Crackerjackalope Games!

As a designer, I can only describe the experience of reading this book as like watching a gold rush. Peterson describes an absolute flurry of design developments, as the zinesters of the 70s rattle through iteration after iteration of new potential for TTRPGs, and cover nearly every major discourse I've ever heard in the hobby.

Frankly, I think this book is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of the hobby AND anyone interested in the modern discourse. It's impact on my view of the TTRPG scene cannot be overstated.

Adventure Time

I'm rewatching Adventure Time with my partner and absolutely loving it! When we first had the idea, I was really excited to come back to the show. It was a big part of my childhood growing up, but looking at the episodes, I only recognise stuff from the first 4 or so seasons, so there's actually loads of it that I've never seen, and that's not even including Distant Lands or Fionna and Cake! We’re just coming to the end of season 2 but I’m very excited to keep going.

On show creator Pendleton Ward’s Wikipedia page, there's a quote about him drawing inspiration from the French comic Dungeon. He says, “Dungeon's a great comic, and I look to it for the sort of casual conversation they have with the big fantasy world that they all live in.” This idea of a casual relationship with the fantasy world really resonated with me and the project I’m working on for uni right now and I think it will continue to inspire some future projects too.

Hades II

I spent over 100 hours in Hades II since February, it’s fair to say I’ve been obsessed. I really loved the original Hades back when I played it and had been eyeing this up since its release last year. Honestly, it surpassed almost every expectation I had.

I absolutely adore the changes to the combat system, the 6 new weapons all feel super cool, Melinoë’s movement is great, the new boons are fun and I grew to love all of the Gods’ offerings with one weapon or another. I also loved that you have two routes to pick from, and the expanded crafting and resource system meant I basically always had an incentive to take at least one of the two routes.

The thing I adore about both Hades games is how they just keep unfurling, mechanically and narratively. I hit the credits after about a month of play, but kept going until I reached the epilogue like two weeks after. Then I was just going to finish up some of the side stories I was enjoying but accidentally ended up reaching 100% on the Steam achievements after realising the few I had left weren’t as hard as I thought they’d be.

Overall I really enjoyed the story. There were definitely moments where I was surprised by the direction they took it, but I thought the epilogue really brought it together in a way that I enjoyed, I’m definitely glad I waited until the game was finished before picking it up.

Draw Steel

I’m three sessions into my campaign of Draw Steel (running the official Delian Tomb “Start Here” adventure) and I think it’s great! I backed the game when the crowdfunder launched because I was a big fan of Colville’s DM advice when I was running D&D 5e back in the day and really enjoyed the Designing the Game series that they were releasing as the game was first being designed. I trusted that he knew his stuff and that this game was what I wanted out of 5e when I thought 5e could be anything.

Sure enough it has met my expectations perfectly. The tactical combat feels great and we’re really enjoying the other procedures like Downtime and Negotiations. I’ve run through character creation and loved that too, there’s exactly enough fiddly bits to make each character stand out from the next, even when they have some overlapping stuff.

On the Yes Indie’d podcast’s 2025 look-back, Thomas and Quinns pointed out that basically no one in the indie scene has discussed the big “D&D killers” that came out after the OGL debacle (namely Daggerheart, Draw Steel and Tales of the Valiant), and that it sometimes feels like these games came and went without making much of a splash. For this reason, I’m determined to write something bigger about Draw Steel once we finish our campaign. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about the game, including some ideas of how I might tweak the world and default setting to better align with the kinds of fantasy action stories I want to tell. So keep an eye out for that future blogpost (hopefully later this year!). I’ll save more of my specific thoughts until then, but just know that I think this game rips.

Links

I’m splitting the links section up again this season because it’s just so jam packed!

Design Tech

Habeeb from in lowercase writes the default dungeon is colonial, “the thing about mechanics is that they are not just rules. they are a philosophy with numbers attached. they are what the game believes is worth measuring. and what the game measures is what the table repeats.”

And as a follow up, Isaac from Afraid of Encounters describes an Anti-colonial Dungeon.

OtspIII from BAATAG discusses how Books [Verb] Play, the many different ways that a TTRPG rulebook affects at-table play.

Geoff Engelstein at GameTek discusses “chunking” victory in board games in Game, Set, Match.

Kevin at Distracted by the Table is Imagining a Post-Scarcity Society in Your Adventures.

Joe from Inkwell Ideas offers 10 Puzzle Ideas for your Tabletop Role-playing Game.

Skeleton Code Machine analyses The Dice Game Inside Before the Bog God, it's my first time hearing about this game but it sounds great!

I’ve also reread Everything is Pointcrawl from SCM because it was nominated for the Bloggies!

RP from Fari RPGs has a tutorial for making tables in Affinity without using the table tool, because it sucks.

Warren D from I Cast Light! is Adding “Memory” To Encounter Checks.

