That’s right! I am stoked to announce that the award-winning Wonderland Nights: White Rabbit’s Diary is out on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and XBox One, thanks to publishers Ratalaika Games. It’s been great working with them to see this come to fruition.
So… I dunno, buy the game or whatever 😛😘🐇
Thought I might cover my (sometimes our) thoughts on the D&D OGL situation, in more depth than I did the other day, since more stuff has come out. It’s mostly what I said the other day, but has more details and also covers how we personally feel too.
Hey all, so there’s a lot going on over the RPG fan interwebs right now about Hasbro/WOTC’s changes to the OGL. There’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people without legal training making comment, but like… this is a sign of things to come, no matter where you fall on this issue.
Here’s the message I posted today on itch.io to everyone who has ever bought our Dragons of Tirenia guidebook, published in 2021. I think it pretty much sums everything up nicely, which is why I think it’s important to share:
Given the recent changes to the Open Gaming Licence by Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast, we are choosing to remove all Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition references from Tirenia. This is something we have always wanted to do, as we originally only chose D&D as our mechanics base due to its popularity – or even ubiquity, you might say. But D&D was never the ideal mechanics base for this game.
So what does this mean for you, owners of this e-zine guidebook? Until we have a new version of this zine, we are leaving the original one up for all of you who have purchased it. No new people may purchase it or even look at its page. As soon as we have a new version, we will take the old one down permanently and you will only have access to the new one.
Comments are open on this, but I would ask that you refrain from trying to dissuade us from taking this action. It’s not going to happen. Tirenia is a setting we have spent almost a decade planning and playing in, and there is another project we have in mind for it that the new OGL will prevent us from doing. So instead we are packing up our toys and moving them to a new toy box. I encourage you to support other creatives you see doing this, or talking about doing this.
Happy New Year all, and thanks for supporting indie creators.
But seriously… right? F*** that. I’ve made mention of a possible new project for Tirenia. I won’t say more on that right now, but it’s in the works. This is just messy, right? Much bigger players than us are worried about the implications of this massive change to an industry standard. But anyway, leave it to the actual lawyers to decide, I reckon. For James and me, the writing is on the wall. D&D was never the ideal mechanic base for us. This greedy, over-reaching, bullying move from them is the catalyst for us to GTFO before things get any worse. We’ll still play when we wanna play, and we’re not trying to dissuade anyone from playing it, certainly not. But no way in hell are we going to chain our creative power to a corporate machine that has now openly stated its intent to swallow us and many other creatives whole.
Hey! It’s been a while, and I have been super busy, but I thought I should help boost ChoiceBeat Issue #6, even though I haven’t contributed anything this time. Hopefully I can write something for the next issue! Anyway, this looks like a pretty exciting line up of games, with quite a few I’ve been interested in trying out.
Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. Happy New Year!
Good news, interactive fiction fans, the ChoiceBeat magazine is back again with this quarter’s issue. It is packed full with all sorts of content this time! I have one review this time. Check it out below:
Hello SBG followers, I just thought I might let you in on what’s happening to me over on Steam and Twitter. This is kinda the most I have ever been rewteeted yet, and the most sales my games have ever made so… kinda exciting if you can’t tell.
Below is the tweet thread that’s getting me noticed, and if you want to come tweet at me to add to the conversation you can find it here: https://twitter.com/SkyBearGamesNZ/status/1560771146693644288
The tweets:
Indie game-dev/creative writer truth time but also big thank you time, buckle up:
Thank you so, so much to @nzgda for organising the Made in NZ Steam sale: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nzgames
My three games have sold more copies in the last 48 hours than they ever have in a single year, in the last three years I’ve had them available on steam.
I bet there are some marketing gurus shaking their head at me, out there. But as a mother and a full-time worker (not working at my art) I had to make the call:
do I spend my precious spare time learning and doing the marketing stuff that I don’t enjoy (and which activates my anxiety), or …do I spend it devoting myself to the art – writing games, plays, novels – that I love?
