Gamenomicon
Explorer
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all!
We here at Gamenomicon are very excited to announce a new project, Warmer in the Winter.
Sometimes inspiration may strike you in the strangest of places. That's certainly what happened with this project. My wife and I were snuggled up at home watching some variety of cheesy Christmas romance movie. There are many and I certainly couldn't tell you which one, but it may have included a prince, or an angel, or a quirky best friend. But I can tell you that we had the house lights off, the Christmas lights on, a cup of warm tea, some holiday baked treats and an all around cozy experience.
And then it happened. That flash of an idea. This is a great feeling - is there a way to recreate that in a game? My brain started spinning thinking about rulesets that might be able to tailor that type of experience. I pondered Apocalypse World and Powered by the Apocalypse (great stuff, look them up) and the mental chuckle of a Christmas game Powered by the Apocalypse was too good to pass up. Plus, it's a great system for evoking very specific styles.
So I hopped up and grabbed pen and paper so I could start jotting down ideas while the movie still played. I'm sure my wife wasn't terribly enthused about the disruption, but she could tell that I was really into an idea. Soon she was helping me kick around different character archetypes from these types of movies that would make for good playbooks.
Soon I was researching different PbtA games for additional ideas. huge thanks in that case, to Avery Alder's Monsterhearts and Simple World. I was in a rush to try to get this sucker out before Christmas so on I went. At the moment, this is in many ways a quick and dirty hack of Monsterhearts by way of Simple World, and for now I'm ok with it. It's done in time to get it out to you all before Christmas and it gives me the opportunity to create the delightful moniker of "Powered by the Heart" as a nice little pun.
I think there's still room to tweak, develop, and grow this game, but even now, I think it's capable of some fun stuff. Enjoy, and I'm looking forward to feedback.
-Will Lentz
Available on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io.
