January Newsletter

Hello and happy new year to my lovely owl friends! I hope the end of one year and the beginning of a new one is kind to you, and that the holiday season was all you’d want and nothing you wouldn’t! The start of a new year means it’s time to talk goals, although to be honest, I’ve been thinking about mine since September, because that’s just who I am.

Project Updates

2025 Goals Completed

So, I may have spent most of December not getting much of anything done at all. I spent most of it sick (I am in fact still sick now) and/or busy with the holidays, so I was stealing little tidbits of productivity where I could. But before we move on to a new year’s worth of goals, I think it’s good to acknowledge that I actually did achieve everything I set out to do at the start of 2025. I have some kind of mental block that means as soon as an achievement is in the rear-view mirror, it stops feeling real to me, like I didn’t really DO anything as soon as I am no longer actively DOING it. And that’s no good!

So to recap, I had three games that I wanted to complete and finish and get out the door – Dollhouse Drama, Leaving Avalon, and Gryphons & Gargoyles. And I did! 

I wanted to get two playtest edition games out into the public as well, Before the Season Ends and one other that I left up in the air at the time. And I did (the second ended up being Blood of the Covenant, one I’d noted as a possibility but wasn’t set on)! 

And I wanted to get two brand new games ready to be playtested at least by me, even if not by other people, and those I left fully to my own whims as the year played out. One of them was an old project, Pax Deorum, and one of them ended up being a brand new one that only first came to me in May or June, Champions of the Crystal Crown. But I did it!

Before the Season Ends

Speaking of BtSE, I can’t help but feel like I’m overdue to put out an updated version of the playtest kit and finally get around to playtesting the campaign mode. It hasn’t even been a year, and also there’s no real deadlines for this kind of thing anyway, but since I have been feeling itchy to work on it, I might as well take advantage of it. Scheduling for a playtest campaign is still somewhat elusive, but until then, I have been writing up additional event invitations to structure sessions of play for when I am able to run them. Coming up with all different kinds of events (you COULD do a ball every session, but I think that could get boring quick!) and different types of shenanigans to get up to at them has been really fun! And that’s good because it’s basically all the work I’ve done this month!

Other Thoughts

2026 Goals

Since it worked so well last year, I decided to structure my goals the same way this year: in three tiers of different levels of completion. 1) Finished, completed, out the door, in the world. 2) Public playtest/ashcan/beta edition. 3) Alpha or playtestable by me, or as I think of it, “metatopia-ready”.

For the first category, I have two things I’d like to have really polished up and finished next year. The first is the two rules expansions for Dollhouse Drama, the modular rulesets that add some additional complexity or layers to the game, if that’s something people want. I have been calling those Hot Swap and Action Faction, and since they accommodate more playstyles, more different types of stories, I’m hoping they will also expand the audience for the game a little bit. We’ll see! I’ve already started those, and they’re not particularly big, so I’m hoping to have those out in the first half of the year.

The second is a smaller game that I’ve been poking away at for a little bit now, called “Moving Out of the Girl Group House”. It’s about the end of a pop girl group and all of the girls moving out of the shared house they lived in (you know, for social media marketing reasons), exploring their formation and breakup through the objects and mementos they take with them when they go. This is not-so-secretly based on what happened to real life girl group Boys World about two years ago, and which I have found emotionally compelling ever since. I think this one will end up being a zine, nothing huge, so that should be feasible to get out in a finished form next year as well.

So both of the things I want to get finished are on the smaller side, and are not projects I see needing significant investments in art or editing. This is intentional, because for 2026 I decided that I wanted to put out a lot more playtest kits for bigger games and try to use interest in those to figure out what to focus on getting to that finished state first. These are ones that I DO want to be able to invest in art and editing and layout for, beyond what I am capable of doing myself, and I think and hope that putting out the playtest kits will help with garnering interest and making sure the games are as good as they can be.

To that end, I want to put out four playtest kits or ashcans in 2026, or more accurately, a mix of new ones and updates to existing ones. Two of these, I already know what I want them to be; two of them I’ll leave more open. For the first, no surprises, it’s the update to the Before the Season Ends playtest kit, with the new event invitations I’ve been writing up and hopefully some good improvements that will come out of playtesting the full season. 

For the second, I really want to get out an ashcan for Collegiate Gothic, which I started some years ago and actually made pretty considerable progress on in 2022-2023. I put it on pause while I focused on other things, and you know how these things go, it took far longer than I would have liked to get back to it. This is my dark academia game, a noir crime type thing set at an elite university. It’s fairly direct PbtA, and I had left off in the middle of working through all the playbook moves. I have more done than I had remembered, so it’s a shame to let that languish in the google drive if I can just polish off the rest and put it out there.

