I. Dear Reader, This week, I’m having complex feelings about a recent’ fantastic post from Lowell Francis on the Gauntlet blog. In this blog, describes the five faces of the GM: GM as traffic manager, GM as meeting manager, GM as interviewer, GM as showrunner, GM as counselor. Lowell is a designer as well as…

in some sense, these titles exist only for fun. just good links. I. Dear Reader, Busy week for me so I’ll just use this space to point you fine folks to a new charity bundle on itch raising money for the victims of gun violence in Buffalo. Includes Psi*Run, A Land Once Magic and Fake…

I. Dear Reader, This week I’ve been thinking about the term “rules-light” (or “rules-lite” depending on your fancy). It’s a quality of a game that a lot of people really appreciate. And for good reason! It’s nice to not have to read hundreds of pages. But at the same time, it feels a bit like…

I. Dear Reader I had a mid-week session of The Sword, The Crown and the Unspeakable Power cancel recently. In its place, we spun up a one shot of Stealing the Throne by Nick Bate. Stealing the Throne is a very slick, very fast playing storygame about a crew of thieves pulling off the heist…

I. Dear Reader, Video games are quite good. I recently started playing them again after a gap of around 15 years and I’m really enjoying catching up on everything I’ve missed. One interesting facet of videogames is how they make movement fun. Running, climbing, jumping, gliding – these are all things you can do in…

I. Dear Reader, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term NSR or New School Revolution. Layla (aka Pandatheist) revisited the term after blogging about it three years ago, laying out the tastes of designers and players who use the term. Yochai Gal who started the discord community followed up with a post about how…

I. Dear Reader, (Due to some technical issues, this is one day late!) We continue the Games From Around The World series this week with a trip to Aotearoa or New Zealand courtesy Jack Blair. Jack is the designer of Sea Legs, Space Legs, and A Game That Will Force You to Stop Procrastinating Your…

I. Dear Reader, Busy weekend for me! So just want to wish you all a good week ahead. Here’s some fun links to interesting things about RPGs! Regretfully, Thomas II. Media of the Week An actual play/introduction of Decaying Orbit, a storygame about an AI-controlled ship plummeting into a star. It’s a part of Storybrewers…

I. Dear Reader, So last week, I said that using stats to express your character wasn’t so interesting to me. And I said that I would talk about the technique of differentiating characters that is way more interesting to me: narrative permissions. I know some people are already bristling at the time “permissions”. So let…

I. Dear Reader, I have a question. Why do we have stats? And let me clarify, so things don’t too get out of hand that I’m mostly interested in “storygames”. I think broadly stats (along with skills) have been our historical answer to the question of how we mechanize who our characters are. They represent…