So I made the choice to focus on the art, realising it was probably relegating me to obscurity and not making a living from the work I love doing, unless I could find my breakout moment in this very busy, noisy world.
The fact that @nzgda have used their mana, their influence, to spread the word far and wide about the wonderful creative work going on here in Aotearoa is just so generous and amazing. I have no idea how you all did it, but you have made my weekend. Thank you, arohanui
Hey all, just dropping a quick line to say that if you use Steam, you should check out the current sale of game made in NZ! All three of my games are up there (Her Jentle Hi-ness, Wonderland Nights, The Nine Lives of Nim), amongst some amazing other ones. I personally recommend checking out Umurangi Generation and Best Friend Forever as two that I have played and enjoyed.
Check it out – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nzgames
Down the Grey Stream Path, we find ourselves at the Ascension Drinking Hall. It looks almost like a temple, with its columned facade. A mottled-skinned gith in a frock coat and bearded moustache, named Heironymus, is the bouncer. He bars our entry since we do not have anyone to vouch for us, and takes out his flute to practice, ignoring us. Even reminding him that someone obviously got into without vouching and murdered someone doesn’t work to sway him – if anything, that seems to make him even less likely to let us in!
We walk away, trying to think of another lead to follow up instead, when Cynna senses violence happening around the next corner. We rush in to find a sedan chair with Godsmen symbols on it, dropped by its carriers, who are right now being cut down by an attacker with a spiked sword and hideous rotting wings. People are just watching the violence! I interpose myself to help the man in the chair get up, while Blander and Cynna try to stop the attack. The man inside the sedan is all right. Actually, not only is he all right, but the handsome half-elf I find myself talking to is none other than Ambar Vergrove, the factol of the Godsmen. I say talking to, but really he did most of the talking. While he waffles about, the enemy teleports away.
Ambar goes around and worries about his recently deceased guards. I’m impressed by how much he actually seems to care for the people who serve him. He arranges for them to be raised, except for those who expressed a desire to move on, and then he rewards us for his rescue with a hundred gold each and, at my request, by vouching for us at the Ascension. He speaks very kindly to Heironymus as we pass, and I treat him to a short, smug grin.
Inside the bar, I meet the bartender, one Julius of the Ninth Test. We talk philosophy to break the ice, and then I ask about the murder. He fills me in: the murder was commited in a private room here, the sort that patrons can hire for loud singing and such, with a standard silence spell on it – a great place for a murder! – and when I mention to him that I’m loooking for evidence of spell components, he figures that the three nutshells he found under a table could have been such.
Before we move on, Ambar asks if we won’t stay for a drink. I ask him for a raincheck on that one – in a few hours, I point out to him, someone is likely to die, and every moment I spend carousing is a moment I could have spent saving their life. He understands. He asks a favour: it appears that in the kerfuffle earlier, his pouch was stolen. It contained a deep blue stone sphere, which he says, in a roundabout fashion, is a gate key. Unfortunately he is not able to divulge secrets that are not his, he says, so I am not able to get out of him where the gate might be or might lead. He does say though that I should be able to guess from things we’d already spoken of. Perhaps the Godsmen headquarters? I’m really not clever enough for this.
When Blander and I head outside, we find Cynna talking to a street urchin. He is scared of Blander, but willing to speak to me. His name is Urchend, and he says he witnessed the murder through the window. He describes that he saw the killer chasing the victim, laughing, and then he touched her with a flash of light. A sparkly red glow ran up the sword as he used it, and made the killer shine. I give the kid my hundred gold from earlier and tell him to share it with his mates, and to get to safety for a time, perhaps to a gate town or something, until the killings stop.
With spell components identified in four out of six crime scenes, it’s time for a visit to my friend/fiend A’kin, who is the only person I can think of in immediate reach who could help me with this (damn it Tessa, where are you when I need you?). He offers Blander a little plushie imp for his kids, and Blander runs away. He offers me a fire cockroach to eat, both as a free sample sort of thing, but also as a dare. I’m all right though, I survive eating it, much to his amusement. And then I do somthing perhaps even more stupid. I make a pact with him for the information I need.
