Premier article en français !

 Bonnes nouvelles : je passe le blog en mode bilingue.

Certains articles en anglais seront traduits. Certains articles resteront en anglais seulement, et peut-être que d'autres ne seront publiés qu'en français.

Cet article a pour but d'annoncer la nouvelle et de tester le mot-clé "Français" adéquat.

Vous pouvez retrouver tous les articles en français et tous ceux en anglais en cliquant sur les liens correspondants en haut du blog, à côté des pages About / À propos.

Bonne lecture ! :) 

Current projects

Several convergent signs tell me to publish something this year.

1. My spouse and I crafted handmade notebooks as Christmas gifts for the family this year. (Well, I just customized covers of preexisting notebooks, because my skills are far from "crafting and sewing the whole cover and book" yet.) We had tons of fun cutting, gluing, and designing our little artistic zine-like objects ! I want to do this for RPG fun !

2. Nova from Playful Void put out her Zungeon Manifesto : demystifying dungeon creation with approachable procedures, a strong zine spirit, and the value of not hesitating to put something you've made out there, for the public to see.

3. W.F. Smith from Prismatic Wasteland put out a Year of the Beta manifesto of sorts, too ! Publish something unfinished but playable : see if you polish it, let others pick it apart, get it playtested, or just get it out of your system, but in any case : publish something.

So. These elements, resonating between themselves, collide with my strong preexisting desire to publish something, and with my drafts growing bigger every week. And with the fact that, yes, I actually felt confident enough to publish a translation on my itch page ! Knowing that I can do stuff is a powerful feeling.

The question is : publish stuff, yes, cool, very cool. But... which stuff ?

This is the post where I attempt to lay out my current projects.

First, a word about my deplorable workflows.

Nowadays, I try to limit myself to 5 active projects and 10 on the back burner. This is what I can manage without much problem, while permitting frequent rotations — which I need.

You have not seen my stuff yet because I never finish it, for a myriad of reasons I wrote an entire post's worth about, before deleting it and choosing to stay on topic.

But it is changing, hence this post.

 

The active projects

 

Standard OSR heartbreaker #12568214

An ever-changing ensemble of rules and systems designed to accommodate the cool OSR mechanical bits I come across, while staying lightweight and accessible. The current incarnation is a simple, generic base, with individual games / campaign settings / modules riffing on this base and adding settings, character options, rules, variants, etc. I am quite proud of the underlying concepts and the flexibility of it.

What I hope to do with it :

- lay out its theoretical foundations in more blog posts, like I started this summer ;

- develop and publish a zungeon by testing my simple dungeon stocking method (mentioned in the post I linked to) ;

- clean it up, publish it on Itch, perhaps as an SRD, and develop my own game ideas derived from it ;

- actually using it to play, focusing more on gameable content than system tinkering for a while.

 

Cosmo Spleen

Ultra-light d6 engine geared primarily for 1 player, solo or with a GM. Short game. Genre : planetary romance / sword and planet (I'm accidentally discovering that the genre is called "planet opera" in French, and the name has its charm).

The pitch : picaresque space losers find themselves in perilous situations on strange worlds, and can only rely on their wit and luck to get out of them, with precarious resources and constant complications.

What I hope to do with it :

- publish it in its most basic, simple form instead of constantly adding unnecessary small bits to it ;

- finish the solo playtest I have started with an interesting character ;

- develop Magic Spleen, a fantasy version where Ars Magica style wizards constantly get into trouble, both in and out of their wizard tower / academy / coven / HQ ; it looks very fun, is d12-based and of course has new rules and random tables.

 

DUNADRA

 My own version of an OSR+trad d20-but-it's-simple-I-promise fantasy game. Inspired by D&D 5e, and somewhat 2e too, this game aims to provide an exciting fantasy setting for heroic and epic adventures, with an anti-canon design, many adventure seeds, interesting character options that stay simple and accessible, and a modular philosophy. The problem, really, is that I have to attach a system to my collection of random tables and worldbuilding advice... But I prefer doing it this way, because I want my own D&D-like without the cruft (of both fluffy and crunchy varieties) of those systems.

What I hope to do with it :

- putting together a simple, but complete enough, system ;

- develop as many tables, tools, seeds... that I want, but publishing a beta with the basics ;

- see if people think that the name "Dunadra" is too on the nose or not !

These are the biggest things I'm working on right now.

