Hello again, my lovely owl friends! Another month down, summer is almost here, the weather keeps getting better and better. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get better at identifying my local backyard birds, the common ones you see all over, rather than just going “guess it’s a sparrow probably” every time (at least 50% of what I’ve thought were “sparrows” have been female blackbirds, which are just…. brown). I feel like the Merlin app is making fun of me, like oh? An American robin? Spotted in North America? In springtime? Groundbreaking.

In addition to a new Dollhouse Drama playset, like we do every month for now, I also have an entirely new game out this weekend!

The latest for Dollhouse Drama is a playset bundle called Stars of the Performing Arts! This one has sets for retro Hollywood starlet melodrama, prima ballerinas competing for the starring role, and traveling circus performers dealing with a rival show! Lotta fun here, so check it out!

The new game is a Descended from the Queen game (so, based on For the Queen) inspired by Narnia and the Pevensie children, exploring what happens if you’re drawn into a magical realm as a child, live a whole life there, and get sent back to reality as children as though none of it had ever happened – and how that might mess you up a bit! It’s called Leaving Avalon, and you can get it on itchio and DTRPG! It was kind of an experiment in seeing how fast I could go from concept to finished execution – it ended up being about 9 months, although that could have been shortened if I didn’t just kind of ignore it in favor of other things for a couple months in there. But it was a fun little project, and I think it turned out really well!

Project Updates

Blood of the Covenant

I think I’m committing to getting a playtest kit of Blood of the Covenant out this year. That feels wild because I’ve been working on this game since like 2017-2018, and I’ve scrapped and restarted it several times, but I think I’ve landed in a good place with it finally. Part of that was having a realization this month while reviewing some of my earliest design notes for it. 

One thing that I always do when I start up a fresh new game project is I record my goal for that game, right at the top of the first page of notes. It’s usually only a paragraph or so, noting what I want the game to be about, what I’m trying to say with it or what I find narratively or emotionally juicy about it, any early mechanical concepts I want to tie to it, etc. Periodically checking back in with that design goal turns out to be really important. 

In this case, it made me realize that over the last couple years, I had been trying to make the game accommodate an entirely secondary thing to be about, a secondary thing I was trying to SAY with it, and that by trying to make it do both, I was diluting both themes. I realized the game is stronger if I strip out this secondary theme and let the game just be about what I originally wanted it to be about. This isn’t to say that I’m no longer interested in the other theme (in fact I will probably do an entire second game about it in order to do it poetic justice), but keeping a really strong focus on one thing is probably better here.

So, that leaves me with a lot of writing to do for this game, much of which I will probably take care of later this summer after I wrap up all the remaining Dollhouse Drama bits (July/August?). But I had a goal of getting out two playtest kits this year – Before the Season Ends and one other, which I didn’t specify because I wasn’t sure which game was going to get there. BtSE was put up in February (and if you want to take a look, I’d still very very much appreciate your thoughts!), and I think Blood of the Covenant is going to be the other half of this goal, before the end of the year.

New Game – Champions of the Crystal Crown

Well, of course, I think I went three months without starting a new game project (I think it was Monaco, as mentioned in the February newsletter, which I am still poking away at), so I was really overdue. This one actually grew out of one of the Dollhouse Drama playsets I did in the last two months, Unicorn Rescue Riders (which won’t be out until October, so that’s something to look forward to). I got so into the research and inspirations for this one, and I had actually had a bunch of stuff set aside as a subset of research for the base game, that I realized I wanted to make a separate game drawing on this:

80s girl heroic fantasy. Like I said, a lot of this stuff I found while I was doing general doll research for Dollhouse Drama, so we’re talking stuff like the Golden Girl doll line, or Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, or Tenko and the Guardians of Magic. Add in some other things that were already on my radar but fit firmly in this realm, like She-Ra (both the 80s version and the 2010s version), or the DC Comics character Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. You may, in fact, already be noticing some commonalities here (the 80s focus groups decided that little girls like gemstones and deriving their magic powers from thematically significant gemstones). We could also borrow a little here from the 90s MB “imagination game” Tales of the Crystals.

The gist, of course, is that very big-stakes, save the world, sword and sorcery vibes but in the way that is so very relentlessly “FOR GIRL” in that 80s focus group way (like we could touch on Red Sonja here for the sword and sorcery, but only at specific recent periods where Sonja is “for girl” and not “for man”). I think I can do a really really fun fantasy adventure game in this realm, because this was always what I liked about fantasy adventure to begin with. Mechanically, I’m actually already drawing on some of the board game stuff I talked about last month, where we’ve got a shared playsheet of color-coded scenes and actions that players get bonuses or penalties to based on whatever crystal color their character is aligned to, etc.

