I. Dear Reader, Inspired by an event in my Band of Blades game, I want to talk about twists. As a player, I love them. The moment of surprise – letting your jaw drop as you think about what has just been said. It’s great stuff! And if you’re playing a storygame, every miss or…

I. Dear Reader, It’s been a non-stop week from me – moved house, major work deadline, hosted my partners’ parents over diwali – and I am exhausted. So I’ll keep this short and shout out a couple kickstarters that are going on now. First, Anamnesis, a quiet journaling game of memory loss and trying to…

I. Dear Reader This week I want to tell you about a cool little trick I did in our last session of Band of Blades. The mission was to attack a camp of undead and blow it up. Standard stuff for this game. The players rolled badly on the engagement roll and kept their perfect…

I. Dear Reader, This week I’m excited to talk about how some advice I thought was rock solid was turned upside down. When I was running D&D, I was a great believer in Matt Colville’s advice about verbs (very good video!). Basically, he says that quests work best when at their heart there is a…

I. Dear Reader, It’s been a really busy week for me so this section is going to be short. I have my Band of Blades game on Saturday evenings and then on Sunday mornings, I run Apocalypse Keys. So I have two games in relative quick succession which sometimes let me spot patterns. And this…

I. Dear Reader, I did something different this week. Petri Leinonen, a game designer from Finland, was sharing some really cool games on his twitter account. And these were all games I’d never heard of! So I reached out to Petri to do a guest feature on the newsletter talking about some of these fascinating…

I. Dear Reader, So at the beginning of this year, I made a wishlist of games I wanted to play and I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to tick off a surprising percentage of it. I think from my original list at the start of the year only three games remain: ECH0. Songs…

I. Dear Reader, This week, I had a twitter thread get a lot of attention and so I thought I’d clean it up and share it here as well. It started because I was seeing a lot of people use the word ‘emulation’. But some were using it positively and some were using it negatively.…

I. Dear Reader, This is something that people have been talking about for a while: the idea that if you’re reading an RPG on a digital device, a website could probably be a lot nicer than a PDF. I think this is a popular opinion now. PDFs can look really great but they’re often inaccessible…

I. Dear Reader, This week, I found out about a really cool co-operative crowdfunding event in November called Sidequest. Inspired by Zinequest, a group of small indie designers have gotten together to create an alternative. It’s not limited to Kickstarter – which is great to see! Anyone can participate and work together to crowdfund their…