What a busy year it’s been! From Powerhouse Late, to the Festival of Creativity, to PAX, we’ve been up to a lot this year. On our way, we’ve had the privilege to deliver two talks on game design that we wanted to share with you. Hopefully they will give you useful ideas you can apply […]
Ever wonder what sparked the ideas behind your favourite RPGs? So did we! So, we asked 50 game designers two key questions to uncover the inspirations that lead to their games. We analyzed all the answers, and turned them into a talk for Big Bad Con Online 2023. In the talk, we unpacked the results, […]
In my last post exploring the Penned to Good Society game jam, I talked about the many supplements that can deeply change your game. This time, I’ll be going through desire, relationships, roles, rule modifications and reinterpretations and more! These aren’t intended to stand on their own or add a new element to gameplay, but […]
In my last post exploring the Penned to Good Society game jam, I talked about the fascinating expansions that folks created as part of the jam. This time, it’s all about supplements. These are interesting additions you can frame your game around to change things up – sometimes just a little bit, and sometimes a […]
We’ve always been lucky to have an awesome community around our games, but in October last year, something truly amazing happened. Chloe (fiercefully on itch) ran a Penned to Good Society Jam. In Chloe’s words, “This jam celebrates Good Society… and the creativity of the people who love it.” The jam could include anything based […]
I love designing one-shot games! The format has so many good features: the scope is smaller, which means easier to give love and care to every part of the game you can be more creative, it’s the perfect format to go on fun design tangents and explore that weird niche idea you’ve had in the […]
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 […]
