dive into the worldbuilding you’ve done in The Lost Bay.
Q: Let’s start with Vibes. You have a fresh variety of player types and powers, here. One thing I love about the Vibe Powers is that they are described in 1-2 words, and the game encourages players to make Powers their own, interpreting them uniquely from their short names and descriptions. Can you tell us how Powers give players more information about the Weird and the world around them?
A: Hey Marco, thanks for having me on The Guac, happy to be back! That’s a great question. Vibes are playable character classes, and there’s a lot of them! Character creation is pretty fast and simple, but it’s also the main way for new players to discover the game lore. The Lost Bay setting is implied, and extremely open. But it conveys a very specific flavor, which I call Suburban Gothic: a blend of mundane suburban references, subcultures, and the supernatural. Vibes reference the key elements that make the Lost Bay world unique: the Weird, the Powers, the Immortals.
Now it’s the year 199X, The 80s are over, and with them a certain colorful and jolly carelessness is gone. We are in a much darker time. Playable characters are not kids anymore, but teens. Something happened to them, and they got touched by the Weird: a mysterious force that flows in the Lost Bay and is the source of their powers. Powers follow a flavor heavy and lore light approach, to allow players and GMs to build their own interpretation of the Lost Bay. That’s why their descriptions are minimal.
On top of this, each Vibe comes with six default Active Powers, and players pick two during character creation. During play, I’ve witnessed how this leads to very different incarnations of the same Vibe. For example the Seer, depending on the starting powers, can be a powerful combat-oriented master of nightmares, a practitioner of the occult, or a patternist who decrypts signs hidden in mundane objects.
The User Guide comes with ten default Vibes, and we have ten more planned as a stretch goal. Members of the community are already designing new additional vibes, so it’s safe to assume there will be lots of third party designed TLB Vibes. They are the beating heart of the game world. This lore in character approach was obviously very much inspired by Troika or Electric Bastionland, which both do the amazing trick of building a whole setting through just the playable classes.
Q: Unique scar lists for each Vibe are another awesome addition to The Lost Bay. Vibe Scars give so much more body to what these characters experience and how they interact with the world differently than other Vibes. Can you tell us why you chose to plant so much of the world experience in the scars characters receive? And, how have you seen players react to discovering themselves while receiving scars?
A: I’ve never been a big fan of XP points, levels, and other numerical character growth systems. I was looking for something meaningful mechanically, but also narratively. Something that would tie the characters to the lore. I tried a couple of things, until I remembered the Cairn scar system. It was exactly what I was looking for: in-game, organic character growth. I just hacked it a bit to fit The Lost Bay mechanics. Characters can get Scars when they use their powers, which they’ll have to do to survive extreme situations or beings. Scars are pretty wild and fun to play. They offer a mix of narrative and mechanical effects. With Scars, characters can acquire new powers, discover something about the Lost Bay, or lose control of the Weird and alter the environment around them in unexpected ways. This pushes forward the fiction and the session.
Q: Just so we can hear the whole picture of Vibes, can you give us a quick rundown of a Vibe you think feels most unique to The Lost Bay?
A: That’s a tough question, because I’m so excited for all of them! I’ve tried to write Vibes that are rooted in 90s’ dark fantasy/street culture, and that reinterpret classical RPG tropes: healer, seer, warrior, druid. I wanted them to embody the setting, but to be somehow recognizable by a larger RPG crowd. One that I particularly like, and is a bit different, is the Scanner. Scanners are creatives, activists, rebels, underground analog/8-bit hackers, connected with all the undercurrents of the Bay. They draw their powers from an immortal called The Monitor and are bound to CRTs, TV streams, and magnetic tapes. They have very dark and powerful abilities: they can blend their flesh with objects, alter reality and mix it with video streams, rewind time. You’re probably guessing the kinds of media that inspired this VIbe: mostly David Cronemberg movies. But Scanners also kind of summon my own 90s: I was a cinema and VHS buff, I used to hang in anarchists squats, and spent nights on activists online forums.
I had a lot of fun writing the Scanner, and particularly their scars. Most of them mention an ominous Channel 7, a TV network that holds many of the Lost Bay secrets.
In some way, playing this Vibe puts you in a special position, at the center of the game lore. Scanners are so wild! They are the spirit of 199X.
Q: Lastly, one of the more unique aspects of The Lost Bay is a theme of rebirth and immortality. I want to ask specifically about Living Saints, the immortals living in an infinite cycle of lives and one source of player powers. Can you tell us about the significance of Living Saints when it comes to The Bay and how the story is enhanced by them?
A: Living Saints are a strong background theme of the game and the setting. Little is known about them: they appear human and share human passions.They live and die among mortals, and are reborn forever. They’re the last immortals. Well, not exactly: there is one other deity, the Faceless God. Sum and source of all evil, it lurks somewhere deep down below.
