One of my favourite expansion to the PTTR full book is the lore section. I say 'lore section', it's actual title is: 

That's write. I wrote a faux-academic paper by an in-world academic in the field of parapsychology. It's about 7000 words long, so chunky but not too chunky, and it follows Dr Xiuying Yu of the Bureau of Perceptual Studies at the the University of Tolouse, as she interviews three very old vampires about their lives and movement's through history.


What makes good lore? I think it's three things to watch out for.

If there is a lot of lore, it needs to be optional. For previous SoulMuppet games, I've not written dedicated lore or world-building sections, preferring to use my characters or mechanics to tell the stories I need to. You don't NEED to read this section to play Paint The Town Red. You can get by literally just using the Player's Guide at the start of the game, which tells you everything you need to know in five bullet points.

It needs to be interesting to read. If we're asking our GMs and veteran players to opt into reading this, there needs to be a reward. The lore cannot feel encylopedic.  For Diaspore, I've presented it a novel way, specifically an in-world artifact. I did everything I could to make it entertaining to read: a clear sense of voice, multiple perspectives from different interview subjects, secrets woven into the paragraphs, weave in easter eggs from all the adventures and hidden meanings to certain sections.

It needs to be incomplete. You cannot hope to present every aspect of an RPG world inside a book, however large that book is. You job is to provide information that allows future storytelling to bloom out of what it leaves behind in the readers skull. The role of lore is to provide answers but also to ask more questions of the reader. It needs to both allow and demand play. Lore should be empowering, not deabilitating.

Our three vampires are The Meliphonist, a Iberian Gaul who claims to have invented beekeeper, Alicia Fortwith, an Ancient Greek inventor turned businesswoman, and Kwizera Alderon, an impossibly old African(?) vampire with a variety of guises and roles. We follow them through antiquity, the birth of the first Necropolis in Rome, the abandonment of Europe in the "Dark Ages", then the medieval period and renaissance, and finally explain how vampires exist in modern times.

What else is happening in PTTR land? Well, I did a whole load of interviews.

I sat down with Science and Sorcery for their A Moment Of Awesome series, and talked about setting games in the real world, good use of lore and much more. If you enjoyed the update above, then this is the interview to listen to.

I had a mammoth hour and 44 minute interview on Weird Games and Weirder People. I spoke with Diogo about how we make games, influences on my games design from wargaming (and vice versa), manuscript information theory and tarot cards. This is the longest interview I've ever done and we go into the freakin' WEEDS. I'll recommend checking it out if you like your interviews LONG.

I also appeared on NotD&D with Jess from ENWorld. It's been my third or fourth time on the show, and Jess is a great interview with a really good insight on making games. Give it a listen too!

Episode 3 of OneShot, Paint The Town Red came out yesterday! The thrilling finale of the series is avaliable wherever you get your podcasts. Bad news is, their actions are finally about to catch up with them. It can only go downhill from here. 

Just 2 days left on the project? That means 2 days until our next episode of IT NEVER SLEEPS from MyFirstDungeon. Keep your eyes peeled for when it comes out on Thursday. 

We're nearly nearly done with this project. Thank you so so much for your support, we really appreciate it. Please share the project far and wide across the internet so we can blast through those final goals and finish on a high note. 

Thanks 

Zach

A massive thank you to everyone who has supported us so far, we've funded the project which means we’re able to create a beautiful core book for Paint The Town Red, complete with more adventures throughout history, expanded undead character creation and weird magic. 

We would love to be able to hit all the fantastic stretch goals we had planned, but we have discussed as a team and being realistic we need to readjust our expectations. 

This means we are going to be removing and changing the price points of some of our stretch goals. 

At 30k, our art director Johan Nohr will design us a GM screen that will be included in pledges above £100 GBP, or you can grab as an add-on to the campaign at a lower pledge level. 

At 35k, we’ll add a solo supplement for PTTR called MOURNING AFTER. Elliot Davis is returning from his work on Orbital Blues: The Wanderer, to write a solo game that takes a zoomed-in look at a sad gay vampire’s bad fucking night. With a RED marker or pen in hand, you will literally paint the town red as you recover your disastrous memories of the night before. This will be a free digital add-on, and the physical copy will be added as a paid add-on for the project and pledge manager.

At 40k, we’ll add the edge papers and upgrade physical core book with delicious, blood-red edgepapers to stands out on your shelf.

Please help us to hit these exciting stretch goals by  upgrading your pledge and maybe  grabbing some addons, as well as sharing the project with your friends. We’ve done our best to make sure we’re adding a little something for everyone! 

Storytelling continues in the newest episodes of the PTTR actual plays on the podcast-sphere. 