I lay out the following criteria for him though:
1) I will not murder any non-murderers
2) I will not commit a sacrilege or be offensive to a god or any divine being in their sanctum/church/sacred grounds
3) I will not commit anything that would be offensive to my deity, the Rainbow Snake.
Let’s be real. He’s going to have found some loopholes I haven’t considered, I’m sure. He could always just send me on a one way trip to the plane of Negative Energy. But I think he knows I’m more useful than that.
Based on rough guesses, using standardised spell componentry, A’kin thinks that this whole thing is a big, unique and esoteric ritual. As such, he thinks there are at least two spells going on at each location: one immediate spell for the time of the murder, and one working into the wider ritual. The three nutshells at the Ascension was probably a Confusion spell. The crushed black pearl at the Court Library was probably a Death spell. The blackened rod found outside the Harmonium Barracks is a component common to many spells, but the bronze disc also found there would be from a Chaos spell. The red energy described by the witnesses indicates to him something like the energy of potentiality, both astral and ethereal. Great – are we dealing with another planar incursion similar to bloody Malar again? I dread to think. A’kin sends me away with a bag of fire cockroaches and says I’m welcome back any time to ask more.
On the street, reunited with Blander and Cynna, we head for the next site of murder, when we overhear a Signer preaching that only if the victims had self-actualised better, they would still be alive. I barely manage to hold myself back from correcting them. Suddenly, a woman in leathers dances up to me and says she dreamed that I am going to fight the murderer. She says that he lurks by a house on a dead end street, by a bake shop, watching the prison with hateful eyes. Tonight, he will kill a Mercykiller! Still speaking her vision, she says ‘Six lanterns and all’s well’, then ‘seven slashes’.
It’s two lanterns right now.
Just to keep her informed, I send a raven with a message to Narcovi. Wouldn’t do to not keep her informed after promising to do so. Then it’s off to the library to see the fourth murder location. On our way, we see a cultist wearing a Lady of Pain-style headdress getting beaten up by some rough cutters. I polymorph the guy into a ladybug to hide him, and Blander casts some sort of paladin whammy on them to get them to freeze in fear, then they flee. One thinks about staying to fight when Blander talks them down with his big dad energy, but he sees the rest of his boys are gone, so he flees. The guy we saved, Paxyt, refuses healing, saying everything is fine, everything would have been fine, that the Lady would have saved him. I try to question him about his religion, but he tells me instead to seek out Trolan the Beloved in Bloodgem Park. Then he heads off with his gift to the Lady, a bunch of rose-scented candles. On our way to the library again, we see deibus repairing a spire, but they aren’t stopping: they’ve added more and more spires on top of each other.
After far too much form-filling at the Court, we are told we can’t go into the Library. That is, until we namedrop the Mercykillers. We go into the library only to find that the deibus are here! “They’ve been at this since the body was removed two days ago,” says a voice behind us, and I turn to see one of the most famous faces in Sigil: the Guvners’ Factol Hashkar. I settle in for some long-winded answers to my questions while Blander has a look around. I ask the Factol if it is normal for the deibus to clean up messes in this library, and the long story short is no. I ask next about Fassa, the murder victim, and learn a ton about him, though it takes half an hour for Hashkar to finally get to the part where he says Fassa was researching commerce between Sigil and the Planar Trade Consortium when he died. This certainly rings a few alarms for me! They were the ultimate buyers for that horrid blade I fetched out of White Plume Mountain, and also bought furs from the two tribes trading from their hunting on Carceri. Potentially a bad sign… Still, the murders weren’t done by that blade, at least.
