A new game from Radio James Games coming in 2024
There’s always half a dozen major TTRPG projects in various stages of development all around my office (which is the corner of a very busy living room) here at Radio James Games. The Kickstarter for Solo Martial Blues is still going on and growing in power all the time, but in the meantime let’s check out a very special game planned for mid-2024: The Psychic Danger Society.
What is it?
Presenting The Psychic Danger Society, a table-top role-playing game of mystery, psychic prediction, community, and tea. Come, spend a little time in Beaumontcamp, a small town secretly protected by a group of community-minded ladies. As the Psychic Danger Society they keep their neighbours safe from any and all danger...even if that makes the danger worse, and more fantastic. Little Timmy didn't fall on his bike, but now a monster stalks the forest. What is the Society to do? The little town of Beaumontcamp is now in your hands...
How is it different from other TTRPGs like it?
Many of my projects start by being excited by someone else’s TTRPG project but dissatisfied with how it turned out. I cast no shade on other TTRPGs, but I wanted to do something cozier (if I can port that term over from video games) than what was out there already. The Psychic Danger Society is about charming little old ladies solving mysteries, yes, and if we can make that into an entire TTRPG subgenre I’d be extremely happy.
The real hook to this game is mechanical—they’re psychic little old ladies, so, you roll their pool of “prediction dice” at the beginning of the night during a seance, and then use those dice results throughout the game session to solve all the problems that crop up.
Tied into it is a pretty nifty small town setting whereby the Society has been protecting the town perhaps a little too much, and the town has a kind of karmic debt, which is a shameless excuse for your mysteries to start small and ordinary, but as you fail cases (which will happen) they become increasingly supernatural. The night may have started with young Jamal slipping on his skateboard and breaking a tooth, but now the problem is the new mayoral candidate is secretly a vampire. Only you, little old ladies, can save your town!
Why did I do this thing?
I wanted to do something small and charming that reminded me of watching inoffensive murder mysteries growing up, like Murder, She Wrote, but with a kooky psychic bent.
I’m so pleased with how The Psychic Danger Society turned out that I can’t even comfortably take credit for it—it just feels like it happened that way, like it was destiny! The marriage of setting and mechanics is truly satisfying and makes the system very tight (the thing is only 40 pages, so far...) and an easy springboard into play.
The art is great. I’ve been looking for a project for my talented art friend Jamie Campbell for almost as long as I’ve known her, and this was right up her alley.
So, to answer the question—I did this one because it’s special. It was destined? It caught me with how charming it was as an idea, and that spell has not washed off me the entire development process.
I want everyone to enjoy The Psychic Danger Society as much as I do.
What’s the plan, Stan?
This one’ll go to Kickstarter mid-year, with enough time before Gen Con. This’ probably a bigger one at maybe $3,000 or more, because I’d really like to do a print run and get this out to distributors. I'm debating if I should skip Print on Demand as a format and go straight to a print run, but that's riskier than I usually like things to be. See—this is why I don't start marketing things until they're already done, because I focus too much on the game, and then get caught with how to market the darn, beloved thing.
That’s it for this week. Please stay tuned (in as much as you can tune dials on the Internet) for next week’s preview, which is the last of this set.
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind everyone that if you’re especially jazzed about the 2024 Radio James Games release slate, I’m toying with a subscription model on Patreon. You subscribe monthly, you get all games at cost. I think it’s a nifty idea for a publishing house like myself that publishes a lot of games.
See you next week.
James Kerr