For the remaining two, I have a few candidates in mind, but I’m not committing to which two at this point in time. Frankly, I’d love to be in a place where I could do all of them, but that feels like biting off more than I can chew, and I’d rather set achievable goals and then potentially exceed them if I can. This would be an update to Blood of the Covenant (possible, I have another playtest scheduled for February), and new playtest kits for Pax Deorum (likely, I already started writing it up for a friend, so the skeleton is there), Champions of the Crystal Crown, or Monaco. We’ll see! Like I said, I’d love to do them all and absolutely flood the zone with playtests, but that’s a lot of writing to do all at once.

And then finally, the brand new games I’d like to get to a playtestable state, getting through the initial round of design for. As with last year, I’d like to do two of these, but I’m not committing to anything in particular just yet. I have some thoughts of projects that only exist as outlines now that I’d like to get there. The Diplomacy of Queens, which I tested the character creation for last year, and then kind of stalled out on the full gameplay, would be a big one. Ink & Courage would be another, since that’s an iteration on The Price of Coal. Greatness and Rather Die Than Doubt are two that I’ve had on the backburner for a long time that it would be nice to bring forward. And just like happened this year, I might get blindsided by a shiny new idea that I just have to work on that very minute, that I haven’t even had yet!

(That’s a lot of games I just name-dropped and there’s a lot of new people here since the last time I mentioned any of them, I just realized. Here’s a quick run-down of the ones I didn’t really explain!)

Monaco – PbtA 1950s/60s romcom glam, everyone trying to get their piece of the high life, gentleman thieves and card counters, frothy and fun and a little sexy, think To Catch a Thief or How to Steal a Million.

The Diplomacy of Queens – one-shot story game about medieval noblewomen engaging in soft-power diplomacy on behalf of their fathers/husbands/sons, political, historical, influence rather than direct access to the levers of power. Jokingly called it my “Eleanor of Aquitaine simulator”.

Ink & Courage – an iteration on The Price of Coal to make a version of the game about the 1899 newsboy strike (the subject matter of the musical Newsies), more suited to families or inexperienced story gamers.

Greatness – storytelling game about the rivalry between two great artists in the same discipline, charting how their animosity and desire to achieve true greatness ruins both their own lives and the lives of those around them (The Prestige, Black Swan, The Duellists, etc.).

Rather Die Than Doubt – three-player game about the doomed romance of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, why they can’t just do as they please and why they still need to do what they do anyway, for the sake of Camelot (the fun twist is that I’m Challengers-ifying their relationship, where running the kingdom is to Guinevere what tennis is to Tashi Duncan).

So, those are my goals for 2026! It sounds like a lot when I write it out like this, but I also said that last year and I did it all, so I think I can do it again!

Too Slow and Too Fast

I have often lamented how long it takes me to finish a game, from initial notes to being up for sale as a finalized thing. A zine game I can turn around reasonably quickly, but anything bigger than that typically takes me several years, sometimes (apparently) near a decade depending on what it is. There isn’t actually anything wrong with this – I don’t have any real deadlines, certainly nothing externally imposed, and I often enjoy noodling on an idea for years while it develops. The only unpleasant part of it is that I’m so excited about all my cool new ideas and projects and I’m so eager to show them to people and it feels like it takes forever before I can.

It’s part of why I always have multiple projects going at once (well, one reason – the other one being that I am fickle and capricious), so I’m always making progress on something, even if it’s not the “main” thing. Over time, this has resulted in a loop where I always have SOMETHING ready to go or ready to show people or ready to test, no matter how long it took me to get it there. You can see it in my goals above, where there’s three stages of completeness I’m looking at at all times. I think at metatopia I was telling people that I’d been idly working on Pax Deorum for like 5 years even though that was the first real playtest with other people, the thing they always tell you not to do (I’m contrary!).

And I think I’ve had a realization that even though I feel dreadfully slow, like everything takes a million years, I am actually releasing games too fast sometimes. I had this moment when I was talking on bsky about the One Night, Last Chance games (because I added a bunch of community copies, go get ‘em) and I instinctively referred to them as being “older” games in my catalog. Those games came out in fall of 2024. They’re only just over a year old. I first playtested them at metatopia 2023, finalized and released them the following year, and then… nothing.

Because I had finished them, I was already on to the next thing; I had slated Dollhouse Drama for the following January, and then Leaving Avalon was June, and Gryphons & Gargoyles was October, and – going back to that note at the start – it’s out of sight, out of mind as soon as there’s no actual *work* for me to do on a project anymore. Part of the reason none of my stuff is landing as well as I’d like is because I’m not good at sticking around to keep it in people’s minds.

