So, the #WeirdTalesGameJam is over, and now I have a free PDF on itch.io that anyone can access and download. Let's talk about this.

I'm a total amateur on the RPG design sphere, but when I saw Baron de Ropp announce the jam, something sparked on me. The three covers that I got randomly assigned include two that were a little too risquè for modern audiences, but the third one featured strange creatures on a night sky featuring a few moons.

That was it. Shadowdark was about darkness, and strange creatures in the middle of the night? Great. The moon was my "excuse". But I wanted a way to make it happen suddenly and to make the players know the moon was what triggered the event. An eclipse! But not any eclipse, an eclipse that was not meant to be. The creatures were to use this to spread chaos.

I remembered a game I played not long ago, Puzzle Agent (and Puzzle Agent 2), and how it have red gnomes doing crazy things in a town. The idea of a blue and orange morality, a hidden agenda that cannot be grasped by common folk, came to mind. Now, to the first draft.

The first draft had six "scenes" that I called Major Mischiefs and a d20 table with 20 Minor Mischiefs, with a monster stat for the moonfolk. The relative short period for the jam and my erratic free time, alongside my fear of nothing finishing up in time, made me cut to four Major Mischiefs and a d10 table of Minor Mischiefs, with the moonfolk being just a refluffed Will-O'-Wisp. With the error of duplicating one of the d10 entries. Poor Carl...

Few things I've wanted and accomplished was:

1. Take the cover and make the necessary modifications. I picked the low-res cover and upscaled it in a site, cleaned up um GIMP and added the text using fontwork from LibreOffice. What leads to my second accomplishment:

2. FOSS and CC. Everything in the PDF, from the software used to the images and typefaces were free-to-use. Credit was done.

3. Got in the 50% best rated. In the end there was 120 entries to the jam and sorting by the most ranked I got in the 34th position. That was great.

I even got some other designers to comment. They spent their time to write, and I'm humbled by that. And they did pointed out few problems:

1. The PDf felt more like a proof-of-concept than a true supplement. The small number of pages and the font size did not contributed.

2. Some scenes felt disconnected to the concept. Sure, this means that a DM can adapt to their game without using the moonfolk, but some scenes could use more of their alien motives to crank up the weirdness.

3. I felt that I left the dark in the background and not included it as a side gimmick to the lunatics (codename for the moonfolk) main gimmick.

Aside from that, it was great to participate and I hope you who read this to the end can enjoy the PDF and build on it to bring the moonfolk to your table. If so, share your stories about how your players faced they who came from the Moon!