 

The back burner

Various Lasers & Feelings hacks

What it says on the tin. Slowly hacking away at a Final Fantasy one and a Giscardpunk one (yes, that's a genre – basically French 60s-to-80s retrofuturism), but I have other ideas. It's quite fun and easy, but I still can't finish them ! I have trouble deciding some options for the FF one, and the Giscardpunk one got hit by a wave of feature creep. Yeah. I'm paralyzed by feature creep in a Lasers & Feelings hack.

What I hope to do with them :

- finish them without spending too much time on them ;

- publish them.

Oh, and the FF one is called LIMIT & BREAK. You have read it here first !

 

RP6 : Voyageur

A hack of Grant Howitt's one-page RP6 game, which I translated last month (see link near the beginning of the post). It's for a comical & cynical space opera setting, with no canon but lots of things, that I have been visiting from time to time for a few years now. I feel like RP6 would fit it perfectly !

What I hope to do with it :

- actually get around writing it ;

- publish a beta before developing all the stuff (there could be a lot) ;

- playing it with people, because I think it's got lots of potential.

SCAV system

One of my darlings. A simple system for playing in a setting I imagined around ten years ago now : France, 2100, after the apocalypse caused by climate change and subsequent societal crumbling. I just love this setting and the stories you can tell in it. The system is simple. Just gotta work on it. I have a lot of material and inspiration already, and it's one of the few homemade settings I actually GMed for friends.

What I hope to do with it :

- publish some form of beta when it's in a presentable state ;

- develop some adventures and various starting set-ups for it.

 

Zelda RPG (that's not the final name, please don't sue me Nintendo, I have no money)

A game I've been developing for a year or two now, coming back to it from time to time. The Legend of Zelda is one of my favorite video game series ever, and I really want to pay homage to it – none of the other existing TTRPG propositions I've seen in that space really appeal to me, for some reason or another. This project is dear to me, and my proposition is very faithful to what I love in the series.

What I hope to do with it :

- finish it with many cool tools for dungeon and puzzle creation, which is a quintessential point in Zelda ;

- use it to fuel the writing of another WIP of mine, a re-imagining of a Zelda fanfiction comics I did when I was 15 (it was atrocious and wonderful) ;

- hope it finds an audience somewhere.

 

Other things

There are other projects I keep in mind, or in notes. Some of which are almost complete (the basic skeleton anyway), some of which are short notes. I could list them all, but this post is long enough as it is. There's an Into the Odd-inspired game tentatively called Giscardpocalypse (adventurers wandering in the brutalist ruins of a former Giscardpunk world), a dantesque "cosmic war" game depicting demons and angels battling at the interstellar level, an ItO / Electric Bastionland hack with Jules Verne & other French vibes called Paradis Électrique, various ideas for generators and tables, and well... many others.

Looking at it, that's more work than I can do in 2025 ! I probably won't start publishing prolifically after so many years of not doing it, but I am confident that some of the stuff can see the light of day this year.

Also looking at it, a certain number of my projects heavily feature French culture, names or folklore. I am not sure why. Perhaps because there are not that many works in that space (even by French authors), or perhaps precisely because I feel the need to engage with my culture and its representations, in a time where it constantly reveals its many dark sides.

Anyway ! Publish stuff this year, do what you can, how you can, and see how it goes. I'll certainly try !

Bluesky presence

Hey, it seems I'm present on Bluesky now.

I never used Twitter at all : it always looked intimidating and exhausting and, frankly, kinda uninteresting from afar.

Bluesky is, too. But I am in a place where it is actually interesting to use for me, now that I care about connecting with fellow TTRPG creators, and now that I have more strength for other causes — and these require some degree of socialization.

And, of course, it doesn't reach the levels of awfulness of the other place, even if not everything is perfect (harmful bullying will never leave the internet, will it ?).

So ! You can find me there : @joyeuxscribe.bsky.social

There's English-speaking TTRPG stuff there, but also in French, and also talks of French politics, Covid / long Covid and my own disability, etc. Making and managing several accounts for different topics and circles of socialization was too exhausting, sorry !

GUYS I DID SOME STUFF

 

I actually finished something for once !

Grant Howitt’s November 2024 one-page game is RP6, a game centered on the quintessential RPG activity : talking with your GM, and by talking I mean trying to negotiate, ask, demand and extract info out of your GM.

So I whipped up a translation in French and posted it on itch.io !

