Hey all! It’s been a while since I last posted, and I was planning to do one big blogpost going over everything I’ve had going on, as I’ve done in the past, but I realized I had a lot to write about each topic, so I’m gonna be dropping them individually over the next few days so it’s not one big blast of info.

Alright? Alright. Alright? Alright.

So the first big thing I wanna brag about is my boardgame! Well, boardgame prototype. A few weeks back, a friend of mine came to me and said we should revive an old board game we started making and never finished. He’s in his last year of his design degree and for the final wanted to design art for a game, as we are both absolute turbonerds¹.

The prototype in question was a game tentatively called “I, Monster” which I thought of after listening to the titular band’s “The Blue Wrath” like 200 times in a row. The game was simple - you played as some sort of monster or cryptid trying to survive in a modern city, and were trying to throw other cryptids under the bus so the city never suspects you exist. The narrative was rather loose and so were the characters (a guy with a fly for a head, a ghost, a leprechaun, a shapeshifter, and a cultist), but the game was a solid 6/10 experience. It was interesting but definitively needed another look around because many of the gameplay mechanics felt like they were disconnected. We worked on it, it was fun, but we ended dropping it once we both got hard into uni.

A year later, we dust off the files and decide to rework it. And man oh man was that a good decision.

Firstly, our new narrative was much tighter because he had to repeatedly show it to teachers and classmates who asked questions and primed us to make it less vague. You were now a north american cryptid hiding in Helena, Montana. You moved there thinking it’d be a good place to hide from more prying eyes, but eventually you find out there’s another cryptid hiding amongst the populace. Nothing’s gone wrong yet, but you don’t trust that to be the case. You’ve been living here for years! Who’s this asshole pushing on your turf? Do they know how to hide? Are they going to get this whole operation busted? Are you going to get found out because of a mistake of theirs? You can’t take a chance. You won’t. It’s you or them. You have to get them exposed so you aren’t the one exposed instead.

We pushed much harder on this eeiry, paranoid, “everyone is coming for you” theme and the game now actually feels tight. Even the gameplay mechanics benefitted a lot because now we actually know what feeling we’re aiming for, rather than just shooting ideas in the air. We were working on Skulk.²

Helping this is the fact that my friend is a kickass artist. Has been for years; when he went to do exams to join his current degree, the dean told him “dude, what are you here for? you already know this.” (I am serious, real story.) So even the prototypes look kickass.

And better yet? People love this shit! We started letting people play the game this week, and holy shit we’ve playtested it so much within the span of so few days. People are independently playing the game on tabletop sim and messaging me going “hey Lucio we played the game a few times, here’s some notes”! People are actually enjoying it to the point that they’re independently booting it up in tabletop game sessions and suggesting new card ideas! It feels so good to have something you made actually enjoyed by people, it’s hard to put it into words.

The one thing people did worry about was our character selection. Well, one of the characters. Our new characters all hail from north america:

• The Mothman: A large moth creature spotted in various locations that is considered to be a bad omen.

• The Loveland Frogman: A 4 foot frog spotted holding a wand.

• The Flatwoods Monster: A 7~ foot creature spotted after a UFO sighting which emitted a pungent smell and seemed to fly at the people who spotted it (was probably an owl that they misjudged the distance of)

• and, The Wendigo

You may have heard of The Wendigo in pop culture. If you’re thinking of a deer creature, wrong Wendigo; the cryptid of native american origin is an evil spirit that inhabits people once their gluttony gets the best of them during times of famine or harsh winters, and proceed to eat their fellow man to survive. At that point the person is no longer considered human, just “wendigo”, and were typically kicked out of the community for it. Because it’s of native american origin a lot of people we showed this game to were worried that this would be culturally insensitive, or even that the name itself would be a bad idea to include because of racial reasons. You might have thought the same thing reading this, which is entirely fair!

However the reason I wanted to include this in the game is because of a native american friend of mine who ranted to me a while back about how often pop culture gets the Wendigo wrong. Y’see, that deer creature you see when you google the term is from the 1910 short story, ‘The Wendigo.’ This story made up a totally new creature and just reused an existing name, but that’s the version of the creature that became popular. So, I wanted to add the (mostly) culturally accurate version into the game because it’s a really unnerving cryptid. A half-frozen, ravenous, once-human. It’s fuckin’ sick. Given an equally sick rough concept art by the aformentioned friend:

She gave me the go-ahead on using the cryptid in the game, saying it’s cool as long as it’s treated with the same respect we’d give any other culture, which is fair. However, one funny thing was the name concern. I brought it up to her, and she clarified that it is the correct name, but it’s problematic for a different reason:

The name Wendigo calls upon the spirit, like saying it, but thats like

Saying skinwalker does that too

Its not racist ur just inviting it to find you lol

So. If I’m found dead after having eaten my own leg, I brought it on myself, honestly.