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

Hello, my owl friends! It’s time for another newsletter! I actually lost track of time and almost didn’t realize it had been a month since the last one – this part of summer always flies by, and it doesn’t help that I spent about two weeks out of commission with a nasty summer cold.

In case you missed it in the last newsletter, I do have a new game out! Life of the Party is a card-based story game about melodrama at a nightclub, and you can get it now! A second game using the same system, Thrill of the Chase, about pulling off a daring casino heist, will be coming out in October as well!

Before we get in too deep, I also want to call people’s attention to a DriveThruRPG bundle to help out Meguey Baker with some medical bills related to her ongoing fight against cancer! Meg is one of the kindest, smartest, coolest people I’ve met in gaming, and it would mean a lot to me for people to support this bundle and support her!

Project Updates

Dollhouse Drama

Work continues apace to get Dollhouse Drama ready for its planned release early next year, plus the ongoing support I have planned for it – I’m writing about two playsets a month to make sure next year has consistent and steady releases to keep the game afloat. I had originally planned to work on the game’s layout in September, but I got ahead of myself and ended up putting the whole thing together about a week ago. I ordered the print proof, and I’m really optimistic that we’ll have something really nice here! 

It’s so tricky, because I’m by NO means a graphic design professional, so I kept my layout really simple, and I don’t have the budget for more than the cover illustration, so there’s no interior art, and I kind of just have to hope that isn’t a deterrent for people. I keep thinking that I should get over myself and just do some kind of crowdfunder, so I could have a budget to make it look as good as I know the game itself IS. I’m not going to do it; it’s more stress and worry than I want to invite into my life at this point. But that’s probably not going to stop me from thinking about it!

Metatopia Preparations

My real goal for September, now that I’ve done everything I can get set for the remainder of this year’s releases, is to get my planned Metatopia playtests in good working order so I can maximize that team and get the most out of it. Good playtesting time, with good playtesters, is so immensely valuable. So it’s a matter of making sure the games I want to test are actually in a playtestable state, but also that I know what I want to get out of those sessions, what questions I need answered, what mechanics I want scrutinized, and so on.

The playtesting experience – emotionally, as a designer – is different for everyone. I know for some of my friends, they feel really good going into a playtest, and then really rough afterwards, when they’ve seen the flaws in their game or whatever it is. I’m the opposite. You’d think I’d have gotten over this by now, but every playtest makes me so nauseous I think I’m dying, like it’s the end of the world. And then I actually do it, and it always goes better than I thought, and I feel great about it afterwards. How could it NOT go better than I thought when I am always worst-case-scenario catastrophizing? Not even realistic worst scenarios either. I’m always such a mess that I’m like “What if my game is so bad that someone dies? What if my game is so bad that everyone decides to shun me and never speak to me again? What if my ideas are so patently stupid that they send me back to kindergarten to learn how to read and count again?” Shockingly, those things have never happened.

Anyway, maybe someday I’ll be able to feel good going into a playtest instead of just when it’s over, but until then, it means that I also have some degree of emotional prep to do, even if it’s just saying “no one is going to die, you idiot” over and over like a mantra.

Gryphons & Gargoyles

For something like five years, I have been joking about taking the Satanic-Panic knock-off D&D as seen on the hit TV program “Riverdale” known as Gryphons & Gargoyles and making it a real game. I think the very first time I watched season 3 I was like “I should make G&G a real game”. And it’s been a recurring gag for me ever since. Well, unfortunately, one fine morning this month, I woke up with an almost fully complete vision of the game that I COULD actually make, like it actually came to me in a dream.

I can’t sell it, because obviously I don’t own the IP and I can’t imagine Archie Comics or the CW Network are interested in licensing me the rights for this one very strange snippet of their show, but I’ve been chipping away at it anyway. I think it’ll be a pretty fun little freebie zine I can put up, along with any of my other zines. It’s such a goofy project to work on, to the point that I only let myself work on it after I’ve done enough on things I’m “supposed to” be working on (things I can actually own the rights to and sell as a product). But it’s been a lot of fun!

Further Thoughts

“Beer and Pretzels” RPGs

The topic came up twice in two different places this month, so I thought I’d talk about it a little here – “beer and pretzels” RPGs, really light simple games, usually comedic, that you’d play in a casual setting over beers. To me, the epitome of the form is probably The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a really classic storytelling game where players come up with a persona and tell of some exploit of derring-do, accepting challenges from other players to incorporate new unexpected elements into the story.

Specific games, unfortunately, tend to go in and out of fashion, and I think Baron Munchausen is pretty much forgotten in newer circles, but it did make me wonder about what people are doing for beer and pretzels games nowadays. It’s not like people have stopped playing casual, funny games that play quickly and don’t require much teaching, right?

