One of the best and most succinct panels we’ve presented was at Hubcon 2019. This was a practical talk about the process of creating an rpg. It does not delve into rpg theory, but rather, the talk revolves around the procedure of design, and tips and tricks to get productive at each step, rather than […]
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.
This post was written by Vee! About time I convinced her to blog her heart out – Hayley This year marks our first ever entry into the Game Chef annual competition. I use the word ‘competition’ here very loosely, as Game Chef is known first and foremost as a celebration of analogue game creation and […]
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 […]
