Deep Thoughts

Thomas Manuel

I. Spotlight

Lots of good stuff this week and I can’t pick so just check it all out and pick your own. As always, have a good week, folks. Hope it’s a good one.

II. Media of the Week

  • I enjoyed this video that’s a deep dive into plastic miniatures: the economics (surprising), psychology, and ethics. No Pun Included are great and I even enjoyed the fact that this whole thing was brought on from an underwhelming experience with the Elden Ring boardgame.
  • I also watched another wonderful piece about boardgame media. Amabel Holland researches an obscure board game without a listed designer and unlocks the story of a whole career spent designing games and toys. It’s a wonderful story but also an exercise in research and care that is lovely on its own terms.

III. Links of the Week

  • I really loved this essay about being poor and seeking out free games and how this is an audience that you can design games for. It’s written by the co-designer of FIST, B Everett Dutton, so it’s not a theoretical argument, but a kind of personal essay about where they’re coming from.
  • Josh McCrowell (His Majesty The Worm) released a free fan game called Lore, a retroclone (?) of  an old Lord of the Rings system from 1991. It’s meant to be a companion for his other big LOTR fan project, a Middle Earth OSR-style hexcrawl.
  • The mindstorm blog has a neat little piece of design called “quick stakes”. It’s about laying out a bunch of consequences and letting players ensure that some of them happen and some of them definitely don’t. It doesn’t look like PbtA but it feels like it.  I personally prefer the version in the optional variants section at the end so definitely read that part too.
  • Rascal has instituted a more flexible paywall where you can read up to four articles for free every month. So I feel like I can share links here without having to worry now. So, check out what I did this week: I interviewed Monte Cook about dungeon design, getting (diverging) feedback from Gary Gygax, and starting the trend of $5 PDFs. Also, how and why he left Wizards of the Coast (twice).
  • The TTRPG bundle raising funds for trans rights in Idaho is live.

IV. What am I playing?

Things are bad everywhere but I had two of the most fun game sessions this week. In the Band of Blades game, we had a mission go sideways and end on a cliffhanger in the best way. It ended with the mage walking into a clearing of clearly weird magical creatures, experiencing a kind of ego death, and then collapsing. This leaves the rest of the squad hiding in the bushes, stranded without the officer-in-charge, wondering what the hell to do. They came to steal a relic but now all they care about is recovering the mage and getting out of there. Everything is too weird! The moon is too close to the earth! They’re very scared and confused about how reality is behaving and having a great time.

My home group also met in person to continue Warriors of the World Ablaze. Our GM was playing out of his skin and just having a ball of a time. One of my fellow characters died in the last game so we began with how he “came back” — one of the most charming rules in Apocalypse World is that characters can just come back after they die. So we began the game in the antechamber between life and death, and this lost priest bargained for a return to the mortal world. The deal was that he now has a new religion to propagate. The creature he was bargaining with was called The King Of All He Sees who was such a strange and weird person. The lost priest has been sent back not to propagate a religion about this King but some other entity entirely called The Watcher In Glass. Absolutely delightful. Because now we’re all dying to find some way to learn more about what’s even going on there.

It isn’t a groundbreaking realization that both of these games were so good and so memorable because of bad dice rolls and failure and consequences in general. It’s an absolute vital quality — vital in both ways, important and “that which gives life”. It’s still genuinely tricky, even after playing so many games, to square this fact that we roll dice to succeed but really we want to fail. Or we might not even want it consciously but that’s when the games really shine.

It’s also a hard thing to convey to other people: “No, you want to fail, that’s when new surprising stuff happens.” It’s just a weird claim to make.

I was chatting with someone whose players feel like they “fail too much” in non-d20 games. And I think this is about the fact that failure is so generative in these games. At many tables, in many trad games, a failed roll doesn’t necessarily lead to things becoming worse, to consequences snowballing into a whole new unpredictable situation. Some people want failure to just mean “try again another way”.

V. 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.

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

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.

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