This makes it my first game on itch and my first published translation. I am fucking proud of myself.

Now I have ideas for several hacks, it’s really tempting.

Reading Holmes right now

... and it's interesting. I lean even more rules-light ordinarily, and the book is still somewhat chaotic. But it's a good read, a good example on how to pack a complete game in 48 pages, and it's better organized than OD&D (which, admittedly, isn't a high bar to clear). There's a lot of good in it.

All in all, in a strange way, it's the official D&D version that I can grok the best, it seems.

Might share other impressions or house rules later.

Where I stand as a creator

 This is a "this is my stance on things" article. And my stand as a creator (or would-be creator) is the same as my stance as a, you know, human being trying to be kind.

These days, everything and everyone is more politically polarized. Perhaps it's bad. It certainly can be. Social networks use outrage to appeal to our attention, and far-right fascists are all to happy to ride this wave while complaining that they're persecuted — fragile little things, they are.

But some good comes out of it, too. Marginalized communities have voices, voices that reach far further than ever before. The real problems can be discussed, nationwide, worldwide, easier and faster than ever before. And now, with a bit of curiosity and internet access, you can know who you give money to. It is possible to vote with your wallet with actual insight.

It's not to say you can't have bad surprises, as some well-regarded creators get to be seen in a new light when their victims speak up.

But now you know. The world of tabletop RPGs in general, and the OSR in particular, are sprawling scenes. There is enough great stuff out there to support good people while playing with quality material. (Heck, there's enough great stuff to play for free for ever, and if that's not voting with your wallet, I don't know what is.)

So there's no reason not to do it. Support good games by good people. Give more money to those who need it (and yes, that can mean keep it to yourself — and play with free material or community copies). Don't encourage or enable awful people, even if they make good games, because there's good elsewhere, too.

As for me ? Whatever the labels, I'll stand with those that the system actually crushes, excludes, marginalizes, in all its accidental and intentional ways. Persons of color, women, children, queer folk, neuro-atypical folk, disabled folks of all kinds, victims of sexual crimes of all kinds, victims of wars and their consequences, etc.
Recognizing myself in a few of these categories, I obviously feel concerned.
Knowing people from all of these categories, I obviously empathize and want things to change.
Living in a world that seems doomed by greed-induced deliberate inaction in front of the coming catastrophes, I am spurred by my will to live.

So yeah. Of course, doing this in the rest of my daily life is far, far more important and far, far more difficult. But RPGs deserve it, too. I won't comment, promote or talk about products made by bigoted people whose views and actions I despise, and that's all. It's quite easy to do, in fact.

Belle-Île-en-Mer : awesome inspiration

When I was a kid, I often went on holidays on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer (Brittany, France), situated 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) off the coast of Morbihan. The whole island basically fits in a 6-mile hex, and it takes the better part of a day to cross it on foot. Circling it takes 3 to 4 days.

Here I jot a few notes on what's cool and interesting there. I have long wanted to create some kind of module, adventure or sandbox there. When I was a kid, we often went there around the time of Halloween, and it was ripe for autumnal adventures.

So. On this tiny hex, you can find :

- 4 villages, including a fishing harbor, a military harbor with a seaside huge citadel, an ancient abbey, a secluded village... and none of them gets along, 

- almost a hundred hamlets comprised of family farms (about 2d6 houses each), 

- a whole system of cisterns and fortifications around the citadel, including weird sewers and buried places where no one has set foot in three or four centuries,

- a magic / witch forest,

- at least three menhirs,

- a small lake, some ponds, an orchard, 

- 20+ beaches lodged in small coves between sharp cliffs, including : one with hellish waves, one with weird seashells and small bits of explosives washed ashore by a sunken WW1 ship, one with a weird marsh, one infested with jellyfish and venomous fishes, one renowned for it's lethal currents, one that's almost impossible to access unless you cross a maze of brambles and thorn-trees...

