Essays, actual play, theory talk, and general navel-gazing about story-focused roleplaying, aka “indie” games. And trindie. And OSR. If you’re small and scrappy, I want to talk about what you’re doing! If you’re fighting to grow, I want to talk about what you’re doing! Basically if it’s roleplaying (tabletop, freeform, larp, whatevs) and it’s not the monolith of D&D, it’s in my wheelhouse.
Okay! This is my first installation of this (probably completely unhinged) project to run through more games, particularly high-investment games that are hard to run for other folks. It might run long! And, yes, it's largely AP fiction. But you never know, it might turn out to be interesting and entertaining. I encourage you to… Continue reading The Haunted Tower (Solo Invisible Sun ft Radiance Adventure Engine)
A hard but very real part of working on a blog like this is that it’s just impossible to play enough at enough depth to do these games justice. As I’ve gotten older, I’m also finding I’m more interested in longer, more expansive play. Bouncing from game to game is getting harder all the time… Continue reading I’m Working On A New Project
Had an interesting thread show up the other day in one of my dark forest spaces: how do you strategize, approach, play your role as GM? I suspect every GM does it, but most of us aren't that intentional -- just doing the thing is already pretty demanding. When I'm doing all the pre-work that… Continue reading Facilitator Agendas
I recently attended BurningCon, a convention devoted to the games published by BWHQ in Queens, NY: The Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, Torchbearer, and Mouse Guard are the big ones. BWHQ haven’t released as many titles as some publishers but their work continues to be some of the most influential in both my own gaming life… Continue reading Returning To My Roots: BurningCon 2023
This is it, our grand finale. Thank you for reading! If you've just run into this one somehow, this is an edited version of my actual play reports of a|state I wrote for our Slack while I was working on my deep dive of the game. Terrific campaign, learned a lot about not only a|state… Continue reading Actual Play: a|state (part 9 of 9)
