Twitch mini-marathon with special guests
6 months ago
– Sun, Mar 03, 2024 at 08:51:28 AM
Tune in at today at noon and 3 PM Eastern for two special games!
As we head into the final stretch of the campaign—and Tony continues to illustrate dozens of mutant cartoon animals with characteristic creative fervor—we’re excited to host two back-to-back live-streamed games.
Game one, Produced (GMed) by special guest Jenn De La Vega (Fun City Ventures, Replay), will feature live illustration by Tony! Meet the players:
Chris Pickett (they/them, timespace.place) is a TTRPG writer, illustrator, and tattoo artist whose work blends historical and weird fantasy, horror, and attempts at eco-marxism.
Leonardo Andrade (leoandradewriter.com) is a writer and narrative designer based in Curitiba, Brazil. Leo has written interactive fiction, lore bibles, RPG adventures, NPC packs, and original tabletop games, and has translated game content such as the Stillfleet Quickstart to Brazilian Portuguese.
Logan Dean (logandean.games) is an award-nominated creator working primarily in the tabletop games industry. Logan makes The Company TTRPG, among other fun TTRPGs, board games, and card games.
GM: Jenn de la Vega (instagram.com/randwiches) is a Brooklyn-based chef and the voice of Vivian Lakewood on the Shadowrun podcast Fun City and Merkis Imeldar on the Stillfleet podcast Float City.
About the episode: The wind whips by at 65 miles per hour in the Mojave Desert, sand smacking you in the face as you peer outside. Your pack has 3 months to stock your burrow for the winter. Life's hard in the outer-burrows, but you know you can score big if you can convince the inner-burrow critters to share their bounty. Beware of the Dead Preds, a mysterious consortium who are pretttttty territorial about their pantry.
Game two, Produced (GMed) by yours truly (@Stillfleet), is a special collaboration with Twice Rolled Tales, a new TTRPG actual play series and module provider featuring genre-bending, short-form campaigns. Meet the players:
Emily Tworek (twicerolledtales.com/emily) is the Managing Producer of Twice Rolled Tales, a lifelong writer, and a storyteller turned business aficionado with a background in fiction, theater direction and design, translation, and project management.
Linnie Schell (instagram.com/LinnieSchell) is a NYC-based GM and Game Designer, and the Creative Producer of TTRPG Studio Twice Rolled Tales.
Our own Tony Grasso (oddgobgames.itch.io), the creator of Blister Critters, is a professional illustrator and game designer.
About the episode: Tune in to find out!
Each game should include roughly two hours of gameplay, with plenty of room for banter, chats about the game’s rules, and Q&A with the audience.
We’re grateful for all the support for and interest in the game, and we can’t wait to play it with more people.
Clarification regarding the Producer screen
6 months ago
– Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 12:31:17 PM
Add-on, not addition to the box
We’ve had a couple of good questions about the Producer screen—ya know, the stretch goal we’re now excitedly unlocking at 20K instead of 30K!?
To clarify, this additional large/fancy printed game tool is sufficiently costly to produce that it is not going directly into every box. If you want one, you’ll need to purchase a copy as an add-on for a reasonable Kickstarter/BackerKit price (TBD). My apologies for any confusion about this!
That all said, the screen will make a handsome addition to the game, contributing to its mutant-1990s design-vibe. We’ll be very psyched to unlock it! Fingers and paws crossed…
Again, we emphasize, the Producer screen will be rad.
Final hours for Tabletop Gone Mad
FYI, there are only 2 hours left to check out our friends' ad-lib-inspired, fill-in-the-blank TTRPG, Tabletop Gone Mad! The design is fantastic.
Here is a nice one-minute summary of the studio, Twice Rolled Tales, and their new game:
See you all on Twitch this Sunday at noon for our marathon actual play of Blister Critters featuring Jenn De La Vega!
Producer’s screen / rules = written / fill-in-the-blank fun
6 months ago
– Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 02:01:13 PM
Crossing stretch-goal streams: 20K now = the Producer’s screen!
Happy almost-the-end-of-Zine Quest! We are excited to see so many great indie TTRPGs emerge, and we’re of course profoundly thankful for the opportunity to create the Blister Critters Boxed Set as Tony imagined it.
