Hello my owl friends! We’ve made it to August, and I hope you’re dealing with the summer heat (or the winter cold if you happen to be on the other side of the planet) as well as you can, because I’ve been melting a little bit! Still, July has been a much more productive month than June was, in part because I do not have a surprise 15,000 word essay for you this month. Lots to talk about though (I actually pushed some topics out of this newsletter because they weren’t time-sensitive, so they’ll be saved for next month), so let’s get into it!

First up, a new month means a new Dollhouse Drama playset expansion pack is available! The theme for July was Glitz and Glamour, so the new playsets have great options for disco nightclub drama, fashion week modeling, and a trip on a luxury cruise ship where definitely nothing is going to go wrong! Go on and expand your dollhouse collection on itchio or DTRPG!

Project Updates

Wrapping Up DD and G&G

So this month I finished up the whole first batch of Dollhouse Drama playsets, the ones that are scheduled to release through January. I do have the additional Hot Swap and Action Faction stuff I want to do that I outlined last month, but since that wouldn’t be on the schedule until February, I am taking a break before digging into those, so I can use my writing time to finish up some other projects that need some writing to get them where they need to be. 

One funny thing I’ve noticed about myself (and by funny, I mean really annoying) is that as soon as I am no longer actively working on a project – even if it’s something I still haven’t released and have to talk about and tell people about and market – it’s like it stops existing to me. If I am not actively writing or designing a given game, it falls out of the forefront of my mind and even the emotional connection to it weakens almost immediately. Like I have to proactively remind myself about The Price of Coal “I made this, I did it, it was a real accomplishment that I am massively proud of, it’s very well-designed and well-written, and I did a really good job with it.” Because most of the time I don’t really think about it and I forget that all happened.

Anyway, I can already feel that happening with Dollhouse Drama, now that I’ve wrapped up this phase of the project – the writing, but not the actual publishing. But with the time that I had been spending on DD stuff, I have moved on to the next thing on my list that I wanted to finish the writing for: the Gryphons and Gargoyles zine game, which I would love to have out in October, as a fun Halloween freebie. Most of the writing remaining to be done on this one is piles of quest hooks – the game involves drawing quest cards from a deck, which the GM cross-checks with their own booklet, where each quest title has an introductory paragraph, a list of sub-objectives, and the reward you get for completing that quest. I had made the list of quest titles ages ago, but now I’ve been actually writing all the hooks and objectives.

Crystal Champions and Vestal Virgins

In terms of design work, I’ve been focusing on getting Pax Deorum (the history game about the Vestal Virgins in the late Roman Republic) and Champions of the Crystal Crown (nostalgic girly sword and sorcery a la She-Ra) ready to playtest at Metatopia in a couple months. For Pax Deorum, I’ve been sorting out how I want the game’s rounds of actions and scenes to work (and what IS an action? What IS a scene? These things sound obvious but there very well may be different answers for every game I work on!).

Because PD involves each player individually taking action to reduce pressure on an assortment of clocks, it took some untangling to figure out how I wanted the scenes to work – this isn’t a board game after all and I do want the roleplay between the characters to still be the central focus of play. So is each action a scene? I don’t think so! Does everyone do their solo actions and then come back together to do one big group scene and we call that a round? I also don’t think so, because I want to leave space for one-on-one interactions that explore relationships between these women beyond just the entire group dynamic. So there’s been a lot of playing around with structural possibilities there.

Then for CCC, I’ve been sorting out how I want character creation to work and what the character sheets should look like. Because each character has a specific affinity to a different color crystal (and thus its symbolic meanings), it’s kind of playbook style, so you don’t have three people with the aqua crystal in one group, because then you wouldn’t get the interesting interplay of different character’s approaches and priorities for how to address a situation. Because there’s two different possibilities of the affinity/aversion “patterns”, each playbook has two different archetypes you can choose between, to decide where your secondary skills lie. Then you get options for your gear, your animal companion, and – most fun to me I think – your elemental motif. 

This goes back to the game’s roots in stuff like She-Ra or Golden Girl and the Guardians of the Gemstones, where each character has some kind of obvious motif that runs through their appearance, their magical powers, even their name. The example I’ll give here is Mermista from She-Ra, whose family runestone is a pearl, and so she has water-based magic and her hair looks like waves and she wields a trident and obviously her name is MERMISTA. It’s all of a theme, as is everyone else, so you see the group of princesses and you know what everyone’s DEAL is. That’s what I want to do with character creation in CCC, where you pick your crystal first, but then that gives you a couple options of what your elemental motif is (for example, if you pick the blue crystal, which represents secrets and mystery, your character’s motif might be shadows or silver or ice).

