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.
Los Angeles, February 2020: we've tracked the replicants to a hotel near the spaceport. It appears they're engaging in some sort of imaginary rituals, or maybe rituals of imagination. It's like they're creating ... memories? Very special. My buddy and podcast rock star MadJay Brown and I were invited as special guests to OrcCon 2020.… Continue reading OrcCon 2020
Still working my way through the last decade of small press, indie, and storygaming. Last week I hit 2011. 2012 was a big one too. Monsterhearts Challenging, beautifully written, makes no attempts at being everyone's favorite. An undeniably important game-as-statement. Monsterhearts 2, the latest edition, is available through DriveThruRPG. 2012: Monsterhearts One of the first… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2012
I'm spending the next several weeks talking through my most important indie RPGs of the twenty-teens. Last week I posted about 2010. Onward! The Burning Wheel, Gold Edition The final and best edition of this ground-breaking fantasy game. The previous edition of Burning Wheel changed my roleplaying life, no joke. I've been writing about BW… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2011
The twenty-teens brought a torrent of new small-press, independently created roleplaying games to us. The Forge had come to an end, the diaspora sent seedlings far and wide, Google Plus and Twitter were rocket fuel for the chaotic dissemination of ideas and audiences, print on demand made the entire workflow faster. And then there was… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2010
The Character Arc advancement system, one of the more notably post-trad mechanisms of this Invisible Sun game I’m running at home, has me thinking about flags. That is, the stuff the players share with the table explicitly as “yes, this, I want more of this thing.” It’s a fundamentally authorial tool. Anyway, our current game’s… Continue reading Raise a Flag