In fact, the team talked late last week, and we feel so strongly about achieving Tony’s vision that we are officially unleashing another stretch goal early. If we can make it to 20K, we will create the Producer’s screen with 3 pockets for cards. This extra funding should cover a run of plenty of screens, and we’ll still be able to pay the team who has worked to bring this game to life.
Tony went ahead and sketched his idea for the screen, and it is EPIC. The art says everything about the vibe of the show: who will prevail in the titanomachy to control your televisual TTRPG experience—Beasts or Critters?
The bird is holding a knife, y’all.
Let your friends who haven’t backed yet know: the next stretch goal is a twofer!
Status update: writing = done
By way of a quick update, we’re done writing the Blister Critter Rulebook! Tony has drafted every section; Stephen and I have reviewed it all and suggested tweaks (sometimes in response to feedback from playtesters—thank you!); and our very talented copyeditor, Jedd Cole, is diving into the polishing phase.
The only core rules left to finish are the mechanical details of all 200 items of Stuff found in the book’s tremendous Stuff catalogue and of all 48 Beasts and Bliffs who appear on the cards. As Jedd edits the book, Tony is finalizing the Stuff and cards. But roughly three-quarters of the Stuff is drafted, and the art for many cards is sketched or finished.
More updates as we have them. TL;DR: this will not be a terribly long process, as Kickstarter campaigns for games go. We have already created and playtested game; we just need to print it up.
Shouting out another game with a fill-in-the-blank mechanic: Tabletop Gone Mad
Time for another fist-bump. Our fellow NYC-based game designers, Twice Rolled Tales, have designed a whole game based on our belovèd fill-in-the-blank ad-libs! The game, Tabletop Gone Mad, looks beautiful and fun to play. Our team can’t wait to try it (perhaps with the Twice Rolled crew!?). Here is the pitch:
Tabletop Gone Mad, a book of no-prep, fill-in-the-blank TTRPG adventures by Linnie Schell and published by Twice Rolled Tales, is now on Kickstarter!
Tabletop Gone Mad combines streamlined d20 mechanics familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons with fill-in-the-blank scenario and character generation to create customized one-shot adventures that get your party rolling in minutes.
The system book will include 25 adventure sheets perfect for your next game night, including 5 new one-shots by Rom Com Drama Bomb creator Elliot Davis. The book will also feature 12 character sheets and roll tables to fuel your randomization!
Time's running out to back this special Kickstarter Zine Quest campaign! For more information and to watch Tabletop Gone Mad in action, visit twicerolledtales.com. Make your pledge now and discover your new favorite no-prep way to play!
That’s it! Remember to tune in to the Blister Critters mini-marathon livestream on Sunday, March 3! We’re streaming two games, one at 12 PM Eastern and one at 3. Follow us on Twitch >
Thank you, and happy upcoming Leap Day!
Stickers = unlocked! / Shouting out more rad games
7 months ago
– Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 01:50:55 PM
More stickers in every box!
Whew, we did it! We’ve unlocked the second sheet of Blister Stickers, which we’ll add to every Blister Critters Boxed Set. Thanks so much to everyone who’s supported the game! It means the world to Tony and the Stillfleet Studio team, and we promise to deliver high-quality boxes full of weird art and fun rules. With the funds raised to date, we can confidently create the boxed set Tony dreamed of, and we may have a surprise or two in store left yet…
For now, the team is busy editing the book, and Tony is busy creating the cards. Here is a sneak-peek! I can't wait for the full deck!
Tomb of a Thousand Doors crossover!
Oh hey, did we mention that we teamed up with Matthew Morris and the amazing team behind the grand new Mausritter megadungeon, Tomb of a Thousand Doors, to create a special crossover episode for Blister Critters: "The Critter of a Thousand Blisters!?”
The story: you've fallen through a portal into the Static Zone—an inter-realm that links all of the universes in which humans have disappeared and animals taken up the reins of the earth. This strange and foreboding place, covered in TV-static snow, is home to one very curious Beast: a giant centipede now imbued with all of the powers of TV advertisements and infomercials... (Think Max Headroom meets... a giant centipede.)
If you haven’t checked out Tomb of a Thousand Doors, please hop over to their Kickstarter and stay on the lookout for late pledge opportunities and more exciting news from the prolific Mausritter community. ToaTD is full of fun animal-scale adventure hooks and dope art. We love Mausritter and can’t wait to spend some time crossing up Blister Critter with the OG wee-little-dudes game.
