This post was originally sent to my email subscribers on August 1, 2024. It is being reposted here to create a more easily searchable archive.

Hello, owl friends! Let’s start things off this month with our biggest news at the moment: I have a new game out today!

Life of the Party (on itchio and DriveThruRPG) is a card-based story game about a group of friends at a nightclub, as we unfold their dramas and pursue their hearts’ desires and inevitably get into a giant mess. Mechanically, the inspirations are games like Fiasco and Microscope; thematically, the inspirations are the comic Phonogram: The Singles Club and the 1978 movie Thank God It’s Friday.

I had a blast writing this one over the past couple years, playtesting it at a couple cons (including Metatopia), and stretching myself a little bit to do my own layout for it. I always hesitate to apply the word “innovative” to my own work – I know I am standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of GM-less one-shot style play – but I think I did some legitimately nifty new stuff here, or at least applied older ideas in new ways.

The gist, if I can keep it fairly short, is that the game takes place all in one night, within the confines of a single location (the nightclub). You make a grid of possible scenes, where the two axes of the grid are the locations within the club (the bar, the dance floor, the bathrooms, etc.) and songs that play during the night, giving the order of events. Each character has something they want to accomplish tonight, and you go around creating scenes on the grid, building the story out of order, until everyone has resolved if they get what they want or not, and/or everything explodes in a big dramatic mess.

I’ve always loved stories that take place in a really confined timeframe or space or both – movies that take place all in one day, for example. I think it’s a really juicy creative constraint that I was really excited to explore mechanically. I have also worried a bit that I’m limiting the potential audience of this game too much with the setting specifics of it – to say it with love, many of my gamer nerd friends and acquaintances who would be interested in a weird little indie game like this are not also people who feel at home at parties.

Fortunately, I was so enamored with this time-and-place constraint that I came up with two sort of “re-themes”, which I will also have coming out in the near future. Thrill of the Chase (coming in October) is a heist game, where you have one shot to pull off a daring casino heist. And then Heat of the Battle (coming in December) is about the night before a medieval battle as the warriors plan for what might be their last day.

The print-and-play version of Life of the Party is available on itchio and DriveThruRPG – this is where you get all the files and can print your own and cut them out for cheap (it includes both a full-color, full-photo version, and a much more printer-friendly version). There’s also a print-on-demand version on DriveThruRPG where they print it all up for you as a nice glossy tarot deck, with the nice rounded edges on the nice thick stock, and mail it to you all complete. There is also, on itchio and DTRPG, a free system reference document, which includes license information to make your own One Night, Last Chance games!

Other Project Updates

Dollhouse Drama

In planning the release timeline for the ONLC games, I had to figure out where I wanted to slot in Dollhouse Drama, as I had initially been planning it for a 2024 release, but I didn’t want to put out too much too fast, or rush it if it wasn’t fully done, etc. I decided to get all the ONLC games out the door, and spend a few more months writing playsets for DD and polishing up the text.

I also took under advisement the wisdom of my many friends who are much smarter than me (and, very kindly, seemingly more interested in setting me up for success than I am) to shift the way I was planning on releasing the playsets. Originally, my plan was to include about 15ish playsets in the core rulebook, and then, a year or two down the line, release a second book with another 15-20ish playsets.

My wise friends have persuaded me that the smarter thing to do is include just three playsets in the core rulebook, and then release a couple more every so often, like a little themed pack (kind of like Fiasco did with its playsets), so 1) people can pick and choose which packs they’re interested in, and 2) it keeps the game “alive” in a sense, both giving ongoing support and keeping the game in people’s minds as it gives something new to promote and talk about. So I took all the playset ideas I’ve had, sorted them into groupings of 3 based on a theme, and have planned mini-releases every month for 2025, with the core game coming out in January.

The much more exciting thing to report with this game is that WE HAVE COVER ART. I was lucky enough to be able to commission artist Jess Kuczynski to do the cover for Dollhouse Drama. She’s someone I had in mind from a really early point on the game, because I loved her work on other games and I know she has such a keen eye for fun fashion details, so it felt like such a natural fit, and Jess completely nailed it! 

Metatopia

It’s still early – Metatopia isn’t until November, they haven’t even announced the confirmed dates yet I think – but it’s also never too early for me to start thinking about which games I want to try to have ready, in a playtestable state, for Metatopia. If you’re not familiar with it, Metatopia is a convention really strongly aimed at game designers, and the entire focus of the con is playtesting unfinished games. I won’t go into all of it, but it’s been tremendously valuable to me as a designer, and is also just a really wonderful community space.

