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

Hello, my owl friends! I hope your November was as kind to you as November can be, and I hope you’re planning all kinds of lovely things for December. I’ll admit, November usually isn’t my month (nor is February – the bookends of winter). But we keep doing our best, even through sub-optimal times! Fortunately, all the news I have here today is good news!

Heat of the Battle

The final (for now?) One Night, Last Chance game is now available: Heat of the Battle! The previous two games, Life of the Party and Thrill of the Chase, have been joined by their sister game, and all three are available on itchio and DriveThruRPG! You can even get them as a nice bundle, which offers you some savings to buy them together!

I loved working on all three of these, I loved exploring three different settings and tones for a fairly tight rule set. I think the inspiration for this one is the funniest, though. Life of the Party was a broad genre of things (parties), Thrill of the Chase was a broad genre of things (heists), Heat of the Battle is one specific episode of Game of Thrones that I never stopped thinking about for years, even after the show ended so poorly (season 8, episode 2, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”, if you were wondering). I love the idea of exploring the day BEFORE this big momentous battle, where you might all die on the battlefield, and how you choose to spend those potentially final hours together: making amends, airing grievances, repaying debts, or maybe just trying to get the hell out of there.

At some point in the future, I’d like to do a game jam for the One Night, Last Chance system, so more to come on that front! If you’re interested, check out the SRD now!

Metatopia

Metatopia, all the way back at the start of the month, was so lovely; I had a wonderful time and all of my playtests went even better than I could have hoped. If you remember my previous newsletters, I was terribly nervous – I’m always nervous both before a convention and before a playtest, so of course I’m extra on-edge before the event that is literally both. Even knowing I had nothing to BE nervous about (I was surrounded by friendly faces, in a place where I have never received anything other than a warm welcome), sometimes logic doesn’t help.

But of course, as soon as things kick off on Thursday night, it all comes back to me – Metatopia has a really unique feeling among conventions I’ve been to, because it’s really more like a professional conference for game designers, rather than something like a fan convention. As a designer, you never have to worry that people won’t “get it” in your playtests. We’re all here for the same purpose, and you just don’t have to worry about explaining this weird niche THING that we do. And it was so wonderful to see my friends, some people I only see at Metatopia, or previously only knew online, and have some really good face-to-face time with everyone.

I got really great, useful feedback out of all three of my playtests (and all of them were full! And they all filled up immediately! I’m immensely flattered!). In my experience, the MOST useful thing coming out of a general playtest is my own observations – where I can see what is and isn’t working how I want it to. Part of what makes Metatopia special is the quality of the feedback you can get from the playtesters, who – by virtue of being the type of people who go to an event like this – can be a bit more articulate about their experience, and more thoughtful in how they express it.

I ran two sessions of Before the Season Ends, and one character creation session of The Diplomacy of Queens (where we got through the process twice, creating two sets of characters, with feedback between and after), so I want to talk a little bit about what I got from those sessions.

Turning Playtest Feedback into Action Items

Because I, personally, need quite a bit of a game in place before I feel ready to test it (and as a GM, I need a decent amount of scaffolding to feel comfortable running a game) my games are usually going into a playtest – even very early ones like these – with a lot already written, and a lot worked out in my head. This goes against common wisdom to playtest as early as possible, but as I say over and over and over – there is no creative process that works for everyone. So I’m going to talk about what works for me!

Let’s assume that, going into a playtest, I have all the written materials that I’ll need already written (usually some form of character sheet or playbooks, whatever GM materials I’ll need for the session itself, etc.). There’s one more document that I usually create, which I call my “playtest procedure” doc. This is nothing fancy, it’s just a quick list of what I want to make sure I cover and in what order. Here’s one I did for Before the Season Ends, as an example:

This helps me clarify what I want to actually examine in a playtest, as well as helping me make sure I have all the components that I need prepared (for example, writing down the procedure reminded me to make sure I had a mentor token sheet and scrapbook sheet prepared). Sometimes I do multiple versions, if I’m running multiple tests where I want to compare and contrast something, or if there’s still decisions I need to make (like I did this time about the number of starting tokens, and a few other things).

During a playtest, I always have my notebook out and I’m taking lots of messy notes. Fun fact: I actually don’t do this when I’m GMing a normal game. I know lots of GMs take notes while they run games, I just typically don’t! Not my thing! I find it more distracting in the moment, and when I DO take notes as a GM, they never end up being useful to me later. But in a playtest, I NEED those notes.

Here’s an example page of my notes from one of my Metatopia playtests, and this is actually one of the neater ones! Arrows all over, stuff in the margins or off to the side, and – I actually didn’t notice this until now – completely inconsistent bullet points or hyphens? Not sure why that happens, but sure! You can see there’s a mix of general info (“took about half an hour”), things I already definitely want to change (“need slots to write down relationship info”), questions to be discussed and decided upon later (“more agency in the husband phase?”), and media recommendations that were brought up by players during the session (the books of Guy Gavriel Kay, the RPG The King is Dead). Well, you can see that if you can read my handwriting, which is questionable at best, and especially when I’m trying to get everything down quickly.

