Listen Up, Soldier!

Thank you so much for your support, He Ain't Gonna Jump No More is a real passion project for me and a refinement of my mission statement and design philosophy that began when I sailed out into the OSR with Shot & Splinters. I realise that I've been quietly tinkering with the game and not keeping track of my updates in a devlog. This update includes a fair few fixes and small quality of life updates, along with some more major additions to the game. 

Critique Navidad

In December last year, He Ain't Gonna Jump No More was reviewed by IdleCartulary of Playful Void. It's an amazing piece of writing and a really insightful look at the game that I would encourage you to read. It also identified a bunch of areas for improvement, and will definitely shape the future development of the game. I would like to highlight one passage from the review, that really captures the heart and soul of the project. 

All I have to say about He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More is: Wow. I have so many thoughts. This is an absolutely unique work, drawing on a bunch of sources that I don’t think I’ve seen concretely in the OSR realm before. It draws tournament play concepts from the early hobby in a way that I’ve talked about in Dungeon Regular needed to make a comeback (although I wonder if in this case the inspiration is actually war games). It takes the sprawling grand campaign structure of Wolves Upon the Coast, and rather than try to replicate its’ scale, it gives it strict borders and time-constraints. This is a really, really impressive piece of work.

Updates

The big additions to the game files since release are the player handout and the town maps. I'm going to tackle thise in turn:

• The Player Handout: This is two sides of A4 designed to give players a grounding in their character and the setting ahead of jumping out of the aircraft. Written in simple language without a tonne of jargon, it's all you need to know about Operation Overlord to play the game. I'm aware that it can be difficult to onboard players and it can feel like you need a History BA to engage with this game, but I promise you that you don't. 
• Town Maps: There are three major settlements in the area of operations - Saint-Come-du-Mont, Sainte-Mere-Eglise and Saint Marie du Mont. I've produced a map for each town on 100yd hexes, allowing you to use them as a visualisation tool, or to run battles in the vicinity of these key objectives.

Smaller updates to the game text include:

• Expanded character options including additional NCO ranks, roles and equipment packs. 
• A broad edit pass of the GM guide to remove jargon and improve consistency in various places. I am by no means a trained developmental editor but I've done my best to improve the readability as best I can. 

Future Plans

I have a lot of ideas of where I could take He Ain't Gonna Jump No More in the future. I think the first step I need to take is to hire a good dev editor to pull the referee's guide to pieces and rebuild it in a more logical and user-friendly way. I think this will make the game considerably less daunting for referees and make it easier to get on the table. 

Then, I'd love a talented and creative graphic designer to make two beautiful zines with top-drawer information design that make the game an absolute dream to run and something gorgeous to look at. 

I need to evaluate the costs of this, and how I'm gonna pay for it but this is my priority for the year. 

Making Stuff

If you are interested in reviewing the game, making Actual Play content or producing anything based on it, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to support you.