Blander interrupts us to point out that he has noticed (although I am sure I did hear him snoring, standing up in his armour, at one point) that a deibus over there has been cleaning a book this whole time. I can sort of make out, past its hands and the cloth it cleans with, that the book is titled “Powers and Demipowers”. I ask Hashkar, with his apparently perfect memory, if he knows what’s in the bloodstained part of the book (I really do not want to fight a deibus to look at the book!). Hashkar, after much disgression and explanation, says it had to be the chapter entitled “Divine Ascension”, dealing with theories on the nature of divinity, how to become or cease being a god, and the nature of belief. The word Ascension reminds me of the drinking hall where another murder took place.
Then, Hashkar adds, without prompting: could I please investigate on behalf of the Guvners? Absolutely I can, I tell him. All in all, we spent two hours in the library, and while they were quite wearying hours, they were useful in their own way.
Blander and I break for afternoon tea, our throats in great need of hydration after the dusty atmosphere of the library. Taking our drinks, we suddenly feel the presence of someone with emotions of surreptition, trepidation and curiosity. We look around and see a flumph approaching us. His name is Cynicism, or Cynna for short. We get from him feelings of hoping to be helpful, suspicion, and disappointment in the unworthy authority figures of this city. He has been investigating the murders and believes them to be linked to the cult of the Lady. He’s a member of the Bleakers, and has been encouraged by them to investigate because of their lack of trust in the Triad of Order (fair!). We share a bunch of information with each other. He shares with us his impressions of the people in the cult, that they are helpless people who have been offered assistance. Their psychic readings make no sense! And where are they all even coming from?
He also points out that there seem to be dropped spell components at every murder site. There is no seeming pattern to them, and they do not appear to be from the same spells. So far we have: a blackened rod and a bronze disc at Harmonium Street; black pearl dust at the library; and a feather at the bunkhouse which is currently unidentified. That is until I ask him to show it to me in his psychic way. Through that, I am able to guess that it could be a Vrock feather, a vulture-like demon. I consider that we could drop by A’kin’s shop and ask him about the components and the possible spells. Either way, Cynna has decided to join us now, and I am grateful for his presence. It was getting a bit too lawful around here!
The three of us descend upon Bloodgem Park. It has actual grass and trees, a rare thing in this city! From what little I know of the history, it predates the Lady’s trim down of the number of factions, but whoever was here before that, their magic has hung around. We pass a deibus who is trimming a rosebush to death. Again with the roses. I can’t help but associate the Lady with roses, I suppose because the first gate I ever passed through needed a green rose as a key.
Around us, we can see the cult is no unified body, but made up of many different groups of people with different interpretations of their worship. Many do at least wear scarlet and/or spikes. We pass shrines, portraits, effigies. Unfortunately we find that Trolan, who we seek, is out preaching in the Outlands currently. At least that answers the queston of where all the cultists are coming from. But some of the people here claim to have not seen him in person, but to have dreamed his words and journeyed here on that alone!
We leave to head towards the Blood Boil Hovel where the first murder took place, passing a Doomguard preacher who is yelling about the breakdown of law and order across the multiverse signalling the end of all things. But that unpleasantness is soon forgotten as a group of bashers in an alleyway come out and surround us. They appear to be Indeps, and they are accusing us of mugging someone. We deny it of course, but they attack anyway. Cynna unleashes on them with a psychic attack in two waves, while I croc out. After we kick their butts, I give them each a goodberry to show we don’t mean them harm, and then we demand answers. It turns out that some gnome woman came to them because she said she was mugged and that we did it. Cynna can sense that she had to have mind-whammied them, because their psychic readings are not adding up at all.
But here’s the thing she didn’t take into account… Cynna can see her face in the memories of the people, and he can share that image with us. Now we know what she looks like. Time to find out who is acting against us!
This is the first episode of Dirwin participating in the adventure “Harbinger House”.
On my return to Sigil, I saw many diverse people, as is always the case; a morbid-looking leprechaun follower of the Morrigan, an orc with a tray of food he was selling, a Doomguard preaching decay, and four deibus, the groundskeepers and messengers of the Lady of Pain, painting a house blue. What was strange about that was that the house was already blue, but perhaps this was simply a case of multiple coats. I commented on this to the orc, and he started to look very nervous. I bought two of his pies (one contained metal, which was a little awkward to eat but I altered my digestive tract so I was fine) and this put him at ease enough to answer that they had been painting there for around a week. I tried asking the deibus themselves about it, but they kept going and ignored me.