In a typical playtest session, I end up with between one and three pages of notes like this, which I’m taking in the moment, or very shortly afterwards. In this particular case, because it’s about a six hour drive home from Metatopia, I also ended up with some notes on my phone that I quickly typed up at a gas station (and I realized later that I probably could’ve just used the dictation mode on my phone while driving, but it did not occur to me in the moment!). Six hours alone in the car is a long time to brainstorm. I wish I could say that the phrase “idk, figure it out” is a rarity in my personal notes, but it absolutely is not. I am always telling myself “idk, figure it out”.

The day after the convention, I went to my usual coffee shop to do some work on these notes. Yes, I am a complete cliche, and I do 99% of my design and writing at the coffee shop, like a little hipster with my laptop and my latte. The thing is, while my in-the-moment notes are useful, I can’t actually work directly off of them. It’s too chaotic, it’s too hard to find whatever specific point I’m looking for, and it’s just messy. They’re also rarely comprehensive – sometimes there were multiple playtests, and I need to look for things spread out across pages of notes with a bunch of other junk in between; sometimes I just think of something after the fact that doesn’t get noted down in the same spot.

So we start a fresh page to collect a list of action items. Action items are what I’m actually DOING with that feedback. Because the thing is, sometimes feedback doesn’t result in an action item. Sometimes I need to see if it happens in multiple tests or if it was just a one-off thing. Sometimes I just straight-up disagree with it or think it would make the game worse (sorry). Sometimes there’s nothing to really DO, but just something to keep in mind (sometimes, in the best case, this feedback is just “I love this thing, it’s perfect, don’t change it”). But a valuable playtest should result in me DOING things to change the game (or in learning that there is nothing left I want to change, when the game is done).

This is a lot neater. The changes are numbered (though there’s no real order to them), most of them say where the change needs to happen or what type of change it is, and this is something I can work off of.

Some of these action items might be really small. You can see here, in my list of action items for Before the Season Ends, things like “remove the # on the goals to not imply sequencing” or “add an age range to the character sheet”. These are 30 second changes, and I probably spend longer adding them to the action item list than it takes me to do them (but I add them to the list anyway because I like to check them off).

Some of these are really big. “Additional writing: introduction to the whole premise” is like… a LOT. What I found myself wishing I had was something like a script, or close to it, to introduce the key setting and background information in a clear and concise format, and to keep it orderly and preempt common questions. That’s a difficult bit of writing that will probably take me some time, and multiple revisions. But you can’t do revisions on something that doesn’t exist, so the action item for now is just to write it.

There’s also some reasonably hefty mechanical changes (adding ties between the player characters, clarifying when you do or do not use a token). At the moment, those don’t actually FEEL big to me, just because next to nothing of this game is written down at the moment, it’s all been entirely in my head. If I was revising an existing rulebook I’d written, that would probably feel more major. As a note, I did tell a few people that I am aiming to have a playtest version of the game up for download in the next month or two, and I hope to deliver on that! I’ll keep you posted!

Some of these are still open questions, and the action item is really to make a decision one way or another. In this case, it’s how I want to rework the stress mechanic, and if I want to add a gossip/rumors mechanic (and if so, what that should look like). These are generally the last items I address, just because I’m bad at making decisions until I’m forced to. So, we’ll see what happens with those!

I also had a separate page of not-quite-action-items for The Diplomacy of Queens this time, because it was just a character creation session. The rest of the game doesn’t actually EXIST yet. All I have is the character creation rules. So I made a page of what I said were “key design points” – things that resonated with the playtesters or were brought up as things they looked forward to seeing in play after making their characters, that I want to be sure that I DON’T change or lose in the process of building out the rest of the game.

The other really great thing to come out of that session was a safety conversation – it’s a game that deals with a lot of heavy subject matter, including things that people frequently avoid in their games. This is not new terrain to me (The Price of Coal has some deeply upsetting material in it, due to the nature of its subject matter), but it is always worth considering anew with each new game. As a reminder, The Diplomacy of Queens is a historical game about noblewomen in the Middle Ages – so some of the themes that are pretty unavoidable in the game include arranged marriage, war, religion, pregnancy and motherhood, you get the idea.

I was so appreciative of how candid my playtesters were, and the suggestions they gave – it’s tricky to balance sometimes where you can say “you can remove this theme from the game entirely if it doesn’t suit you” vs “you can remove this for your character, but not from the group as a whole” (which is probably how I’ll approach the issue of pregnancy/motherhood) vs “you cannot remove this from the game without breaking it and you should probably pick up a different game at this point”. 

So, that’s how I took everything away from Metatopia, now I just have to actually DO them! You know, the easy part!

Historical Games, Historical Fantasy, Subversion, and Playing it Straight

Speaking of historical games, there’s a point I made here a few months ago that I was reminded of in multiple conversations recently – at Metatopia or as follow-ups to Metatopia. I am generally interested in making (and playing) historical games, and not historical fantasy games. When I say “historical fantasy”, I’m not just referring to “the past but there’s wizards and dragons”; I’m also referring to “the past, but without all the icky problems like sexism and cholera”. 