A New Rogue Idea

Well, maybe a “new” idea isn’t exactly right; this one has been a bullet point in my big document of future game ideas for at least a couple years now. But after sitting there and being occasionally passed over with a “oh huh yeah I should do that someday”, now it seems the concept has fermented enough and it’s started to become more of a complete idea and something I’ve expanded my notes on quite a bit. I was honestly trying to avoid it (“don’t make eye contact with the rogue idea”) when I felt the idea taking shape, because I already have so many games actively in progress. But there’s no point in avoiding it, I think, the idea is going to happen no matter what!

This one comes out of movies like The Prestige or The Duellists or Black Swan, and books like The Art of Rivalry, where I want to really explore a rivalry between two artists (in the loosest sense of the word), where they both have this kind of dangerous level of obsession with their art and with one-upping the other, to the point that lives are ruined in its pursuit – their own, or someone else’s. I noticed in all these things that one common thread that we see here is that much of their rivalry comes down to their different approaches to their artform – one is more of a technician and one is more of a showman, to put it in loose terms. 

I think there’s something so juicy here, and certainly other games have explored similar thematic territory – I will basically never pretend that I am the first person to walk any given thematic OR mechanical road in games – but I think there’s still lots of room for me to make something really interesting here (I hope!). I certainly don’t have a LOT of this game figured out, it’s still all fairly barebones notes. But it’s a lot more than I had a month ago, where it was a single sentence, three dozen items down on the list of “maybe someday” ideas.

Other Thoughts

The Platforms and the Money

Sorry to start with kind of a bleak topic but it’s gotta be talked about! By the time this comes out, I think most of you will be aware already that payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are in the middle of a huge crackdown on so-called “adult content” – which includes anything like LGBT representation, because the tiny minority of people pushing for this are shrieking bigots who think that “a gay person existing” is the same as “hardcore smut”. This has resulted in several platforms – including itchio, which much of indie gaming is reliant on – removing or delisting anything that might even remotely be considered “adult” and many things that aren’t but are getting caught up in the sweep anyway.

It’s blatant censorship and it’s a capitulation to fascist ideals. People are rightfully angry, and there are livelihoods at stake.

But we don’t really have anywhere else to go. It’s very easy for people to say “stop using platforms like itchio and DTRPG (or kickstarter or backerkit), just make your own website” and a very different thing to make that work in reality. For one thing, because the issue is with the underlying payment processors, it’s extremely difficult to escape the rules of Visa or Mastercard in e-commerce, regardless of what URL the transaction is being handled on.

For another thing, discoverability within indie gaming is already terrible. I cannot stress enough how bad it is. It is abysmal, and has only gotten worse with the implosion of twitter. It’s not going to get better if people are all off on their own little websites and relying on social media to get the word out that they exist (which is just a different form of platform reliance). The sphere of indie RPGs is outrageously small. I was thinking about this earlier in the month as well, when I was skimming back through The Art of Rivalry, which noted that modern art in the 1900s was a similarly tiny non-concern for most of the art world – there were only a few dealers who sold it, buyers were rare, and everyone involved was accordingly fragile and hostile (sounds PRETTY FAMILIAR). This leads me to my last “another thing”…

…the money has dried up. I made note of this in my 2024 year in review, but I am not alone in noticing that the money has dried up. Everyone I have spoken to has noted depressed sales numbers, weak crowdfunding responses, etc. Kickstarters that would have been slam dunks in 2018-2021 are barely funding, struggling over the finish line, if they make it at all. Word of mouth attention is harder and harder to get. I actually felt validated when Nem, over at Sandy Pug Games, noted this in as many words as a factor in the hostility of creators in this space.

We are all between a rock and a hard place here. If I had answers or solutions, I would give them, but I don’t! All I can hope for is for those of us working in games to give each other a little extra grace as we figure out how to navigate this (and continue to push back on censorship TOGETHER rather than tearing each other down).

The ENnies

Oh god, another kinda ugly topic here, albeit less so. By the time this newsletter comes out, the ENnie awards will be taking place that day, but at the time of writing, the nominees have been recently announced and we’re in the voting period. I try not to do too much navel-gazing about awards recognition (I don’t think I even mentioned the ENnies last year?), but I am going to fail this month.

