After many years of playing role playing games and board games, and a long time since I last ran a game for anyone, I find myself running an online game. I am pretty happy about that - the players are great and the game (Mausritter) is a lot of fun to run.
Because I tend to jump into things with both feet, I did some research for different parts of the game - newts, birch, calendars and goodness knows what else. I wrote them up, partly as a challenge to myself to get to grips with Affinity Publisher at last, but mainly because it's nice to set things down on paper and I had a vague idea I might share them with the Mausritter Discord community.
I have to tell you, I really enjoyed the process. There have been a couple of days recently where I got to really focus on the process and I ended up with two pamphlets that I published on itch. Both are supplemental rules and information, and I now I have an idea that I might like to write an adventure location for the game next.
There is certainly something very satisfying about seeing that 100 people have viewed (or better yet downloaded) the thing you wrote.
At about the same time, I saw a series of posts from Diogo Nogueira (@diogo_oldskull) on Twitter about the process of creating role playing games and they really chimed for me. One suggested that you do your creation in public, sharing your process from start to finish, bit-by-bit.
Which is kind of scary.
So I'm going to do it. Why not? I can't think of a good reason why, other than people telling me that I'm very bad at this and let's face it, this is the first time I've tried to write an adventure to publish, so they'll probably be right in a lot of ways.
I saw a small riverside house in Portugal a little while back. At the time I thought "that would make a great setting", so I took a picture, just in case. Here it is...
It looks pretty cool, doesn't it? To me, that said "potential", especially for Mausritter, where the size of the mice means that a location doesn't have to be physically huge to contain a lot of things.
So, what's my first step? Well, I wanted to have a sketch of the building that I could refer to until I get around to actually doing a "proper" drawing. I sat down with a square of notepaper and quickly sketched what I saw.
I like sketching (though I'm not exactly skilled) and when I thought about it, this part of the process gave me a better understanding of how the parts might link together. I put the door on the lower level, opening into the part under the house. Initially, I thought the bit under the house would be underwater, but in drawing the sketch I realised that would have made building the house almost impossible to get started.
I started making a better copy, using a ruler and blocking things out as though I was back in technical drawing classes at school. That made me realise that I had the stairs all wrong - in the original picture you can't quite see how they end.
And that's about as far as I've got right now - I think I'm getting a bit of a feel for the building and how it sits in the landscape. Hopefully that'll help as the process continues. I guess we'll see...
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