I've been posting behind the scenes updates and development logs for this game over on my Patreon, but I thought I should bring them over here too! This is the first post from when I first started working on the game back in January. You're going to see another two updates today as I bring things across, and I apologise for the notifications you're going to receive for that. If I could turn them off and only notify you once all three posts are live I would, but unfortunately I can't.

In March Backerkit is launching their competitor to ZineQuest, Pocketopia - a crowdfunding event centered around portable, easy-to-learn games. I was invited to take part and I figured this would be a very good excuse to dust off Wretched & Alone and finally write a new solo journalling game. It's been a hot minute since I played in that pool, and I've been looking for an excuse to go back to it. My plan is for this to be completely written by the time the campaign launches so that all I need to worry about after it (hopefully) funds is editing and layout. I've definitely learned my lesson from Down In Yongardy about taking incomplete manuscripts to crowdfunding.

Blood In The Margins is a solo journaling game in the 'dark academia' genre, heavily inspired by books like Donna Tarrt's The Secret History and M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains, plus films like The Skulls and Saltburn. This genre thrives in "reverse murder mysteries", where the main characters have committed some sort of crime (usually a murder) and the story that unfolds covers how they did it, why they did it, and how - or whether - they got caught. I've often seen them referred to as "howdunnits" rather than "whodunnits", and I feel like W&A is perfectly suited to telling these sorts of stories.

It's been five years since I wrote The Wretched and Wretched & Alone became the thing, and in the intervening time I've had a lot of thoughts about how the system could be improved. My goal with this new game is to update and refresh W&A a little bit (and hopefully Matt will be updating the SRD to reflect the stuff in this game). My main points of focus are:

To the first point, I think I'm going to learn from games like Jack Harrison's The Slow Knife and board games like Legendary Encounters. They use a classic 3 act structure, and one of the ways in which they do this is by having you stack the deck in a specific way before play commences. This will give a little bit more focus to the game and allow it to really feel like it's driving towards a conclusion.

Right now my thoughts are that I might have the player split the deck up into unequal piles and place an Ace on top of each of them. Each time an Ace is pulled, we move into a new Act. I can also write different sets of prompts for each Act. This means that instead of having 52 prompts the game will have 156 prompts. That's 52 potential prompts for each Act and, depending on how I split the deck, you're only likely to see ~17 of them each go around. It feels like this one change to the system will fix both the structure issue and the replayability issue.

One thing I'm cautious of with this is that I don't want the game to feel too predictable. Having a set number of cards for each Act means you always know when you're going to move into a new Act. Maybe this is desirable, but right now I'm not really a fan of it, so I'm going to think more about how to introduce a bit of variety - and, crucially, mystery - into the length of each act.

In Wretched & Alone the tumbling block tower always represents some sort of inevitable force that's going to bring your game to a close. The genre that I'm working in already has that built in pressure in the form of a detective (or some other equivalent) who's investigating the crime you've committed and is slowly tightening the noose. It seems obvious that the rising tension should come from the increased likelihood of your being caught, and so the block tower should represent that investigator. But I don't want to use a block tower.

Something I've had in the bank for a while waiting for the right project is a mechanism that turns W&A into something a little closer to a roll and write game then a dexterity game. Rather than the tower, the player has a matrix of 24 boxes arranged into 6 columns and 4 rows. Rather than pulling a block from the tower, you roll 1d6 and make a mark in the corresponding column. If you ever fill a column, the game ends.

The average amount of pulls in a Jenga game before the tower collapses is somwhere in the region of 20-25, which is why I initially picked a grid of 24 boxes. Of course, you don't need to fill all of the boxes to lose the game, so this makes for shorter games. But how much shorter? I spent a couple of hours rolling dice to try and figure that out.

I later moved onto spreadsheets because drawing the grid every time was tedious. You can view it here if you'd like to, though it isn't very interesting. I simulated 144 games, rolling as many different dice as I could and also making use of digital dice rollers (though I didn't make any notes about which games used digital dice rollers). What I found was:

This obviously makes for a much shorter game than The Wretched if we roll at the same frequency as we pull blocks. That can be mitigated by using the Act structure and saving prompts that call for rolls until later in the game. It could also be mitigated by having failure occur on the fifth matching number rather than the fourth. 

I like the idea of tying these rolls to specific things about the detective (or whoever's) investigation, with different results asking you to talk about how said detective is advancing their inquiries. It could go into classic "means, motive, opportunity" territory, or it could deal with things like evidence recovered at the scene of the crime, witness testimony, even contradictions in your own testimony (which would require you to correct earlier parts of your journals, which leans into the unreliable narrator trope that's often evident in this genre). It's not quite there yet, but I think it's got legs. (I'd also like to simulate a lot more games with different numbers of results needed in the grid, but that's not something I want to do manually. I may see if I can work out how to write a Python script to do it for me, but we'll see).

Part of what works about The Wretched with the block tower is that it introduces an element of Game to the act of journaling. I'm conscious that this framework might lose that a little bit. Rolling dice is still gaming but it also introduces an element of randomness that isn't quite there in The Wretched. When the block tower tumbles you can tell yourself it's because you weren't skillful enough to keep it standing. When the game ends here, it's because the dice came up with the wrong number. In my simulated games there's a lot of swing between the longest and shortest games, whereas W&A games played with the tower tend to have similar lengths. I'd like to reduce swing as much as possible while still retaining some element of uncertainty, so I may experiment with giving the player some ability to modify their dice rolls or erase marks made on the grid. That's for a later stage of development, though.

Another interesting thing about this matrix is that it opens up the possibility that the player could win the game. That's not been desirable in the W&A games I've written in the past, which are very much about perservering in the face of certain failure. Here, though, I like an increased chance that you might get away with it. That works well with the genre I'm writing in, and I think it will make for an interesting twist on the system.

So, this is where I'm up to with Blood In The Margins so far. Keep an eye out for more WIP posts here as I progress on it. If you're interested in checking out the campaign when it goes live, the prelaunch page is here and I'd be very grateful if you followed it and/or shared it with your friends!