HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL!

I have written one hundred one page games.

This all began a decade ago. Maz and I were in Norwich, and we were taking stock of our lives. We'd recently moved back to London from New York, and before that we were in Sydney for a year and a half: both with Maz' job. It was all tremendously exciting, but I'd slipped into something of a subsidiary role within the relationship. I was just sort of following them around.

We chatted about what would happen if we prioritised my career for a bit. I had been a video games journalist for a while in the early 2010's, but I was quietly fired along with half of the website staff eighteen months into my full-time work with FHM; I was only just starting to put together enough contacts to have a go at doing it freelance when we moved halfway around the world. I had lost my edge, despite a few thin attempts at actual journalism.

The pair of us had run a scrappy little livegames business - appropriately called Serious Business - that grew out of Zombie LARP. If you don't count the live-action Knightmare game we ran in 2006, Zombie LARP was the first thing that Chris and I did together, and when Maz joined us for the second and subsequent events, it was where I fell in love with them.

This is the sequel event, a Film Noir-themed Knightmare live game.
No images of the first event exist

We never made any money from Serious Business - not unless you count the Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter live game we did for 20th Century Fox - but it laid the groundwork for me to shuffle towards being a tabletop roleplaying game designer.

I set up this Patreon when we were in Australia, but it quickly became unsustainable. I was printing and posting 30-page games, because that was the only kind of game I knew how to make, and I couldn't afford any of it on what it earned me. I packed it in after releasing THE HOMECOMING COLLECTION, four untested experiments I wrote on a plane back to the UK, which felt terribly avant-garde.

Anyway. Back to Norwich. "What if you restarted the Patreon but just did games that were one page long?" asked Maz as we walked back from the chip shop with dinner.

I liked it. It was a fun limit to set myself, and it had the side-effect of making the entire process something approaching profitable. (I wasn't entirely comfortable with the thought of charging people for a single page. It felt... cheeky. Maybe kind of audacious? Like it wouldn't last.)

But look! It DID last. Thanks to you - some of you who've been here since my first post - this Patreon has gone from being an overambitious financial burden to very nearly breaking even. (Turns out you don't get a lot of change from $15 when you're printing, packing, addressing and shipping games, even if they're only a single page in length. And writing them takes AGES.)

For my hundredth one, I decided to write whatever I wanted. Thankfully, what I want to write is animal crime clickbait shitposts, and on that subject:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL

Goats.

I love the bastards. They're up there with geese, for me. They're beautiful. They make a terrible noise, and they're cunning and irascible and fun. The earliest inkling of this, and the entire concept of goat girls, comes from 2017's TRASHKIN:

And, following a playtest, this crucial update:

The Goat Girl (or Goatgirl, or goat girl, I use all three) has the power of Birthdays: it is always her Birthday, and she behaves appropriately. I think it is always, somehow, her Birthday. It's not a delusion on her part. In the same way that some fey creatures are caught in an otherworldly ethereal breeze, the Goat Girl deserves a cake and a sing-song.

GOAT CRASHERS, a year or so afterwards, firmly established the idea that goats are, to me, for me in this specific situation - about parties. I guess it's a satyr/pan connection, perhaps coupled with the way that goats are notoriously hard to contain and train. Plus they're big enough to cause a fuss and kick over a table, but not so big that they can easily kill a guy, so there's a fun power balance there.

Then! In Kenku Bin Wizards, I came up with the idea of a Goat Girl War / Birthday Party as a rival gang, and drew them, and fell immediately in love with these horrible goblin creatures all over again.

I knew it had to be Goat Girls. But I wasn't sure what to do about the rules.

(P.S. After writing this post, I realised that I also wrote BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT about, I dunno, three weeks ago. I've written so much shit about goats that it blurs together into one.)

FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE

There's an old theory of GMing that failure, at a story level, is impossible. If the adventure's behind a big wall, the player characters are going to get over that wall. Or through it. Or under it. It's an agreement, often unspoken, between the players and the GM: while the moment-to-moment things can be left up to chance, the broad strokes of the narrative are more important than that.

I tried to write something which embraced this a few months ago - failure at any action was impossible, and the players knew it, and all the game was concerned about was what it cost you:

But it didn't take. I was trying too hard to do something clever. I wanted to make the players care about what they were losing, and it's hard to establish that in a one-page, one-shot game.

Thankfully, I had just the thing up my sleeve when I was sitting in the garden smoking and bouncing ideas off the walls of my brain for my hundredth game: Goat Girls. Goat Girls can succeed at any action, because it is their birthday and they deserve it. Goat Girls cannot be seriously harmed, because it is their birthday and who would do that. They lead a charmed existence (I have decided) and gangs of them function as a sort of cosmic festivity runoff, determined to use up all the fun in the surrounding area by beating things with hammers.

So, as a Goat Girl, when you fail an action, you can just say you didn't. It's your birthday. You deserve a treat. So it succeeds instead, and you mark Hubris, which functions akin to the wanted star system in Grand Theft Auto, and the more Hubris you have the greater the authorities are that arrive to try to stop your birthday party.

It goes all the way up to God. And there is nothing God can do to stop you, because it is your birthday.

Happy Birthday Goat Girl! is an exercise in non-restraint. You cannot be stopped and there is no comeuppance for your actions. I am interested in seeing how players react to that, when stripped of the core thing at the base of most roleplaying, and whether they choose to let themselves fail because it's more exciting than success.

Plus! You get to be a Goat Girl! It is your Birthday!

NEXT

Next month, I'm running THE ONE HUNDRED ONE PAGE GAME JAM. The core idea is this - you roll randomly (or pick) two of my games to kitbash together into a single two-page game. You've got a month to do it, and you can sign up here to be kept abreast of developments.

There're prizes, too, for the best three entrants (as voted by the participants) - some original drafts, notes, sketches and other ephemera from the several large boxes of loose scrawlings marked "GRANT SURPLUS BRAINSPACE." Stuff you could probably frame. Stuff that might one day be worth upwards of five pounds, depending on how soon I die and how well my career goes from here.

I'll take a month off the monthly games, and we'll have a talk in the office about what we can do with this Patreon. (Those of you with physical copies owed will get them in October, or thereabouts.) I've been enjoying writing longer blogs and dev notes, so it might become a fancy newsletter. Maybe I can use it to collaborate on projects with other designers, like I did back in Volume 5 in 2021. Maybe I pivot hard into a podcast, see if I can't get myself a fancy mattress or sock sponsorship like the big boys. Maybe I write a setting in as many random tables as I can think of, then bundle it and release it as a zine.

Maybe I'll just start writing one-page games again and do another hundred.

The author when this started, a bright-eyed fuckboy

The author, yesterday, a haggard smear of a thing

It's been emotional. Thank you all for sponsoring the magic button that makes dollars come out of the internet. It is a strange time to be alive, but this is one of the best parts of it.

Yours,

• Grant "One Hundred" Howitt