—-
The next day, I was browsing the shops when I found one called the Friendly Fiend. Inside, I met A’kin, a yugaloth, the eponymous fiend. He gifted me some vambraces, asked me about myself, and invited me to take tea with him. While we were chatting, a male elf entered, wearing the Lady of Pain’s insignia (which is definitely not advisable!), and he asked for directions to Bloodgem Park. A’kin warmed him to take off the symbol before he went, but the elf insisted his love of the Lady would keep him safe.
Shaking our heads, we got on with business. A’kin’s assistant, an eryines named Balaka, brought out a black box containing a longsword, with a black gem in the pommel, said to be glowing with power of the multiverse. 4000 gold later, and 500 gold for an appraiser, and I had a present to give to Toledo – a Sword of the Planes.
—-
Later, when I was dining at the Garden Gnome, four Athar caught my attention. “Another body was found,” I heard, and listened in closely as they said it was someone called Keluk, and they were found near the Shattered Temple “like the others”. It seemed, from their conversation, that there was a possible serial killer going around and killing lawful faction members. I asked them for more details, and learnt that the first one happened a week ago (a stray thought occurred to me: the same time as the deibus started painting?) and was a Godsman. There were two Athars killed in the same place so far. They had been exsanguinated, and had the Lady’s mark on their foreheads. Not only that, but there were even more worshippers of the Lady in Bloodgem Square than I realised, but their account, and yet they had not been cracked down on by the very anti-worship Lady or her forces. A woman in the group of four mentioned to me that the Godsmen were becoming more active and cautious, even the Factol, surrounding themselves and the Great Foundry with bodyguards. The Guvnors are offering a reward for the capture of the killer, which they describe as “a monster that found its way into the cage”.
I mull all this over for a while, and then in occurs to me… aren’t the Godsmen a neutral faction, not lawful?
—-
Blander Mull has me around for dinner, but this is not as much of a family affair as my last meal with him. He tells me that since he’s pretty much the most stand up guy at the Mercykillers (his words, not mine), he’s been asked to investigate the current rash of murders. He’s asking me to be his offsider in this, to help me liaise with other factions and have his back if things go south.
The information he has so far is this: the murders have been committed against solely lawful factions (again, is this accurate? Going to check on this angle); his boss, Arwyl Swan’s-son is worried that the Mercykiller’s factol, Nilesia, is going off her rocker, making a link between the Lady of Pain worshippers and the murders. She wants to bring the Lady of Pain to justice. He doesn’t say as much, but in how he describes her conspiracy theories (Sigil is a cage for the Lady of Pain, therefore she must be a prisoner of some sort!) and her youth, he seems to think she is rather fanatical. Worryingly, her boyfriend is Duke Rowan Darkwood, the factol of the Fated.
Blander knows exactly how to hook me in. The Sensates are dominant right now but Fated are rising in influence here in Sigil, and I will absolutely not allow that to happen. I tell him we’ll start investigating immediately.
—–
We meet in the morning to go over the information he has been given by his superiors. To date, there have been six murders:
When I ask Blander what the obvious link between them all was, he points to the murder weapon seeming to be a sword, and the fact that each victim was killed with a successive number of sword slashes – one on the first night, two on the second, etc. We can assume then that tonight, someone will die by seven sword slashes tonight if we can’t find the killer in time.
We begin in the Lady’s Ward, heading for the Barracks to check in with Captain Narcovi so that we don’t end up butting heads with her. The streets get less chaotic as we progress, which raises the question then: how could someone murder an officer right outside the Barracks, even at night? We walk past some deibus, and this time they are doing something strange yet again: pruning nothing, and sweeping nothing. I talk to Blander about this, and what I saw, and the possible connection with the Lady’s worshippers. Without saying too much, we speculate about whether the Lady is in some way altered.