Clayton Notestine’s Designing Lore Blocks presents a great method for conveying characters and creatures without conventional stats. Either for a system-neutral adventure, or a statless game like Notestine’s 1 HP Dragon.

Zak from Bommyknocker writes about Shoulder Tables, with a very tidy mechanic for rolling on the same encounter table in different environmental contexts.

You encounter 4 Rival Dungeoneering Parties on the Exploding Corpse blog, I love these freaks.

Other TTRPG Stuff

A.A. Voigt’s The Golden Age of Indie RPGs: 2010-2025 is going to be a cornerstone of the hobby’s history, I’m certain.

Titanomachy RPG played 251 games in 2025, here’s what they learned.

the-river-delta on Tumblr describes 6* Things I Love About Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics (as a non-tactics gamer), this is a neat lil review that has piqued my interest about the game!

Jeff Stormer writes Against Games That Say I Can Do Anything (But That I Can't Play Sonic the Hedgehog).

At A. V. Club, Cameron Kunzelman reviews A Land Once Magic.

Kayla from Rat Wave Game House discusses her game The Gallant and the Virtuous in Revisions to a Jousting Game. It sounds immensely my vibe.

Since putting this on here in January, The Gallant and the Virtuous has since released! I'm looking to get a copy at UK Games Expo in May.

Dan from Five Minutes, Not 5e discusses APOCALYPSE FRAME with Binary Star Games, also check out the Beyond Five Minutes interview for a little more about the game.

James Introcaso talks a bit about MCDMs second game, the OSR-style CROWS on the MCDM Patreon.

MCDM has a video about this now too! Welcome to Crows.

At Mothership, Joseph Wales writes about How running a restaurant made me a better Dungeon Master.

Quinns Quest reviews Public Access!

Mint from There’s A TTRPG For That writes about safety and their game Protect the Child in On the Conventions of Genre: Protect the Child and Hopeful Storytelling.

Serket at Flourite Guillotine traces the heated legacy of the quantum ogre in Quantum Ogre Reborn.

Beyond TTRPGs

Zelda lore YouTuber Zeltik has revived his Old-School RuneScape lore channel Wizard’s Mind Bomb, I’ve never played Runescape but I’m thoroughly enjoying the vibe here. Check out RuneScape's Zombie Parasite is Spreading... for one.

ReligionForBreakfast discusses What Fantasy Gets Wrong About Sacred Groves, with a challenge to incorporate this understanding into your fantasy fiction or games.

My friend Suntooth (from the Randomness and Pacing post!) recommended me the 70s Sci-fi Art blog, so I’m recommending it to you too! Check out '70s Influences on Fantasy Film or Strange Dragons for some great primers.

In what can only be described as a collab of the century for me, Jacob Geller and Quinns discuss "Train" and Other Games about Atrocities on Nebula.

Peter Austin talks about history’s weirdest pub names (really the UK’s weirdest pub names) including The Swan With Two Necks and The Bucket of Blood. Some great inspiration for fantasy taverns in here!

I’ve been OBSESSED with Mr Bruce’s new music video for YOU TOLD ME SO, immensely haunted vibes is all I can say, nobody can move like him. Really excited for the album!

Read more at the Crackerjackalope Games Patreon:

Despite the hype, there were naysayers (myself included, I must admit). It’s a frustrating game at times, mainly due to the fact that progression is locked behind randomness. The game keeps you busy by handing you lots of different leads, but progression towards the central objective is locked behind finding a specific room that can only appear randomly. I never got that room, it was actually developer Tom Francis’ video about the game that told me this room even existed. After multiple consecutive runs with no progress, learning that there was nothing I could do besides get lucky was the final straw that made me give up.

I really liked how Bluesky user wombburn put it in this post, “there's so much about blue prince that is simultaneously held back by yet which would not be nearly as impactful or engaging without the "roguelike" elements.” This design paradox is so interesting to me, and I’m not sure if I know the way out just yet.

I actually had a similar but opposite experience when playing The Librarian’s Appentice, a solo TTRPG by Almost Bedtime Theater. TLA is built on the Firelights system by Fari RPGs, which I’ve admired from afar for ages because it released just as I was getting into the indie RPG scene.

TLA and Firelights see the player travelling across a map made out of cards, with each card representing a different location. The goal of each game is to find 6 face cards. In Firelights these are beacons, in TLA these are books for you mentor.

Here is an overview of the cards I played in Librarian's Apprentice:

4, King, 8, 7, King, King, Queen, Jack, Jack, and the game was over.

The first half of the game was nicely paced, with a face card coming out every 2 or 3 cards. It felt a little jarring when the first card I moved to was a face (the 4 was where I started), but getting two non-faces afterwards smoothed out the pacing nicely. Then, in the second half, I got nothing but faces! Every time I discovered a new region, I was thinking “surely this won't be another face card,” and I was wrong every time! I thought I'd settled in for a game that would take 2-3 times as long, but that wasn't how it played out in the end.

