I. Dear Reader, As promised, this week I’m going to talk about putting radical societies in your game. Usual caveat, these are about my tastes – yours will differ and that is fine, none of us are bad people because of it. So that said, here’s another worldbuilding principle for you: “A society’s politics are…

I. Dear Reader, This week, we’re continuing our series on how to introduce societies with more alternative political systems into your games. I’m assuming here that this is something you already want to do so I’m not going to try and convince you of anything here. Because there’s a wide variety of reasons: from novelty…

I. Dear Reader, I’ve watched two separate Youtubers both make excellent videos on the subject of politics. But they both talk about roughly the same thing which is a bit strange to me. The first is Matt Colville and his series on politics (starting with this one but goes on for 5 more videos, I…

I. Dear Reader, I played a lot of fun games in 2021 – around 30 different games by my count. I feel like it’s almost mandatory for me to do some kind of “best of” so here are my highlights: CrashCart, Once More Into the Void, For the Queen, Girl by Moonlight and Band of…

I. Dear Reader, This newsletter is a day late because I allowed myself the weekend off. It’s been a busy Christmas week – one of those “I’m going to need a vacation at the end of this vacation” times. But things are settling down now and I’m excited for January. I’ve got lots of plans…

I. Dear Reader, After Finland, Australia and France, we’re hopping over to Italy. This list comes via my friend at RPG Internationale, a Youtube channel that does actual plays, reviews and interviews with indie RPG folks from around the world. Five Italian Games That Mattered To An Italian Immigrant And You Probably Should Try  Art…

I. Dear Reader We continue December’s trend of guest posts about games around this world. This week, Côme Martin has been kind enough to write for us about games from France! Five French TTRPGs You Might Not Have Heard Of France has long been a welcoming country to RPGs: D&D was quickly translated there as…

I. Dear Reader, After the success of the Finland issue of the newsletter where Petri Leinonen wrote about five games from his country, I thought it was something worth doing again. So I asked on Twitter and lots of lovely people volounteered. This week, I’ve got the first of these new set of guest contributions.…

don’t worry, it’s “rules” I. Dear Reader, Let’s talk about rules. It’s funny that in English we use the same word for “how to play a game” as “the things your teacher used to make your life miserable”. Because the word ‘rules’ has this kind of messy association, I totally understand why some people don’t…

I. Dear Reader, So a few weeks ago, I did a panel at Metatopia Online along with momatoes, Aaron Lim, Jamila Nedjadi and Logan Timmins. The panel was all about questions and how they show up when you’re playing and designing games. The basic idea was that questions are “mechanics” – in the sense, that…