So the other day I mouthed off on Bluesky about a game I’ve been wanting to write for a year or so:
Oh crap. Well… let me be gentle with myself. 1 game I want to make in 2026: - Just A Rock and Roll Band (a rock band’s final tour, using @bullypulpithq.bsky.social’s Desperation engine)
— Bryant Durrell (@innocence.com) 2025-12-24T03:29:54.077Z
I played Jason Morningstar’s Desperation twice with friends the other year and loved it. I have a couple of ideas for hacks rattling around in my head; the less ambitious one is The Last Tour, which will capture a fading rock band making a comeback tour in Europe in the late 1970s. And failing, of course. Now I’ve gone and told the world in an attempt to pressure myself into getting it done.
Let’s sketch out a schedule. That should help.
The SRD calls for 65 cards. Two of those are transition cards, which I will leave out of my planning for now, and one is the End Game, ditto, leaving 62 cards. There should be 10 Locations, 12 People, 12 Events in each of the first two acts, and 16 Events in the last act. A modest goal would be finishing up the playtest set by the end of June, and I feel like I should be modest here since I have a lot of travel going on this spring. Last year I tried the Character Creation challenge in a month during which I flew to Ireland for work, and that was dumb.
So let’s try and knock off one of those sections per month, which leaves me all of June to catch up and/or write the three cards I’m fervently ignoring. (I should probably write those before I start in on the three acts, really.) I’ll post once per week on Sundays with progress, including actual card text. The schedule, then:
January: 12 People (I want to start here because I think everything else needs to come from the characters)
February: 10 Locations
March: Act 1 – 12 Foreboding Events
April: Act 2 – 12 Escalating Events
May: Act 3 – 16 Hell Events
We’ll see how it goes.