Hello my owl friends! Welcome to 2025! I realized that my habit of doing the newsletter on the first of the month rather than towards the end of the month means I might be the first newsletter to hit your inbox in the new year, so: happy new year! I am a big believer in beginning as you mean to continue, so I rang in the new year as I intend to spend much of this year: falling asleep early after reading a book and eating leftover Christmas cookies.
I’m gonna throw a couple quick calls to action here, to make sure I don’t forget them in all my ramblings:
- I made a nice bundle of my three One Night, Last Chance games! It’s $10 to get three games, all exploring combustible interpersonal situations under time pressure! If you like parties or heists or battles, I’ve got you! Check it out!
- Game designer Sarah Doom launched a newsletter recently, and you should sign up for that! She wrote or co-wrote two games that I really love – Velvet Glove and Bluebeard’s Bride – and she always has really interesting insights on games, so I can’t wait to read what she writes and you should too!
- They’ve been around for a minute, but last month they had one of those random sudden publicity surges that comes with a social media post really blowing up, so I only just learned about them: Bull Press, publishers of indie games and dedicated to getting games into the hands of people who are incarcerated. I think this is so fascinating, and a wonderful statement on the power of play. Support what they do!
2024 in Review
I’ll keep this section short, because I mostly feel like I’d rather look forward than look back, at least in my personal life (as you’ve seen in previous months, I love reading history books!). If you flatten 2024 down to financial numbers, it was a pretty bad year! Many are saying this! A bunch of game designers I know have noted reduced sales, difficulty in getting eyes on things, and a general struggle against external factors that we can’t control. Social media implosions, people having less money for leisure spending due to inflation and underemployment, a potential bubble bursting in RPGs, a general culture that makes it impossible to make a living in the arts (any medium), these are all things that exist, but that I can’t do much about, so I’d rather not dwell on them! I will simply add my voice to the list of voices saying: it was really hard to make money on games this year, compared to previous years.
Fortunately for me, the money is really kind of a tertiary concern (I have a day job that I don’t expect to quit until I retire). If I look at other things – my satisfaction with my own creative work, making or continuing relationships with people I like and respect and trust in the game space, etc – it was a fantastic year! I did a bunch of design work that I’m really proud of. I proved to myself that I can finish things without external pressures like publisher deadlines (a legitimate concern; at one point I really thought I would never finish anything again if I didn’t have someone else forcing me to). People who I admire and respect saw me as a peer and said kind and encouraging things about my work.I feel like it’s easy for things like that to get lost in the shuffle, but they shouldn’t! So I take a minute to note them here.
Goal-Setting for 2025
I’ve never been much of one for New Year’s Resolutions. Not to say that I don’t get that big “new year, new me!” energy; it’s just that for me, the time where I feel urged to reinvent myself or make big changes is usually September (residual emotional memories of starting the new school year, plus my birthday) and not January. But this is still a good season to set goals for the new year, so let’s talk about that a little.
I’m kind of particular about what I will and won’t set as a goal. To me, not only does a goal need to be achievable, it needs to be achievable by myself. If it relies too much on other people, it’s not a good candidate for “goal-setting”. It can still be something I want to do, but not something I feel comfortable putting a lot of pressure on. It can still be an aspiration, but if it’s not really in MY hands, I don’t feel like it’s really a goal. This is why I don’t set goals relating to sales numbers (I can’t control what people do or don’t buy) or working with specific people (because that depends on THEM also wanting to work with ME and being available to do so)(I’m also just a terrible creative collaborator, and I acknowledge this about myself).
So my goals for 2025 really focus on designing and writing the games themselves, because that’s the part that’s really fully in my control. I’ve sorted them into three categories based on what level of completion I’d like to get each individual game to:
1) Done! Finished! Out the door and into the world!
2) “Beta”, or something like an ashcan version or public playtest kit. Enough written that I can put it up for download somewhere and someone else could pick it up and give feedback on it. Playable but by no means finalized (for comparison, this is the state Dollhouse Drama was in when I first put it up in July 2023).
3) “Alpha”, or enough written down or decided on that I feel comfortable running a playtest of it myself, even if there’s nowhere near enough that someone else could do it (this is the state I brought both of my games to Metatopia this year, where I knew what I was doing, but it was pretty much all in bullet-point notes except for the playsheets).