Now, granted, I tried to do this with Dollhouse Drama; I really sincerely thought the monthly release of supplementary material for the game would make a difference. It hasn’t! I think the type of audience that likes to see regular new support for a game isn’t the same audience that likes a rules-light pretty pink game about dolls. And for a vast majority of my games, this kind of ongoing release isn’t really possible; it’s a one-and-done game in a complete package because that’s mostly what I like to make (and also what I like to play and buy from other people!).

And I know I’m not the only person with this problem; I think we’ve all seen a recurring cycle where there’s a big hyped-up crowdfunding campaign that gets everybody talking and everyone is super into it and it sparks all kinds of interest… and then the campaign ends, the game quietly releases a year or two later, and nobody talks about it because we’ve all moved on to the next hot thing. I know a number of people have told me about games that have done extremely well in crowdfunding and then struggled to sell a single additional copy after that point. And, you know, if you choose not to engage with crowdfunding for your own work, you don’t even have that initial boom usually.

In theory, when I had this realization, I could have scrapped my above goals and slowed down the release train (even if it’s just releases of playtest kits, which I obviously do not expect significant attention on at any given time). I could have set a goal to instead focus on promoting and marketing my games that are already out, in finding ways to support them long-term, in paying to get them shown on APs or at convention booth tables. 

…But I just couldn’t make myself do it. Knowing as I do that even teams that put in a lot of effort and time and money for marketing are still struggling with the same problems I do (albeit on a different scale), that it’s a deeply uncertain investment, that I might very well put in all that work to sell the same number of copies as I would otherwise… I couldn’t do it. Because ultimately, this is not my day job. It’s my fun creative outlet that I earn a little on the side from. 

Also because, and this might be cynical, I think with so many people in the same sphere as me struggling to identify how to support a game in the long-term, the next best thing is… regularly having something new out and hoping that people who see and like that new thing will also go and look at your back catalog. I’ve always seen a lot of mid-list and below authors – people who aren’t bestsellers basically – talk about the value of the back catalog. The long tail, where even something that didn’t do well initially is still available and selling here and there, and having many years’ worth of books that sell a handful of copies adds up just as much as having one book that sells a ton of copies. 

I’m kind of hoping that goes for games, too! I hope that having something totally new out multiple times a year keeps people’s eyes on my work; I hope that putting out playtest kits and updates to those kits means that the audience for a game keeps getting pulled back in over time. And that eventually, we’ll hit some kind of critical mass where the back catalog itself is able to sustain some degree of ongoing attention. 

It’s interesting to think that while I have been at this for a long time (10 years now!), it is only now that I am beginning to have a substantial catalog of finished games available to people. From the inside of the process, I know it’s because of that slow pace, but now that I’ve kept at it, I think it looks a lot faster from the outside.

Closing Notes

So, my now-annual flex is that I read a hell of a lot of books this year. 100 of them, in fact! Ever since I stopped using goodreads (it started annoying me after amazon bought it) and have embraced being old, I just keep track of my reading in a list in the notes app on my phone, so here’s the list! The italicized titles were my bedtime reading (I always have two books going at once, with a separate book to read a bit at a time before bed), and the pink ones were my favorites. Lots of the non-pink ones were good, or even great, but the pink highlighted ones really wowed me.

Returning readers know how much inspiration I take from what I’m reading, so I like to share this list – inevitably, down the road, the things I loved to read do show up in my games work later on, whether it’s immediately recognizable or not.

And speaking of artistic inspirations, my boyfriend got me an absolutely fabulous Christmas present, which is the Wes Anderson Criterion Collection set of his first 10 movies, with all kinds of really delicious bonus features and commentaries and behind-the-scenes goodness. I’ve always loved learning more about Anderson’s creative process and inspirations because I relate a lot to his approaches when I read about them (I also have a bunch of the Wes Anderson Collection books from MZS Press). 

I think we both embrace artificiality in a similar way, if that’s not putting too much on myself – maybe I should say that he does it and I aspire to it. A lot of his directorial quirks (putting text captions on screen, using different aspect ratios for framing narratives, having split screens of multiple things happening) are about conveying a lot of information very efficiently, which is something I relate to a lot in my own work as well. So I’ve been diving into that box set and really enjoying it! Every time I put on a new commentary, I end up opening a dozen wikipedia tabs of things he mentions that I want to know more about, and that’s the most fun feeling.

So we’ll close it out here for 2025 and the beginning of 2026! Happy new year, and we’ll catch you next time!