Both of these moments reminded me of a similar problem I had when making my TTRPG Goodbye, World </3. Goodbye World is a game about a dying mech and the pilot that is stuck inside. The Pilot speaks but the Mech can only communicate by typing, and their messages are running out. The mech starts by rolling 3d6 to determine how many messages they can send, when that runs out they roll 2d6, then 1d6, then they die.

However, before this system of rolling for messages, the first version of Goodbye World used a death saves mechanic. Every time you sent 5 messages, you'd roll a 50-50 death save to see if you lost a life. If you failed, you'd roll every 3 messages, then 1, then you'd die.

Inspired by the blog Skeleton Code Machine, which frequently uses Python to simulate game outcomes, I asked my friend Suntooth to help me write a program to simulate the number of rolls that 1,000 games of Goodbye World might entail. Here’s what we got:

As you can see, the results are all over the place. The range of this simulation was 10-103 messages, but it dawned on me that a game could literally go on forever were a player unlucky enough (or lucky enough, maybe, it does mean they don't die!).

Either way, that completely ruined the dramatic pacing I was going for with the game. So I redesigned it to use the d6 pool system I described earlier. In this system, the game now had a concrete range to the number of messages you would send, the range of 6d6:

I managed to simulate this one all by myself :)

This was a vast improvement to the previous version. The new range was large enough to create strong tension without keeping the players for so long that the tension fizzled out. The games are quick but absolutely packed with high-emotion roleplay, precisely because you know that time is running short.

My lesson here is: consider the upper and lower bounds of the randomness in your game, and the experience a player might have if they have the absolute worst or best luck. Does it feel like the game goes too long (like Blue Prince)? Or that it flies by (like The Librarian's Apprentice)? Even if a combination of outcomes is incredibly unlikely, it might happen to someone, and you should keep that person in mind when designing your game.

It's also worth mentioning that different people have different tolerance levels for weird pacing like this. I'm very aware that I gave up on Blue Prince quite quickly. But I guess my point is that those unlikely outcomes are worth remembering when you design.

I really enjoyed Tom Francis’ video Blue Prince and its awkward relationship with hunches, I’d definitely recommend watching the full thing for a deeper dive into how random progression affects the experience of playing knowledge games like that specifically.

Also huge thanks to Suntooth for helping me with some of the dice simulation. Check out more from him at https://suntooth.online/.

This blog post was adapted from a Bluesky thread I made in May 2025, read the original here.

Thanks for reading!

CJ

Read more at Jackalope Mail:

Crowd Control

Watch it on Dropout here.

I hinted at this on the last post about things I liked, but Crowd Control is Dropout’s latest Game Changer spinoff. It sees three comedians doing crowd work where every crowd member has an interesting story which is hinted at on their t-shirt. I really love standup comedy, and this is a great format for it! I was super excited when I saw Atsuko Okatsuka in the trailer, but honestly I was a little disappointed by her performance. She started by disclaiming that she doesn’t normally do crowd work in her sets, and you can really tell. I still think that episode is good though, and the show as a whole was awesome. Check it out!

MotionRec

Play it on Steam here.

I first played MOTION●REC as a Pico-8 game on Itch, and was really impressed by how clever its core mechanic was! So I was super excited to stumble upon a demo for the full-length game during Steam Next Fest last Summer, and I bought the game as soon as it released in October. MotionRec is a puzzle platformer where you can record your movements and then replay them standing in a different location (it feels hard to fully emphasise the genius of this mechanic in text, you should go watch the trailer). I beat the game (not 100%) in 3.5 hours, but I’m definitely looking to go back and get that 100% down the line. I love a game that has a central interesting mechanic and just builds on it through level design and secondary mechanics in really interesting ways, and MotionRec absolutely nails that. Also it’s gorgeous.

SCAV

Watch it on Nebula here.

SCAV is the new documentary from the team behind Jet Lag: the Game. It follows competitors of the University of Chicago‘s annual SCAV, the largest scavenger hunt in the world. Each team is presented with a huge list of items, which they must complete to get points. SCAV items range from “blow up a car” to “the SCAV-lympics” to “the moon”, so the whole show has a chaotic energy that I absolutely loved. Fans of Jet Lag and Taskmaster should definitely check this out!

Peter Austin

Watch Austin on YouTube here.

For the last seven months, Peter Austin has been making videos about all sorts of weird cultural quirks, with a particular interest in British folklore. I first saw his video about a WWII pillbox built to look like a ruined cottage, but quickly fell down the rabbit hole of videos from Hands of Glory, mummified hands holding candles that are said to have magical abilities, to the Water Hags of British folklore and their surprising use in an 80s child safety PSA.