Of course, it’s one-page RPGs now. The Lasers and Feelings hacks, the Honey Heists of the world, that’s where the “quick funny game” energy is now. Which is all well and good, but it does feel like the one-pager has overwhelmed anything else that might crop up in this space, and some games simply need more room to breathe than a single page, even if they’re as light as can be. 

Part of the reason this came up, at least one of the times it did, was because I keep thinking about taking one of my current projects and moving it more into this design space, making it lighter and more improvisational, but I’m not sure. For one thing, I’m actually not good at TRYING to make my games into something specific, I kind of have to feel it out as I go; for another, I’m not sure there’s any real audience for this at this point. But we’ll see! 

My Early Design Lessons from Fiasco

Speaking of games that were really influential during the years I was just getting into story games, Fiasco! I was digging around in my google drive for something unrelated (because I have an arcane folder structure and a thousand untitled documents), and I found a list I’d made ages and ages ago of Fiasco playsets I wanted to write (some of which I did end up writing!) because that was really where I got my start in games writing.

I had put together adventures for D&D and Savage Worlds before that, but Fiasco playsets were my first real dip into putting things together for other people to use, besides myself. And to me, thinking about how other people will use something at the table is the first step of game design (I know there’s always a lot of discussion about “are GMs game designers” or whatever – no. They’re distinct but overlapping skills).

I’ve always said that the thing Fiasco taught me was that failure is fun. Sometimes (often!) failure is even more fun than success! Both as a player and as a designer, I have leaned pretty heavily into failure ever since. A couple months ago, I talked about the use of predetermined outcomes in my games (in THAW, in Dollhouse Drama), and that includes failure – knowing when and why you’d choose to fail.

But in looking at my old Fiasco stuff, I realized how much those playsets taught me something else – the value of staying on-theme. If you aren’t familiar with it, a Fiasco playset is basically just a themed list of stuff (relationships, needs, objects, and locations). And that’s ALL it is. There’s no script, there’s no plot, there’s just thematically linked story elements that you, as players, put together into the story.

I discovered Fiasco when I was in college, and prior to that, a lot of my games had the very teenage whiff of the “throw in everything and the kitchen sink” attitude. D&D settings had everything, adventures crammed in nonsense from a dozen different sources, and I didn’t care if it all made sense together or if it all added up into anything good. And pretty much ever since, the idea of the kitchen sink setting has been intensely boring to me (I actually wrote a blog post about this in 2015, if my old blog still existed), and I also get really irritated when people I’m playing games with can’t seem to stay on-theme.

Like I think we’ve all had that player who wants to cram their same character concept into every new system or campaign, regardless of if it actually makes sense or not. Or you’ll be sitting down to play a nice game of Good Society, and someone wants to make their character this gruesome killer and you’re like, buddy, I don’t think you understand the assignment here. Or vice versa, you’re playing Blades in the Dark, and all someone wants to do is run a cozy coffee shop and fall in love with the florist next door. Things like that? Drive me up the wall (although there are many things I will put up with in my home groups that I don’t at conventions or other public play environments). I feel bad about it, like I’m being an unnecessary hater, but I can’t help it.

At any rate, imagine my surprise when I found this nearly-decade-old document of Fiasco playset ideas… and I have already written two-thirds of them as Dollhouse Drama playsets without even realizing it. The structure of DD playsets is different – they’re not ALL lists of stuff, I also give plot hooks and NPCs, etc. – but there’s a good chunk that is a thematic list of stuff. And my hope is that by providing that TO the players, they’ll be more inclined to actually use it!

Industry Blues

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past month worrying about how to get more eyes on my games. I mean, that’s the big thing in indie creative spaces, isn’t it? How do we get people to see what we’re making when we don’t have the resources and backing of a large corporation? I generally try not to be too doom-and-gloom, but I can’t deny that things are looking kind of rough out here in indie-TTRPG-land lately. 

In some ways, crowdfunding has been a massive boon for getting things made that might never otherwise exist, but it’s also tough to feel like we’re beholden to it now for marketing. One of the reasons I think this is, is that we’ve kind of settled into an unspoken language where doing a crowdfunding campaign is how we signify that something is important to us, as designer-publishers. To just release something, on your own, is to say that it isn’t ready for the big-time, that it’s not fully cooked, that it’s a lesser project that people who would gladly support your crowdfunding campaigns can ignore. 

And I think that sucks! And obviously this isn’t the whole of the problem or the root of the problem, but I do think it’s a trap we’ve fallen into. And it hasn’t been helped by the social media splintering after the twitter buyout, either; if anything I think it’s kind of made it worse. Many game designers I know and follow are spread out across one platform or another – twitter, facebook, instagram, mastodon, reddit, bluesky, cohost, tumblr, a million discord servers, god knows what else – but we’re all still looking at kickstarter and backerkit. 

