I. Spotlight
- The Awards 2026 is open for submissions. Read the instructions and please submit your game.
- The shortlist for Canada Roles, a new RPG awards, is out and if you’re in Canada, you can vote on it.
II. Media of the Week
- Nothing this week!
- 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
Articles
- Aaron Marks argues that “satisficing”, which in this case means finding a kind of compromise solution that sorta works for everybody, is what makes trad games popular.
- This isn’t controversial. It is, by far and away, the dominant wisdom in RPG design. But as always, it’s hard to disentangle the role that habit and expectation plays. How much of what is successful in RPGs is due to what was successful before?
- Prismatic Wasteland does a round-up of 80 blogposts about maps.
- After a series of posts analyzing how to write a good key for a location in RPG books, the BAATAG blog has their final post with a list of learnings.
- Valeria writes an idiosyncratic guide to prepping a fantasy RPG campaign from scratch.
News
- The team behind Magic the Gathering Arena have unionized and are now trying to get Hasbro/WotC to recognize them. This is just the beginning of the story as Hasbro, like every company of that size, is extremely anti-union but good luck and solidarity to the workers. Among other things, they’re trying to keep their jobs which have always been remote from being shifted to offices in cities that they are nowhere near.
- Shannon Appelcline is working on a product history of Classic Traveller called Free Trader Beowulf Origins, which will be published by Mongoose as a part of the 50th anniversary for the game next year.
IV. What am I playing?
We only did Band of Blades last week — the other games feel through. One of the big parts of the fun of the game is the “microstories” that come out of the smaller characters in the legion. They’re not NPCs because it’s troupe play and the players are playing them but they’re only playing them rarely. It feels a bit like fan fiction in the way that rookies and side characters in the legion suddenly get this rush of interest and energy put into them and we discover their personality or relationships or backstory.
It’s one of the most important parts of the game for me: that you never know who today’s session will be about. Anyone can be our main character. It’s awesome.
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.
- Honest Dice Kickstarter! Beautiful, limited edition, hand-poured dice 🔥 Engineered to increase fairness with mathematically balanced numbering. Tested w/15,000 rolls. Already made, ships right after the project ends!
- TRADLIFE is a psychological horror one-page, one-player TTRPG about being a tradwife. Available now!
- Edison’s bargain with the Fae brought the world to Boston through teleporter gates. Free Boston’s living storms and fight for justice to an alternate history in this cinematic fantasy TTRPG.
This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- There’s five Traveller bundles on offer from Mongoose Publishing: the core rules, an imperial navy bundle, a mercenaries bundle, the Great Rift campaign, and the Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society supplements.
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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