Essays, actual play, theory talk, and general navel-gazing about story-focused roleplaying, aka “indie” games. And trindie. And OSR. If you’re small and scrappy, I want to talk about what you’re doing! If you’re fighting to grow, I want to talk about what you’re doing! Basically if it’s roleplaying (tabletop, freeform, larp, whatevs) and it’s not the monolith of D&D, it’s in my wheelhouse.
Spent the past couple weeks poking at the idea of good faith in roleplaying. I have a couple other pieces I’m working on, more technical, but I wanted to start somewhere. It’s a big sprawling topic, and it touches more stuff than I realized. Wikipedia has this interesting entry defining good faith: A sincere intention… Continue reading Good Faith and RPGs
Matt Snyder's Dust Devils was the first RPG in the storygame style I really "got." I'm going to run it for the first time in more than a decade (!!!) at RinCon in a few weeks, so I refreshed myself on the rules the other night. It's quite a dive into the earliest ideas of… Continue reading Dust Devils: Blast from the Past
Apocalypse World introduced the word “clocks” to storygaming. Ye olde AW clocks were checklists of escalating narrative events. The MC could tick a slice of that clock and the event associated with that tick would happen. Or if the listed event happened, the MC could advance the clock to that point. AW clocks are prescriptive… Continue reading Clocks: Forged in the Dark’s Underappreciated Killer App
Tonight is our third session of Band of Blades. The Legion is headed up the Long Road and it's gonna be awful. Just awful. 😉 Anyway, I made another resource for my players and wanted to share this with you. They're printable tent cards for the squads, basically replicating the functionality of the Marshal's character… Continue reading Another Band of Blades Resource
Today I offer you three short posts for the price of one. Had an interesting conversation with a prominent indie game publisher/designer recently. It came on the heels of our second "full" session of Band of Blades, which has been on my mind a lot lately. The core of the discussion was, basically, what is… Continue reading Band of Blades and What Even is Forged in the Dark?