The Barracks are an imposing, pretty ugly building. A dwarven guard lets us in once I explain that Blander is here to ‘liaise’ (that word seems to carry a lot of weight with these lawful types). Diana the receptionist helps us fill out some registration forms, until we finally learn at the end of filling them out that Captain Narcovi is, of course, already out for the day. But before we leave to find her, presumably at the site of the most recent murder, Diana gives us a rumour, that with each of the murders, the body was partially eaten. She reckons it is probably a Xoasitect.
On the way to the bookshop, we are greeted with another typical Sigil sight: a person on a soapbox. This time it’s a Dustman, and he’s preaching that the victims are lucky to have been released from life. Thankfully, most are ignoring him. I bite my tongue and do the same.
At the bookshop, we find a crowd of Harmonium types outside, with an authoritative looking female dwarf addressing them. Our assumption that she is Captain Narcovi pays off. When we let her know why we’re here, at first we only succeed at pissing her off, and maybe getting Blander’s boss in trouble for interfering with a Harmonium investigation. But when she asks what we came here to do and I say honestly that we wanted to share information and to introduce ourselves so that at no point are we butting heads with her, that seems to set her at ease a little, and she shares information with us. We manage to generate new leads and ask some new questions with this information, as follows, for each murder:
The answer to the last question is yes, and as Narcovi and her cohort get ready to leave, Blander and I are let inside to have a look around. We meet Kesto, the gnome shopkeeper, who is really quite upset. I ask him if I can make him a cup of tea, and while I do, Blander starts having a look around. Then his look around turns into a tidy up of fallen books, because he can’t help himself. Kesto pours some alcohol into his tea, thinking I don’t notice, but I don’t call him on it. He starts nervously talking about getting out of town, and I tell him I can help him with that if he needs to.
Blander uncovers a footprint in white powder which he uncovered under a fallen stack of books. It’s talcum powder! While we try to puzzle out why the killer might be shedding talcum powder, Kesto starts to freak out. I manage to sweet talk him into talking, and he reveals that he saw it all! He had let Keluk stay late in the bookshop to do some research, but he heard noises and came down to investigate. He caught the killer over the body, drawing some sort of red magic out of Keluk and into a very large sword, possibly a two-hander, oddly spiky. Kesto failed to arcana check in time before the killer saw him and grabbed him. He looked at Kesto strangely (Blander and I wonder if he was trying to assess Kesto in some way?), didn’t kill him (I wonder, is he restricted somehow to only killing once a night?), and threatened him not with death, but with maiming if he told anyone. He said he could find Kesto anywhere, and he would know. He was probably human, though Kesto can tell us little more than that, save that he had white powder on his boots.
While we help Kesto pack to leave and come under our unofficial witness protection, Blander mentions that he recognised the description of the sword. He knows another Mercykiller, named Calderon, who commissioned a new sword with extra spikes (so obviously he’s from THAT side of the Mercykiller faction…) but the blacksmith was murdered a few days ago, and the sword went missing. While I take Kesto off to join Toledo, Marja and Word who would escort him and protect him in another part of the prime material, Blander goes off to ask Calderon about the missing sword. I linger over that question, and how the sword might be able to either be imbued with magic, or possibly be vampiric or something. I make a note to see if anyone in my faction might know anything, but I’ll have to wait until evening to see any significant number of Sensates at the Festhall.
At lunch, Blander meets me again and fills me in. The blacksmith’s name was Sod Dirk, and the murder was written off as a break-in gone wrong. He was murdered on his own forge. The nature of the size of the sword is made clear when Blander points out that Calderon is a dwarf, so it would be a two-hander for him, but maybe an unwieldy one-hander for a human. We consider what our next steps might be – perhaps to go back to the Barracks to fill Narcovi in on what we’ve just learned, since that’s what we promised.
Sky Bear Games 