I just remembered I didn’t actually post about releasing another quick storygame zine! (I Must Remain) The Glad Cowboy is a storygame where one player plays a Glad Cowboy and the other player plays The Repressed Horror At The Thing They Did. It’s about stuff.
You can get it here. It’s pay what you want, but really, pay nothing.
As I did this last time, let’s include the Designer Notes.
DESIGNER NOTES
I was thinking about the lovely Soulmuppet games’ love of trope-but-sad games – Orbital Blues (the sad space cowboy game), Paint the Town Red(the sad vampire game) and Inevitable (the sad knight-cowboy game).
Why does no-one do “trope-but-glad” games?
The idea of spark tables of why life is great hit me, and struck me as funny. I wrote three table titles and then promptly had the piece of paper idea.
It’s a very pure example of my aesthetic that when I try to imagine a happy cowboy game, within three sentences, I’ve conceived of a mechanic where players are trying to resist looking in an envelope full of The Awful Thing That You Did.
Just to say it, just so you know I know, while it was conceived as I describe, the second you have a cowboy trying to not think of what you’ve done, it’s clearly about something else.
Dedicated to Comrade Rossignol, who suggested the pass-the-parcel multiplayer mode.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.