Emotional storytelling in rpgs has always been an area of interest for us, both as players and designers. This year we were lucky enough to speak at Metatopia 2020 on the topic The Human Heart: Engaging Emotions in RPG Design. Here is the video of our panel, or for those who prefer to read, I’ve included an […]
Last year was our first full year as (almost) full-time game designers, and we learned a lot from the experience. One thing we learned was how hard it is as game designers running their own publishing house to actually find time to make games. This year, we’ve decided to track the way we spend our […]
Of all the GMing techniques in all the Kingdoms of all the Lands, my very favourite is the humble question. It is versatile, editorial, creative, and narrative. It allows the GM to shape the story while giving ultimate say to the players. And it’s a relief to share the narrative burden GMs typically bear with […]
I like to think that when I play a roleplaying game with other people, we are working together to tell a story. We surprise each other—developing new twists and turns in the narrative as we go. Or we delight each other—playing into hints and clues left earlier to create a bitter conflict or a smoochful […]
I have been doing a lot of designing lately, and thinking about design, but very little writing about design – but I’m secretly hopeful that this blog post represents my return to writing more regularly. This blog post is about writing and playing historical, historically inspired, or alt-historical roleplaying games. The topic of my blog […]
Another quarter, another update. Q3 was a bit more subdued than the RPG frenzy we saw in Q2, nevertheless there were many awesome roleplaying projects that left their funding goals long in the dust.
What happened on Kickstarter in the TTRPG world between April and June? Quite a lot actually! Check out the stats below. Need to zoom in and absorb the detail? There’s a high res version of this infographic here.
Ok, so I realise this is just about the most clickbaity title that a clickbait generator could have generated. But it is my genuine and firm belief that to be a great GM there are only two things you need to do. Sure, there’s a thousand other things you could do that might make your GMing even […]
Stats continue to be a popular choice in game design. They are a simple and intuitive way of creating mechanically unique player characters, and mediating conflicts between these characters and the world. But should stats really be the go-to game design choice? In this article I discuss what stats are, what they fail at, and […]
As designers we all construct and manipulate the moral universe of our game. When we ask a person to play our game, we often require them to pivot their worldview and ethical framework. In this post I discuss the moral power of designers, and then move on to my approach to re-framing player expectations to […]
