Doodles City

I am revisiting a tiny zine I published a year ago, you can find the original files here.

The zine was about a surreal whimsical city where humans coexist with living doodles.
How would I game using this odd setting?

Cthulhu Dark: you could use Cthulhu Dark and as the insight of the characters raise they begin to understand that everyone and everything are drawings, they get glimpses of object in our 3d reality, they understand that they exist as multiple copies, both printed and digital. If you need menaces they are intrusions from other realities. 

Troika: well you can write custom background for native of the Doodles City or you can simply send your group of Troika characters in the city and play as usual.

Tunnels Goons: use the basic rules to play citizen of Doodles City, items must be draw on the character sheet to be use for rolls.

Show the maps to the players, when they visit a building or a location, ask them what they think the doodle represent and run with their ideas. Roll or select one or two descriptors for each keyed locations.

Presentation of my Doodles City zine

I crafted a experimental zine, each copy of the zine represent a city block. Each layer have different descriptors that you can select to make each block unique. You can open the zine on the side to gain access to random encounters.

1) Download the files.
2) Print in letter format with no margins (full page).
3) Print the second page on the verso.
4) Fold in 8
5) Cut the inside slit
6) Fold and assemble the zine.

d6 strange cyborgs

I drew these guys for my Patreon. Since I am too busy working on commissions I changed a bit my approach for my Patreon, what I do now instead of working on zines is that I often draw sets of characters or things that my patrons can freely use for their blog, games, zines or other publications.

I eventually want to get back to doing zines as I have multiple work in progress that are well advanced, but right now I am too low on money and I need to focus on drawing commissions.

So if you want to use some hand draw random tables, join my Patreon at 1$ or you can also simply follow my Patreon as once in a while I post stuff for everyone.

https://www.patreon.com/evlynmoreau

Cosmic Crawl Zine

This is a other G+ community project, I drew a cosmic crawl map and people on G+ wrote descriptions for it different locations. I compiled everything and wrote random tables for each entries.

Also since my Patreon reached one if it objective I was able to put more time into the zine and draw additional illustrations! :)

When we filled the map I was really unsure if it would end up giving something gameable or not.
I am looking forward reading your feedbacks about the whole thing as I am very curious of what people will think of it.

Free PDF version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pTD1XBhuDinUHmURtH4QKnz-9dU-7V5i/view?usp=sharing

Print version on LULU (better wait for the free shipping coupon to be active):
http://www.lulu.com/shop/evlyn-moreau/cosmic-crawl/paperback/product-23823323.html

(I also uploaded a printable version of the Doodle Maps on Lulu)

More about the doodles maps

Thinking back about how this little community project went.

Starting with a fun and inspiring artwork map really helped to trigger enthusiasm, 32 people contributed and we keyed the 41 areas in 24h. (I notice that we were only 3 women, this is only 9% of the of the contributors, a percentage common to OSR discussions threads).

The tone was overall whimsical but imaginative. I only edited out one element that was too pop culture reference gonzo. But thinking back about it, I could have turned this element into a silly rumor.

Some people contributed different descriptions for the same area, this was not a problem and I even encouraged it. I fused the multiple interpretations together or I turned them into rumors. Rumors are a good tool to keep descriptions that may contradict each others.

Once I compiled everything, I wrote a d6 encounters and a d6 treasures tables for each area. To write the tables I based myself on the description of the areas, sometime incorporating stuff from other areas, I also had to extrapolate and invent some stuff for some of the areas that had a very short description.
I really like this d6 encounters and d6 treasures tables formula. I think it help a lot to bring the areas to life and to make the map more gameable. Having more time I would maybe have added a d6 rumors table to each area. I think these three elements work well together: dangers, rewards and opportunities. The d6 tables are also a good tool to glue together the content of the contributions as you may create link between them.

Having one or two persons who add a other layer of content (the d6 tables) over the collective material make the content stick more together. Doing it alone was a lot of work (I wrote 82 tables) but it was also super fun to jam with what the community contributed.

I enjoy these community creations projects a lot, I especially love the cross pollinisation of ideas (including illustrations and text), it feel a bit like playing a game of How to Host a Dungeon or of Microscope.

...

Eventually I would like to draw more maps to have a full 3x3 grid. But that would be a lot of work as it would give us a total of 360 areas to key (and a lot of d6 tables to write!).

If we ever complete the grid, I would like that someone better than me work on the layout for the compilation to have a nice book. Maybe we can also print the maps on PoD cardboards.

Here are the North-South axis and the West-East axis b&w unkeyed maps:

Doodles Map collaboration

I doodled a small map in my note book and we collectively filled the areas' descriptions on G+

Feel free to reshare the PDF and to use it content as you wish.

The Doodles Map PDF file

Upgrading the Doodle Temple

I plan to double the number of pages 

and to make the temple a bit more gameable.

Visitors downloading at the Doodle Temple

Doodle Temple (zine)

I made a new zine: The Doodle Temple.

This one is in color, so I won't have the budget to print it, but it's ok since it was fun to work with colors. (I doodled everything with ball point color pens).

The temple is more of a illustrated tool box than a actual dungeon (there is no map).

But the way I see it, the Doodle Temple create new rooms when you are distracted, so in a sense it's a infinite random dungeon. (A nice fit with Narcosa).

A way you can use the temple to generate a dungeon on the fly:

Each time the group enter a new room roll 3d6, remove the "1" and distribute the remaining results between those elements (so you get 0 to 3 elements by rooms):

• Stair Tube: (2-3) go up, (4-5) go down, (6) go somewhere else (I did not drawn the tubes)
• Doors & Windows: (2-3) obstructed, (4-5) locked, (6) unlocked
• Traps: (2) victim in a trap, (3-5) one trap, (6) two traps
• Creatures: (2-3) traces, (4-5) one type of creatures, (6) two type of creatures interacting 
• Treasures: (2-3) leftovers from a stolen treasure, (4-5) one treasure, (6) bigger but hidden treasure
• Altars: (2-3) cult objects linked to the altar, (4-5) one altar, (6) creatures praying at a altar
• Specials: (2-3) it's just decoration, (4-5) magical trick or trap, (6) dangerous boon or upgrade 

Roll in the zine to generate things.

Or to go faster you can simply roll 2d6, choose two category of elements and directly read the results in the zine.

Also in each rooms, you can roll a bunch of d6 to generate some furniture.

Doodle Temple

City & Garden Doodles