It’s all very loosey-goosey right now because it’s so early, but I already did a quick prototype of what it might look like, so it’s solid early progress! Think there’s a definite chance this comes with me to Metatopia this year, alongside Pax Deorum (the Vestal virgin game).

Other Thoughts

Making “Girl Games”

One thing I’m super good at – like I’m SO confident in my skill here – is overthinking the broader ethical ramifications of my work until I give myself a complex. Those of you who’ve been longer term readers might remember the period last year where I gave myself a complex about my love of Arthuriana and all kinds of related kings-and-knights-and-damsels stories, and how reconciling that with my actual politics sent me down a gigantic rabbit hole of academic texts about Arthuriana until I could reassure myself. What I’m saying is that sometimes I’m really stupid in a way that might, from the outside, look smart.

A recurring thing I worry about is the idea that I “just” make “girl games”, and let’s interrogate both of those quotes there. “Just” is inherently minimizing in this context. It’s implying that making games about girls and women and subject matter that appeals primarily to girls and women is lesser than something else I could be making games about (presumably, boys and men and things that appeal primarily to boys and men, which there is no shortage of other people doing). Except I happen to believe in the equality of the sexes and that women’s stories are of equal importance to men’s stories, so, you know, let’s just write that off as cultural programming that lingers in your brain long after you’ve learned better. We all have it.

Another thing people might try to argue against here if I said it to them is that The Price of Coal “isn’t a girl game”. I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know if that’s true. Statistically by the distribution of player characters, most people end up playing a female character. The game started from the premise of the impact of labor issues on domestic and community groups, which are generally thought of as the more female sphere, compared to the male-oriented labor of coal mining. My first idea for it came from a book of poetry by a woman and written mostly from the point-of-view of women. When I play it, I often still think of it as an experience that highlights women’s stories. So, anyway, we’ll call it a draw on that one.

I have rather a lot of games that require you to play a woman or strongly imply that you will anyway. The Diplomacy of Queens, Pax Deorum, and Before the Season Ends all require you to play a female character; Dollhouse Drama does not require anything at all regarding gender, but it’s a bright pink game based on fashion dolls and I’m not kidding myself about it; the newly begun Champions game I mention above is similar in that regard. For a while I appeased my thoughts about this by reminding myself that at least the first three of those are serious or semi-serious historical games examining women’s roles in actual society in actual history; I could consider them a serious feminist body of work.

But then I get into the games like Dollhouse or Champions where it’s like, the kind of “girl game” that comes out of marketing focus groups and ideas of “boy toys” and “girl toys”, where I have to think at least semi-seriously about my own nostalgia and my own childhood. And I usually don’t feel bad about this – if I think it’s vapid or silly, well, how many vapid and silly games have men made out of nostalgia for the equally-focus-grouped boy toys of their childhoods? Why shouldn’t I make some for girls too? And it certainly can’t be said that I’m doing it uncritically, due to the entire issue of driving myself insane over the ethics of doing it at all

Most days I’m able to shut it up and roll my eyes at myself and keep working. Once in a while it gets loud, though, and I don’t love it! And, you know, one simple answer would be to stop making “girl games” but the truth is that I don’t want to! I am a woman, I was a girl, and I’m interested in what I’m interested in. I do still end up with some more external concerns – sometimes I think making “girl games” means people won’t take anything else I do seriously (which would be wrong of THEM, not of ME, but it’s something I can’t do anything about). I’ve joked before about being seen as too much of a goof to make serious games but also as too much of a bummer to make fun games, but I’m only maybe 10% joking.

At any rate, I don’t have much of a conclusion here, except that you should be better than me and not waste loads of time overthinking about how your body of work is perceived by completely hypothetical others! Because very little good comes of it!

Poetry in the Process

Oh look, I’m going to pull together two seeds I dropped earlier in the newsletter that you probably didn’t even notice! I mentioned in the previous section that a book of poetry (Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher) was one of the biggest inspirations on The Price of Coal. And also, I mentioned a poetic-justice-realization about Blood of the Covenant, but I didn’t mention what prompted it – it was poetry (in this case, the classic play Antigone, and Anne Carson’s poetic interpretation, Antigonick).