The second episode of My First Dungeon’s campaign of IT NEVER SLEEPS is out now! Our characters have ended up at a very fancy party hosted by Margino and Bane Advertising. You might recognise the name Antonio Margino if you’ve read the quickstart, as he is a Fagin-like criminal mastermind and theatre producer in A Modern Babylon, but 40 years later he has ended up a Madison Avenue Party executive. It’s safe to say that bad things are abound for Drak’s character, Cain. 

The folx from My First Dungeon really GET this game and we’ve been enjoying the adventure so much. Mol made a spoilers without context post that we thought we’d share with the class.

We’ve also had the second episode of the One Shot podcast, where our trio of Roman vampires have been enjoying the Saeculum. This party of messy, weird little guys are really embodying what it means to be a vampire and it’s also dead worth a listen! 

Check both of these out wherever you get your podcasts and tell ‘em SoulMuppet sent you! 

We'll be back soon with more to share! I'm planning to write a post about LORE this week and how we're doing it in PTTR. 

Thanks 

Zach

We’re so so nearly funded on Paint The Town Red, and we have exciting updates for you! Just a few hundred quid more to get us over the line. 

First up, I did an interview with Alex from Wait, Roll That Again. In this incredibly tightly edited interview we cover everything from iterative design, playtesting, the creation and themes of Paint The Town Red, and both pass on a bunch of advice to any creators looking to make their own RPGs. This is a fantastic 32 minutes of chat that I really enjoyed and I think you will too!

Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or head here. 

If you want to interview me (Zach) on stream or on a podcast, drop me an email to [email protected]. I love talking about this game, and chatting in general. 

Like Orbital Blues and Best Left Buried, Paint The Town Red is going to have an expansive community license that allows you to make your own adventures. 

One of our playtesters, the incredible Attus, has already put together their own adventure. But it’s not just one adventure, it’s actually THREE, all set in the same city: Stockholm. Welcome to Paint Stockholm Red. 

In Forging a Kingdom, you arrive in town shortly after a successful uprising by the new Swedish king in 1523, just in time to celebrate the start of a new era for the living and dead alike.

In A Grand Theatre you return in 1783, at the height of the power of the Theatre King as he is transforming the town into a European centre of culture. From behind the throne, the vampiric Shadow King is proclaiming his city a safe haven for the dead, calling all to join him in his undead capital.

Lastly, in The Plutonian Games, Stockholm is in 1912 host to the Olympic Games, and the dead is at night hosting their own violent counterpart. Join in the games, or just enjoy the carnage and debauchery in its wake.

Attus was a playtester for some of the advanced mechanics in PTTR, such as city generation, moving in between cities and all of the playtest adventures. With access to the playtesting materials, they’ve been able to weave the Factions and Contacts from our existing adventures into Paint Stockholm Red, so this adventure is actually a great opportunity to meet some of the characters from the official adventures before the game goes to general release. 

The important thing about the Best Left Buried and Orbital Blues licences is that they technically prohibit you from using stuff from the setting of those games in your own 3rd party work. Really, if the Duchy of Torre or the Parazzo Family shouldn’t appear in your 3rd party adventures for those systems. With Paint The Town Red however, we want you to mix in these iconic characters into your own adventures and continue the mythos, and we’ve set up the writing of the game from the outset to encourage this and foster the interconnectivity of our universe.  

If you want to make some in PTTR adventures of your own, drop me an email to [email protected]. I’ll share the license terms with you, and also tease characters or locations from some of the future adventures if there are specific things you need! 

As for Paint Stockholm Red, please support this third party adventure and grab it on Itch. If enough people buy it, we might print it and offer it as a add-on on the project. 

You might have listened to SuperDillin playing party animal Minnie in the My First Dungeon campaign of Paint The Town Red, but now they’re GMing their own game of PTTR on the OneShot Podcast. 

Dillin is running another official adventure, Party of the Century. So our three vampires have been unleashed on our Ancient Rome adventure from the core book! Our guest stars are ZakTheDrak, Sarah Chaffee and Breeedo, and I have been promised that they ‘partied hard and suffered BIG at the end.'

Dillin absolutely *gets* PTTR and I’m so excited to see them GM this amazing game. It comes out tomorrow on Monday, so go check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to run an actual play of PTTR with one of our unreleased adventure, drop an email to [email protected] and we'll sort you out with some preview material and whatever assets you need!

I’ll be back next week with some information about our Edo adventure. 

Thanks, 

Zach

Paint The Town Red is played over an extremely long period of time. At its purest, the game is played in a few short arcs in a given city. You players arrive in a city, Paint The Town Red, then render it uninhabitable due to struggles with factions and when one city is finished you pass on a few hundred years to the next. 