I submitted Dollhouse Drama to the ENnies this year, basically on a lark. I thought, hey, submission is easy, and you never know. This game is not the type of thing that normally wins ENnies, but maybe I’d get really lucky and get a judge’s choice recognition, or even a nomination in the family gaming category. And if I didn’t, no harm, no foul, because I didn’t expect anything to begin with. The game IS worthy of that kind of recognition, and I should stand by it.

Well, maybe I’m a little naive, because I was still perhaps unreasonably disappointed when it very predictably was nowhere to be found in the nominees. I got over it, I didn’t do the terrible cringe thing I see some creators do where they lash out at those who DID get nominated in a misplaced sour grapes moment, we process our disappointments like adults here.

But then I noticed something. My name was on that page of nominees after all. Way back in 2020, I did some work-for-hire for the Hit Point Press “big bads” project, a monthly series of booklets they published, and I wrote one of them. This year, the compilation of a whole lot of those booklets was nominated for an award, so me and a big pile of other work-for-hire writers are now ENnie nominees.

And I found it REALLY hard to get excited about this. Some of that is what I talked about earlier – this was a contracted project that I did five entire years ago, and it was just entirely off my radar as something that ever happened at all. I don’t feel any strong connection to the work, both due to the time, and also the fact that it’s no longer the kind of work that I’m interested in doing. If anyone tries to hire me to write third party D&D stuff now, I would turn it down, even though I was super excited about it five years ago.

But how terrible, right? Then I felt guilty for not being super excited for this nomination! I don’t think it’s wrong of me to want to be recognized for my passion projects, the games that I pour my heart and soul into, and not as part of a giant anthology of work-for-hire for someone else’s game. But I DID do good work on that project, because I didn’t half-ass my contract gigs, and I still think what I came up with for it was pretty neat.

So it’s all a bunch of complicated feelings about awards, probably none of which are necessary because awards are not that important anyway! The ENnies have never been the be-all, end-all of quality in the gaming sphere! It’s a glorified popularity contest and I feel very silly for having this many feelings about it at all! So the winners will be announced tonight (as of sending), we’ll all talk about it for at most three days, and then we can move on again.

Let’s Get Literary

Okay finally a fun topic (or at least it is for me!). Most people have a bad association when they’re comparing their RPG play experiences to that of a novel. Typically to them, it means the game was on-rails, or they couldn’t make meaningful decisions because the GM had already decided how things were going to go. It’s a pretty common trope among roleplaying forums and advice spaces that some GMs really should have just written a novel instead of running a game in which players are supposed to have some degree of freedom and their choices impact the outcome of the story.

I generally haven’t made a secret the last few years that my tastes in my reading material have changed; I will always love my genre fiction, but in the last two or three years, I’ve read a lot more literary stuff, a lot more classics, things that are a bit more introspective and character-driven rather than purely plotty. This isn’t a value judgment for or against genre fiction or literary fiction – they’re just different from each other and sometimes I’m in the mood for different things (although I will also grant you that I AM a snob and I DO think everybody should be reading more and watching screens less, but that’s a different point).

So I keep thinking about ways in which RPGs are actually more like a good novel than we might think at first glance, and why that doesn’t have to be or shouldn’t be a negative association. It is definitely true that different media will have their different strengths and weaknesses, but I also don’t think it’s worthwhile considering every type of storytelling media in a silo – movies are not in a vacuum from TV or stage theater either, you know?

One of the things I think is a real strength of the novel – and one that is primarily explored in literary fiction more than genre fiction – is the depth of understanding it can grant you of a character. In a much more thorough way than in any visual media, you can really get inside a character’s head. To me, the best fiction is really psychological, in portraying characters that feel both fully realized and not like a single-dimensional plot-driven role, and like real people you could know, and then diving into what makes them tick. This is a function of narration, and the efficiency of text in conveying certain kinds of information.

I think tabletop RPGs, more than almost any other kind of media, are poised to make that same leap, where players are much better equipped to dive into the psychology of their characters and create them as people and explore what makes them tick. This is just a function of how RPGs work, and the inherent relationship between “player” and “character” in most games. I think most games don’t necessarily take advantage of this – a lot of the time it is much simpler to play a kind of heightened-but-flattened archetype, a larger-than-life caricature, and that works out fine if we’re playing “genre games” where we’re emulating genre fiction.