Poetry shows up in my creative process more than you might expect (although I generally haven’t written it myself since I was an angsty teen, when I wrote it profusely, and very badly). And I actually think poetry is really analogous to RPGs in a lot of ways! 

Before the pandemic, I used to attend monthly poetry slams at a local bar, and as much as I know “slam poetry” is a joke to some people, I loved it and I always found it really moving and invigorating. Poetry, to me, is… okay, on the page. It’s obviously fine to READ poetry. But I think it’s a little dead. Poetry is ALIVE when it’s spoken aloud, when it’s performed, even if you’re just reading aloud to yourself. 

Perhaps controversially, I don’t buy into the theory I see some of my peers repeat about reading an RPG text being a form of playing it. I think it can be an imaginative activity, but I do not accept that all imaginative activities are play. An RPG is fine, but a little dead, just on the page. It’s only alive at the table, with others, in play. I think if reading the game is imaginative, it isn’t actually CREATIVE (in the sense that something is CREATED), while play is inherently creative. I’ll say that my idea of the difference is the requirement of friction – both in play and in a creative act, you might START with ideation and imagination, but the introduction of friction at the point of bringing an idea to reality is what makes something real.

It’s one thing to imagine hitting a tennis ball; it’s another to feel the racquet in your hand and the force of the ball as it hits and the muscle in your arm as you move. It’s one thing to read a written poem with your eyes; it’s another to feel the shape of the words in your mouth and the modulations of your voice and breath. It’s one thing to read the rules of an RPG and imagine how they work at the table and imagine the stories you might tell; it’s another to sit down at a table with your friends and see where their ideas bounce off yours, where game elements like dice and cards introduce randomization, to be surprised by what others say and do. The former case in each of these examples is imaginative; the latter is creative and to me, only the latter is play.

Others disagree and that’s fine (and this is avoiding the whole topic of “lyric games” which, to be honest, I’d be happy to avoid in general); I don’t think this is a terribly important thing to argue about (we have bigger fish to fry, in case you’ve been living under a rock!). But it feels like a spicy take that will make other people want to argue with ME, which I simply won’t do at all, which is why this is hidden away in the middle of the newsletter under a decoy topic. Shhh. Be cool. Anyway I’m giving very real consideration to doing an RPG adaptation of the play Antigone. Stay tuned.

GMing as a Skill Groundwork for GMless Games

Earlier this month, I was talking with some of my discord pals about RPGs (I know this is going to shock you). This was in a fairly mixed discord group – some people with limited RPG experience, some with lots, a couple other game designers. I’m going to excerpt a bit of the conversation here with me and two of the others (I swear I am not doing manipulative editing, it’s just that we always have four conversations at once and go on a lot of tangents and I didn’t want to edit screenshots to hide the irrelevant side conversation happening simultaneously).

“A” is my friend who has been experimenting with playing more story games and GMless games after some 5e experience; “C” is one of the aforementioned game designers (check him out!); “Me” is… me. We were discussing Microscope at the start of the conversation. I have lightly edited formatting/fixed typos for clarity in some places, but not the words themselves.

A: I feel like that’s partially the fact that the way I play narrative RPGs with a lot of roleplay is different than worldbuilding RPGs. And there’s some [games] that spend a lot of time building the world and then say “go RP inside of it” and it’s almost always the grinding of gears as I get my brain to switch from building to inhabiting.

C: This is the biggest issue I’ve had in play with Dialect; the game is really interesting and clever but the shift from “abstract omniscient view” to “inhabit this one character with the purpose of exemplifying this idea you just named” is not an easy one.

A: I really like beak feather and bone conceptually and then the first time we sat down to play it was very clear that everyone wasn’t sure how to exercise this part of our TTRPG muscles and we were fumbling through it. I’m still incredibly positive on the game but I think I need more plays or a different group before it feels good to play.

Me: This is so interesting to read because I haven’t struggled with that jump between modes but I totally can see how it happens.

C: I think experience in games (and also, specifically running games, where you’re doing that/a similar kind of shift a lot) is a huge part of it; it’s a little awkward for me but I got it, whereas like, the rest of the whole table really, really lost momentum multiple times during said shift.

A (almost simultaneously): I wonder if this is a GM thing? Like could be a you thing but so much of GMing is flipping between “here is the world” and “now I’m an NPC let’s talk”, so it’s a skill you exercise more often even unconsciously.

Me: My brain is churning on this and I am making a note to go deep on it in the next newsletter lmao thank you for the topic.