Austin is one of many that seem to be following in the footsteps of Tom Scott (shoutout to Chris Spargo while I’m here), but Austin’s videos have a focus on history and folklore that attracts me particularly. There’s so much stuff here that’s going to inspire my fantasy work, and you should check it out if any of these topics have caught your eye!

Wake up Dead Man

Rian Johnson has done it again! I absolutely love the Knives Out series and this third entry knocks it out of the park again. The church setting creates a great moody atmosphere that perfectly complements the themes of hate and isolation that permeate the film. Daniel Craig is having a blast again but Josh O’Connor really steals the show. I need to watch more of his stuff.

I think on a rewatch this could be my favourite of the series yet, truly I will keep watching these until they run out of actors to star in them.

Links

I’m splitting the links section up this time because there’s so much! Some exciting news first:

Dorian Blackwood has made two games based on my RPTree system! Check out Welcome Home Darling for Australian gothic horror and For the Crown for royal lineage investigation!

I’ve also found a bunch of useful stuff about adventure design this season, so here’s all of that together:

Dan from Gem Room Games is Overloading the Faction Relationship.

Gestaltist creates a procedure for making rumours: Number-Omit-Distort.

The Welsh DM writes about Hub & Spoke Adventure Design, applying IT structure design to a TTRPG adventure release structure.

Ty from Mindstorm describes a framework for small adventures in Pocket-Sized Powderkegs.

Nathan Savant has two blog posts analysing Donkey Kong Bananza’s narrative design. Narrative is by no means the focus of Bananza, but it pulls some clever tricks that can be applied to more narrative-focused games (including TTRPGs!). Check out A Narrative Bananza and Systemic Narrative: A How-To Guide!

I went back to some of the previous work Savant cites in these posts, and found another great double feature from him. On Game Developer: Nonlinear Story Structure in Games and Region-Based Narrative lay the groundwork for these previous posts, and are also very useful for TTRPG adventures. I disagree with his definition of dungeons as “linear” experience (I don’t even think that’s true of Link’s Awakening, which Savant references), but the concept still works if you swap out “linear” with “contained”.

Now for the miscellaneous links:

A.A. Voigt writes about Deathmatch Island, Squid Game, and the Tension of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Incidental Mythology writes about The Meaning of the Amphibian Man in the Shape of Water.

The Folklore Podcast gathers a number of witchcraft historians to discuss The Traitors in The Traitors: Whimsy or Witch-hunt?

snow on Tumblr has posted TTRPG School: Required Reading, an amazing collection of academic texts and blog posts for TTRPG theory.

Also, from snow's blog: In Defense of Clocks, an exploration of real time as a resource in TTRPGs.

Over at Explorer’s Design: Affinity Studio First Impressions, a review of the new version of Affinity.

Talk of the Table interviewed Connie Chang and Sea Thomas to talk about Dramaturgy in Actual Play.

StatMonkey talks about the quest for cinematic TTRPGs: Chasing the Sweet Spot: The Feeling I Still Can’t Name.

ThemePunked discusses how Terraria Changed Gaming Forever, Terraria was an early favourite game of mine, and I think this video gets at a lot of the reasons why.

Alfred Valley is Smashing old images together to make Brute Fort.

Quinns reviews 4 RPGs that come in boxes over at Quinns Quest.

Over on the Dododecahedron Blog, The OSR Onion is a post applying Vincent Baker’s PBTA design concept of concentric circles to OSR design philosophy.

The Jolly Reiver talks about a 1963 ghost photograph that has all the visual hallmarks of a fake, but every analyst claims it hasn’t been tampered with.

On the PlusOneExp store, Make Hard Moves is a free, digital zine by Aaron King about PbtA move design and advice for running PbtA games.

On Skeleton Code Machine, Exeunt Press writes about Tracking ammunition in CY_BORG and other TTRPG systems

Read more at Jackalope Mail:

I also rewrote and layed out the RPTree Creator Kit, the system behind ABODE! I was never happy with the first version of this, just being a plain word document and a crappy logo I put together myself, so I did a second draft of the intro and design notes, layed it out properly, and commissioned my partner Jamie (on Bluesky and Tumblr) to make a new logo. It looks way better now!

I’m so glad I did this, both for my own sake and because in the months since, Dorian Blackwood has made two games based on the system! Welcome Home Darling is a game of Australian gothic horror incredibly in the vein of ABODE and For the Crown is a fantasy game about investigating the lineage of a noble family. Both games feel like they do something really unique with the RPTree structure that I wouldn’t have necessarily done myself, which is exactly what I wanted to come out of making the Creator Kit.

Outside of full games, I made a 1-page NPC called Witch of the Mountains. This was just a little fun thing to get me out of some creative burnout from my uni projects, because I was craving something to layout.

I also a released a video game as part of my university course. Temporal Breach is a sci-fi top-down shooter where the player can harness different time-travel abilities by collecting dog tags dropped by the enemies. I discussed this game more in the respective Design Diary.