Which projects do I want to get to which levels? Well, let’s go through them. You’ll notice that this is kind of structured like a funnel, where I’m leaving things more open at the less-complete levels.
At the first tier, I want to finish and publish Dollhouse Drama (and the monthly “expansion packs” I’ve been writing for it). This one is arguably the most achievable because the game already IS done and I have set a January publication date (MARK YOUR CALENDARS, JANUARY 21ST, NEW GAME DROPS). The expansion packs make this a little more questionable, because while I have a lot of them done, there’s still a bunch more I’d really like to do, and I worry about running out of steam, especially if the response to the game is tepid. I have high hopes for this one, but that also means I worry about it more, if it disappoints. It’s a fashion doll game! It’s fun and light and kid-friendly but also great for nostalgic adults! Fabulous accessories give you your skills and powers! I have a GORGEOUS cover from a great artist! This should have a much bigger niche than my normal weird sad historical games! God I hope so!
I’d also like to finish and publish two smaller games: Gryphons & Gargoyles and Leaving Avalon. Gryphons & Gargoyles feels a little silly to set as a goal, because it’s a fanwork of someone else’s IP that I literally can’t SELL (I will put it up for free). But it’s something I’ve wanted to do for so long that finally clicked for me, so it feels like fair game (this is the one where I took the fictional game Gryphons & Gargoyles as portrayed in the TV show Riverdale, and made it a real playable game). Leaving Avalon is a Descended from the Queen game, so fairly straightforward; at this point I only have a little more writing review to do, and then art and layout. Because I don’t know how this is going to perform, I’m going to use public domain and stock art for it, so it’s just a matter of finding the right stuff. Ideally I’ll make enough money from it to cover a piece or two of art for another game next year.
I want to create beta versions, ashcans or public playtest kits for two games: one is definitely Before the Season Ends. This is one of the games that I brought to Metatopia, and which I have already promised to a few people that I’d put something together, so they could run their own playtests and provide feedback. Since we’re doing a little rundown of all the games here, this is my “Regency friendship” game about girls coming of age as debutantes in Regency London. The second, I’m going to leave a little open and give myself some choices of a few games that are ready to reach that stage: The Diplomacy of Queens (medieval game about how women use power in patriarchal structures), Blood of the Covenant (dark medieval fantasy about paladins and oaths, been in progress since literally 2017, it’s probably time to DO something about it), or Collegiate Gothic (PbtA campus novel/dark academia but not fantasy/noir crime stories set around a prestigious university). In a perfect world, I’d get to all four of these and have a bunch of playtest kits flying around, but we’ll be realistic and aim for two: Before the Season Ends and one of the other three.
And then for the alpha level, where it’s just playtestable by me, even barely, we’ll leave it a little more open than that. I’d like to get two to this state as well. I have three candidates currently in mind. Pax Deorum is my game about the Vestal Virgins of Ancient Rome, and the idea of the priestesses being used as political scapegoats in times of crisis for the city. Rather Die Than Doubt is a 3-player romantic tragedy game about King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. Circuitry is a story game about robots gaining sentience and defining what “humanity” means for them. Those would be great ones to do, but I’m also open to any two new ideas that happen to really strike me during the year. Because sometimes a new idea takes you by surprise and you just have to make it happen because it won’t let you go until you do! So my goal is to get any two games to the alpha playtest level, whether it’s ones I’ve already identified, new ideas I haven’t had yet, or some combination.
So that’s a lot! I have set large goals! But I think they should be achievable!
Process: Notebooks, Commonplacing, Zibaldoni
One of the books I read last year was The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which I had picked up after a few people I follow had recommended it, but I was already piqued by the subtitle. “Thinking on paper” is exactly it. Writing is the act of organizing your thoughts (sidebar: this is why people who use chatGPT are making themselves dumber. It’s not just a shortcut, they’re robbing themselves of the skill of organizing their thoughts). The end product of “writing” isn’t always the point; sometimes (often, even!) the point is the process itself.
The book has some great historical anecdotes in it (BIG fan of the 1500s commoner who, after some embittering experiences with the nobility, doodled himself a noble coat of arms with rats and turnips instead of lions and lilies), and some great discussion on how people have used notebooks throughout time, and I was so pleased to see my own practices kind of reflected back at me through time.