This means we can zoom out over a long period of time to see how our characters change. As they journey through time, they can fit into new roles in society, develop new Passions, become new types of undead, change their name or even completely reinvent themselves. It’s fascinating to see them move through time and have their characteristics shift over hundreds or even thousands of years. The core book contains a whole set of procedures for mapping what happens to your characters over the centuries between cities, which we call The Full Weight of Time. 

Thankfully, the characters around them are going to change too! Each Paint The Town Red adventure contains about 50 NPC, 12 sets of 2 Contacts plus 4 characters in each of the 6 Factions. While a lot of these change, it is absolutely fascinating to see how returning characters can repeat and change between adventures, kind of like recurring characters in a television show. What might this mean in our game? Let’s take a look at Pasco. 

Pasco first shows up in Ancient Rome. They’re a charming yet revolting creatures who enjoys scaring people via delightful costume and tall tales. Their shit is inventing monsters and scaring people with them. They boast they invented half of the world’s mythology. They’re essentially a modern drag queen/king/thing, transported through thousands of years of history. 

They begin their story in Greece, but then they move onto Rome. Here is their entry in Party of the Century:

5A: Pasco (Devious, Shrivelled, Unsettling) 

A little freak who boasts of scaring the daylights out of generations of Greeks. Through delightful costuming they originated the myths of monsters across the Aegean: cyclops, medusae, harpies, satyrs. They are in Rome for a PARTY and are firmly back on their bullshit.

Jobs

Spook the everloving daylights of some poor mortal

Help them make a costume for a new monster

Deal with Phros a Greek Hunter chasing them  

Rewards

Scare someone to death for you 

Help you invent a new and fanciful tale

Tailor you a costume, preferably a monster one but they can do normal stuff

We see him then, roughly 800 years later in Hair of the Dog. He’s not really changed that much. He’s moved on to stock Germanic myths, dragons and valkyries, and a different hunter is chasing him around, but he’s really not changed that much. He even has the same descriptors! He has chosen a new set of pronouns though. 

6B: Pasco (Devious, Shrivelled, Unsettling) 

A little freak who boasts of scaring the daylights out of generations of mortals. Through delightful costuming he originated the myths of monsters across the Mediterranean. He’s having more trouble with Germanic myths; his dragon outfit is hard to move around in, and valkyries are awkward. He can’t really fly. 

Jobs

Spook the everloving daylights of some poor mortal

Help him make a costume for a new monster

A mortal pastor, Albus, is convincing locals to go “monster hunting”. Deal with him! 

Rewards

Scare someone to death for you 

Help you invent a new and fanciful tale

Tailor you a costume, preferably a monster one but he can do normal stuff

I wrote both of these, but the most fun is seeing different writers taking a crack at it. We’ve been working hard on collaborating with all the different monsters and creators, and cross pollinating them between the adventures. 1100 years later, our fellow Pasco has made it to Germany and then New York in IT NEVER SLEEPS. They’re a professional costumer and aspiring actor now. They did Nosferatu! 

3a. Pasco (Smarmy, Unsettling, Decaying)

A little freak who is positively feasting on the combined mythologies of a new nation. For more than three-thousand years, they have developed a costuming skill beyond any mortal which they use to inspire society’s fears and imagination. Pasco has been getting consistent work in the new world of film and will talk your ear off about the Nosferatu costume they created while in Germany.

Jobs:

Share a legend or myth from one of the immigrant communities of NYC

Scare the pants off of a newly arrived mortal 

Seed a story about one of their monsters to the mortal press

Rewards:

A truly scary fucking costume

The head of F. Scott Fitzgerald, known vampire hunter

Help you invent a new American legend

Look at him go! A completely different character, into the same things thousands of years later, but with a fun twist by his new location.

There’s dozens and dozens of characters spread across the vampiric adventures and there’s more to come. PTTR is going to have an expansive community license, and I want to know what you all think Pasco would have been up in the interim… Perhaps the first PTTR third party adventure will reveal some secrets of his origins? Maybe we’ll even tell you how Dracula fits into our story! 

My favourite bit of the Full Weight of Time are the Memories. There are slots on your characters sheets for six core Memories of the city you were just in. They form a set of requests for the GM about what characters you PCs want to see again. If Pasco appears ass someone’s “Joy: What moment was your emotional high?” and another character’s “Hatred: What was the character you hated the most?”, then the GM knows to bring them back later in the campaign. Each city, you can keep your Memories or replace them with new ones, keeping it clear for your GM what you want to see in future games. 

Well that’s enough about that… Let’s chat soon, share the project, and if y’all like this I can share more fun NPC stories. 

Thanks, 

Zach