Hello readers. It’s been a while.

You may have noticed I haven’t put anything up for a few months. Things are good here, no worries. No medical emergencies, no family or work drama. My kid’s school year started and with it, my third year running their school’s parent-teacher organization.

I’ve been gaming quite a bit! Just wrapped up a nice little run of Rapscallion, Magpie’s fantasy-pirate PbtA game. Before that I ran a session each of Mappa Mundi and The Revenant Society, both disappointments. What else? Mothership, Alien…I’m not wanting for RPG time.

In fact I just got back from Arizona’s best all-gaming convention, RinCon, in Tucson last weekend. I ran In Dreaming Avalon (the Bakers’ most recent Firebrands style game, amazing), Lovecraftesque 2e (Black Armada’s gmful storygame about existential horror, always solid) and Beak Feather & Bone (a map-making party game from Possible World Games, delightful).

My physical TBR shelf is getting out of control. Let’s see…Sword Opera, His Majesty the Worm, Coriolis 2, Ashes Without Number, Mythic Bastionland, Armour Astir, Garbage & Glory, and Elder Mythos are all staring me down. My “IGRC games received in 2025” spreadsheet is up to 33 titles. I’d love to run them all! But there are only so many weeks in a year.

The games just keep coming. And I care less and less about diving deep into any of them. So my writing stalls out, gutters, maybe dies? Hopefully not.

At some point I got in the habit of wanting to get out front and write the deepest dives about the newest things, even if I didn’t particularly care about them. For my sanity, that stops now.

But today I’m thinking out loud about why my interest is waning even as the flood waters of new games continue to rise.

Game Shaped Objects

I think Mappa Mundi and The Revenant Society really sapped my desire to write about new games. I had genuinely terrible experiences with both. I used to have a rule about keeping my negative opinions to myself but lordy, there is so little upside to that approach other than fewer hurt feelings. Dunno man, it’s not like I’m living off my Patreon money or anything.

Let’s be clear: I just don’t have time or energy to hate-run games. I’ve been accused of it in the past but it’s absolutely not true. This is something of a problem, actually. Hate-running means I could half-ass something I’d already eyeballed as poorly tested or under-designed. But no. I always meet games where they are no matter how bad it hurts.

Mappa Mundi is this sort of semi-OSR thing with a beautiful premise: rather than a game of monster killing, it’s a game of monster studying. You go to a community, learn what the locals know, go on a journey to observe the monster directly, then apply what you know and your character’s training to understand the creature. Armed with understanding, you save the community and bring what you know back to headquarters. Great pitch. No notes.

The GMing advice reads a lot like folks who have read OSR manifestos and taken away talking points, not real understanding. “The answer is not on your character sheet” has mutated from its D&D 3.5 origins (ie “I roll diplomacy!” is very boring) to some other idea about bringing “player skill” to bear. In every case, “player skill” means aligning with the GM’s vibes, not any real-world knowledge. And to be clear, vibe alignment is a real thing! Hell, it’s the secret to most games. Figure out the common ground and go from there. That’s how conversation works. Otherwise the saying would be “roleplaying is an argument between motivated parties with no incentive to compromise.”

MM also has this interesting bit where you’ve got illustrated cards from various terrain types you use to build out a “journey” for the characters to go on. Great, love it. But it’s quite unclear from the text how this deck comes to be. I think you’re supposed to pre-build it, and then flip cards right-side-up or upside-down based on how they dealt with their investigation. Great table presence. Doesn’t work in practice. I’m quite sure I could do a lot better building the deck in situ as the investigation proceeds, and let the investigation organically evolve. Right now the investigation is nothing more than moving through a sequence of preprogrammed scenes and making rolls. Feels like completing a to-do list. Boring.

The actual monster duel bit isn’t bad, but again there’s this “player skill” thing. You’re supposed to be able to eyeball the correct approach to each of a monster’s behaviors. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. It feels arbitrary and not particularly rooted in the organic situation. Again, if you just went with the flow and decided on the spot whether an approach aligned with a behavior, I’m certain the game would feel more rewarding. It’s all very preprogrammed.

The Revenant Society is just a very poorly designed PbtA game. It’s a time-loop game, in which recently deceased characters have four nights to connect their deaths to a “shattering event” that results in some ahistorical twist. It’s sold as “solve your own murder!” but you totally don’t do that. You have a bunch of memories and revelations triggered by passing through each loop, and you might maybe figure out what the “shattering event” is before four iterations. Ours figured it out in 2. Because the “shattering event” happens at sunrise, the characters never even see it because that’s when their lives go back to the start of the night. It’s weird and I don’t think the writers themselves understood their own premise very well.

The Revenant Society is written by two big-ish names. The work is phoned in. The moves literally do not work as written. There is no understanding of what “agendas” or “principles” or even “GM moves” are. The editing is so bad that parts of the book are almost unusable. The box is gorgeous, with a big glossy hardback rulebook, maps of 1910s Paris and 1920s NYC, little miniatures of these wraiths that haunt the undead characters, fancy dice. Wildly overproduced and undertested.

The thing that connects both these games in my mind, and many of the releases of the past couple years, is that they are game-shaped objects. They come in boxes. They come with extra accessories. They’re priced like midrange board games. Our dumb monkey brains pick them up and say “ooh heavy!” and want to possess them. They look good on shelves and spread out on a table. But they’re incomplete as games.

