BBG Digest - February 15th, 2023
Anamnesis audio drama & new game demo
Hi all! The first quarter of this year is a very busy one! Lots of exciting projects and collaborations happening in February and March. First though, I want to talk about the end of the…
Anamnesis Jam
The Anamnesis Jam ended on January 31st with a whopping 30 entries!
I could not be more amazed. Among these projects include:
Many of these entries were by first-time designers, which is absolutely incredible.
I highly recommend looking through the list of submissions - there’s something here for everyone! I can’t wait to read them all.
One particular entry that I want to feature here is…
Anamnesis: An Audio Drama
Tin Can Audio has turned Anamnesis into an audio drama!
David Devereux of Tin Can Audio (part of the Rusty Quill network) wrote a script based on a game of Anamnesis, brought on the incredible Mark Gallie to voice the main character, performed some impressive audio editing, and even composed an original score for the series.
They created the entire 5-part miniseries in 3 months, all live on stream to show how an audio drama gets made. All of these streams can now be found on the Tin Can Audio YouTube channel.
I’m a huge fan of audio dramas and could not be more excited about this project! I even voiced a couple lines for this series, which was a ton of fun. There are also pieces in here from the Anamnesis audiobook I recorded.
Also, the amazing cover art for the series was drawn by Arazmis! I yelled when I first saw it.
You can listen to the entire series right now on Bandcamp and Spotify.
Death of the Author
I also created a project for the Anamnesis Jam!
Death of the Author is a solo tarot game about a character fighting for agency in their story, against the wishes of their author. It uses very similar mechanics to Anamnesis with a couple of twists.
The game currently unfinished, but there’s a free demo to check out. I’m planning to release the full game later this year and might crowdfund for a print version depending on interest.
The cover art sketch was drawn by Victor Winter, who also made the art for Anamnesis! The cover shown here is unfinished concept art - Victor is working on the full version right now and I’m excited to see the end result.
Current Projects
There is SO much going on right now, so I’ll provide a short description of everything I’m involved in over the next couple months! Expect more details in future newsletters…
Project ECCO - Elliot Davis is crowdfunding Project ECCO, a solo game about chasing a time-devouring entity through the pages of a planner. This concept is SO up my alley and I’m delighted to be a guest writer! I’m currently working on a tarot mechanic for traveling through time.
[I also made a short video about Project ECCO]
W&A Research Assistant game- I’m currently a creator-in-residence with the Far Horizons CoOp, and with them I’m writing a Wretched & Alone* game! This solo game is about being a research assistant in a strange lab and it’s filled with absurd comedy (think Welcome to Night Vale). It’s also based on my own experiences of working as a research assistant for 5 years! My goal is to write a fun game that also shows people what human research is really like, detached from the “clinically-pristine” and “mad science” tropes from media.
*[A Wretched & Alone game is a TTRPG based on the framework of The Wretched by Chris Bissette. The Wretched is amazing and there’s a ton of awesome games that use this framework!]
These Stars Will Guide You Home - Albi is currently Kickstarting These Stars Will Guide You Home, a solo journaling game about an epic voyage, heavily inspired by The Odyssey and the Aeneid. I’ll be guest writing an island for this game!
Cloud Empress - Now that the Kickstarter for Cloud Empress by watt has launched (and ended wildly successful), I can share here that my pamphlet adventure will be about exploring a massive, ancient, freshly-unearthed seed vault to find the last surviving seeds of a life-saving herb. This will be a big March project for me, so more on it later!
Zine Month
February is Zine Month! TTRPG creators from all over the world are releasing games and launching crowdfunding campaigns. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend browsing the Zine Month website where you can find a list of all the games participating.
There are a couple games being crowdfunded right now that are hacks of Anamnesis and were part of the Anamnesis Jam!
Tangled Blessings - A 1-2 player horror game by Cassi Mothwin about rival students at a magical academy.
Contact - A cosmic game by J Strautman about communicating with aliens through tarot and song. [Also, J is one of the DMs on Planet Arcana, one of my favorite podcasts, and you can hear us playing Anamnesis together in this episode.]
Aaaand I’m running out of space for this newsletter, so that’s all for now! Hope you are all staying warm this winter. I’ll have more to share next month!
~ Sam Leigh