So usually some time in the later half of summer, I try to look at my current projects and figure out both what I can plausibly get ready in time for Metatopia, and what I think will get the most benefit out of the Metatopia experience. Right now, I can say tentatively that I’m planning two sessions of Before the Season Ends (Regency debutante game), and probably one session focused just on character creation for The Diplomacy of Queens (one of the best parts of Metatopia, in my opinion, is that you can do really narrow sessions that hone in on one part of a game).

Further Thoughts

Long-Term Design Goals

Okay, apologies in advance that this section is going to be really self-indulgent today, but this is my newsletter and you signed up for this! As I approach completion on a couple of projects and try to figure out which newer ones I want to turn my attention to, I think that’s a good time to evaluate what I actually want out of this whole thing. That’s important, because that determines how much and what kind of work I’m willing to put into the “not immediately fun” parts of this (game design and playtesting are immediately fun, to me. Hiring an artist is immediately fun. Marketing, manufacture, crowdfunding, not fun to me).

Recently I tweeted about there being two things that would really tell me if I had “made it” in a big way, not commercially, but artistically. The first is that I would love to see people hack my games or cite my games as an inspiration for their own. I think achieving something like the Bakers did with the open availability of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” label and framework is incredibly aspirational, even if I don’t think I’ll ever achieve it to the scale that they did.

This goal was a big motivator behind me putting together the One Night Last Chance system reference document and publishing the games under a really permissive license – you can remix it to your heart’s content! You can reuse my EXACT words if you really want to! You can sell your own game for profit! All you have to do is provide attribution that your game is based on the One Night Last Chance system, by me. This is also the motivation behind putting a section in the Dollhouse Drama rulebook about writing your own playsets for the game. If other people hacking my games is a goal for me, I can and should make it as easy as possible to do so (stay tuned for word on a future game jam!).

The other – and this is a real flight of fancy here – is I’d love to be in this for long enough that there could be some kind of “retrospective” element to analysis of my games. The most immediate thoughts for me are how some authors have their “juvenilia”, or early minor works, repackaged and published together; or how there’s identifiable periods and eras in especially long careers. It requires both longevity, and a demonstrated creative evolution over time. I can’t actually DO anything about those, in the active sense, besides sticking around and continuing to push myself creatively. 

Of course, there’s also the simple matter that TTRPGs just haven’t been around long enough for something like that to exist yet, for anyone! So I guess I also have the secondary goal of continuing to see the medium grow and develop and spread, for both altruistic and entirely selfish reasons. I do often think of TTRPGs as analogous to comic books, where there’s one or two major players that most people – even those who don’t engage with the medium at all – are broadly aware of, and a whole seething undermarket of independent work. But I don’t know that the two media have similar issues or will have similar patterns of growth. But I can’t wait to see!

So like I said, self-indulgent! It turns out I actually want rather a lot! A tall order! My goals are lofty! As I said when I first tweeted this, the medium is young, but so am I.

TTRPGs as a Vulnerability Teaching Tool

I’ve spoken in a previous newsletter about RPGs in educational settings, and the idea that they help us practice certain emotional responses, but I want to hone in on one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: vulnerability.

It’s really hard to be vulnerable. In modern Western society, vulnerability is often punished at worst, or ridiculed at best. I sometimes feel like I’m trying to walk a tightrope between being open and forthcoming and feeling secure or in some way unassailable. If you’re too vulnerable, you leave yourself open to a lot of hurt. But if you’re too guarded, you become defensive, and new things can’t ever really get through to you.

We’ve made “putting yourself out there” a lot harder than it needs to be – in interpersonal relationships, in our relationships with art and media, in our lives in general. I think about trying out for school plays as a kid – even if I didn’t get a part, the adults in my life congratulated me on putting myself out there and trying to audition anyway, because on some level, people recognize that making yourself vulnerable (to judgment, to ridicule, to criticism, etc.) is one of the biggest hurdles to any undertaking like that.

