I’m Alex Wiltshire. I’m a writer and editor in the world of games. I work at Mojang Studios on storytelling for Minecraft, am the author of books including Britsoft: An Oral History, Making Videogames, Home Computers and Minecraft Blockopedia, and am a former editor of Edge magazine.
In the pursuit of working on something that I’m not quite ready to share yet, I found myself needing to create a map of a town without any labels. No road names, no area names, just the roads and paths. Turns out that, due to the wealth of geographic data that’s freely available to all, this is both entirely possible to create and difficult to do without a lot of blind fiddling, so I put together a quick guide to the solution I discovered.
I GMed a session of the sci-fi horror TTRPG Mothership, using the scenario There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station. In it, a goblin is on the loose in Icarus Station. My son made some art for the titular character:
And I made some atmospheric audio for a radio transmission that the players receive…
There’s far too much going on in this winter photo of the Avon river. A background of trees in haze, then a bridge with vehicles. Closer, more skeletal trees against reflected ripples on the water of a river. Across it, just visible behind blurred briars and wood smoke that drifts across the whole scene, cuts a racing boat with eight – nine? – rowers. The colours are weird: blues and burned copper. But I like it.
I stumbled upon an 2002 interview of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax by Deus Ex and Dishonored designer Harvey Smith for Game Developer magazine. The text of the interview itself isn’t particularly extraordinary. Smith’s questions are good, though sometimes betraying a little awe. Gygax’s responses are too well-oiled to give much real insight.
But here’s a founder of the RPG talking to a designer of immersive sims, a videogame encapsulation of Gygax’s ideal for the RPG, which he describes in the interview as:
“The players are not acting out roles designed for them by the GM, they are acting in character to create the story, and that tale is told as the game unfolds, and as directed by their actions, with random factors that even the GM can’t predict possibly altering the course of things.”
I didn’t play many videogames this year. Not sure why; not for a paucity of options, nor even opportunity. But they generally didn’t seem as essential as usual and when I’ve tried to sit down with so many of them I’ve struggled to apply enough attention and energy.
Some transcended this sad state of affairs, though, and the following are my favourites from the year, in no particular order. I’m actually pretty happy with the range of genres and styles, heh.
Recently I ran a session of the tabletop RPG Trophy Gold for my gaming group, and because one of us had already read all the introductory adventures, I decided to make my own one, called The Everbarrow. And since it seemed to go pretty OK, I thought I’d make it public here.
The apples from our front tree have been amazing this year. They’re juicy, tangy and sweet. Terrifyingly, and yet gratifyingly, there are hardly any worms in them. And there are lots, and we’ve managed to pick the good ones before they fell, and most are now sitting in the cool darkness of the bottom of our fridge.
Meanwhile, our back tree has hardly borne any apples. Usually it’s prolific (though they aren’t that good). Weird!