Playing characters are bound to a particular Living Saint, and draw powers from them. But how this happens narratively is up to the table. Running the game, I’ve noticed that most players try to decipher the nature of their bond with their immortal patron. This sparks unexpected storylines, or creates new lore variations. So, right now Living Saints are like evanescent glimmers, constantly present in the background of the game.
Hidden in the deepest folder of my laptop is the Cycle of Saints, the tale of the immortals. It details their true names, struggles, lives, deaths, and even prayers written in a fictional yet understandable dialect. A full pantheon. I’m not sure if I’ll release it as it is in the future, or if I’ll let it keep emerging through mechanics, tables and adventures.
Right now, we are preparing the crowdfunding of the core books, plus a setting book, and six adventure modules written by amazing guest designers: Sam Leigh, Watt, Alfred Valley, Chris Airiau, Dave Kenny. But we’re just opening the door. If the community digs The Lost Bay, I have so much more ready to be shared!
Thank you for the interview Iko!
The Lost Bay has a ton of wonderful aspects I am really excited for. I would feel ridiculous if I didn’t mention the aesthetics of the game, especially since Evangeline Gallagher is the artist for The Lost Bay. I love their work so much and it’s nuts that Evangeline has been pumping out artwork for The Lost Bay for about 2 years! It’s actually how I got introduced to their work before bringing them on to illustrate Outsourced. Onto the Cool Links
Cool Links
New News
Rascal News
https://www.rascal.news/
Rascal is an independent, reader-funded, worker owned outlet for journalism about tabletop roleplaying games and the people who make them. It was cofounded by Lin Cordega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter who have all done incredible work in the ttrpg journalism space.
Check out the About Page also!
I’m excited for what they are doing and how easy they are making it for indie publishers of all sizes to work with them and publish on their site.
Videos (Game Inspiration??)
The Creation Story of the Maya
Sharing this as it’s a quick synopsis of one of the main inspirations for Born of Pine.
History’s Most Horrifying Cult Leaders i
Creepy Archaeological Discoveries
Podcasts
I’ve been catching up with Weird Games & Weird People. Here are some fun episodes.
43 Luke Gearing
33 Adam Vass
The Weekly Scroll has been running wild during Zine Quest. Here are some highlights.
Ep. 133 Psykers
TWS Plays 10 - The Lost Bay
Ep. 139 Interview: Beetle Knight
The Brain Trust episode “Companions and Mr. Lindor” is one I will be returning to and found very interesting for meaningful NPCs and introductory adventures!
Born of Pine
I’m stoked to publish my first solo-journaling game! The idea for Born of Pine started with a !!Boss!! I wrote for Greenhorns. The !!Boss!! is in The Creaky Layer from the core book called The Cracked and Disposed. An vengeful group of original peoples discarded by their false gods.
The Cracked and Disposed is based on the first peoples created by the Mayan Gods in their creation story in the Popol Vuh. First they created people out of mud, but they had no soul and were bad keepers of days so they were washed away. Then the gods created people out of wood, but they too could not worship the gods so they were destroyed. The ones that survived were said to become monkeys.
The Mayan gods are far from the only gods to destroy their “first takes” at creating people. It’s an odd trope and this concept of discarding a people for lack of soul or ability to worship in particular stole my attention for a long time. I finally got the core details for the game written up at a few of my son’s karate lessons and felt it better to dedicate a few hours to finalizing it than to let it fester while trying to stay heads down on larger Spicy Tuna projects. It was a bit rushed in execution, but I’m really happy with the state it is in being sent out now.
Born of Pine is a game where you play as a proto-being of Earth. A first take. A mistake. The creators wish to wash you away for something else. Something capable of loving them. But in the moments before your destruction you find meaning in your life. The creators are wrong and you run towards the Tower to Heaven in an effort to prove your worth.
Will you fall in sorrow and be swept away by the deluge or will you prevail in triumph and earn your future?
You are a being that originally lived as if programmed, but as the creators whisper your unworthiness to you, “You cannot think, you cannot worship, and you are soulless. You must be reclaimed, your energy reused for a being more able,” you gain the ability to think and begin assigning meaning and love to your past memories.
Against the odds, with the flood rains pouring down and destroying the land you called home, you attempt to reach the Tower to Heaven and prove you are worthy of life. Born of Pine can be a very sad game where you struggle through loss and grieve loved ones, not knowing if they even learned to love in their moments before death, but I’m happy with two variations of ending and am excited to hear what other people think of it.
Download Born of Pine for free here!
Low Ink B&W version is also available
That’s it for today! Thank you for reading this far! I hope you have a beautiful day ahead.
Marco
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Ooo, really excited to dig into Born of Pine. Great concept!
Yet another rad article , great job! Thanks for the free download too - can’t wait to check out Born of Pine 🌲