Most of my mental energy these last two months has been spent on a project I have named “The Demon of South Gloria”. It’s a set of puzzles or a game or something. It’s available for free over on Itchy. Over there, I describe it thus:
The Demon Of South Gloria is a puzzle booklet that puts you in the role of a paranormal investigator who has come to a small town region that appears to be in the grip of demonic forces. To figure out how to defeat this evil, you have to solve 13 pages of puzzles.

Comes in the form of a pdf with 13 pages intended to be printed. Very likely could take more than one sitting to completely solve.

All of that is correct. I really enjoyed making these, and I’ve got ideas for no less than three sequel-type sets of puzzles. The thing is, though, I simply can’t justify working on those right now. I am certain there’s an audience for this sort of thing, but I can’t find it. I went so far as to go to Reddit and make self-promotion posts. That is unlike me. I genuinely don’t enjoy going to parts of the Internet that aren’t my home, let alone drawing attention to myself while I’m there. But still, I believe in these puzzles, so I went to forums (or whatever they are called on Reddit) for people who love puzzles, or love wordsearches specifically, and so on. I tried to draw attention to my work. It hasn’t worked. I get barely any views on these things.

But I don’t feel bad talking about it here on this site. This site also gets barely any views, and those who do come here already know about these puzzles. So I don’t have to feel bad about posting it here. This is for posterity!

Now to just keep reminding myself that no views is actually better than lots of views and no downloads.

I did another little one-page print-and-play game for the people on the Internet. This one is based on all those comic strips where the character(s) get trapped on a little desert island.

It began as my attempt to do another one-page rpg, but in the end while I think I created a neat little game, I did not create a role-playing game, really. I guess you could use it as such, but you’d be bringing that to it, not me. Oh well, I’ll try again on the rpg front, and maybe someday I’ll return to this concept and fit the rules and the image of the island onto two separate pages, so that you could put the cards on the island like a proper board game.

I did a thing! Somehow I have found myself participating in a thing called the One-Page RPG Jam 2024, which is a thing where people create role-playing games, the rules to which can fit on a single page. I’ve been tinkering with a PDR RPG for some years now, so the chance to carve off some of that work into individual slices and actually have something to show for it is very welcome.

My first one-page rpg is called “And Lo, The Wizards Shall Fight!” and it is lets two players generate some random Wizards and then have them fight with a system of my own creation that relies on dice and a deck of cards.

My inspirations for this are pretty specific and very much the sorts of things that PDR would connect. There’s the wizards duel in the Disney movie Sword In The Stone for a start. That’s definitely what I’d call the most mainstream inspiration. After that comes the climactic sorcery fight between King Graham and Mordack in King’s Quest V, which I figure was probably inspired at least in part by the movie. And finally there’s the fight between Modred the Mystic and Blade in Marvel’s comic Darkhold: Pages From The Book Of Sins (My favourite from their Midnight Sons line). Those are the big three, in reverse order of importance, because I took them in at a very formative age and they put a love of wizards fighting that has lasted to this day. I suppose there was also the computer game Magic Carpet, though I never played more than a demo of it, so my idea of it comes less from the game itself than from PC Gamer reviews of the game.

All of which is to say that And Lo, The Wizards Shall Fight comes from a long lineage of wizard duels. But now you can play it with cards and dice!