A: I do think it’s interesting to think about what skills certain games encourage players to develop/exercise. Like I’ve talked about the switch from 5e to GMless and sometimes desperately needing a facilitator because all the former forever-players will just sit around waiting for someone else to take the lead/start a scene/move things along. (It’s me. That’s been my struggle with stuff like belonging outside belonging/no dice no masters)

C: It’s also me because I dared want to play anything and not GM and so my former D&D group just died instead of playing anything.

A: Like obviously what everyone takes away from a game or how they play is different. It’s just fascinating that like GMing can force you to stretch worldbuilding muscles that players only ever have to think about during character creation, if they think about it at all.

Me: There’s a reason people sometimes refer to GMless games as actually being GMfull, because it’s not that no one is GMing, it’s that EVERYONE is.

So, okay, now that we’ve summed that up, I’ll go ahead and say here that I think my statement in the conversation really undersells how eye-opening this was to me! I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about game preferences and liking shared story games vs not liking them, but in I think almost all of those, it was framed as solely a preference. I like doing this, vs I don’t like doing this. I don’t know that I ever saw parts of it (especially the transition between parts) framed as a skill, one that was practiced indirectly in other methods. Even last year when I was poking around at a skills framework of roleplaying, I didn’t get there.

Some of that IS a me-problem: I tend to think that anything that I am good at isn’t a “real” skill, and if I’M good at it, then EVERYONE must be good at it because I’m nothing special. But I think that’s doing a disservice to others too, and not just to myself – obviously being a good GM is a skill! Being a good player is a skill (we talked about this a bit last year when I was talking about the passive/watcher-player dilemma)!

I started GMing for RPGs at a very young age, and fairly soon after I started playing. I did not have years of on-ramp as a player before starting GMing and I was about 13 years old. As such, I am generally aware that there was a period where I wasn’t good at it yet, but it’s long ago and kind of faint and I was running for people who wouldn’t have had any point of comparison to KNOW if I was good or not, because I was all they had. I made a joke a little after this conversation that “The solution is to make everyone do what I did to learn games: reverse engineer 3.5e from a handful of photocopied pages and run it for a group of 5-15 teenagers, as a teen yourself.”

What I mean is that it’s really FLUID for me – I don’t know that I’m particularly skilled in scene setting or worldbuilding or in roleplaying as my character, but I know that I can switch between those states at the drop of a hat. I’ve even done it accidentally. One time I was playing in a friend’s D&D game and I stepped out of my character’s voice and started describing a scene and the NPCs and the look of the building before realizing, “oops, sorry, I’m backseat DMing, I’m supposed to let you do that here”. 

So, what I’ve been stewing on all month is if there’s a way to get players to where they have that really fluid ability to switch between “levels” of the game (call them “worldbuilding” and “roleplaying”, call them “out-of-character” and “in-character”, call them “birds-eye view” and “first person”, I don’t know) without requiring them to go GM a “traditional” RPG, per se. Some people will just HAVE it, I think. Some people won’t “need” training or practice at it, but in ongoing conversations I’ve had with a bunch of people this month, LOTS will, most will.

I think it’s maybe connected but not entirely linked to improv skill, in the sense that this might be one skill that books like Improv for Gamers might help someone develop, but I think you can be good at this tier-switching without necessarily being good at improvising on the fly. I could be wrong about that, but that’s my gut instinct. (As an admission, I have exceptionally little experience with “improv” outside the realm of RPGs, and attending a couple of improv comedy shows in college)

A lot of games give really good advice on framing scenes and setting up the moment and populating the world, and a lot of games give really good advice about roleplaying and inhabiting your character and speaking at that level. I am struggling to think if I’ve ever seen one address the “bridging” moment where you switch gears from one mode to the other (if you know one, please tell me!). I’m wondering if this was invisible to other game designers in the way it was to me? By nature, most game designers also have a baseline comfort level with GMing (though certainly not all of us). On the other hand, maybe what I’m saying is ludicrously obvious to everyone else and I was the last person to get here! Maybe you all already knew about this but just figured “the only way to learn it is to do it”, like it’s a muscle you exercise.

And I’m also wondering if maybe there’s room for a conversation about it being BETTER for some to make the jump to GMing fairly early on in your “career” as an RPG player, rather than spending YEARS playing before feeling like you’re “ready” to GM, because “playing” does not always build the skills necessary for “GMing”. I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve said things along the lines of “well I can’t GM yet, I’ve only been playing for a year or two”, which I think we should push back on (in a polite way)! This isn’t fully formed yet, but I think there’s room for a paradigm where getting some early experience with GMing under your belt both demystifies the process and also makes you a better player.