“Literary fiction” in and of itself is already a pretty poorly-defined term, but if we take it on its face and say that it’s character-focused, slower-paced, and more committed to exploring a theme than delivering plot action, what would it look like if we looked for “literary RPGs” in contrast to “genre RPGs”? Because while we have, in RPGs, a kind of crude delineation around “story games” and “trad games” and even “lyric games”, I think most of what we call story games would still turn out to be genre games. I want to stress here that I’m not really looking to create new useless categorizations for people to argue about, but a lens I want to apply to examine games from a different angle.

Beginning with myself, because there’s no games I’ve thought about more than my own, I would say that The Price of Coal is probably more “literary” than “genre” (as are some of its compatriots in the historical game sphere, like Red Carnations on a Black Grave, or Montsegur 1244). The ending IS predetermined in that game, and the plot DOES happen on a timer that you can’t really impact in play (the four season transition cards that give key narrative escalations), calling back to that initial “like a novel” complaint. The game is about exploring how your characters (who are pre-created and given to you) endure and change and learn under those pressures.

I would also maybe point to something like Bluebeard’s Bride, where each player is playing a facet of one woman’s mind, quite literally taking on the roles of different aspects of her psychology. Through this lens, it has genre signifiers – the fairy tale horror framing – but I think its focus on the different aspects of womanhood and exploring that through the framing of the fairy tale, as well as its very loose delivery of plot-type action (exploring the house until Bluebeard returns, which again happens on a kind of mechanical timer), make it a pretty fair candidate to be considered here.

I might also look at Star Crossed, a 2-player romance game that inherently explores a lot about the characters individually and the relationship between them. Because of the breadth of worlds it could take place in (last time I played, we set it in a Star Trek type future where we were both spaceship captains), there’s often going to be a lot of genre in it, but the mechanical focus of the game is ENTIRELY on this relationship. Player actions are centered around intentionally or unintentionally revealing things about themselves, or intentionally or unintentionally exploring desire through touch. Play proceeds through 8 pre-determined scenes, in order, from first meeting to potentially parting forever (assuming the tower stays standing that long). If we take a step back and look at our lens, we’ll note here that “romance novels”, in the sense of bodice-rippers, are generally part of genre fiction, but there is absolutely a whole realm of “literary romance” and literary novels that involve romance, so I don’t want the subject matter here to get confused. This game is focused on who these two people are, why they want each other, why they can’t have each other, and how that affects them emotionally, through a series of already-structured events.

So while I do absolutely find a lot of value in the idea of “play to find out what happens” in most games, I think this is something we can do that’s really really cool and special to RPGs. We can take an already-determined narrative structure, even to the point of a foregone conclusion, and use that to explore character and relationships and psychology like a novel, but with the unique interactivity and embodiment and responsiveness that you could never get from other media. In games like Bluebeard’s Bride or Star Crossed, the narrative structure of the game isn’t a drawback; it’s a blessing because it allows you to shift your focus to something else. If we’re not using the game to create a plot, what ELSE can we use it to create?

Closing Notes

Many years ago, my boyfriend said to me, “Have you ever read I, Claudius? That shit fucking slaps, as the kids say.” With such an introduction as that, of course I had to read it, and he was right; it does fucking slap. Highly recommend it. I was thinking about it again lately, because this year I’ve read two more literary fictionalized memoirs of Roman emperors – John Williams’ Augustus and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. I really enjoyed both of them, but of course I would – it’s a format that lends itself to musing on the nature of leadership and civic ideals and all that good stuff. 

I even picked up two more recently (in addition to noting that we do have a copy of I, Claudius’ sequel, Claudius the God). Evelyn Waugh said that Helena, a fictionalized account of the reign of Emperor Constantine, was his best work; and after I enjoyed Gore Vidal’s Burr some years ago (in the height of Hamilton-mania, to which I was not immune in 2015-2016), of course I had to pick up Julian, about Constantine’s nephew, Julian the Apostate.

There’s a timeline to be made here, and I really think that if our modern great authors applied themselves, we could fill in a lot of gaps. We could, with a little intellectual elbow grease, create an entire timeline of the Roman Empire out of esteemed literary fake memoirs of each emperor, or at least each dynasty (probably not much need for individual books covering the Year of Four Emperors, ALTHOUGH I would not say no to it). I’ll start assigning them out, if I need to! We’ll give the Flavians to Ottessa Moshfegh, or the Severans to Michael Chabon. Surely this plan will work perfectly.

Anyway, that’s probably enough goofs for this month – thanks for reading, and we’ll catch you again next month!