Blackwell Games - Maker of fine titterpigs

@annablackwell.bsky.social

2134 Followers 628 Following

Creator of DELVE, Apothecaria, and other popular solo role-playing games. Find my games at https://www.blackwellwriter.com/

Annas amazon package hiding in the recycling bin along with some other crap
A classic star trek opening credit scene with the title card reading For Small Creatures Such As We. The USS Enterprise is orbiting a strange green and purple planet.
A mouse helps splint a weaver bird's injured wing in front of its nest. The text reads: Apawthecaria. New Stock Incoming! pre-order now from: Blackwell Games Blackwellwriter.com
A cartoony picture of a blonde woman wearing old fashioned clothes and carrying a green typewriter on a shoulderstrap. She has a chubby dedenne on her hand who is wearing a fedora. Her hair is messy, as if electroctued and she has a pen behind her ear. She is a pokemon trainer and has several pokeball motifs in her design. The background is a large pokeball.
A picture of a paper plate and the bottom of an irn bru pallett being used as a journal to play Death Road Services. Anna's handwriting is nearly illegible anyway but can be assumed to be a hilarious story of post-apocalyptic nonsense.
A cheerful poster telling people to learn to make a guillotine for historical reasons. It features a guillotine at a jaunty angle on a colourful retro sunrise background.
SEX • What biological challenges do you face if you have sex with one of your Crewmates? What solutions do you or they propose? • What does your date’s reproductive organ(s) look like? What other senses does it trigger? • How does your date’s culture view sexual activity? Is it taboo? Celebrated? Does it require any sort of ritual – like marriage – before it is allowed? • How do they show pleasure during sex? How do they show arousal before? • How similar is our understanding of sex to theirs? Do they have familiar reproductive organ(s) or do they have another way of stimulating each other? SEXUALITY • How do your Crewmates view homo- hetero- bi- or pan- sexuality? • How do your Crewmates’ cultures or biologies affect their kinks? • How do your Crewmates view relationships? Are they monogamous, polygamous, etc? How do they view interspecies relationships? REPRODUCTION • How do your Crewmates reproduce? What is their attitude to this process? • Is hybridisation across species possible? Like Mr Spock. SEXUAL HEALTH • Are there any sexually transmittable diseases between species that you need to be careful of? • How do you/ your date protect from harm during sex? • What sort of contraceptive is recommended for use with your date?
Sex is an integral part of the human experience. You don’t get more humans without it. The reason this expansion exists is to promote discussions about love and sex, to get you thinking about your alien crewmate’s relationship to relationships. And as much as it might be awkward to discuss, it is about getting you to think about sex in a healthy and positive way. If you want to write an erotic encounter with one of your Crewmates or a date you’ve met through your travels then I give you express permission to do so. That is a much better use of your writing talent than describing how orc#787 gets his throat slit. If you would rather keep it clean and academic then that’s alright as well. The key point in all this is consent and I have done my best to ensure that the sexual content that you encounter in this expansion is optional and does not presume anything about your involvement. With that in mind, here are some optional prompts to help you think about the wide spectrum of sex, sexuality, and sexual health that can be used to bring even more depth to your stories.
There were a lot of times during the creation of this expansion that I had to stop and carefully think about what I was writing. I had to consider; would including discussions of kinks and fetishes or discussing sex workers mean that this expansion would be blacklisted from certain retailers? Would making a game that dives into discussions of sex be seen as somehow immoral or cheapening myself as a creator? Would I get cancelled by people going out of their way to take this book in the worst possible ways? Sex is a whole lot better than violence and yet we enthusiastically expose ourselves to the latter in every possible medium. So many RPGs give you not just permission to bash someone’s brains out but rules and mechanics on exactly how to do so and yet sex remains the taboo subject. I can open up Netflix and be shown trailers for horror films where someone is being burned alive but the BBFC would have a fit if Netflix showed me an erect penis. We are made to be ashamed of our sexual interests and our desire to see, discuss, or take part in sexual activity while videogames that glorify military violence and warcrimes are plastered on bus stops, billboards, and Youtube ads. Fuck that.
Screenshot of the itch.io popular physical games storefront showing Anna's games Apothecaria (2nd), Apawthecaria (5th), DELVE (6th), and For Small Creatures Such As We (7th) ahead of Rowan Rook & Decards eternally popular Honey Heist (8th)
Anna in a white monster costume on 4 stilts. The costume looks to be made of old bedsheets and rags and has a fox skull as a head.
Text for a Death Road Services Event, 2♦ - Some mutant is drinking all the petrol! Can’t run the risk of shooting or hittin’ it in case it blows up so you’ll have to wrestle it. Draw a Card for each of you. Highest result wins. If you Lose, Lose 1D6 Bitz to replace the lost petrol. How does it go? If it survives, where does it run off to?
An angled shot of the Golf Quest book. It is A4, spirobound and features four of the holes in angled cutouts. A tentacle, large mushrooms, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and strange eyeball monsters are visible.
A copy of For Small Creatures Such As We sits open on a galaxy themed bedsheet. It shows the planet spread page for Ruin, a desert world with strange ceramic structures emerging from the sand. Two squat aliens work on machinery above a sci-fi HUD like page which details the planet info and various important details for players to know.
Screenshot from Tabletop Gaming Magazine: Play it? Must-Play There is something so effortlessly simple and yet varied about For Small Creatures Such As We, that it has to be experienced in all of its randomness and uncertainty. Its accessibility is unmatched and its sci-fi influences are stellar.
A brown haired werewolf woman crouches in the middle of a stony temple and shos a broken goblet to her white haired vampire partner. They are smiling at each other and are dressed anachronistically for what feels like a high fantasy story.
A screenshot from Rollercoaster Tycoon