With two and half days left to go in the campaign we've crossed 4500+ backers and raised over $225k! At this point all stretch goals have been unlocked and now is the best time to finalize your pledge.
As we tick down to the final hours of the crowdfunding phase, take this opportunity to consider upgrading to the Limited Edition cover, one of the Bundles, or just adding an extra book to your pledge. This won't be your last chance - you will still be able to do add-ons once we shift into the pledge manager - it's just your best option.
Thanks for all the continued support and remind your friends to get in before the campaign ends on Thursday, June 22nd at 8pm PT.
And now we turn it over to Andrew for another Design Diary, this time focused on the various audiences they hope to reach with Girl By Moonlight.
Who is Girl by Moonlight for?
There are some very self-evident answers to this question. GBM is for fellow queer and trans people, for whom its symbolism of transformation and embodiment will resonate with experiences of coming out, fluidity, and embrace of the self long denied.
In getting into all of that, it’s a game that is reflective of my own queer experience, and those themes are as fundamental to the game as its rules and systems. There are ways in which the rules and systems are queer, for that matter. It goes beyond aesthetics, into design practice, and the structure of the game.
One part of the player agenda in GBM is to see things through a queer lens, and in there I say “This queer lens extends beyond identity—ways of being—to include ways of acting, and seeing.” For me it runs deep into the core of the game, in how it imagines adversity, frames possibilities, and operates moment to moment. The protagonists are not just queer in their identities, they are queering the world through their actions.
I also like to think that the game is for folks who are really into Blades in the Dark.
Players going from Blades to GBM will have a lot of fun experiencing all the differences, big and small, that distinguish the two. Hacks, like mashups in music, re-contextualize and energize the works they combine. You hear the new thing, and it makes you want to revisit the established thing, and you see that in a new light when you go back to it. In that way GBM is a love letter to Blades in the Dark, and Monsterhearts.
I’m very pleased with the hacking and remixing of Blades that I’ve done in GBM, and I think there are some useful insights for enthusiasts and designers. I learned a great deal about Blades while fiddling with it, breaking it, and repurposing its pieces. It feels important to put this back into the design continuum from which it was made, and keep the cycle of design, remix, re-imagine turning.
So it’s my hope that GBM might break out of its niche a little bit as it makes its way out into the world. I worked real hard on it, and I think it has some valuable things to add to the broader TTRPG space (I would not have published it if I didn’t think that, I suppose). That said, if it resonates with other queer and trans folks, I’m happy. It’s for that community first and foremost, even if other folks are invited too.
