Triangulation

I. Dear Reader,

The latest Quinns Quest dropped this week reviewing multi-award-winning game, Triangle Agency.

The review generated a lot of discussion — though most of it is beyond closed doors, in discords that can’t be linked to and so on. A lot of that discussion was spurred by tension around it being a “bad review”, which is probably exacerbated by how much Quinns’ other reviews were “good reviews”. Shut Up and Sit Down published many “bad reviews” and the comments would be full of people going, well, we like that game actually. But as far as Quinns Quest goes, this seems to be the first time that a lot of people find themselves strongly disagreeing with a review, having come away from playing or reading Triangle Agency and really enjoying it.

While I don’t have opinions about Triangle Agency, having read but not run it, let me compare it to Impossible Landscapes for a sec. Impossible Landscapes is a very frustrating text in a lot of ways but unlike Triangle Agency, it has a lot of discussion and fan labour that supports running the game. People have essentially developed “best practices” for the adventure. If you want to see an extreme version of this, look at the legendary Masks of Nyarlathotep which I think is Not Good in text form (especially as per current tastes) but has a literal decade of official and unofficial effort turning it into something Good (maybe). Triangle Agency doesn’t have that kind of support — maybe it’s there in the official discord but it’s not visible outside of it.

Triangle Agency is a weird text. It does demand some work and it has a great chance to go wrong at the table. But this is also true of every RPG I have ever run — but those other games demanded a kind of work that we’ve come to accept as normal. I’ve talked about this before — how all games demand their own version of interpretive labour — and it’s what I’m thinking about it again here. As always, the critical question for me is never: is this a good game?

The question is: under what conditions, does this game shine?

And if you too want to triangulate an answer to that three-sided question, this review does help with that but, as always, there’s more digging that you can do:

• Quinns released a podcast interview with the designers Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland that makes for a good companion piece.
• Building off last week’s expressionist games, seraphim-seraphina on tumblr talks about why Triangle Agency fits that description.
• and hopefully more soon!

Yours three-sidedly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

See above!

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• 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.

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• On tumblr, Jenna Moran (Nobilis) writes about Wisher Theurgist Fatalist, her commentary on RPGs as a medium that has delighted and baffled people ever since it was published: “People spent all this time on rpg.net debating whether my work was easy or impossible to comprehend… So in good part WTF was me playing directly into that reputation. It was self-parody, and a deliberate effort not to be approachable, and most of all the decadent-feeling pleasure of writing the kind of stuff that I enjoy writing most.”
• Chris McDowall (Mythic Bastionland) writes a career retrospective: “I designed games semi-seriously for 7 years before I sold anything. I sold games for 6 years before I went full-time as a designer. I’ve worked for 5 years as a full-time game designer and I’m still a company of one person with just five releases.”
• Bleeding Cool has an interview with the creators We’re All Gonna Die, a ticketed live game of horror darling Dread presented by comedy youtube channel, Smosh.
• The International Journal of Roleplaying have a special issue out devoted to facets of safety and consent in RPGs.
• I really enjoyed this Bluesky thread about how Unknown Armies thinks about character creation and how it mechanizes the interior life of characters in interesting ways: “When I first started playing RPGs, there was a weird pushback basically across the board to one general interaction: you can tell me what HAPPENS to my guy, you can make anything you want happen to my guy, but DM, don’t you fucking DARE tell me how my guy FEELS or REACTS in any way.”

Misc

• Samantha Leigh (Anamnesis) organized a delightful “puzzle hunt”, a challenge to solve a series of ten puzzles all about indie RPGs.
• There’s a TTRPG Tools Jam, where the call is for tools to support your favorite game.

Not RPGs but

• Loved this essay by Vajra Chandrasekara, fiction editor for Strange Horizons, about setting in stories: “The traitor’s text must refuse authenticity—which is a fetish of the patriot, the tourist, and the imperialist. The traitor’s text is an ideal, being the work that must critique both the big empires and the little ones, so the comprador’s text and the patriot’s text are also traps that await all of us who are, undeniably, from there. Pits shallowly disguised with dry leaves. The traitor’s text is the measure, for me, of what writing about place must reach for.”
• On Wargamer, there’s a great review of the new documentary The Grim and The Dark – The Search for Jon Blanche about the indie wargaming scene that exists outside of Warhammer 40k.
• The Hushcrasher newsletter has tried to do a data-driven analysis of videogames based on filesize and credits to come up with a systematic explanation for what is AAA, AA, and “indie” (they don’t use that word). It’s a deep and fascinating work that has some great insights including one that comes from comparing the number of Steam reviews games get across their categories.
• Another videogame one, also courtesy of Critical Distance, is this exploration of how Hollow Knight: Silksong has become a lightning rod for discussion around a host of issues in the industry: “Was Silksong emblematic of the problems facing games criticism? Or not really? Is the game too difficult? Is that a problem? Is it fair? What does Team Cherry owe its peers in the video game business? A lot of these questions are, frankly, kind of silly, and one might wonder why a single game has to bear an entire industry’s insecurity. That precarity, however—both within the games industry and in the media that reports and comments on it—is the unspoken rationale behind every cultural skirmish happening around the game.”

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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.

• Not your typical TTRPG bestiary: A Bestiary of Enchanted England features plot hooks to make every creature the centerpiece of a memorable story. Pre-tariff price while supplies last!
• Orestruck is an adventure for Cairn that drops your party into Pact, a village on the edge of the Tannic Forest beset with horrors mundane and supernatural.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Raging Swan Press’ Dread Laironomicon compiles a hundred lairs for monsters to slot into fantasy games.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.