[Soth] It's Call of Cthulu after you've gone mad (and a publishing experiment)

[hix]

I'm writing an extremely short horror-comedy game, which I want to use to break through my fear of publishing (I've been writing my "big" game - Bad Family, aka The Lucky Joneses - for about four years). Last year, Jared Sorenson wrote about how writing-in-order-to-sell-things messes with your head, paralysing you - and that felt true to me. So I'm going to use a whole bunch of techniques I've learned here at the Forge to try and rapidly write, test, and publish this game.


What is it?
'Soth' is basically Call of Cthulu after you've gone mad. You play a bunch of small-town cultists, trying to summon the dark god Soth while dealing with your family, pesky investigators and the fact that you're crack-smokingly insane. It's a game I've been wanting to write since thinking of it in August last year.

I wrote my first draft yesterday.  It turned out a lot more procedural than I expected.  There's a tightly structured order of scenes, a limited number of stats, and a couple of sub-games inside the big game. It feels very focused, very much like a cross between a board game and an RPG - and I'm going to reserve judgment about what that means until I've playtested it.

The draft is on a wiki, here.
NB: It's very rough in places - and occasionally badly punctuated or misspelled, due to my speech recognition software.

As for what Soth is "about", I can never really tell that until I've actually played a game. I think it's about insanity, and the repeated behaviours that insane people perform while expecting a better outcome.


How am I doing it?
For Soth, I'm using some of the System in a Can criteria developed by Filip Luszczyk.

    * Games need to be instantly playable. The group should be able to start playing after no more than 10 minutes of prep.
    * Games can be no more than 4 A4 or Letter pages long. The main text should be at least 10p in size.
    * These four pages need to contain everything that is required to play the game.
    * You can also assume that the reader is familiar with the basic gaming vocabulary.

I'm also adopting a publish-fast approach:

-- Before I started writing, I emailed friends asking for playtesters.

-- I wrote the game on a wiki, in 24 hours. I'v found the 24-hour time limit for writing games really useful (something that started for me with the Ronnies competition).  In addition, I found that using a wiki really suits my writing and mental processes - I can skip between sections that interest me, and add stuff as I think of it.

-- I'm arranging a playtest using Doodle, scheduling a time that's convenient for everyone.  I want to playtest within a week.

-- Publish the alpha .pdf (probably on the wiki). Then I'll start a playtest thread at the Forge, and ask for feedback. Specifically, I'll be asking people for their fundamental issue / problem / concern (if any) with the game, and for two solutions / suggestions. I want to implement those ideas in a 24 hour rewrite

-- Playtest again
-- Rewrite, and layout the game
-- Publish the game for free.

Hopefully by that stage, Soth will be mostly-baked, and the free .pdf will be at an ash-can status. Anyway, I want to write it and then let it loose - and the short timeframe, plus 4 page limit are big encouragements for me to do just that.

At the moment I'm trying to develop the final sub-game - which is the summoning of the dark God Soth. I have lots of elements that I want to include, but they're all floating around in a rough, first-draft, unordered state at the moment. Here's the link to the mess of ideas I've got, and I'll probably post them here when they're in a bit more of an order. If you've got any ideas on how I can impose a structure on the summoning sub-game, though, I'd be glad to hear them.

(Cross-posted to Gametime.)