- at least one sunken 17th-century galleon with rumors of treasure and gold, 

- three lighthouses and one meteo station,

- the ruins of at least three other lighthouses and semaphors, and one windmill, 

- several seaside caverns and grottoes, including a giant one that's closed because the waves and rocks are too dangerous, another nicknamed the Vazen pit or the Devil's pit, and another that was used by pirates and English soldiers for smuggling and clandestine operations, 

- one islet that gets cut off the island when the tide comes, where you can get trapped for 6 hours if you're not careful, 

- a cove named "Borderune" (Runeside) with a rock looking like a giant bear, 

- wild boars sometimes, 

- all manners of strange mushrooms, in autumn there's an annual display of the weirdest, biggest, most colorful mushrooms found by people in the preceding weeks, 

- traces of occupation and encampments from both Bronze Age people and Roman soldiers,

- a dozen small seaside forts, ruined or occupied, one once built and owned by a famous actress, 

- a former orphanage / child prison that's full of ghosts and awful stories, 

- lots of bunkers built by the Nazis and left in place along the coast, 

- a tiny airport, a ranch...

Belle-Île-en-Mer means "beautiful island in the sea", which does sound a bit precious. But it's former names, most meaning the exact same thing, are all very inspiring : Vindilis in Latin, Guerveur in Breton / old French, Kalonessos in Greek...

Of course the island is exceptionally packed with stuff, and of course most of these places might be of little interest for a more epic or lengthy campaign. But it shows how much stuff you can pack in small distances such as a single traditional 6-mile hex, and Europe is certainly a great inspiration for this.

As for me, I'm definitely in the mood for making something out of this...

OSR origin story : my turn !

 So back in november, Jenx over at Gorgon Bones posted about his coming into the OSR and invited others to do the same.

Since I was planning a post in this vein at some point, why not now ?

I've succinctly described my role-playing background in my opening post, so let's build on that.

I'm a 30-year-old French man, not raised in a particularly geek household (at least not in the tabletop RPGs and video games kind), so I haven't been exposed to the now-classic D&D kind of fantasy at an early age. That's why you won't see much fondness here on this blog for actually old-school modules and rulesets — they're just not part of my fantasy / RPG upbringing. I'm no TSR grognard and it shows.

My own exposure to fantasy, science-fiction and RPG concepts was made through several ways :

- in childhood, many contacts with the traditional European, Polish and French body of fairy tales, fables and bedtime stories, along with bits from other cultures of the world, and a healthy dose of Matter of Britain (and France, and Rome, and Greek myths) by way of tales and simple cultural osmosis ;

- inventing a parallel world in our garden where my younger brother and I would weave stories blending various toys and the garden's micro-landscapes ;

- from childhood to adulthood, extensive travels and holidays in Brittany, Germany, Poland, and various French mountains and countrysides ;

- a long-time habit of playing board games, including slightly fantasy-themed ones like Labyrinth ;

- discovering Game Boy games at school, so you can thank Zelda : Link's Awakening for introducing me to the whole "you adventure with a sword in a weird fantasy setting" thing, and Pokémon Blue for familiarising me with the concepts of HP and levels (and cool monsters) ;

- reading adventure comics and novels : looking back on it, it's mostly XIXth century anticipation (Jules Verne, Herbert George Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle...) and XXth century comics of the French-Belgian world. Among those you'll find fairy tale / fantasy (the Smurfs), series blending contemporary adventures with pulp and sci-fi stuff (Tintin, Blake & Mortimer, Yoko Tsuno, Les Petits Hommes, Le Scrameustache, Bob Morane...), and other things (Gaston Lagaffe and its yé-yé / hippie protagonist in an uncaring 70's Belgium, for example) ;

- several old or not-so-old movies illustrating various fantasy domains : Jason and the Argonauts, The Neverending Story, Jumanji, Sindbad, Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, etc. I spent a non-negligible number of Saturday afternoons binging and re-binging Jumanji and Neverending Story with my brother ;

- and then, around the ages of nine to twelve, that's the explosion : Harry Potter books, borrowing the whole Lord of the Rings from a friend's mom after being gifted Fellowship of the Ring by chance, owning my own Game Boy Color with Tintin and Harry Potter games on it, scouring the library where my dad worked (and still works) for all the SFFF I could find, discovering  « chose your own adventure » books, and reading the weird sci-fi / sci-fantasy comics hidden in my dad's bookshelves (hello, Enki Bilal, hello, Mézières & Christin...). Add to this the GameCube with Zelda : The Wind Waker, a passion for hacking the stories of my video games and the mechanisms of my CYOA books, and my background was pretty much set.

So, everything was in place for me to discover and appreciate pen-and-paper RPGs. All the basic concepts were there : fantastical stories and worlds, role-playing in groups, or solo, inventing my own stuff, hacking stuff I found of interest, dice procedures to resolve play, and even levels and HP by way of video games first. (Those core D&D mechanical elements really had the time to permeate pop culture a lot already, even though it's even more ubiquitous 20-25 years later, of course.)