The final thing I did in the realm of games was host a small game jam! I discussed briefly in my blog post I’m So Events-Pilled, but I hosted a game jam for a couple of my friends in a Discord server and it was a really lovely project to get some of them to finally start working on the game ideas they’ve mentioned to me before. Check out the entries for the Squid Realm Game Jam here!

Jackalope Mail

Like my games output, the blog took a small hit as I dedicated more time to university work and personal non-games stuff this year. But I’m incredibly happy with the posts I did manage to get out.

The major change was that the Things I Liked series became quarterly (with three posts out now, and the final for the year out tomorrow!). I’m definitely glad I cut these down from monthly to quarterly, it reduced my workload while also making each post more jam-packed than before. The links section in the Q4 issue is absolutely fill to bursting, I can’t wait to get it out to you!

Early this year I posted my university year 2 essay: An Exploration of Player Elimination in Multiplayer Games. I’m really happy with this piece, especially with the prediction it made that came true just weeks after I submitted it.

Later that month, I bore my soul writing about An Inspector Calls, Social Murder, and Blame. This is simultaneously a highlight of the blog for me (because of it’s seriousness) and an outlier (because it’s got nothing to do with games). Ultimately it was a piece for me to vent about all the big emotions I’d been feeling this year, and it was immensely gratifying to have video essayist SolidArf describe it as “Powerful, poignant, and deeply affirming.”

The final highlight from the blog for me was when I got to take part in Mint’s Blog Buddies series. It was such lovely feeling to read someone analyse my work so deeply. It made me feel seen in a way I have genuinely never felt before, which was super affirming as an artist. It was also lovely to do a collaboration with another blog, which I hadn’t done since my very first blog post in 2024.

Media Appearances

This year was my first time having media appearances outside of my own stuff! As previously mentioned, I took part in Mint’s Blog Buddies series, which was an absolute blast, and I also did an interview for Backwards Tabletop’s Monthly Mecha newsletter.

This has felt like such a step up for me professionally. It’s suddenly dawned on me just how many people actually know me in the scene now. It’s a lovely feeling, but also quite daunting since I don’t have a very high rate-of-release, with uni and everything going on at the moment.

Also on this topic, when I went to UK Games Expo last summer, I was recognised after mentioning my work to the lovely folks at the Biscuit Fund Games table. This was super surreal because they’re way ahead of me in terms of physical inventory and convention presence and stuff, but it was really cool to be recognised like that.

Idk! Still very much processing these feelings, but it feels good to be known in the industry. Next UK Games Expo I’m looking to wear a pin of my logo, and I’m very curious to see if anyone recognises it!

Also, I got followed by Meguey Baker on Bsky earlier this month?? WILD fangirl moment for me there. Anyway, I’m getting way off topic for this section, let’s talk about the future:

Moving Forward

This section is kind of two different things. It’s partly a set of announcements of what to expect from me in 2026, but it’s also maybe a set of new year’s resolutions? I’m not gonna hold myself too harshly to anything, but it’s a combination of things I know I’m going to be doing and things I want to try and do in the new year.

First up, I’m going to be spending the rest of my time in uni making a TTRPG. It’s looking to be bigger than anything I’ve made before, and it’ll be a test for the tactical combat system I’ve been noodling on for a while, which I want to use for a couple big games down the line. Doing this will be another big step for me professionally, setting the foundations for something that I’d need to get crowdfunded. Very exciting!

I also want to try and return to the RPTree system next year. I’ve had an idea for ages, and Dorian’s two RPTree games have re-energized me to get that done. I want to make a game about a divine family tree (like the Norse and Greek mythological pantheons), I feel like there’s loads of potential for petty drama there, which is exactly what I was trying to capture with ABODE. I’ve already spoken to a friend about doing this, and maybe we’ll make it together!

As previously mentioned, I’m going to write up design diary posts for the two games I released this year (Borrowers Dungeon Crawl and Visitations). Sorry they’ve been so late, but I’ve got interesting things to say about both so I’m definitely still going to write them!

In terms of more abstract goals, I definitely want to blog more than I did this year. I’ve already got something in the works, just hoping I can keep that momentum up! On that topic, I want to do more blog collabs too. Whether that’s a specific exchange with one person like Blog Buddies was, or just hopping on the blogwagon and taking part in a bigger collaboration like Prismatic Wasteland’s Merry Hexmas that ran this month. Either way, I want to start connecting more with the blogging community, and this is a great way to do that!

Finally, I’ve started making crosswords! This has just been a fun little hobby so far, but I’m starting to get to the point where I’m quite happy with them, so I’d like to try and post some in the new year! The current one I’m working on is slightly TTRPG related, so it might be good to start with! I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to host them yet, but I’ll work something out when the time comes.

