"Ind of the Year" 2020 Updates

December, 2020

The Colors of Magic is in the Ind of the Year Bundle 2020!  I'm honored to be included along with 24 other games by international indie creators. (Is this impostor syndrome?  It feels like I lucked into that bundle. Those other games are amazing.)

Over the last year, I've done more playtesting of this game (I call it playtesting - I'm just running it), and I've learned it needs a player handout to give the players of protagonist characters (and the gamerunner) a simple menu of the outcome choices for Risks.  So I made a new handout!  Enjoy!

I've noodled about "hacks" for The Colors of Magic, which seems kind of odd for a game like 50 people have played, tops.  But I really love the character-driven gamerunning it pushes you to do, and I can't shake the feeling that it would really work well for other genres.  Some thoughts swimming around my head:  The combination of righteous beliefs establishing at least some black and white morality and wrongheaded beliefs setting up character arcs strikes me as ideal for a western or an "honor among thieves" heist serial.  You can fine-tune the outcome menu to adjust for different genres: One player ("playtester") suggested making every outcome come with some down-side.  That'd be great for a crime drama, for instance, no "clear success" option would be bad for the current YA fantasy genre.

Going back and thinking about genre hacks and gamerunning got me to re-read the text, and there are a lot of places I need to polish the writing.  This December, I plan to  do another editing pass, just for simplicity.  The early text is way too wordy, and the color sections need some cleanup.  I also want to expand the gear options to 15 or 20 and expand the quick start section to d6 tables for every character aspect.  There are also some suggestions in comments here on itch, and ones I've gotten in email.  Not huge changes, but I will try to make them!