Into the Portal #4

Spring is, on a technicality, here!

I find few things as exhausting as the dredges of winter. My creative energy hibernates with the bears, it seems, and my productivity takes a real hit. All that to say, I am exceedingly happy to see spring tentatively arriving, with summer on its heels. I have so many things I want to make, and I am tired of operating at half-capacity.

So, what have the last couple months looked like for Portalier Press? And what comes next?

Portalier Press' Summer 2026 Playtesting Packet

The work has begun preparing for our next playtesting packet! With our previous packet dropping last November, we didn't want to sit on our heels too long before planning a follow-up, and summer seems like the perfect time.

The first step was looking at our slate and seeing which games we want to polish up over the next few months. While I wouldn't want to talk too much about games that are currently early in the development process, one that feels like a slam dunk candidate is Eternal, familiar to anyone who read our last slate. The rules are drafted, roughly, and just need fleshing out and polishing before inclusion in the next packet.

I'll be playtesting games from our first packet in April, which should give us some insight we can use to write V2 drafts of at least one or two games in time for the summer packet. And in a perfect world, one or two of those games already play really well, and can be released publicly with some tweaks... but we'll see if we're that lucky.

The last game that currently feels like a sure thing for the packet is new. That is to say, I'd like to tell y'all about...

Court of Vipers

We have a new micro-TTRPG on the slate! The basic premise and mechanics struck me one night a few weeks ago, and I furiously jotted them down in my Notes app. Court of Vipers is a GMless game of paranoia and social maneuvering, with each player controlling multiple simple characters, each looking to destroy their social enemies.

I've got a playable draft of this one that's out to its first reader now. Unless I find some fatal flaws in its construction between now and midsummer, I imagine this one will definitely be joining our summer packet.

Other Development

With some major non-TTRPG projects devouring my writing time these last couple weeks, progress has been slow on our big bet games - Devil's Hollow, Junker's Peace, etc. But I've found some time to keep cooking on our smaller morsels, like the above, and also:

• Become, something new: We dropped Become, our entry into the 48-word game jam, back in January. While that game was a complete entity, there's something intriguing about what its central mechanics might look like in a more fulsome game. So I've prodded a little at that and made some development notes; we'll see if that work bears any fruit.
  
• You're going to kill me yesterday, aren't you?: One of the first TTRPGs I ever drafted was one called Time Travel Murder Mystery, created alongside the very first drafts of Story Builders and Gilded Blades and the inspiration, mechanically, for The Box. It was incoherent, unsure of its identity, and pretty much unplayable. But I still love the concept, and have learned a lot in the five years or so since I wrote that first messy draft. Taking cues from games like Project ECCO and Brindlewood Bay, and mechanics I'd not yet encountered originally such as dice stacking, I've got some notes for how I could build this into something very, very strange.
  
• Take the Low Road: I love TTRPG jams. I am an adherent to the 'make a bunch of smaller games before you make a big game, and then keep making them' school of philosophy, and jams slip into that perfectly. Reflections in a Dying World and Become both came out of jams, as well. The next jam I am dyyyyying to submit to is the you cannot play this TTRPG jam, where you submit a portion of a game that does not, and will not ever, fully exist. I'm cooking on an set of character classes for an experimental TTRPG (tentatively called High Road, Low Road) that play with the idea of rewards and advancement in a way that fascinates and discomfits me. It's a game that I am very glad I am not releasing a full version of, because I don't think anyone should ever play it.

So, that's where we're at! Over the next few months, the plan is to get our summer packet ready. and maybe even get a playtestable draft of Devil's Hollow together for folks to take a look at. Until then, I'll be dreaming of sun and melting snow...