There was a soft launch of A Looking Glass Jukebox at Chaosium Con in Melbourne. A Looking Glass Jukebox is not a Chaosium product; however, it was supported by Chaosium as it was one of ten finalists out of 190 entries in their global Basic Role-Playing (BRP) Design Challenge. Also at the convention, Sam Robson, whose game A Season of Magic is about good witches, was one of the BRP Design Challenge winners.

I ran two sessions of “Nude at Surf Beach”, and was in a panel discussion on using the BRP system. The BRP system is the underlying rules system used by RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and other Chaosium games. Using this percentile-based system means it is an easy-to-learn, robust, and well-tested system on which I could build my game.

In one of the sessions I ran, I met and was subsequently interviewed by the team from The Tuesday Review. They are a local group that reviews movies and games. They describe their experiences of the convention and playing my game in their podcast. They also interviewed me for their YouTube channel. And they volunteered to conduct additional playtesting of the game. So many thanks to them for all that.

The wisdom of my Wednesday role-playing group is that you need to play or GM a game about six times before you are entirely comfortable with the rules. I saw another BRP finalist advertising their game as having over 40 hours of test play; I’d like to have a lot more than that before releasing a game to the public. Test playing for A Looking Glass Jukebox has only just approached half of that, so there will be a lot more to come.

I was doing more playtesting with my Wednesday night group this week. Playtesting is harder than normal GMing because I don’t know what the rules are; I just wrote them… revised them… rewrote them… revised them again…