I’m not someone who had to be convinced of the importance of keeping a physical notebook (I’ve kept a diary since I was 12, and I’ve held onto all my creative writing notebooks since around the same age). My current notebook (I use ONE notebook at a time, fill it up, then replace it) is a combination of game design reference/resource, reading notes, daily to-do list, journal, brainstorming platform, and inspiration/instruction collection. It’s not dissimilar to a commonplace book!
Commonplace books were a big trend in the late medieval and early modern era in Europe, in which people would create their own reference text for use in their daily life. It might have any combination of poems or songs you heard and wanted to remember, your favorite bible verses and prayers or information about a patron saint, key recipes and medical formulas you’d refer back to, tables of weights and measures, aphorisms and quotes that you liked, memoranda on family information like birthdays and anniversaries, all kinds of things. They were generally custom and unique to the person making it. I am personally fascinated by the note that young women would be instructed to keep a commonplace book, and then show it to prospective in-laws to prove that her upbringing and education had been “correct”.
The fad particularly caught on in Italy, and especially in Florence, where an abundance of cheap paper made them popular with people of all ages and classes and genders in the 1400s – which is just an incredible effect of the increase of literacy that led to the Renaissance. They were called zibaldoni, and a shocking number of them have survived, which is just magical. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving notebooks are zibaldoni. The combination of classic-educational, religious, and popular “vernacular” literature quoted in the surviving zibaldoni and commonplaces is really compelling to me; because it was so personal to the writer, there was no pressure to keep to a canonical set of “approved” sources to quote from. It’s just such an interesting milestone in the development of literate culture.
In school, I (and many others, I imagine) were instructed to keep separate notebooks for each subject: this is your science notebook, this is your literature notebook, this is your history notebook. I think that makes sense for the setting of a modern American public school where you’re taught all these subjects in discrete chunks, and your day is strictly divided into chunks of time for each subject, but I never felt it made sense for me as an adult, where the spheres of my life are less divided, and my note-taking interests in games, literature, history, movies, travel, hobbies, etc all feel related.
Nevertheless, I always felt a little silly for keeping everything all in one – like I ought to have specific notebooks for a given project, or that my personal notes should be separated from artistic notes. So it was actually kind of nice to see here that there’s a pretty solid precedent for this kind of collection and curation of notes copied down from other sources, compiled into one notebook by and for the writer. Very validating! And it’s encouraged me to be a bit more intentional about some things I already do (recording various quotes and things that inspire me creatively, taking notes on what I’m reading and playing, etc.).
And I will just say, for my own part, that I do think it’s important that it’s a physical notebook written by hand with a pen or pencil. Yes, I could record all the same information by typing, but I don’t think it’s the same. I’ve observed for years that I remember things better when I write them down by hand than when I type them, and that I feel a bit more free brainstorming on paper than I do on a google doc. I understand that’s not necessarily on the table for everyone, but I think it’s worth trying for most people, and especially people who want to be writers or artists or game designers or whatever kind of creative.
A Prototype Playtest
For some of my games with a physical aspect that I’m not 100% sure about – really anything beyond like, character sheets and dice and pencils – I end up doing what I call a “prototype playtest” as one of the very first things I can even do with the concept. Sometimes you just need to see how things interact in a physical space (or, I guess some people might not need to, but I have no good spatial sense, and it’s hard for me to imagine certain things, even knowing their measurements). I think I’ll go into this in more detail next month, but I’m tacking on this note here at the end of December because I just did one for a game that I have only the barest inklings of in my head yet.
This is going to sound insane, but this idea comes from reading a New Yorker article about the Stasi earlier this year. In a nutshell, there’s a group of German archivists who are piecing together old Stasi files that were only partially destroyed (ripped in half or quarters, half buried but not really disposed of, etc.) when the wall fell, because it’s how they can get a more complete picture of just who was involved and who they were watching and what was being reported, but they have an understandable conflict about what to DO with that information.
