Is It July Already?

It feels like just yesterday I posted the poll to determine what zine I would make next!

So July has been a fast passing month here at Blackwell Games. I'm still working off of a folding table in the living room as we work to get our usual office/ computer room back in working order after the rewiring. We boldly declared that we would paint a mural on the walls before putting the desks back in and have... not done so yet. Well, Shanice has started with some beautiful clouds and then somehow three weeks passed.

You'll be very pleased to know though that Spirit Tea is rapidly nearing the playtest stage. All I need to do now is put the Brew Times onto each Ingredient, finalise what Festivals are going to be in the game, and get my teacher to write a couple pages about tea and tea culture to hopefully serve as a useful primer for the book.

The book is currently around 100 pages long with some spreads serving as full art pages to split things like Requests, Ingredients, and Locales apart from each other. Sometimes those give opportunities to explain things or to provide useful reminders for players who might skim the rules.

It's me, I'm players.

Something I've introduced to Spirit Tea that is new to the Apothecaria format is some helpful character creation.

These entirely optional tables should hopefully give you some helpful prompts and structure for your character's backstory should you want it.

Drawing my own I get a character who is:

From the Dragon Depths, was a Musican or Actor, loves Money, and is associated with Water, Winter, and Kindness.

I think in that case I am a minor dragon, one who can take a full dragon form at times but struggles to hold it. I'm most likely a half-dragon and even while human I still have antler-like horns and a certain sharpness to my features that betrays my heritage. I serve in my mother's palace as a flutist and did my best to entertain guests and try to earn some coin on the side.

Once I was old enough, I left the dragon depths in order to find my own place in the world and after a few tours of the surface world, playing music in cities, towns, and palaces, I came to Peach Spring Village and found the tea house there. It felt like it was calling me and its owner saw my interest and potential. They trained me until eventually it was time for them to retire and for me to inherit their beautiful tea-house!

Sadly for my character and for yours, your shifu does not give you the tea house in all its glory. Instead, they send their other employees off to work in teahouses across the country. They sell most of the decorations and have spirits return the tea house back to a form that is as close to its original as possible. They stop just short of putting termites in the beams. Their excuse is that you need to learn from the ground up and must build up the tea house just as they did.

Don't worry though, you'll get to voice your complaints at your shifu as they come to visit once a month and will serve as a constant companion throughout your story. They might even decide to stick around and help out but that does mean they take your bed and you have to sleep somewhere else. Sorry.

Drawing for my own teahouse, it is Overlooking the Village, the decor is Colourful and Time moves strangely inside. It seems you can sit on the balcony with a pot of oolong for hours and it still be morning by the time you finally leave.

Maybe it's an effect of the many spirits that come to the tea house? Or a touch of my dragon magic?

With so little left to do, I expect we'll have a playtest version of Spirit Tea out by the end of the month. Likely without the tea ceremony section but it is playable without that. If you'd like to be part of the playtest, keep an eye out in the Discord as I'll be recruiting playtesters via a Google Form.

Downfoot Abbey

We're still in the research stage for Downfoot Abbey which mostly involves watching Downton Abbey and working out what makes it so darn good.

We've done some brainstorming and have come up with a bunch of fun ideas of the sort of stories that Downfoot Abbey could tell and now we just have to work out the mechanics necessary to facilitate those stories.

I've also gotten in touch with the artist who did the illustrations for Shirefolk, my other Hobbity RPG which long term supporters will know I've been working on in the background for a few years now.

Like a hobbit's breakfast, that game has become a feast of things to do. From building your burrow, gardening mechanics, pigeon rearing, travelling, trading, doing oddjobs, collecting gossip, to competing with another player for granny's good silver cutlery set.

Is this the beginning of a sort of Shirefolk Extended Universe? Who knows! But hopefully I'll be able to bash that game into a Patreon suitable shape by the time Downfoot Abbey is ready so you can end the year with all the gossipy goodness you could hope for!