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.
Movie critic Roger Ebert once famously said, “It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.” The same thing applies to games. It’s why systems, among other things, matter. I got my copy of Bite Marks this week. It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse style game about belonging to a pack… Continue reading Inside You There Are Six Wolves
We played our second session of Invisible Sun last night. It got me thinking about a whole stew of interconnected ideas: holding environment, buy-in, credibility, and incentives. If those things are misaligned, any game’s going to be harder to pull together, keep together, and move forward together. Here’s what I’m talking about when I talk… Continue reading Invisible Sun, Session 2: A Motivation Sandbox
This is one in a series I've been doing about Invisible Sun from Monte Cook Games. Click here to see everything I've written about the game up to now. Last night was our first actual play session of Invisible Sun. I’m going to write some thoughts down before we play, and swing back around to… Continue reading Prep never survives contact with the players
Last night, for our final gathering of 2019, my Tuesday night game group made characters for next year’s Invisible Sun game. It was…A Lot. We might be done? I’m not really sure. I started an online game with some folks in my Slack two weeks ago, and they’re still not quite done. After going through… Continue reading Invisible Sun: Setup and Session 1 is A Lot
First off, thanks to everyone who's supported me on Patreon the past couple days. I'm really looking forward to upping this blog's quality over the next year, and you're making it possible. Today I posted my first "locked" post. This post is visible to folks who support me at the $10/mo level or higher. It… Continue reading A very quick note about the blog (and Patreon)
