Holiday Mode

I. Dear Reader,

I wrapped up two games this week: The Defy the Gods game that has been going on since July. It ended really triumphantly, appropriately bombastic and dramatic and fun — everyone got what they wanted out of it for their characters and the story. I also wrapped a four session run of Ironsworn: Sundered Isles, which also ended in a surprisingly sweet way.

I’ve got nothing at all scheduled for all of December right now. But I’m thinking about what I want to run next year and reading some new games. So many options to choose from and I’m enjoying going through and making a list and dreaming.

Hope your games are also going sweetly!

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• Weird Place with a look at Swedish RPGs. A lot of it is based on a recent book about the subject by game designer Magnus Setter that for a long time was only available in Sweden. But it’s now available internationally in digital form at least.

• Many Sided Media have an interview with Devon Chulick, the head of startplaying.games, which has apparently paid out over 50 million dollars to professional GMs over its life span.

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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

Reviews

• Based on previews at Pax Unplugged, Fail Forward has a blog about the new official Godzilla RPG that’s coming out. It’s got a new card-based system and seems to have gotten at least one person excited.
• TTRPGFans has an overview of Nimble which is “an aggressively streamlined version of 5e” that I’ve seen get a lot of buzz recently. Much like Grimwild got a lot of attention (before its designer suddenly disappeared), Nimble has caught the attention of a lot of people who were unhappy with 5e for being slow or overwrought and wanted a faster version of the same thing.
• Seyed Razavi writes about the new Discworld RPG from Modiphius. While diagnosing it as heavy-lift improvisation game (even with scenario prepped), he wrote: “The system absolutely supported that palette-cleanser energy: one roll per interesting beat, consequences that were funny rather than punitive, and a sense that the world would carry on wobbling even if the dice hated you.”
  • Another really interesting section is the comparison to QuestWorlds and Liminal as alternatives for scratching a similar but non-official itch.

OSR

• Twas a big week for articles talking about the OSR, a perennially entertaining subject. We had a very grounded post from the Dododecahedron blog that uses the framework of an onion to lay out what they think are the superficial outer qualities and the most central core pillar.
  • The end result is very close to a Rascal article that I wrote about how the primary aspiration or dream of the play culture is about perfecting sandbox play for both GMs and players.
• On a lighter note, we got “an OSR is a discord full of trans women“.
• We also got from Snow (.dungeon, lilancholy) an article about how dungeon delving is about the body in a piece titled “the eroticism of my gored corpse“. I think this is a great example of a piece that is both entertaining and insightful while being wrong (in my opinion) about its core premise that this is something that comes from a genre rather than, you know, a very specific approach to a genre that must be cultivated.
• ElmCat did some very impressive data wrangling to make an interactive graph of the blogosphere highlighting how they link to each other.
  • I obviously had to check this newsletter and sadly I think the data set only contains about 19 issues out of the 250+ I’ve done so it doesn’t capture how link-y it really is.

Other Articles

• Vincent Baker has a fantastic post about PbtA moves that don’t give players a choice about whether they trigger and don’t actually do anything beneficial for the character. They’re just “the kind of stuff that happens around you because you’re a specific kind of messed up”. It’s a great example of all the under-explored design space that’s still available.
• Judd Karlman has boiled down four approaches to handling mysteries in RPGs — specifically when they happen in games and you weren’t prepared for the sessions to be about investigation. One of the options is “Pull a Thomas” which is a loving reference to me in our Mythic Bastionland game ignoring potential sideplots in favor of doing the thing I came to the table to do (embarrass other knights).
• Related: I missed this but I really like this house rule that Valeria proposes for Mythic Bastionland called Promises that’s essentially about declaring goals in dramatic ways and getting little bonuses for following through. It’s based on Luke Gearing’s way of handling boasting and I think it’s a neat addition.

Misc

• Groupfinder is a new tool that hopes to solve RPG scheduling. This was one of those things that startplaying was supposed to do before it became a pure paid GMing platform.
• The American Library Association’s Games Roundtable announced a couple of cool things this week. They’ve recognized both Apocalypse World and Call of Cthulhu as “2026 Platinum Play Classics” alongside Clue, Jenga, Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Mario Kart 8, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
  • They also announced two RPGs as winners of Platinum Play awards. These were No Thank You Evil! by Monte Cook Games, which is a very stripped-down version of Cypher aimed at kids, and Sodalitas, a bright adventuring game by French designers Jan Van Houten and Nicolas Folliot.

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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.

• Mud Ghost Estate Redux is a spooky tumbling block tower-based TTRPG inspired by the urban legends and folklore of Hong Kong. Crowdfunding on Kickstarter!
• Connive, backstab, and play the political game as you scheme to accomplish your Hidden Agenda in this semi-competitive, sci-fi political thriller RPG!

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

• Two Shadowrun Fifth Edition bundles: one is a revived intro bundle and the second is a whole new one with some of the best supplements that version received.
• There’s also a cornucopia bundle with some cool standalone titles like Doomsong, BREAK!!, Grant Howitt’s Tartarus Gate, Tidal Blades from Monte Cook Games and more.

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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.