Shout-out: Punch Nazis… in 865 AD!
In other shout-out news, we only recently discovered No Nazis in Valhalla by fellow Leftist game designer Wes Ascolese, and we had to throw this game some love. Here is the quick pitch:
January 1945: the writing is on the wall, and it is clear that the Nazis are going to surrender. The Thule society, through mysticism and technology, send all members they found relevant, back in time to the year 865 England. Their goal to ally themselves with the Great Heathen Army whom they idolize. Their presence is met with harsh resistance and a new war breaks out.
This book puts players in a heroic role of repelling the Nazis out of England in the year 865. The year is one where The Great Heathen Army began it's conquest on England but have found themselves a new foe.
Take on the role of a Norse hero with the power of the gods and take an axe to the face of fascism.
Reminder, we are still running the Critter City Crawl game jam on Itch.io. We’ve heard some wonderful ideas from people about what the near-future eco-apocalyptic world of Blister Critters would look like in their own regions. We can’t wait to read through these! But we decided to do this after the campaign, to give the team some breathing room. That means you still have time to write up a quick one-page Location (game term—a setting) for the game!
New news: we are planning a day of streaming Blister Critters games with some guest players and GMs on Sunday, March 3, over on Twitch.TV/Stillfleet. We’ll be playing one game at 12 PM Eastern and another at 3 PM. Tune in! More news on this soon!
Finally, we are grateful for continued press coverage! Thank you! Press folks, feel free to DM me and get in touch!
Welcome to Critter City / Shouting out Death Game
7 months ago
– Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 10:01:38 AM
Join the jam, try the game!
Reminder, we are running a game jam over on Itch.io to create more fun content for Blister Critters so that you can dive into any number of different episodes right away.
We already have several entries, but we want to bring in as many voices as we can. We've now extended the game jam beyond the end of the Kickstarter campaign. The requirements for the jam are very light, and you still have plenty of time! If you have questions, please reach out.
We've also created a new channel on the Stillfleet Studio Discord server for discussing and setting up games of Blister Critters. Use this channel for brainstorming game jam submissions, talents for your favorite animals, plot hooks, ideas for Stuff—whatever you want!
Also, if you're curious to learn more about how the game works, Tony and Wythe just recorded an actual play episode with The Weekly Scroll and our consulting producer, Logan Dean. Check it out!
Shout-out to a project we can't wait to play: Death Game
If you haven't heard of it, please check out Death Game, the battle royale TTRPG by by Laurie O’Connel (writing), HODAG RPG (art), and Sam Leigh (editing). Laurie is an amazing game designer, and HODAG illustrated a few spreads of the Stillfleet Core Rulebook.
As a fan of brutal, eat-the-rich stories such as The Hunger Games, Squid Game, and Battle Royale, I had to back this one. The character archetypes in the game are extremely cool and weird. Plus, Death Game uses dice for scores, much like the Grit System!
Here is a bit more about the project from their press release:
Death Game is a narrative driven tabletop roleplaying game when characters compete in a high-stakes battle for survival for the entertainment of the ultra-rich. Throughout the game, players will pick up different characters, struggling against all the odds for victory. As the number of competitors narrows and the stakes grow higher, you'll play until one of you wins, and the rest of you die. During that time, you’ll build an arena, work out the rules of play, and grow attached to your mostly-doomed cohort of competitors.
Shout-out to a beautiful diceless adventure: Mystery Under Magi-Mart
To end this week's update, we have to shout out a project by another talented indie creator we admire—Bodie H. Bodie makes vivid, perfect little gems of games (sometimes sci-fi!), and Mystery Under Magi-Mart looks to be no exception.
The game is a self-contained diceless adventure; there are tons of items (you know we love items); and Bodie is making stickers (you know we love stickers). Here's the quick pitch in the creator's words:
Mystery Under Magi-Mart is a pick-your-path adventure book, taking you on a quest into a magic store’s dungeon basement to find a potion. There are no dice, no rules to learn, just exciting choices to make on every page as you explore this bizarre dungeon.
That's all for now. Fingers crossed we unlock more Blister Stickers! Thanks to everyone who's supported our work!
