Tea Wagon Games

I have been thinking about mastery for a couple of weeks, and I just want to get this off of my chest. I have heard that to become a master at something you need to spend 10,000 hours practicing it.  I have also heard a story that an Asian master artist said to draw 1000 blades of grass to become an artist. One day I was in the studio to help run bits for Fritz Dreisbach. He took me over to a bare patch of concrete and began to draw while he told me his plan. "I was taking a shit, when I thought about this bowl....blah blah blah". Here is a man that literally eats, sleeps, and shits glass art. I once heard a professional video gamer say that as a professional they train and practice so they don't have to think about their decisions; that they will have more instinctive reactions in the game. After watching some teachers in training teach some classes this spring, it finally became clear to me what mastery is. Mastery is the knowledge and understanding of an activity or sy...

 Games are often released in PDF format. This is a versitile format for locking in design and layout elements of a published work. With embedded fonts, page backgrounds, and other layers, the PDF format ensures the page will look the same, no matter where it is displayed. But this becomes a problem with more and more people viewing these documents on phones and other small devices. When the page is viewed as a whole, the text is too small to read comfortably. When it is zoomed in, readers have to navigate across columns and art spreads to find the beginning of the next bit of text. To help avoid this, I have decided to begin rerelease my games with View Only Google Drive documents. The benefit is that Google Drive automatically formats the layout to the screen it is being viewed on, and the viewer may export a copy via either downloading or printing it.

 The Labyrinthine Library of Bibliothecia is up. This is a game I made out of necessity. I have a group of students learning English as a foreign language, so I wanted to make a quick, card / icon based game so they could focus on speaking instead of reading. I originally put the game up on the site a week ago, but after playing a session with the students, I made some changes to the rules to further streamline them. The result is a game that can be played with a single d6 and a deck of cards. The players take on a cast of fantasy tropes to explore the once lost city of Bibliothecia. It was once the center of knowledge for the world. A peaceful city, where each home, every restaurant, and even the alleyways were libraries housing books. And the books contain knowledge that is now lost to the world. The PCs are adventurers, plumbing the depths of the discovered city, looking for knowledge, and riches. Head over to the games page to check it out, or click here .

 Gods of Miami is finished. The largely unformatted text is available on its page . I'll push out notifications in the morning.

 Work, more work, sick child, and life. There are many things that can get in the way. However, looking at my blog stats, I don't seem to have very many, or possibly any, regular followers. The weird thing is that the RSS doesn't seem to add to stats at all. For experimental purposes, I subscribed to the blog via different apps, but receiving the post in app never seemed to move the stats at all. So I am not going to concentrate on putting blog posts out so much. Instead, this will just be where I announce when an RPG page has been updated, and possibly describe my thought process behind the rules update. The week away from writing was actually a little good for me. I turned the rules for my own game around in my head, and I have had a few good ideas to implement. I just need to get it on paper.

 I have reworked the covers I mocked up back in July. Mainly I changed the font to something more art nouveau. The previous font was playful, but a bit unreadable. This font is Poiret One, and I am using it (paired with Open Sans) as the heading font for the interior of the game. Gods of Miami Front Gods of Miami Back

 My next game project is another game that is nearly finished. I wrote it over the summer, and it is fairly polished already. I just need to generate some art for the Patreon version, give it a good edit, do some proofreading, and then lay it all out. Originally, I was planning on getting a game out at the end of each month. However, after setting up my Patreon account, I realized that if a game draws someone to join the Patreon, they'll be immediately charged, and then they'll be charged a few days later when the new month rolls around. So, my new deadline is the beginning of the month. Since this is already the beginning of November, I'm planning to put out Gods of Miami for the beginning of December.  The game is Gods of Miami, nee Gods of Aureata. I have waffled on the setting. Part of me wanted to do a weird sci-fi / fantasy mashup, so over the summer I spent to much time editing the documents back and forth between the two settings. But, now that I'm putting it ou...

 This will be a first for me, just writing a post only to review of something. I have nearly finished watching the first season of the Tales from the Loop  series from Amazon Prime.  Here is a link for the game . Full disclosure, I am coming from reading the game book first (it was my gateway drug to the Year Zero Engine). It is one of the few game books that I've read from cover to cover.  With that said, I feel that anyone who watches this show, gamer or not, can enjoy the show. Rather than focusing on the setting, as many shows based on games do, Tales from the Loop focuses on the characters. It feels like an anthology show, a little similar to the Twilight Zone, but it really captures the small town feel.  It does this by focusing on a character in Episode A, and then bringing in a side character, or background character to be the focus of Episode B. Then in Episode C you might see the two previous main characters as supporting cast. It is a really cool effe...

 One of the toughest parts of worldbuilding is developing consistent yet different map labels. Even without a map, I need city names, continent names, cultural identifiers, etc. I know there are hundreds of random generators out there, but I have another trick I like to use; Google Translate. What I do is pick a language family that will represent a culture, and use them to pull up words for to give to a map feature. For example, if the culture is in the frozen north, it makes sense to pick languages such as Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. Then I pick a common word to describe the feature, maybe Rocky to describe a mountain range. For the family I listed previously Rocky translates to: grytt, steinet, and klippig. From these I would choose the one I like the best. I'm going with Klippig for now. Then I would play around with the final syllable to make sure it fits with other nearby features. For example if other features end in -en, I might change it to Klippen. However not eve...

Haveno is just one city within the greater world of Vaeth. It is located on the island of Krucho, which is just off the continent of Beleco. Haveno is a sprawling paradise. Situated at a leyline junction on the Northwest of the island of Krucho. The weather is mild, with only tropical storms and cyclones threatening it in the late summer. Millions of tourists visit the island every year, drawn by the glittering beaches, pulsing nightclubs, and world renowned casinos. It appears to be a minor player in the world; just a fun place to play. In fact, Haveno is a major player in the international underworld of drugs, crime, politics, and corporate greed. It is a place notorious for money laundering and as a staging point for smuggling drugs into Beleco. Most visitors are vaguely aware of the corruption and graft from movies and TV. But they usually do not experience it first hand. Haveno is a city I have written a TechNoir style plot generator (what they would call a transmission). It is t...