Somewhat tangentially, it also makes me come back to questions about the idea that starting players off with GMless (or maybe I’m finally coming around on “GMfull”, several years too late) games is easier, that bringing someone fresh and new into the hobby inherently benefits from not starting with trad/GMed games. Because I’ve seen a TON of people float that over the years, this idea that this type of GMless story play is inherently easier, and you know, I just don’t think that’s true! They’re doing the thing I was doing, where they assume the thing that’s easier for them is easier for everyone! If I can call myself out on it, I can call them out too!

Because I will say this – what my friend A observed in the above conversation about difficulties with Belonging Outside Belonging games is something I had seen independently too, and I always wince when I see those suggested as inherently better for beginner players than other types of games. I don’t think they are! I think those games benefit tremendously from familiarity with lots of different types of games and styles of play! “Fewer rules” does not actually mean better for beginners, because “beginners” is just as much a widely varied group as “experts”. It’s good to have them out there as an option, but I don’t think it’s in any way objectively “better” than starting someone with a more traditionally GMed game. It’s like books – the best one to give the kids learning to read is the one that makes them want to read more, so it depends A LOT on the kid.

But that’s all getting into the broader topic of “how we teach games” and what actually MAKES a game “good for beginners” rather than this specific micro-skill that my friends identified for me, that I simply did not know existed, so we’ll save that for another day (maybe next month!).

Games I’m Playing – Inevitable

Lately I’ve been running a short campaign of Inevitable, the “doomed Arthurian Western” RPG, for my Friday night group, and I’ve had a great time with it (and hopefully they have too! It seems like they have!). This group likes to rotate games (and rotate GMs) fairly often, so we tend to give lots of different systems a 6-8 session arc or so, then move onto something else, which suits me really well. And that is just the right amount of time to do one or two of the DOOMS listed in the book – six plot hooks for what the potential “Doom of Myth” is that’s been prophesied. 

A lot of times in the past, I’ve balked at running really lore-heavy games, and Inevitable definitely is one of those – probably 2/3 of the book is lore and setting fluff, if not more. But in this case the lore is just so good, and so extremely up my alley, that it doesn’t feel constrained in the same way as some setting books do. So maybe that’s the real advice for those who would make lore-heavy games, is just… get good? Write better lore? Much to consider. I will say that I AM glad I have both the physical book and the PDF – I end up referencing the physical book for rules, because those are all concentrated at the beginning of the book and organized pretty obviously, and then hitting ctrl-F in the PDF to find lore information.

It also just feels good to GM again, because I hadn’t run any games that weren’t my own in… at least a few months? Maybe four or five months? Running my own games is one thing; running other people’s games and turning off designer-brain and just running them as a normal game for my normal game group feels very different (in a good way!). Anyway, I’ve been having an absolute blast with Inevitable.

Closing Notes

This month I reread The Hobbit for the first time since I was maybe 11 years old. I read it as my bedtime reading for a couple weeks, one or two chapters at a time, which I think is the way that The Hobbit is kind of meant to be read. I was really struck again by just how GOOD it is. I know that’s hardly news; one of the most acclaimed fantasy books of all time… is really really good! Just a great little story, written in a beautiful way!

But what I was really blown away by is how there’s ten million fantasy adventure games trying to imitate The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or anything else set in Middle-Earth (I’m sure there’s Silmarillion games…), including the single biggest game in the entire industry, and how not ONE of them that I’ve EVER tried has come anywhere close to feeling like the real deal. I want to ask “how has no one made a game that feels like this?” but honestly, even if I were to try, I’m not sure where I’d start. 

I suspect that it requires a better understanding of what makes good fairy tales, folklore, and children’s literature than… most RPG designers have, if I’m being honest. And I rather suspect that many RPG players would push back on a game that successfully captures feeling like Bilbo or Frodo because the point of Bilbo and Frodo is that they aren’t special and don’t feel special (Bilbo, in particular, is the analog to the child reading the book and feels appropriately childlike for that context, but I can imagine being unpopular for adult players).

Anyway, I have rambled on more than enough (I think this sets a record for longest newsletter) so that’ll be all for me today! I’ll catch you next month, and don’t forget to check out Leaving Avalon!