I. Dear Reader,
I started recently playing Harvest by Luke Jordan and very quickly ran into my usual struggles with Belonging outside Belonging games: they’re basically freeform games. And honestly, if you asked me at the start of the year, I would’ve said I didn’t really enjoy freeform and it wasn’t for me. (Despite the allegations, I did not called it “a loathsome and devilish trap set by my enemies” — that was about something else.) But I find that my opinion is changing now.
To be clear, freeform isn’t a weird or rare thing — it shows up in every game in some capacity. Sometimes, in a crunchy game, people refer to the non-combat sections as ‘roleplaying’ and by that, they mean that they play it freeform. It’s the water we swim in. I just preferred not to get it in my nose and mouth.
A part of the reason for my change of heart is that I’m playing more of these sorts of games — ones that spend lots of their time being freeform — and I’m picking up one some unwritten tricks. For example, in our most recent game of Harvest, we started the session with 20-30 minutes of ‘scene planning’.
Basically, we drew up a list of scenes we wanted to see. They were mostly combinations of characters: “Let’s do a scene with Aoife and Mayfly”, “Let’s do a scene with Aoife and her sister”, “And a scene with Mayfly and her grandmother”. This was basically our first session so a lot of the goals of these scenes is just “hey, you mentioned this NPC in character creation, what’s their deal?”. But the key detail is that these all written down like a meeting agenda — a pleasant little to-do list. Then, you spend the rest of the session, working your way through it in a straightforward and satisfying manner.
This is a technique that comes directly out of my experience playing Good Society hack, Budding, where it was used by Agatha, the game’s designer. This is a way a lot of Good Society facilitators organize their games — and surprise, it’s not in the book! In fact, I believe it is now making its way into rulebooks for similar games because it’s such a standard practise.
There are some people who don’t need any structure — the lack of structure of these freeform games is a good thing for them. But I think for most people, the role of a GM is invaluable because of what it offers in terms of organization, direction, and clarity. I’m in that camp — my roleplaying time is precious and if we spin our wheels too much, I get bored and cranky. And it’s not anyone’s fault. We’re all just being polite and deferring to each other. Boo, someone be rude and tell us what to do. Anyway, it turns out that techniques like this — that often don’t get written down — can make freeform games so much more palatable for people like me.
Yours learning-like-always
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- Folio is an actual play podcast with an interesting twist: it’s different people playing solo games with their sessions woven together. The end result is a kind of ‘multiversal’ feeling. It’s a great execution of a clever idea and the end result shows how different and how similar playing the same game can be. The rare actual play recommendation on this newsletter!
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
- Alex Rinehart does a hilarious written interview with Emily Zhu (Houses of the Sun by Night): “the rules of the Hentai Dolars Pact are… I pledge to have something released or finished or whatever by such and such a date. And if I don’t have it done by that date, I will forfeit $10 to you and you will take my $10 and go on Steam and Itch and wherever you like and buy $10 worth of the worst Hentai games that you can find with my money and I am required to then play those on stream for everyone’s pleasure and my humiliation.”
- Rob Donoghue wrote a very long series of posts on Bluesky about Daggerheart that have been collected into blog form. They’re a good if disjointed read and don’t continually just compare it to D&D in amazement like everyone else.
- Ben Robbins has a nice post teasing apart how a game can be satisfying (separate from whether its fun, good, etc).
- Some Rascal reporting that you only need a free membership to access:
- Backerkit’s new investment drive and their unfortunate choice for “lead investor”
- An interview with Chrys Sellers about what it means to want to make a game that’s “intensely full of life“.
- News that NY-based Tabletop Workers United have won a contract after a long fight with the management of Hex & Co.
- News about a remake of an old Rifts videogame?
Misc
- Panda Games Manufacturing is offering $25000 sponsorship of production costs for designers with less than 2 games.
- Storybrewers Roleplaying have a detailed survey to inform the second edition of Good Society.
- Evil Hat announce that the Tomb Raider TTRPG is canceled after creative differences with the license-holder. Looks like 2.5 years of work has gone up in smoke. They’ll try to repurpose the design but it’s going to be even more work to do so.
From the archive:
- jay dragon has a short piece about how a game influences play without mechanics that is worth thinking about called “the game left unplayed“. (Issue 101, July 2022)
- The Alexandrian has a series of posts called “Running the City” wall about writing a city setting or campaign. (Issue 101, July 2022)
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Unleash Your Epic Fantasy Story: Every character is your creation, every turn your canvas, every campaign your legend.
This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- Get 10+ Troika adventures in this bundle including Acid Death Fantasy, Fungi of the Far Realms, and cool new ones.
- Also, a bundle of Raven, a gothic horror game from Spanish publisher Shadowlands
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
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