This is something that is a bigger problem than any one of us can solve, and I don’t know what the solution is. I can say that I am not crowdfunding my games as a matter of principle, and all that really is is either punishing myself or self-sabotaging. And, you know, it’s also at least partially a lie (I am not crowdfunding my games because I don’t want to). But I do think that things are going to continue to be really ugly here in RPGs as long as we’re so dependent on crowdfunding, and especially seeing huge companies do multi-million dollar crowdfunding campaigns (which is probably a complaint for another time).

I’ll also just throw out there that there’s two big trends in games right now that I can’t or won’t follow, so I’m even swimming against the current in a fun bonus way. The first is the rise of APs, which is objectively fine, but I don’t watch them, I don’t want to perform on them, and I don’t think I’d be good at doing so even if I did want to. I did a couple of appearances when we were promoting The Price of Coal, and it was terribly nerve-wracking, even though the people I played with were always lovely. I’m just not a natural performer in that way. Plenty of respect for those who are, but this is THE growing part of the indie games sphere, and it’s just not an area I can hope to touch.

Then there’s this big trend for solo RPGs, which again, are fine for those who enjoy them, but are very much not for me. I dabbled with them in 2020-2021, when the trend was emerging, but I pretty quickly identified that it wasn’t giving me what I wanted, so I stopped playing them and stopped making them. This is probably bad, but I actually get really disappointed when I hear a cool new game concept and then it turns out it’s a solo game, because it’s just not for me. And I’m not so cynical that I’ll make a type of game I don’t personally enjoy just because I think it might – MIGHT – sell better.

I’m sure I’m just feeling it particularly keenly this month because I have had a less-than-stellar release recently (not to lift the veil too much), and I will bounce back from it. But I always wish I had better answers to the industry problems that certainly affect more than just me.

Games I’m Into

Star Trek Adventures

One of my regular weekly groups has just started up a campaign of Star Trek Adventures, the official TTRPG for Star Trek. It’s actually been ages since I played a licensed game like this, but I’ve always loved Star Trek, so I was pretty open to giving this a try. I did kind of forget that playing this type of game is really leaving yourself open to having obscure nerd lore recited at you, so I’m very glad that it is Star Trek, because I will tolerate obscure lore rants for it in a way I simply would not for any other intellectual property.

I decided to play a joined Trill, because I always loved Jadzia/Ezri Dax, and I think the roleplay potential for having those past lives/past memories is really interesting. I also – somewhat inadvertently – ended up as the captain of our ship, so that’ll be new, I don’t usually play the leader figure in a given group! 

Licensed IP games are always in an interesting space to me, because they’re obviously beholden to fidelity to their source material, and they have to try to meet the largest possible subset of fans where they are, which sometimes means they miss what I personally found interesting in the source. A lot of times, a fan-game that is clearly emulating the IP, but with the serial numbers filed off, is freer to do new things, or to look at the original story through a unique lens, and that’s just a more fun approach to me. I don’t really care if this or that or the other thing was canon in the TNG timeline, if it’s a more interesting story to ignore that.

May You Fish in Interesting Times

This is a recent release, one that I’ve been looking forward to, because I think it’s a great example of what small, focused, weird games can do. May You Fish in Interesting Times is a game where you play former revolutionaries, your failed revolution long past. You are going on a fishing trip together, where you might reminisce about old times, talk about what brought you to the revolution in the first place, and catch some fish. Before the day is over, though, the secret police will find you. And also you’re all playing birds. 

I love the idea of playing former revolutionaries, and the emotional weight of that. I love the very narrow focus, on this play idea of having difficult conversations in unexpected places (I have heard my fishing friends observe that sometimes things are easier to talk about when you’re outside and not looking at each other! Makes complete sense!). And also I love that you’re birds.

Closing Notes

Earlier this month, there was a theatrical re-release of Lawrence of Arabia, and I really wanted to make sure to see it on the big screen, because I had never seen it before, and I had heard for years that it was one of the best movies ever. I tried to keep my expectations in line, and I thought, well, I’m not going to go in hoping to see one of the best movies ever, I’ll just be happy if it’s a good movie.

Haha, no, it turns out that Lawrence of Arabia really is one of the best movies ever. Unbelievable!

Also, I mentioned at the start of this newsletter that I spent a good chunk of time being sick this month, which was bad for doing pretty much anything except laying around on the couch and reading. At one point I read five books in four days. The best of them was The Blue Castle, by L. M. Montgomery, who you may recognize as the author of Anne of Green Gables. The Blue Castle is a sentimental novel (a kind of precursor to the romance novel) for adults, rather than for children, and it was beautiful and I loved it. I have enjoyed pretty much every century-or-more-old sentimental novel I have sought out, because it’s like having the soothing comfort of a romance novel but without being talked down to like a modern romance novel. It’s good stuff.

And that’s all we got for this month, folks! Don’t forget to check out Life of the Party!