Personable Thoughts

  In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game. I think it is a well articulated critique, echoing some points made in Dwiz' review over on Knight at the Opera (now sadly unavailable). However, as a self-professed "system-curious indie guy", I think Paul underestimates the value of a simple but effective chassis (or at least, he comes to the conclusion that it is not what he wants out of a game). The strength of the stress system is how simple it is to interact with - yes, the rules in the booklet may not be enough to fully drive play on their own, but perhaps that was never the intention? I would argue that the core rules of Mothership offer just half of the game, with the other half left open to be filled by modules or an enterprising game master: The quality of the rules should the...

  Inspired by a discussion in the RTFM Discord, I have decided to write up some thoughts on how the properties of a modern "roguelike" video game could be adapted to a tabletop RPG. Of course, there is a whole nomenclature discussion to be had about modern "roguelikes" greatly differ from the original Rogue and its likes Angband , Zangband , etc. and is now essentially just a marketing term. However, I will nevertheless root this in modern "roguelike" conventions, as the originals could essentially be emulated by just playing an OSR dungeon crawl . Let us first define the specific genre conventions that we wish to emulate: Gameplay structured around short-ish "runs". You always start at the beginning of the "generalised dungeon" and make your way deeper until you either die or succeed in vanquishing the final boss.  Dying rather than succeeding is the expected outcome for the first many runs. There is no going back to town to resupply...

  Recently, there has been discourse on the social medias about the prices we pay (or perhaps rather, do not pay) for our RPG PDFs, including the thread by Chris Bissette of LootTheRoom, and a sternly worded blogpost from Ramona of Alderdoodle. Discussing the value of RPGs is of course something I have done before , and every time I see this discourse, I am tempted to get involved (as indeed I sometimes do ). However, I find that my opinions on this issue are too nuanced to be neatly presented in a series of social media posts, hence, a blog post. Another few bits of preamble that I would like to make clear, is that I don't want to dispute what Chris and Ramona are saying. They run tabletop businesses, I do not. I am just a customer and hobbyist creator. Probably the kind who ought to buy more PDFs. An Outside Look a the Landscape Let's start with an assumption that we can hopefully all agree upon: A professional RPG writer designer deserves to be compensated fairly for the...

  As has been established by the big pink bird over at Prismatic Wasteland, 2025 Is the Year of the Beta . To that end, I have been working hard (ish) in the game mines to finish a first draft of my game Mistwalker . It now sits somewhere in the vicinity of a beta, ashcan, playtest version, or similar. It's out now on Itch, and I'd love for people to read it and tell me what they think. I was asked by Elmcat of  Among Cats and Books to come up with a tagline, so of course I came up with two, depending on whether you want the setting and vibes, or the mechanical stuff: An RPG about venturing out into the mist between cities in a fractured world, inspired by polar expeditions, Nordic folklore and the worldbuilding of Disco Elysium. A classless system with trait-based character building, 5e style skills, abstracted wealth, and high-consequence combat.  If either of these sound cool, maybe take a look? The game started out as a hack of Songbirds 3e, which I have been playin...

  Hot on the heels of my previous review (of the down and dirty game of criminals, Swyvers ) comes another look at an even bigger book! This time, the tarot-based Forged in the Dark game The Hidden Isle with design and writing by Daniel Adams and James Patton , and art by Eliot Baum and Viv Tanner , published by the Austrian Causa Creations under their Sefirot brand. Evolved from the background lore of their previous board game offering, Sefirot , the game revolves around around Agents from the fictional Dioscoria, the titular Hidden Isle . The book is 190 pages of content, roughly A4 sized, and full of beautiful art. Set in what is ostensibly our real world with a dash of magic (inspired by the real beliefs of people at the time) on top, players take the role of agents sent by the Dioscorian government to meddle in the affairs of the rest of the world. Dioscoria itself is presented as a bit of an imperfect utopia: a multicultural haven of enlightenment and tolerance in an other...

Once again I have read a book. Swyvers is not the biggest of books, but it's a nice hardback and thus not a zine, and as we all know "Zine" and "Big book" are the only two types of RPG. Swyvers is written by Luke Gearing with art by David Hoskins , published by Melsonian Arts Council . I backed the Kickstarter for the fancy deluxe version, so this is the version I have read. To the best of my knowledge, the only difference between this and the standard hardcover, is that this one has shiny gold foil (making it a more enticing bit of loot for anyone who would burgle me, I guess). The book has a total of 95 pages of content, written by Luke Gearing at his nastiest, accompanied by David Hoskins' excellent art, bringing Luke's dark fantastic Britain to life. Swyvers is a book full of tables, and this is a good thing, since this is also where the work shines brightest. Gearing's writing is darkly funny, leaving me unable to suppress my chuckles at sever...