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.
My alternate clickbait-y title was The Sordid Secret Small Press Scene at RinCon. I kind of wish it actually was any of those things, but it's not: we just wrapped up RinCon, a very mainstream, lovely, family-friendly gaming convention in Tucson, Arizona. And I played a bunch of small-press stuff while I was there. RinCon… Continue reading The Secret Indie Underbelly of RinCon
This is the second in a series of deep dives I’m taking on Invisible Sun, Monte Cook Games’ sprawling, prestige tabletop RPG. If you want to start at the beginning, go here. Invisible Sun’s Killer App My first exposure to Cypher was via No Thank You, Evil!, a game targeted at kids. In that iteration,… Continue reading Invisible Sun: The Gate
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