So yeah! That’s been my year. It’s definitely been a hard one for me, but I’m in a good place going into 2026. Very excited for what the new year will bring, I’ll see you there!

Read more at Jackalope Mail:

I’d love to know more about time.war! Would it be focusing on the epistolary element of the book? I’ve had my eye on a game of Dead Letter Society for a bit now because I think epistolary RPGs are such a cool concept. I’ve just found your Itch collection of epistolary games, I’d love to know if you have any particular recommendations from it!

I actually think this culture of citing your inspirations is ingrained in TTRPGs more than any other creative medium. You can trace it all the way back to the Appendix N of AD&D, but I’m most impressed by the Ludography of Apocalypse World, which I’ve been reading bits of for the first time while researching my uni dissertation (more on that in the new year!). AW goes into incredible detail citing how specific mechanics were inspired by mechanics in other games, and I really admire that level of citational detail. I think my interest in games academia also fuels this appreciation of citations, but I think it’s a very healthy culture for creatives in all disciplines.

To get a bit meta for a second, this discussion made me reflect on the inspirations behind my Things I Like series, and I can draw it back to two different newsletters I still love nearly 2 years since I started mine. Thomas Manuel’s Indie RPG Newsletter was one of the first RPG newsletters I ever subscribed to. Every week, Thomas writes a small blog post musing on some aspect of the TTRPG scene, then links to a bunch of other blog posts, videos and occasional game releases from the week. It’s a super thorough newsletter that keeps me up to date with so much of the scene, I can't recommend it enough!

The other newsletter belongs to YouTuber Tom Scott (two Toms! Isn’t that fun?), who has been in my inbox weekly since he launched the newsletter in 2021. Tom’s newsletter is half YouTube video recommendations and half links from elsewhere online. I find there’s always something interesting there to check out, whether it’s about science, history or culture.

Much like you with Crush Curriculum, I’ve got something on the back burner about taking mystery mechanics and giving them a new context. Specifically turning it into a game about journalism. I’ve got this idea for a game about urban fantasy journalists partially inspired by the newspaper sidequest in Tears of the Kingdom, and partially inspired by the newspaper clippings found in the D&D 5e Eberron book. I’ve been building up this moodboard of super colourful editorial art because I think it would make for a super neat and unique look for a game. No idea when I’m actually gonna commit to making this, but it seems like it might be a far larger game than what I make right now, so it might be on the back burner for a while!

It’s funny that you’ve paired Goodbye, World </3 with Ech0, because Asa Donald has just done the exact same thing on the Monthly Mecha Newsletter. I didn’t really know anything about Ech0 before you both spoke about it (the Sad Mech Jam was before my time in the scene), but it seems super up my alley with it's themes of dead robots, ghosts, and ancient history.

That sense of ancient history is central to Breath of the Wild and is a large part of why I find it's world so captivating, and thus why I wrote about it. It's a theme that appears more explicitly in my game ABODE, but I really love the concept of pairing multiple TTRPG systems to tell a longer-running story. I need to check out your CAMPAIGN.FRAME for exactly that!

I actually think the game of mine with the most explicit inspiration was my One-Page RPG jam entry Borrowers Dungeon Crawl, which I had the idea for not even 20 minutes into watching The Secret World of Arrietty. There's a scene super early in that movie where Arrietty’s father takes her into the human house for the first time, and the clever ways they use common household objects as dungeoneering equipment immediately put me onto the idea of making a game about the same thing.

Now, I’m so glad you mentioned Uncertainty in Legacy Games because it tees me up to talk about my strongest TTRPG opinions: that the RPG scene as a whole relies way too much on randomness. The book that I cite in that blog post, Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan, massively changed how I think about tabletop game design. It’s part of MIT Press’ Playful Thinking series, which are all written to be super accessible texts that you don’t have to be deep in the weeds of games academia to enjoy, there’s a couple others in there I really wanna read. In Uncertainty in Games, Costikyan lays out how uncertainty is key to making games interesting, and the many different ways you can have uncertainty in a game. Mathematical randomness is one way to do it, but there are plenty of others, from physical challenges (like Dread!) to hidden information (like you mentioned about There’s Something About the Deep!). I think it’s easy to make things random when you could make them something else, and the design space gets far bigger when we look beyond dice and playing cards when making our games. I also talked a bit about this when I wrote about The Power of “Might” ages ago.

There’s Something About the Deep was inspired by Immortal Gambit, which was in turn inspired by Goodbye World (see what I mean about citations being cool?). The secret goals came from Immortal Gambit, but I think I built on it in some interesting ways, expanding the goals beyond just getting a particular number on the dice. I actually think the clearest example of Uncertainty in Games’ effect on my work is with ABODE. The first edition involved randomly generating your relationship to the other player characters, but the second edition made it the player’s choice. I think with 1E I was making that mechanic random just for the sake of it. But as I’ve gained more experience as a designer, I’ve gotten a better understanding of when to implement randomness and when to leave things to another source of uncertainty.

