Hello my owl friends, and welcome to the lovely month of May! It’s been a pretty fair month here, despite turmoil in the wider world. We’ve had a great start to our garden this spring, which has been a pretty nice little escape (April showers? Bringing May flowers? In MY garden? Unheard of).

This month’s Dollhouse Drama expansion pack is Girls Save the Day, which adds playsets for superheroes, magical girls, and Greek demigods! I think these are really fun ones for thematically leaning into the transformations via changing outfits. I have been having so much fun writing these and I hope people are liking getting all sorts of new options for the game! Available on itchio and DTRPG!

Progress Tracking

I mentioned this on bluesky when I wrote up my last newsletter, that I always feel a little silly when I go to do this section of the newsletter and I have to really think about what I actually worked on in the past month. I’m really not one for formal progress trackers that people like to use, because that makes this all feel like work and not fun, which, you know, I don’t make nearly enough from this to be willing to think about it as work (more on that later!). But I still wanted to be able to look at what projects I actually touched in any given month.

So I kept track of what games I happened to work on during any given writing session. This doesn’t really break down into “time” tracking, like these units do not equate to hours (each one was probably anywhere between 30-90 minutes, maybe averaging 45? But that’s a loose guess). And yeah, that puts some things into perspective!

Dollhouse Drama was not this high for the past couple months, but I did bump it up this month because I’m going to try to get through the rest of the planned playsets a bit sooner. I originally paced it out to write 2 per month, so I’d finish the whole project up in October. This month I wrote 4 playsets, and I’m going to keep up that pace to try and wrap up in July or August. The thing is that it’s all writing and not design anymore, and I have other games that are reaching the point where they need more writing too. I think it’ll be easier for me to get this fully off my plate rather than trying to split time for a few extra months.

I had some time off of work this month, so I had a couple extra writing sessions, where I did some pretty sizable chunks on Diplomacy of Queens, Pax Deorum, and Blood of the Covenant, which is what got them back to a point where more writing is needed than design. It’s not writing anything like a usable game text, but it’s the stuff that would be necessary to playtest it, like descriptions of moves or a set of narrative prompts for a session. Unfortunately now I’m in this point where these three games all kind of require the same thing, in fairly large amounts, so that’s what drove the decision to try to wrap up the Dollhouse expansions sooner.

And, for whatever it’s worth, “general brainstorming” is exactly what it sounds like – new ideas that haven’t taken form enough to be given even a working title; mechanics without a story or stories without mechanics that haven’t coalesced yet (and maybe never will!).

Other Thoughts

RPG Curricula

This month there were a handful of posts about what RPGs you would use to teach an intro to tabletop RPGs class. I think that’s such an interesting prompt, because you know, it’s a fairly young field but there’s a lot of depth, and I also think that, crucially, there’s no “set” list of films used for “intro to film theory” classes, there’s no “set” list of novels you’d use to teach a general literature class. There’s common ones you’d see in a lot of classes, but it’s not “wrong” if one film theory teacher shows you Agnes Varda and another shows you Jean-Luc Godard to discuss the French New Wave.

Also, a lot of those intro media classes have their own specific lenses or structures that the teacher is using, to give the class a specific shape rather than a big blob of “here’s a bunch of stuff”. I thought about in college when I took British Literature I, which you could take all kinds of lenses and frameworks on. I mean, when do you even start the distinction of something being “British” literature? Where do you draw the line? The class I took started with the Aeneid, a poem written in Latin by a Roman. You know the Carl Sagan bit about making apple pie from scratch by inventing the universe? Apparently you can teach British Literature by inventing Europe.

I joke about it, but that is probably the approach I’d take – the first section of the class would be covering things that firmly AREN’T tabletop RPGs, but that played into their creation – improv comedy and theater, wargames, etc. I think it would be difficult to introduce people to tabletop RPGs in an academically rigorous way without establishing that baseline. I have a lot of thoughts about what specific games I’d use – some people’s lists are closer to mine than others – but I do think people generally covered the definable “eras” and “movements” of game design fairly well. (I did kinda think it was crazy that none of the ones I saw included The Quiet Year? Or the official Dallas RPG? Consider those would be on my list)

Of course, I have to say this with the caveat that I’m a terrible teacher and you should never ever take a class from me, even if the opportunity presented itself in some extremely unlikely scenario! Anyway, it’s always interesting to look at what’s really foundational to the medium and what people do or don’t see as part of the extremely limited and ill-defined “canon” of RPGs. In no particular order, I’d consider including a couple different editions of D&D to examine design trends over time, Dallas, Vampire the Masquerade, Cyberpunk, Traveller, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel, Dread, The Quiet Year, For the Queen, Dream Apart/Askew, Montsegur 1244, Fiasco, Microscope, I think that probably fills up a standard 15-week semester if we look at a game per week. Take it with many grains of salt!

