It's been a while since I posted anything here, huh?
It pains me to say it, but, as you might have guessed, Escape from All-Mart is dead, as are some of its players (dead to me, anyway). The session writeups will haunt this blog forevermore. If you're especially lucky, there might even be sightings of some unused GM notes when the moon is full and/or the stars are right.
Quilombos & Colonizers
Still from Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a movie that very much encapsulates the vibe I want for this project.... Whatever it ends up being.
My life has been quite tumultuous in the wake of EfAM. I've gone back to school (again), moved into a truly horrible apartment, found a safer place to move, consulted an attorney to cover my ass during this process, and started dating someone very cool.
Amidst all this, you'd better believe I've still been working on creative projects, mostly RPG-related. I've been slowly nurturing a historical fiction or historical fantasy project of some description set in early colonial Brazil. I spent a ton of time on research, which helped me narrow my scope to one Brazilian state (or in the parlance of the era, "captaincy"), Pernambuco, and the forty-year span during the 17th century that the Dutch managed to seize the colony and keep it from the Portuguese (for maximum factional drama).
Through my copious research, I found plenty of interesting historical figures who could serve as prominent NPCs or viewpoint characters, like the Jewish pirate captain Moses Cohen Henriques, and Zumbi dos Palmares, leader of a famous settlement of rebel slaves and capoeira martial arts user. I found two academic texts on the indigenous peoples of the region not from the colonizers' perspective, which turned out to be something of an accomplishment, since the Tupi and other local groups didn't have cities or a writing system.
So far, this project has amounted to highly interesting research and not much else. I had initially been thinking of using it as the basis of an OSR hexcrawl, but at this point I think that'd almost be a waste of what I've learned, what with having to pare everything down to work within the BX D&D rules framework or something similar.
If I want to turn it into fiction, I would need to figure out a format, including a single plot and cast of characters (not having to do that was one of the big draws of doing this as an RPG campaign). I also feel like it would take even more research to get enough concrete, sensory details down to write this as fiction. Maybe it could be an RPG setting supplement? For now, it's on the back burner so I can give it time to breathe and gestate. It's pretty likely I post more about this on here in some form, if only to show off my research.
Looking Forward, Looking West
Since deciding to hit pause on the still-formless Pernambuco project, I've set my sights on a different OSR project for the next game I actually run, one from a storied tradition: the West Marches. West Marches campaigns are supremely open-ended and player-driven, even more than the OSR is by default. The GM sets up a campaign environment in some sort of wilderness area at the bounds of civilization, rife with ruins and monsters and treasure, and everything from there is down to the players, from scheduling sessions to deciding what to do on each expedition.
The West Marches style is an open table, so I hope and expect to have quite a few players from the get-go, with only some attending each session. I have also elected to have all my GM notes 100% in analog format - I'm busting out the 3-ring binder, baybee. Much, much work remains to be done before session 1, and admittedly the analog notes plus player-written session notes means I'm not sure how much of the campaign will end up on this blog, but there will be something, so stay tuned.
Lastly, I just tonight formulated the idea for a Halloween-y solo journaling game while talking to a friend about some recent computer hassles. I'm thinking it'll be a very short (and thus hopefully manageable by the actual holiday) project drawing heavily on the "Wretched & Alone" format. I can't promise anything on that front since the West Marches project still takes priority, but who knows.
I really don't know if anyone keeps tabs on this blog when I'm not linking the posts on the Unknown Armies fan discord or someplace like that, so this is quite possibly a bad use of my time, but hey, future me will probably get a kick out of it. Until next time, enjoy the spooky season!