In terms of board games bleeding into TTRPGs, I definitely think it’s a healthy thing to think about. Exeunt Press’s blog Skeleton Code Machine is full of interesting posts about applying board game concepts to TTRPGs, and lots of EP’s solo games (such as Eleventh Beast) sit snugly between board games and RPGs. I’ve flirted with this briefly when making Trivia Heroes, but I’m definitely interested in doing it more!

I think that’s answered all your questions! Thanks so much for having me on! This was the first time (afaik) that someone has really picked apart and analysed my work like this, and it made me feel seen in a way that was really unexpected but so lovely! You’re absolutely killing it, Mint, thanks again for inviting me to do this.

Best,

CJ

This post is from Jackalope Mail, read more at:

FlyKnight

Buy FlyKnight on Steam here!

FlyKnight is a short, first-person dungeon crawler video game that I played with my partner Jamie. You are humanoid flies on a quest to defeat the evil witch Lunamoth who cursed all flies to never grow wings.

The artstyle is great. It’s low-poly character models are very charming, and all of the animations feels very expressive. I was pleasently surprised by the combat, which became very tactical over time. As you fight enemies, you can cut their limbs off, reducing their damage or movement. The different weapons have different attack animations, meaning some are better for striking certain body parts over others. And the friendly fire meant we had to be careful when ganging up on the same enemy together.

Also, the game is only £4.99, a steal! I got 3.7 hours out of it across 2 sessions, which I think is definitely enough to justify that price. Check it out for a short, charming, old school dungeon experience!

Game Changer Season 7

Check it out on Dropout here!

The latest season of Game Changer absolutely crushed it. There’s so much to talk about but I’ll stick to some of my favourite episodes:

You-lympics sees Brennan Lee Mulligan, Ify Nwadiwe and Katie Marovitch completing a series of challenges and then trying to beat their previous attempts. This was one of those episodes that really leaned into the fact that the contestants don’t know what’s coming, because they only realise the gimmick halfway through recording the episode.

Crowd Control is a new all-timer for me, and Sam seemed to enjoy it so much that he commissioned a whole series of it before the episode even aired! It sees stand-up comedians Jeff Arcuri, Josh Johnson and Gianmarco Soresi do crowd work while the whole crowd are wearing t-shirts hinting at their interesting stories. As a big fan of stand-up, I really love this one! The full series will probably make it’s way onto next season’s post, but only two episodes are out right now.

The Drinking Game, Rulette, Who Wants to be Jacob Wysocki, and of course the bonus episode Samalamadingdong are all up there with new favourite episodes too. This season absolutely killed it!

GUDIYA

Watch Part I and Part II on YouTube!

GUDIYA is an actual play of Bluebeard’s Bride by Nameless Domain. Despite winning the Best of the Best award at the New Jersey Webfest in 2023, episode 1 sits at 1.7k views and episode 2 sits at under 400, everyone is sleeping on this thing!

I first encountered this two-part series when this Rascal article from last year came up on my feed. It describes the game as “the closest I’ve seen to an AP art film,” which immediately caught my interest, so I started the series without reading further.

Rowan points this out in the Rascal article, but the choice to play Bluebeard’s Bride with three PCs gives it this beautiful mythic feeling, with the three facets of femininity evoking the pagan triple goddess. The game’s Desi perspective also really makes it stand out to me, with the threat of colonisation added to the many threats that Bluebeard embodies in this game.

I also really loved the visual aesthetic of this series! It uses digital collage and similar techniques to represent Gudiya’s mentality visually, with her face shattering like porcelain and growing and shifting in body-horrific ways.

Everyone should watch this series. It’s massively underrated and I really loved it!

Links

Quinns Quest reviews Mythic Bastionland and Triangle Agency.

Quinns’ interview with the Triangle Agency designers is also free on his Patreon!

For something very academic: Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough’s ‘A Queer OS Powered by the Apocalypse’ takes theories of queer and feminist operating systems, which frequently look towards the future, and argues that these things are possible now, in the medium of TTRPGs.

A.A. Voigt writes about The Ones Who Try to Play Omelas, various games inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. This was also my introduction to LeGuin’s story, and I really loved it! There are a couple pdfs online and it’s only short, go give it a read before watching the video!

Gestaltist is Playing With “But” to create unique settings and generation tables.

Wobblerocket writes about How To Run A D&D Magic Item Auction. It uses some 5e mechanics but it's generally portable to any trad fantasy system, just sub out the skill checks and saving throws appropriately.

Matt Colville asks What Are Backstories For?

rose-colored essays writes about Severance and the Poetics of Science Fiction.