Stealing Mechanics from Board Games

I really like playing board games, though I’ve said pretty often that I’ve never had any inclination to make one myself like I do with RPGs. And it’s funny that even though I like both, I generally don’t really like when they mix too much. I don’t want RPGs to feel “too board game-y” if that makes sense, and I find “RPG-in-a-box” board games (like Gloomhaven or Descent) are fairly miserable experiences to me, like the worst of both worlds.

So it’s funny that I really like thinking about board game mechanics I DO want to steal for RPGs. I think I talked about this briefly before, where one of the inspirations for the dice manipulation mechanics in Dollhouse Drama was the board game Sagrada, where players can purchase tools that let them manipulate the available dice in ways they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do. Like that, it’s rarely a direct lift from a board game mechanic to an RPG one – it needs to have narrative potential to it, and not all board games are concerned with narrative (nor would I want them to be!).

One thing I am trying to do is be better about identifying WHY certain board game mechanics feel more “RPG-able” to me than others, or why some pique my interest as having particular narrative potential even if they aren’t really used that way within the original board game. For example, I love the board game Gorinto, but I would struggle to apply any of its mechanics to an RPG without a lot of forcing; like I could do it but the end result wouldn’t “feel” natural to me.

I recently tried out Zoo Vadis for the first time, and even setting aside the specifics of the different player abilities, I was really intrigued by the potential of having abilities that you CAN’T use on your own behalf and can only use on the behalf of other players. I think that’s something that could be really interesting to explore in a narrative, as a mechanical backing for a feeling of group cohesion and interplay. Zoo Vadis (and most Reiner Knizia games) is not really known for being “narrative” or even especially thematic! Zoo Vadis is a re-skin of a game about the Roman Senate (formerly called Quo Vadis), to make it about zoo animals instead!

I’ll give some examples of a few others that have really tickled me lately: 

1. I like in AHOY (and also in a slightly different shape in the video game Dicey Dungeons) how the different player factions have boards with slots for both shared and unique actions that indicate which d6 faces can be placed into them, so it forces you to strategize about how you allocate your dice to which actions. I think that could be used really satisfyingly in a more narrative game as is, or it could be transformed into something more narrative to begin with, like scenes you have to decide how and when to unlock.
2. I really like the omens and prophecies mechanic that gets added to Dominion in the Rising Sun expansion. You lay an extra rule card, called a prophecy, on the table with a pile of omen tokens on it, and at the start of the game, that rule card is NOT in effect. But there’s certain actions that, when taken, instruct you to remove an omen token off the prophecy card, and when the last omen is removed, bam, the prophecy instantly comes true and the new rule comes into effect. I especially like that the included prophecy cards include some positive ones and some negative ones, so you can play it where you’re trying to avoid or encourage this thing to happen.
3. Tokaido and Namiji have been some of my favorites for YEARS, but I didn’t really think about the possible use of their different action stations and limited space at each stopping point (and especially Namiji’s use of a loop rather than a straight line) until recently, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. I think there could be something so compelling in setting up a really obvious “cycle of play” on a board or playmat like that, and have the different stopping points represent different kinds of scenes that are repeated on a loop – think like the investigation loop of a mystery or horror RPG, or the cycle of social events in Good Society. There’s something here and I am determined to sniff it out!

So if you see any of these crop up in my games in the next five years, remember you got the sneak preview right here!

Tariffs and Digital Publishing

Other people are much more qualified than me to discuss any specifics around the latest fiasco of tariffs here in the US, and how they specifically apply to board games and RPGs, but the general consensus is: it’s real bad. Don’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. And in RPGs, where margins are small and a lot of “businesses” are really “one guy shipping games out of his basement on the weekend”, it could be catastrophic.

So a lot of people have spent the last month or so trying to crack the code on digital-only publishing and how to make that profitable, which, like, okay, that’s a good goal, but I’m gonna say this: some of us have been trying to crack it for years and I don’t think anyone is going to get there in 6 weeks, so cut yourself some slack. I wish I had any kind of useful answers, but that would imply that I had found any measurable success in publishing PDFs and print-on-demand books/cards, but I really haven’t. 

I never like talking about numbers here – for one thing, I was raised that it’s tacky to talk about money, and for another, the numbers I do have just feel straight-up embarrassing – but let’s say I’ll be really really interested if someone does figure out how to make digital-only games pay, because suffice to say I have not found it (I haven’t LOST money, but I also really haven’t made any – I only just broke even on Dollhouse Drama and future sales are all profit now, but also sales stagnated a lot after the first couple weeks, as one example).

Fortunately for us all, I make games out of a sense of spite and willfulness, rather than any sense of financial success, so it’s not like I’m going to STOP any time soon. On the other hand, doing it out of a creative drive rather than being hard up for cash does not stop me from wishing the numbers were simply better. I try not to look at them all the time, because it gets discouraging even if they aren’t my primary or even secondary motivation.

