I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka… Continue reading A Few of My Favorite (Trindie) Things
Another week, another year looking back at the 20-teens and what they brought to small press roleplaying. To recap the games I've focused on so far: 2010 was Apocalypse World, 2011 was Burning Wheel Gold, 2012 was Monsterhearts. All huge games. But 2013 brought one of my all-time favorites, which I continue to play today.… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2013
Still working my way through the last decade of small press, indie, and storygaming. Last week I hit 2011. 2012 was a big one too. Monsterhearts Challenging, beautifully written, makes no attempts at being everyone's favorite. An undeniably important game-as-statement. Monsterhearts 2, the latest edition, is available through DriveThruRPG. 2012: Monsterhearts One of the first… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2012
The twenty-teens brought a torrent of new small-press, independently created roleplaying games to us. The Forge had come to an end, the diaspora sent seedlings far and wide, Google Plus and Twitter were rocket fuel for the chaotic dissemination of ideas and audiences, print on demand made the entire workflow faster. And then there was… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2010
The Character Arc advancement system, one of the more notably post-trad mechanisms of this Invisible Sun game I’m running at home, has me thinking about flags. That is, the stuff the players share with the table explicitly as “yes, this, I want more of this thing.” It’s a fundamentally authorial tool. Anyway, our current game’s… Continue reading Raise a Flag