There was a real opportunity to turn either Before the Season Ends or The Diplomacy of Queens into a queer girl power fantasy, where we turn history on its head and the girls can do anything and they are not affected by the real societies that inspire their settings. I didn’t want to do that. I don’t find it particularly compelling to design, though I sometimes like to play it. I can see why other people do, and there’s for sure the audience for that (Thirsty Sword Lesbians is very popular! There’s really a much LARGER audience for historical fantasy than there is for history!). But for me, I like the creative constraints too much for me to disregard the history in the history.

For me, the duality of the “debutante” system and the “marriage market” – being both overall a bad system for girls and women and also, for many of the girls who participated in it, a truly joyful time in their lives – is the heart of Before the Season Ends. The conflict is part of it. I want you to have to consider that and think about it.

I’ll share a quote here from a great book which I highly recommend, and which was a great inspiration for my game – The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson.

“…innumerable, nameless girls who went through this process, whose only legacy is their debutante scrapbooks, a record of press clippings and photos of fellow debutantes. These scrapbooks are generally found at the tail end of family archives, where one first must riffle through the recorded deeds of great and accomplished tycoons, politicians, and landowners. Even though these daughters played a vital role in the transmission of their fathers’ power, their lives remain obscure. 

It is ironic then that the season was the only chance a debutante would have to experience even the barest control over her own body and mind. The transitional space between her parents’ house and her husband’s was the freest she would likely ever be. At a party, this might mean noting the texture of champagne sliding down her throat, or the restraint of a corset, or the pain from her beautiful shoes.”

That’s CLEARLY where the fun is, to me. That conflict is the interesting part! Savoring your first sip of champagne while knowing you’re being sized up like a sculpture at auction, to be used as a broodmare. I know not everyone agrees, but that’s SO obviously the thing that’s JUICY that I struggle to imagine how others don’t see it. So that’s the game I’m making!

To multiple people, in these recent conversations, I had made the note that I’m not interested in “subverting” things, I like to play them straight. If you’re wondering, no, I’ve never liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! I don’t tend to go in for subverted fairy tales either (and I have a fun note about Wicked later). Sometimes it’s fine, but a lot of the time, I end up feeling like they’ve smoothed out any interesting friction in the source material or original genre, in order to insert some dumb mess or to miss the point (or what I see as the point, anyway). It’s not for me! 

It’s a choice and a preference that I used to feel was “wrong”, like I SHOULD be more into historical fantasy, but I’ve lately been very validated in that preference and it’s made me feel more secure in what I make, so I wanted to shout that out as a fun bit of personal growth that came from talking to other cool people.

Closing Notes

Should I just rename this section “Media Recommendations”? I feel like that’s what I end up doing with it most months.

In books, I finally read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel this month; it’s one of those books that of course you always hear is excellent, and I’m glad that it really is. I enjoyed it enormously. It has a really unique prose voice, it’s written in the present tense which is fun and different, and I think Mantel has such a delicious grasp of character. To me, that’s the mark of a great author, is their grasp of personal complexity and their skill at portraying it in their characters. And it’s also very fun to read a story where traditionally-the-bad-guy Cromwell is our protagonist, and we’re slandering actual saint Thomas More.

Speaking of saints, I hope everyone went to see Conclave this month while it was in theaters. I actually went to go see it on election night, to distract myself from… the election, which ended up being maybe the funniest choice I could have made. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s about a conclave of cardinals meeting to elect the next Pope, with a lot of old man drama and ominous secrets and it’s very well done. Surely someone has already done an RPG or a LARP about electing the Pope? And if not, do I have to do it? I can’t possibly be the right person to do that, and YET… I’m tempted.

I also got to go see the Wicked movie (or should I say, part 1 of the Wicked movie) with my mom this month, and I feel I need to give the backstory note that I was OBSESSED with Wicked from the age of 12 to maybe 17 or 18. I was fully prepared for the movie to be bad, but it was not! I enjoyed it a lot! But the really funny moment I had was realizing how formative it was to my tastes and thematic interests as a tween and teen. I’m pretty sure reading the book Wicked (and a few of the other Gregory Maguire fairy tale twists) when I was too young is part of why I’m so much less interested in the subverted fairy tales thing (all of those books are bad, by the way. I do not like Gregory Maguire). And I could SEE things in Wicked that show up repeatedly throughout my work, most recently in Before the Season Ends (namely, the idea of your whole life and social status changing at one big momentous dance party, and girl besties exploring a big exciting city together for the first time). Just a funny realization!

As a postscript, added at the time of finalizing the newsletter: this might be cheating, since I read it five months ago, but five months ago I read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it’s returned to the front of my mind lately. This month I finally read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and found I actually preferred Chronicle! Solitude was very good, but there’s just something STICKY about Chronicle that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s a very dispassionate, journalistic deconstruction of a murder that everyone in town knew was going to happen, but that no one prevented, and I think that’s just fascinating. Anyway, yes, of course, I have notes for a game – who would I even be if I didn’t?

Alright, I think that’s more than enough for this month (normally I get to more subjects in the same number of words!). Thank you all again for reading, and the next time you hear from me will be the start of 2025!