On Sunday (17 April), our game Villagesong, designed by Vee Hendro, won Game of the Year at the Australian Role-Playing Industry Awards. This year, the ARPIA was hosted at Fortress Melbourne. These awards celebrate the diverse forms of fun, creativity and imagination coming out of the Australian community. The evening’s celebration emphasised how important diversity […]
Littlebox Journeys is about to launch on Kickstarter in just a few days time, and with it we’ll be doing something Storybrewers has never done before – we’ll be publishing the work of another designer. It’s a leap we wouldn’t make for just any game, but when we first played Decaying Orbit we knew it […]
The highs and lows of a tense sports match make for great stories, but are a unique design challenge. We joined in the online fun at Big Bad Con 2021 to present The Making of a Match: Designing Sports Action. It was a good chance to reflect on our process and learnings designing the sports drama game, […]
This guide is adapted from the content of Good Society: Expanded Acquaintance. If you want even more detail about how to hack Good Society, you can grab the book or PDF for the full guide. In Part 1, we talked about the process of hacking Good Society. In this post, we’ll be talking about the elements of Good […]
This guide is adapted from the content of Good Society: Expanded Acquaintance. If you want even more detail about how to hack Good Society, you can grab the book or PDF for the full guide. So, there’s a story you’re itching to tell, and you’re already starting to imagine how Good Society can help to […]
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 […]