Playing TTRPGs requires a surprising amount of vulnerability, especially when you get into narrative games or things that aren’t just a GM leading you by the nose through a pre-written story. In my time in this space, I have had a LOT of different types of players cross my tables – at game clubs, at stores, at cons, wherever. One thing I see somewhat consistently from players – both new and old – is a worry about putting themselves out there. They don’t want to venture their own ideas or suggestions out of fear that it will somehow be wrong, even though – ostensibly – we’re a couple of friends sitting down at a table to play make-believe. 

(I think this may play differently for recorded or live-streamed actual play settings, where you’re also performing for an audience who are not participating themselves. I am not qualified to speak on AP, and to me “2-8 pals sitting around a physical table together, with no audience” is still the platonic ideal of TTRPG play and you can generally assume that’s what I’m talking about)

I think there’s real value in embracing TTRPGs as a way to practice vulnerability in a safe setting where the stakes are low. Much like horror movies let you feel the catharsis of fear and relief without actually putting yourself in real physical danger! If I venture some wild, out-there idea, something that might make me look crazy, at a game table with my friends while we’re playing make-believe, the worst that can happen is maybe some gentle teasing? Maybe a “well, not quite, but what about [x] instead?” (I guess I am also assuming that you are not friends with assholes? Don’t be friends with assholes, be friends with people who are nice to you)

And the thing is that even if that happens – even if my idea gets completely shot down in that safe, low-stakes setting – it reinforces the idea that having an idea shot down, or having put myself out there and not stuck the landing, is not the end of the world. You keep going. You try a new idea. Eventually something lands. It reinforces your own resilience without actually putting you in “social danger” in the way that putting yourself out there might at your job or in your domestic situation. But in doing it in this safe low-stakes setting, you’ve practiced being vulnerable, for higher-stakes points in your life where you might need to be.

Play, as a child, is about practicing for life. As adults, we don’t have as many socially acceptable opportunities for play. But I think it’s still valuable to have that, both as an outlet for whatever emotional pressures we might be feeling in our adult lives, but also as an ongoing opportunity to practice our lives. Maybe not in the sense of literally “playing dress-up” and pretending to be a doctor or a teacher or a princess as a little kid, but in the sense of practicing our emotional responses to things – like the potential for rejection, criticism, or judgment. 

So I think TTRPGs are especially well-suited to practicing vulnerability, without needing to change anything at all about people’s normal paradigm of play (unless you’re one of those groups where the GM leads all the players by the nose through their novel, and the players’ only action or reaction is to see how hard they hit something, but I don’t think there’s any of those here).

The Games I’m Into

A lot of my own work has been rather chipper lately. I love a sad game (god knows I made one!) and I certainly have some more in progress, but my recent focus has been on Dollhouse Drama, a fun Barbie game about clothes and adventures and girl power, and Before the Season Ends, a heartwarming coming-of-age game about making friends and finding yourself. Not what I would call sad topics! 

So maybe it makes sense that my most recent reading has been two pretty dark games! I was looking through my itchio library and found some recent releases that I’d skimmed but hadn’t read in-depth and hadn’t played yet (when I feel stuck on something, I often just pick up and read games to see what it might shake loose in my brain). I found a fun little pairing of Last Train to Bremen and Hellwhalers.

The similarities are definitely amusing to me – both games are about the souls of the damned avoiding hell, both games have strong animal motifs, both games use gambling mechanics (liar’s dice and sic-bo, respectively), they even both use a similar style of woodcut art. But the actual stories told by these games, and the specific mechanics they use to do so, are really different, and they’re both really compelling to me!

So I’ve been scratching that itch for a deeper read of both of these, and I hope I can get them both to the table at some point soon (but we’ll see – so many games, so little time, as you probably know well). Would definitely recommend checking them both out if you like hell and gambling and being damned.

Closing Notes

I will leave you this month with a couple of fun movie double-features I’ve done lately (I LOVE a themed double-feature, and I arrange them for myself all the time).

Jupiter Ascending and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – the theme is zany space mess! I expected to like Jupiter more than I did, and I expected to like Valerian less than I did. Sometimes it’s like that! Am I finally going to make a space game one of these days? I’ve had a few on my potential projects list for like six years!

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) and How to Steal a Million – why do we make any movies that aren’t about hot people doing art heists? That could be the only genre of movie and I would probably be pretty happy with it. I’ve had kind of a rough game idea I’ve been sketching out about rival art thieves trying to steal a masterpiece that, in some way, connects to their relationship as well. Probably a long way out, but lots of inspiration until then!

Thanks for reading, folks! Don’t forget to check out Life of the Party!