May Newsletter – Prismatic Omens

Ephemeris Fulfillment Complete + The Prismatic Oracle Approaches

Ephemeris is officially on its way to all backers! It’s been one hell of a month with a slew of print projects, art markets, conventions, and all manner of goings-on, and with summer nearly upon us I’m diving in to a new project: The Prismatic Oracle. 

On the Threshold: The Prismatic Oracle

The Prismatic Oracle is a junk journaling and bookbinding game I’m designing where players gather found text, images, and objects and interpret them as omens of a prophecy. Oracle is set in the world of Retrograde, making use of its distinct brand of offbeat and occult magic, and parleys the found object gameplay I experimented with in The Anarchitect into a keepsake game. In Oracle, players will use the artifacts they find to create physical books that are both the expression and the result of the story the players tell together through the course of play. 

I held my first proper playtest at Beefy Wizard Con a few weeks ago, and it was a delight. The folks who volunteered to playtest were gracious and curious, and I’m immensely grateful to them for giving the game a test run and diving right in and constructing a world together. I have solid notes for how to sharpen the flow of play and refine how things are presented in the game’s text, but I’m happy to say that the basic gameplay loop worked great.

One of the most exciting things about the playtest was that the pace felt excellent. I worried that exploring and junk journaling 6 different locations would be too much for a one-shot, but play with 6 players timed out right to two and a half hours. 

The Prismatic Oracle is designed to be played either solo or with up to 6 players without a GM, and there was a healthy balance of solo and collaborative activity in the playtest. Players envisioned scenes together and developed characters and narratives that organically intertwined, and everyone collecting their own artifacts and building their own junk journals gave each player to build an artifact that was truly theirs.

If you’d like to try playing The Prismatic Oracle, I have a free promo version available on itch here! The full version of Oracle is closely built off of Prismos, with more emphasis on bookbinding and how you interact with and interpret the artifacts you collect. If you play The Temple of Prismos and want to share any thoughts or feedback you have from playing, feel free to drop me a line!

I’m aiming to launch a crowdfunding campaign for Oracle sometime this summer, and if you want to support my work and help The Prismatic Oracle and all my other crazy ideas become physical realities, you can follow the Kickstarter pre-launch page here!

I still have a kind of romantic notion of crowdfunding as a way to make art without depending on gatekeepers or corporations, and while I know that’s not exactly true, I find real satisfaction from the fact that it is backers, people who are actually reading my work, playing my games, finding beauty in my art, who make it possible for me to create what I create. Retrograde and Ephemeris could not exist without y’all, and I’m immensely grateful to the folks who continue to support my work and want to play the weird, beautiful, ink-stained games I make. 

A Full Month

Life has really been happening this past month and a half. Right now, all’s well, but some medical situations in my family were squarely my focus. Things are looking okay for everyone right now, which I’m immensely grateful for, and I feel really lucky that my work is pretty flexible and allows me to give what I’m able to give. A truth I feel lucky to know is that the people I love are the most important part of my life, and I’m happy to say that they’re doing a lot better now.

Some things fell by the wayside last month, but I’m doing my best to right the ship and get things moving again. Fulfilling Ephemeris took longer than I hoped, but all pledges are now in the mail, and all backers should have their games in hand by the end of the month. The weekly blog also slipped away from me, but here I am trying to get it back in gear! I’m also finding my footing with getting back into the swing of creative work and the nuts and bolts of making and crowdfunding RPGs, especially wrestling the dragon that is social media. Ugh. It’ll get easier someday.

I also had some big wins this past month that I’m really grateful for: I completed a big riso job printing the Beefy Shotgun Wizards Quickshot: Yearbook Addition (go follow their pre-launch page!), printed more Retrograde Player’s Manuals, and had a great time talking about Retrograde and Ephemeris with folks at the Appleton Eclectic Market and Print & Resist. Life keeps happening, but life feels full, and I’m trying to roll with that and find as much of the good stuff as I can. 

Prismatic Oracle will be front of mind these next few weeks, but I’ll also be working on riso club projects, prepping for The Big Gay Pride Market and some local game designer’s meetups, and generally knocking things off my to-do lists and getting up to good mischief. As always, thanks for reading, and I’m eager to share how the work ahead unfolds.

– Zosimos