I found that really compelling, emotionally, and if you’re me, anything that’s emotionally compelling is ripe terrain for a game. And of course, I kind of have two angles I want to take it – you could go in the direction I like to do, where it’s sad and historical, and I probably wouldn’t make it literally about the East German secret police because it’s outside my realm, but you could do something quite thematically similar to reality, where you’re piecing together historical records with really terrible ramifications. OR, if I would like to ever sell a game that people actually play instead of just sitting on their shelf and being sad, I could take it in a fun and whimsical direction – the wizard’s grimoire was torn to shreds by his pet griffin and you have to put it together again. I don’t know!
I also don’t know anything else about this idea except “I think there’s something fun about ripping up papers and putting them back together and maybe not liking what you learn very much”. It’s not even really an idea as much as it is the seed of an idea. But at any rate, I wanted to see if getting my hands into it would help things along, so I printed out some lengthy wikipedia articles, ripped them up in my basement, crammed all the bits into a bag and shook it up, and then sat down a day later to see what type of tactile response I got from the activity. I’m a real professional game designer. I could plausibly say this is “my job” (in the sense that I make a non-zero number of dollars from games each year). I’m an artist.
Games I’m Playing
So, the last couple newsletters have been light on talk about what I’ve actually been playing, and that’s in part because my two regular home groups are still playing games that I have very little of interest to say about. One is playing the new D&D 5.5e. It’s fine. It’s D&D. I have been writing in a semi-professional capacity about D&D since 2013. Coming up with new things to say about D&D at this point is like beating my head against a wall. The other is playing the Star Trek Adventures RPG. It’s fine. It’s Star Trek (but not the way I like Star Trek, as a certified fanfic writing girlie). I’m having fun with my friends, but these games do not spur game design thoughts in me except occasionally “I could do better” and that just feels mean (which is not to say that I won’t get deeper into it throughout these winter months, when boredom and the lack of sunlight makes me itchy).
Fortunately, last month, my dear friends Camdon Wright and Kate Bullock hosted a little game day, and I got to play some of the real good stuff: I facilitated sessions of Dialect (one of my favorite games of all time), using the Utopian cult compound playset, and Desperation, with the Isobel card deck, about the shipwreck of a cod fishing ship. Those were both great fun (in the sense that sad things are fun to me). And then I got to actually PLAY in a session of the Root RPG, which I have run many times but had never gotten to enjoy as a player. That was a joy, both getting to be a player and for that game itself, because I love the world of Root (the RPG is based on the board game, which I also love).
Every time I play Desperation, it makes me really want to make a hack of Desperation, or do something inspired by it, or borrow some bit or piece of it for something. I just don’t know what that thing is yet. I’m sure it’ll come to me, because I find the idea of “here’s the dialogue, decide WHO says it” so narratively compelling and juicy that I keep thinking about it and coming back to it, flipping through the card decks even when I’m not playing. The box set is one of a handful of games that basically live on my desk right now, rather than down in the game room where it should be, along with a playtest deck for one of the aforementioned hacks from a fellow designer, Jenn Martin’s Aldsworth 1811. I just feel like there’s a great possibility in this system that I haven’t tapped into yet.
2024 Favorite Movies and Books
I went into 2024 with the goal of reading 50 books and watching 100 movies (not counting re-reads and re-watches; it should be stuff that’s new to me). Just because of how this year shook out, I ended up blowing past the reading goal really early, around August, and readjusting to a goal of 75 books, which I also hit by the end of the year. On the other hand, I only just barely hit the 100 movies goal in late December by actively spending the last three weeks of the year trying to catch up on stuff I had missed earlier and sometimes watching multiple movies a day.
For movies, because I like going to the movie theater and seeing the new hotness, I do a ranked list of all the new releases I see each year. You can see the full thing on letterboxd here, but here’s a preview with my top 10 new movies of 2024.
For books, it’s much harder to keep on top of current releases, and I have a much greater interest in going back to old classics or things that were big before my time. So this list is everything I read this year, in chronological order, with my particular favorites highlighted in pink (I won’t rank them). The italicized titles were my “bedtime reading”, where I picked specific things that are easy to split into little chunks to read before bed, so I wouldn’t be tempted to stay up until 4 am finishing it (the theme was fairy tales and morality stories, obviously). Should I use goodreads or storygraph or something? Probably! Do I like my little notes app list? Yes I do.
So that’s probably enough for this month! Don’t forget to check out the One Night, Last Chance bundle, and we’ll be back with a brand new game next month!
Owl Knight Games 