I keep thinking back to Metatopia (which was the weekend after the election, mind you), where some very well-intentioned people tried to tell me that even with my general inexperience, it wouldn’t be a big deal to manufacture a simple box set for one of my games (Before the Season Ends) with small player boards, a bag of tokens, and a deck of cards, have it shipped over from China, and distribute through IPR or another game distributor. Even at the time I was kind of blown away by the nonchalance some people had about it, but even more so now, when “just a simple game shipping from China” could bankrupt you pretty easily and you might have no way of knowing for sure until that container ship reaches the US. 

Anyway, I do hope people find a way to weather this, but I think it’s going to look like a drastic realignment of our expectations around the production quality of games (board and RPG) vs their price. And I don’t know if consumer expectations are going to be able to meet us where we are going to land on that. My take on it all is pretty bleak! I can keep going with what I’m doing because I was never making any money on this anyway and that’s what my day job is for. The worry is more for those who had made the leap to doing this full time, because the industry and the entire medium needs those to thrive.

Projects with Overlapping Thematic Territory

God, I can’t end this newsletter on that note, can I? Tragic. I’ll tack on a little subject here that probably wouldn’t be enough to fill out a whole section, but that I’ve been coming back to lately. I keep coming up with ideas where a couple of different small-to-medium games explore the same thematic territory from different angles, and every time I do this, I think “I should make all of them and publish them together and package them together into some kind of fancy omnibus edition”. 

This is, naturally, absurd. For one thing, I’m not a “fancy omnibus edition” kind of publisher; I’m barely a “merge PDF” kind of publisher. For another, given how long it takes me to finish even one game, trying to wait until I’ve finished three or four of them to publish together would take a preposterously long time and absolutely not be worth the wait. And realistically, when I try to make multiple games along the same thematic lines, what happens is that I work through everything I’m interested in in one of them and then the rest fall by the wayside (this is most of my trunked projects – things ended up being too similar to something else I was more invested in).

But isn’t it just so pretty to think about? To think about really thoroughly interrogating a theme from a bunch of different lenses, making each game unique and special, but also so cohesive as a unit, and then releasing it as a really appealing physical package that makes people go “wow what are THEY playing” when they walk past it at a game store or a convention? Something with all the trimmings?

Okay, it’s possible this is just a daydream for me. 

Anyway, I have a set of four interconnected games I keep thinking about, which I will almost certainly never make, and if I do, it almost certainly will not be in a recognizable format compared to what I describe here. The way I tend to think of the thematic links is like a chart, really. I’m taking inspiration from a couple of different books and movies here, which I’ll put into a nice little grid of quadrants for you. What might we label the axes on this grid? That’s for me to know, and you to find out when you play this game or games in several years, of course! If I keep the illusion up, maybe someday I really will make it happen!

Closing Notes

I didn’t know, way back in February when I sat down to read Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez, that I was signing up for a two month bout with ocean madness in which I was only interested in reading books about the sea, or at least, the seaside. I think I am finally coming out of this fugue state, but what a close call! 

I started with Log from the Sea of Cortez, went to Moby Dick, and then to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, an entirely understandable path. Of course, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has a notable scene where squids attack the Nautilus, and Verne directs you to check out Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, which also features a similar octopus fight scene (sidebar: extremely funny that Verne is like “I can’t do this justice, go read Monsieur Hugo”). Toilers of the Sea was excellent, although decidedly bleak in that Hugo-esque way.

And of course, I couldn’t keep it just to books, I had to move into movies too, and we watched the 1950s movie adaptation of 20k Leagues. I assume audiences in the 50s seeing that for the first time felt something like what I felt seeing Avatar for the first time in 2009? And what could be a more natural double-feature with that than 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, my favorite movie between the ages of 8-11 and a hugely formative influence on me? 

At this point I thought I might DARE to set my eyes back on land and I read The Feast by Margaret Kennedy, which is set at a seaside resort, which I adored and I keep thinking about although I finished it about three weeks ago now. I also read Vonda McIntyre’s The Moon and the Sun, which is about capturing a mermaid and bringing her to land, and then freeing her to return to the sea, which is apparently what happened to ME in this process. Finally I thought I might expunge the ocean madness by returning literarily to the source of it, with Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Untamed Shore, which is set in Baja California on the Sea of Cortez, bringing us neatly full circle. 

I really enjoyed all of these books but it’s so funny that for two months straight I looked at everything on my bookshelf like “I don’t know, it’s not about the ocean, it’s not grabbing me”. Just a little micro-fixation, nothing out of the ordinary I guess! 

And that’s all for this month, folks! Catch you next month! Avoid the ocean madness!