Today’s the day, it’s finally here! TorchLite is released into the world!
You can grab it at itch.io, which handles our downloads and traffic tracking. It’s pay-what-you-want and that can be free!
If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing and would like to see more, please consider supporting our Patreon or kicking a few bucks into our Ko-Fi. With your support we can make even more stuff like this!
I actually went through the whole TorchLite manuscript—and it’s not small—and counted them all by hand.
There is a ridiculous amount of design that went into our “small project.” Whether you use it as intended for dungeoneering adventure fun or you kitbash it into your own whimsical creation like a obsessive goblin tinker, we’re just excited to get all this good stuff out there into the community!
Lynn Jones wrote a whole bunch of pieces to TorchLite, and also did a bunch of editing, and also did a bunch of art sourcing, and and and. But I’d like to focus on the one thing he brought to the table that completely blew me away
The Five-Scene Adventure.
This idea has roots that go back a long way, but Lynn wanted to plant the seed in TorchLite and cultivate it into a native bloom. Optimized for TorchLite, it positively blossoms.
The core idea is simple: to prepare a fun adventure all you really need is five solid scenes. Sure, you’ll play more than those five, but the others you can improv. These are the landmarks.
It sounds too easy, really.
But it works. It works so well it’s bonkers.
I’ve written a couple five scene adventures and I’ve run a couple, too, and I have never seen anything so simple generate so much incredible play. It’s not a stricture, it’s a springboard, and it is glorious.
Catch Five Scene Adventures and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff when TorchLite ignites on Friday, November 15th!
Here’s a fun little teaser for TorchLite character creation.
The core of every starting character is their three starting distinctions: one for their People, one for their Profession, and one for their Persona. You can pick each one right off a list, and modify it as much or as little as you like.
And we made the list names alliterate, because we just had to, you know?
These pick lists have a lot of old favorites plus a few new goodies. There’s something for everybody!
Your People
Your Profession
Your Persona
Cambion
Bard
Cipher
Dwarf
Cleric
Comrade
Elf
Fighter
Devotee
Gnome
Hexknight
Disruptor
Goblin
Mage
Loose Cannon
Halfling
Mystic
Mercenary
Human
Paladin
Schemer
Ogre
Ranger
Valiant
Wyrmkin
Rogue
Wholesome
Mix and match to your heart’s content, and then customize your tait sets and SFX to make your character sing the exact tune you love.
TorchLite ignites on November 15th. Don’t miss out!
Let me tell you about working with Jeremy Forbing.
I’d be like, “Look, I threw this dumb thing together, it maybe sort of works, isn’t it funny?”
And Jeremy would be like: “Yeah, that’s great, Miriam, except it’s all wrong. This part should be shorter and punchier. This part should work like this. This part should appeal to the audience in this totally other way. This part demonstrates how you, specifically, have not been playing dungeoneering roleplaying games since you were a pre-teen, and you’ve got the vibe all wrong.”
And the worst part was that he was always right.
He also churned out reams of content of his own and threading it together with everybody else’s contributions made a tapestry so rich I can hardly believe it.
I am immeasurably grateful for the chance to collaborate with Jeremy on this “little project” that got way, way bigger than we ever dreamed. Jeremy made the project way, way better than I ever hoped.
Also I convinced him that we should include minotaurs as a playable character option, which is probably the most important thing, at the end of the day. I’m gonna play a valiant paladin named Moucau!
Folks, it’s been a long and winding road developing this “small side project” that we expected to be “oh, you know, something like 64 pages, no big deal.”
Vampires, werewolves, and witches exist: you’re one of them. And you’ve been breaking the rules…
Keep the delicate peace, face your elder’s wrath, or both, in Group Chat of the Damned by Jeremy Forbing, part one of MoonLite, and playable with Cortex Lite. It all premieres in Xine One!
What’s a better fit for “beginnings” than character creation? Jeremy served up a character creation process for vampires, werewolves, and witches primed to be dropped directly into all sorts of urban horror mayhem and drama.
I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of my formative gaming years in a certain World that was full of Darkness, and I’m so excited to see a solid remake of that whole gaming vibe reconstructed in Cortex.
Because Group Chat of the Damned is just Part One of MoonLite, a complete game that uses and extends Jeremy’s other baby, Cortex Lite.
Will we see Part Two in a future issue of Xine? I think it’s a surety if we there are future issues of Xine. If you want to see it, sign up for our releases mailing list at the top or bottom of this page or clicking here.
In the mean time, here’s the werewolf character sheet, in all its interlocking SFX glory.
There’s only two more days until Xine and Lite are both released into the world to wreak havo— I mean, be enjoyed by discerning gamers like you. I’m so excited to have you along for the ride!
Cortex Lite is a complete tabletop roleplaying game, created as a sleek and simple example of a game built with Cortex Prime, a toolkit of rules which serves as the “engine” for many other games. Cortex Lite is designed as a “generic” RPG, a basic system you can use to run games in any setting.
Weighing in at just 32 pages, Cortex Lite packs a powerful punch. It’s also professionally illustrated and—if I do say so myself—really pretty.
And as with Xine, Cortex Lite is both free to play and free to use in your own Cortex projects. It’s all part of the Cortex Community Licensing!
But why is Xine producing Lite? Simple. Lite will afford Xine a sort of foundational baseline for future articles and games, a presumptive basic level of how-the-game-works that we don’t need to include in every single article, over and over again, in the very tightly-constrained zine format. Lite lets Xine fly.
If you’d like to get email notifications when we release Lite (and all future Lite games), sign up for our releases mailing list at the top and bottom of this page… or just click this link!
Got characters for a new Cortex game and no starting situation? Is Pathways big and scary? Do you have three index cards?
Kick off your game with Quick & Dirty Pathways by Jasmine Barlow. In Xine One!
Count on Jasmine Barlow to take a big, complicated chunk of game and magically reduce it to a single page without losing anything important. You’ve no doubt seen her character sheets that encapsulate a whole game. But for Xine One, she took on Pathways.
Jasmine’s article has taken the gloriously sprawling mess that is Pathways and distilled it down to a piquant three-questions-on-three-index-cards dollop of awesomesauce.
I expect this to become the default means of kicking off a Cortex one-shot; it is so tight and packs a punch well above its weight class. It can also launch a long-running campaign with a complex situation that binds together all the player characters and gets the story started on the right foot.
Speaking of getting started on the right foot, have you signed up for our releases mailing list? Pop an email in the form at the bottom of this page (or click on the link at the top of this page) to get notified the moment that Quick & Dirty Pathways and the rest of Xine One are available!