But I cannot seem to pinpoint the exact moment I discovered the existence of the classic format of playing RPGs. All I know is that, upon arriving in university and discovering the local gaming club, it seemed natural for me to join and play.

I actually did not play in group sessions very much at the time, and haven't much since. A railroady Talislanta one-shot at the club in 2012 and a short-lived D&D 4e campaign by a dear friend in 2013 convinced me of two things : first, railroading sucks. Second, D&D 4e was not for me and, to be honest, most complex or crunchy rules systems were not.

Retrospectively, I think that I bounced off 4e for several reasons. First is that we picked up the game to play, without knowing much about it, this specific edition, and how it was played. So I had no idea the game was supposed to have that tactical side of squares, powers and resources, synergies, etc. Second is my legendary cursed luck with dice : my cleric managed to miss hitting immobile enemies and nearly die against low-level animated wood puppets. (To be fair, the first bit is also a problem of rules adjudication.) And third, my (then undiagnosed) ADHD made it very difficult for me to grasp the different powers and elements of the character sheet, to reference and use them easily. I had a lot of trouble and it made the game difficult, for me and for my friends.

It's from then on that, still hooked on the potential of pen-and-paper RPGs, I tried to look for and devise simpler game systems. Things that carried flavor and promises of great adventures, but designed with simplicity and accessibility in mind. I'm not proud of my first tries, but that's what first tries are for. And I slowly opened up to the English-speaking RPG internet spheres, around 2013-2014.

This led me to take up the mantle of the GM and game initiator : once for a very fun one-shot Lasers & Feelings hack, once for a would-be campaign set in post-apocalyptic southern France, and once with the indie game House of Reeds that I translated and played one-on-one with my girlfriend-now-wife. I also got involved in freeform role-playing on a French language Skyrim forum. 

Since these, a few years have passed. I discovered and binge-read many OSR blogs (too many to quote here, but I'll make a list one of these days). What got me into the whole OSR thing was the joy to discover that, like me, there existed people who just wanted to play : stuff that was fast to set up, quick to resolve and adjudicate, free from the "character build" mindset that was too heavy for me, and all of it DIY-friendly. It felt like a perfect fit. 

I lurked on many forums, participated and commented on reddit (r/osr) sometimes. I wrote many drafts, many genres, many random tables, many ideas. I formed opinions on some games, some topics, and many aspects of what has come to be known as "the OSR", and also discovered the FKR movement, and its delightful radicality. I got interested in procedures, theoretical reflexions, and came back to solo role-playing, which was one of my earliest ways of playing. I tried blogging once or twice, but didn't commit. The itch stayed, though, as I regularly found myself wanting to say and develop things and share them with others.

So here we are now : I try to actually write, and actually post. I'll try to participate more in the scene, to my humble level. And, most of all, I'll try to play with what I write and discover, because this is why we're here, after all.

Am I officially an "OSR guy" ? I have no idea, since I didn't really ever played an OSR game, solo role-playing excepted. But it matters little : I know it broadly fits what I want, and I know I really appreciate what it has given to the whole hobby. 

Here's to many blogs, exciting adventures, inventive ideas and hours of play !

A scribe makes their debuts

 Welcome, welcome ! 

This is the first article. Gotta make one, right ? 

 « Le joyeux scribe » means  « the happy scribe »,  for those of you non-French-speaking heathens.

Who's the happy scribe ? That's me ! Writing from France with my ADHD-burdened brain, finally daring to participate in the RPG/OSR blog scene.

My first exposition to the hobby was a matter of cultural osmosis, through video games (levels ! Hit points ! A little guy in green who cuts grass with a sword !),  « choose your own adventure » books, and literature (old sci-fi, 19th century classics like Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and, yes, Lord of the Rings). After playing my first RPG session ever back in 2012 and discovering the OSR movement and RPG blogs in 2015, it was about time for me to start my own thing.

For some reason it seems easier to write in English, perhaps because that's where most of the online activity takes place.

So this is a separate effort from my blog in French, and I'll limit myself here to what feels fun or interesting only. Just dropping whatever strikes me as relevant.

Might be random tables, rules discussions, thoughts after other readings, and so on. We'll see ! 

And now, let's begin.