Into the Portal #2

One month down! Into the Portal is finally starting to feel real, as we start to refeature the best of the old blog and start in on drafting some entirely new pieces, too. In case you missed them, our posts since last check-in:

• We dropped a new post on The 100 Ideas Challenge, an exercise I examined in early posts on the old blog.
• We refeatured a slightly updated The Creative Self Check-In, still possibly the most important exercise I've built into my ongoing creative practice.
• We reintroduced The Markus Project, and refeatured the first post in the series. Refeatures of parts two and three are in the works - and an all-new part four is well on its way as well!

What's coming up here at Into the Portal? We've got the aforementioned Markus Project #4 in the works, as well as public and subscriber-only versions of a post laying out Portalier Press' slate of TTRPGs in development. We have some really fun games cooking, so that's one to absolutely check out... and the subscriber-only one has a lot more of our early-stage projects on it, so it might be worth subscribing to see.

Development on our games has been a little soft this past month, with plenty of projects needing attention on our busy weekends and evenings. Our main priority has been getting this place properly up on its feet, as it will be our hub as we develop and release new projects. That's meant releasing the posts linked above, as well as getting some new ones in order.

Beyond our work here on Into the Portal, we:

• Did some work on character creation for two in-development TTRPGs, supernatural historical Unbecoming and horror Unwelcome. (The similar names are a coincidence. No, I don't want to change either name. Yes, it's giving me a little heartburn.)
  
• Took a second look at Junker's Peace, and realized we're underserving two key parts of the sci-fi Stardew Valley genre fantasy: farming and the 'village' of NPCs for you to develop relationships with. We're currently working out how systems for these elements might fit into the whole, before we dive into earnestly playtesting the game.
  
• Put out a call for research sources out on Bluesky for an untitled epistolary combat TTRPG we're kicking around at the concept stage, and received some fantastic suggestions to pursue. (Thanks to everyone who suggested some sources for us to look into!) We've acquired a few of the suggested texts, and I'm looking forward to spending some time luxuriating in historical letters from poisonous pens.
  
• Made a thing! I cobbled together a beta draft of a small TTRPG called The Station, based on a handful of sci-fi genre archetypes like the Paragon and Renegade from Mass Effect, and the lawful outlier and 'off-kilter' weirdo (usually an alien) in a lot of sci-fi series. It's a character-centric TTRPG about a spaceship crew coming together to solve problems... if they aren't sunk by their trust issues, character flaws and different perspectives. Inspired by the evocative character-centric narrative choices in games like Sleepaway and Wickedness, it's intended to really lean on narrative character and relationship development. While the game itself is fairly pedestrian, I really loved building the playbooks and trying to evoke these genre archetypes I've seen, and loved, in so many works.
  
  It's purposefully a cobbled-together draft, utterly unreviewed and unplaytested, as part of my personal challenge to complete and release more projects. I may continue revising it, if it seems like there's a there there, or merely strip it for the parts I like down the road.

We're really still in a 'getting our feet under us' stage, both as a newsletter/blog and as a company. It's exciting to be taking Portalier Press seriously, and hopefully the next year will show people exactly what types of games we mean to make, and what we mean to become.

Over the past month, my physical TTRPG shelves have continued to grow, mostly via two arrived online orders: one, of Wanderhome (which I have wanted to own for a good while now) and slim time-loop TTRPG Thursday; the other, an order of (mostly) solo TTRPGs A Visit to San Sibilia, I Bury the Gods, Spirals and Expedition Log. Beyond those, some crowdfunded books arrived: 52 Pickup, Knight Forlorn, Underneath, and Crucible.

In terms of reading, I've actually made significant progress on reading my way through a number of exciting TTRPGs, including Pallas, Household, Daggerheart and DIE RPG! Pallas, in particular, is a fascinating game I'm excited to see more from. I also read through A Visit to San Sibilia, a bittersweet solo game of spending a brief, but potent, time in a strange liminal city. It seems like a fantastic candidate for when I finally start doing some solo TTRPG playthroughs.

"The Storyteller Technique" [Possum Creek Games]: Wanderhome and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast designer Jay Dragon discusses how to empower writing a TTRPG by subtly telling it in the voice of a character who might belong in your world. This seems like a really clever way to weave tone and point of view throughout your text while still keeping it focused and approachable, and preventing the text from feeling too clinical or detached.

"What is concept art?" [Creative Bloq]: An examination on how concept art is designed for video games, and how concept artists work.

"Amberspire Design Diary #17: Micro and Macro History" [Lunar Division]: A look at macro history vs. micro history (specifically in the development of Amberspire), and how storytelling can interweave the two in potent and interesting ways. A great way of thinking about setting, whether you're developing a video game, a TTRPG, etc.

"Plus One Exp's Brandfox Saga" [Rascal]: A deep dive feature into the woes of TTRPG publisher Plus One Experience getting tangled up with a problematic publishing and sales logistics company. This feature is a reminder that designing and releasing a game isn't the whole process: if you mean to release a physical game, that means printing, sales, and logistics, and that it can be a more fraught and complicated process than you expect.