This shit just drains my enthusiasm for where games are going. And don’t @ me with zines or itch.io sketches. I’ve got tons of both. They never make it to the table.

A Different Kind of Novelty

I’ve been gaming outside the D&D bubble for most of my gaming life. Started on B/X and did my time with AD&D, but once Traveller had its hooks in me (1981 or so) I never looked back. There was a little break there for Birthright and Dark Sun.

Like a lot of folks, stuff coming out of the Forge movement either interested me or repelled me. But at least it was novel! Polaris might not have landed for me but Dust Devils sure as shit did. Dogs in the Vineyard was great and Carolina Death Crawl was upsetting. And the new ideas just kept coming. A solid decade-plus of envelope-pushing. Turns out the broader game-buying audience has a limit on envelope-pushing. And money is what makes any of this possible.

I can’t tell you the last truly new, engaging idea that hit me out of game design.

Like…everything on my tbr pile seems okay! Either they came to me because someone I respect has spoken about them, or there’s an interesting premise, or it pushes an old button of mine and I get it despite knowing it’s probably Not For Me anyway. But new ways of playing? New ways of thinking about play itself? Very, very thin on the ground.

Looking forward at the next 20ish years of play and it’s all gonna be pretty much the same? Not a great feeling.

I now find myself looking at big projects I’ve never quite gotten to and wondering if now is the time to bust ‘em out. Masks of Nyarlathotep. The Red Cow. The Pirates of Drinax. All very trad. All proven to go the distance. Armed with the past couple decades of envelope-pushing play, I’m certain I could deliver an awesome experience. Unfortunately my hunger for novelty will almost certainly mean I’ll never finish any of them. It’d have to be a very intentional project with players ready to settle in for a year or more.

It’s supremely unlikely this design lull will continue forever. We’re due for another big breakout that spins off years of distinctive new play. Will it be distinctive in a way that’s interesting to me? Can’t know until it happens. Lord knows the whole OSR thing happened and metastasized and hardly any of it was engaging to me once it hit the table.

Meanwhile, PbtA running low on gas in the design space. FitD stuff won’t be far behind. What was the last Fate thing that came out? A quick peek at DriveThru says something came out last September (WetRunner: Cyberpunk Fishing Action, I shit you not). Someone’s keeping the dream alive. Still, I don’t really see a big Fate presence at conventions or in the public discourse.

What’s novel now isn’t play experience. Hasn’t been for a while. The New Novelty is just how gorgeous and elaborate these games are now. Huge vibes and catchy hooks to carry them through a crowdfunding cycle. I’ve got so many fuckin’ games here that I bought on vibes and hooks alone that won’t ever get to the table. That’s interesting but also expected when we’ve told a generation of upcoming designers that you can pay the bills with this work. You absolutely can! But you have to chase the incentives. Interesting and new play experience is not on that list. Coming up with new ways to sell the fantasy that players will have the time, audience and energy to run these games is the list.

The Central Paradox

Music, literature and movie critics have it so easy. Video game critique, maybe less easy…but at least you can sit and play alone if necessary.

A novel might take a week or two to read. Movies are two hours, albums are usually less than that. Songs are down under 4 minutes these days. You can take them in many, many times. Our 24 hour days and 7 day weeks work just fine to chew over these short format works.

Fucking rpgs, man. Three or four hours for a one-shot, a half-dozen or more sessions for short campaign play. A year, a year, for longer format play. The person-hours involved, GM and players together, are just insane relative to literally every other artistic medium.

I wouldn’t want RPGs to be any faster, good grief. It’s just how they are. But it means they’re uniquely immune to meaningful critique. The “you don’t need to play to review” folks are just wrong if you want anything deeper. Does anyone want anything deeper? Probably high-hundreds of us do! Heck, call it a couple thousand.

But I don’t necessarily play RPGs just to write about them. I mean I have, for a long time, done just that. But not forever I think. These last half-dozen I mentioned playing recently, like…what new thing can I possibly say about them? Other than the two heartbreakers mentioned. And just slagging bad games gives me The Ick, so don’t expect a lot more of that.

The State of Play Right Now

In a couple weeks I’ll be starting a campaign of something. Has to be something, can’t be nothing, because at no point in the past half-century have I not had something going. It’s my main social and creative outlet. It’s a place to put my ADHD fixations. No game means my psychic gyroscope starts to tilt out of balance.

I’ll want it to last for no less than a couple months, so that’s 6 to 8 sessions at a bare minimum. I would welcome a game that held on for longer than that without demanding a year out of my players. Where are my quarter-long campaigns at? What can survive the holiday season? So many considerations.

Nowhere on my shelf is a game promising a journey into uncharted waters. So whatever premise, system and campaign supports are there will have to make up for the lack of interesting new play experiences.

Maybe the uncharted waters are what it’ll feel like to set aside novel play for refined play. To really let the players dig deep into their characters and the evolving situation without worrying about how things work procedurally. To get back to assuming the bulk of the creative load between sessions and embrace good old fashioned prep.

Anyway! I’m not sure what my writing will look like going forward. Hope you’ll stick with me, but I understand if you don’t.

Tl;dr: yes you need to sell games, but if you don’t start putting in more design work no amount of gloss and vibes will keep this thing afloat forever.