I. Dear Reader, Last week, I talked about a technique we’ve been doing while paying the delicious folk horror game, Harvest. Looking back, I was using the word “freeform” to refer to the unstructured nature of the roleplaying as well as the unstructured nature of the game. The scene-planning technique is probably more about the…

I. Dear Reader, I started recently playing Harvest by Luke Jordan and very quickly ran into my usual struggles with Belonging outside Belonging games: they’re basically freeform games. And honestly, if you asked me at the start of the year, I would’ve said I didn’t really enjoy freeform and it wasn’t for me. (Despite the…

I. Dear Reader, Been a long week, work-wise, so no preamble from me. Enjoy the links! Yours recoveringly, Thomas II. Media of the Week III. Links of the Week From the archive: IV. Small Ads All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section…

I. Dear Reader, I’ve had two essays published over at Rascal in the last month that I’m really proud of. The first was a look at Austin Walker’s Realis, which I turned into a history of surrealism. The second was this week’s review of Impossible Landscapes. I mentioned wanting to run Impossible Landscapes back in…

I. Dear Reader, I was on vacation this week so enjoy another issue with just the links! Yours mountain-ly, Thomas II. Media of the Week No TTRPG stuff this week so I’m going to share something full aware that most people simply don’t have time for it: this six hour review of a Japanese dating-sim…

I. Dear Reader Another edition of my regular round-up of new games on itch. If this is the first time you’re seeing one of these: many of these games came through this form but others I just stumbled across. I haven’t played or read them but each of them has something that made me sit…

I. Dear Reader Another week, another little anecdote. If you’re following me on bluesky, you might’ve seen this already. Last week, in my Apocalypse World: Burned Over game, an interesting thing happened: all my players teamed up. Now this is something that you might take for granted in most games… but in AW, you shouldn’t.…

I. Dear Reader, On reddit, azura26 did some interesting graphical visualization of what games get recommended and how connected they are to each other. You should check out the thread here because it explains how the chart was made and how to read it. But I’m also posting the image below so you get a…

I. Dear Reader, I’ve been thinking about scenarios and railroading and ease of GMing. Let me take a step back. GMing is hard. It’s not so hard that people don’t constantly just learn how to do it on their own but it’s hard enough that many people don’t do it. It’s also hard to talk…