From Zack Zweizen at Kotaku, How Sam And His Crew Design All The Devious Game Changer Episodes - “if you start Game Changer from the beginning, you can kind of watch my journey as a game designer, which I think is fun.”

Jay Dragon asks Does Super Mario Bros. (1985) Have Rules?

This post is from Jackalope Mail, read more at:

ABODE is a generational storytelling game for 3+ players. Over a number of scenes, players will draw a family tree and play each of its members. Each character only has a name and a trait, and each scene is guided by a question, so roleplay scenes are super punchy and fast paced! The game only requires drawing utensils to play.

Visitations is a solo game of ghostly encounters inspired by A Christmas Carol. Create a horrible person and narrate the three ghosts that visit them in an attempt to change their ways in this playing card-powered solo RPG. All the art in Visitations was taken from antique illustrations of ghostly encounters.

Additionally, all the art for Visitations is made of public domain images from antique books. While editing these images, I ended up making more than I needed, so I'm also releasing a PWYW art pack! Check it:

We began with The Librarian’s Apprentice by Almost Bedtime Theater, then they played VOID 1680 AM by Bannerless Games, but I missed that one unfortunately. The most recent game we played was Summit by The Copper Compendium, and next up we’re playing Mountaintop Isolation by La Lionne Publishing.

The first game I made was a solo game, but I hadn’t really touched the genre much since. Jumping back into them here has been really interesting. The Librarian’s Apprentice re-inspired me to think about the Guided by Firelights game I had an idea for back when the game jam for that was happening. And Summit has also inspired me with an idea for a new game that uses some of the same rules for generating visitors (more on that later).

One of the other attendants, Alex, has also been blogging about some of the games we’ve played, so take a look at his Substack for a more in-depth review of Summit, as well as a review of Dead Air which talks a bit about his experience with VOID.

Video Essay Club

On the topic of book clubs, I took it upon myself to start up a video essay club with my old college friends. Each fortnight, we pick a video essay, watch it, and meet back up to discuss our thoughts. I started us off with Art in the Pre-Apocalypse by Jacob Geller, one of my favourite videos from one of my favourite creators. Then we watched It's Embarrassing to Die: The Immortalist Story by Atrocity Guide, a video about the history of various groups in the US who are claiming to know the secret to immortality. Then I suggested a double feature of LegalKimchi’s videos, Bioessentialism in Gaming and Dehumanization and Creating Monsters, about the depiction of “monstrous” races in D&D and other high fantasy. And most recently we discussed The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures by Verilybitchie, about how science fiction movies dress men in feminine clothing, and what that means the films are saying. Next up is Taskmaster and Intelligence by Incidental Mythology, which I mentioned in my last recommendations post!

This whole thing has been so lovely, both as an excuse to experience new viewpoints on topics and as an excuse to hang out with my old friends. During our first discussion, we spoke about how long it had been since some of us had seen each other, and how its really lovely to have a regularly scheduled reason to hang out again after college.

Right now, we're keeping the videos roughly between 30 minutes and an hour, which makes the commitment much smaller than reading a full book. This whole thing was inspired by Game Studies Study Buddies encouraging their viewers to start game studies book clubs, as well as Death To Secret Cinema, an essay by Adam J. Reed in Filmmakers Without Cameras, which is about Reed’s experience with secret cinemas back in university and during COVID. We used to do monthly movie nights in the same server, so this has been a really fun, new take on that!

Game Jam

In a separate friend group (with some overlap), I’d been listening to a bunch of people talk about cool game ideas they have and then not actually making them. This had been going on for MONTHS and it was KILLING ME. So I finally decided to do something about it, I’m hosting a game jame! This is a private jam for my small friend group that I’m running this month, so don’t take this as an announcement of a big public event, but next month’s blog post will probably involve me going through the games we made and talking about how cool they are. Apart from me and one other person (I think?), these are a bunch of first time designers, and its been lovely to hear them all share their progress and collaborate on these projects.

I started making a tactical combat system as a first foray into the system I want to use for larger projects down the line. But I decided that it’s probably not a good idea to make my first tactics system under a time restriction, considering all the playtesting I should do for it. So I’ve decided to pivot to making a solo game, which is much easier to playtest.

VISITATIONS is a game where you play a terrible person and get visited by ghosts who attempt to teach you a lesson. Themeing-wise it’s entirely inspired by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and because of that I’m pulling from a bunch of old illustrations of ghostly encounters to make the art for the game. Here’s a sneak peak of the cover:

Mechanically, it’s inspired by Summit, which I only played because of the Solo RPG Club! It’s all come full circle! I’ll speak about it more when I write a Design Diary post for VISITATIONS, but the way your resources work in Summit—laying out cards and then using the information on them to reference specific journalling prompts—really reminded me of laying out a tarot spread. I want to push the amount of information you get out of the spread further than Summit took it, and I guess we’ll see how successful I am with that. Wish me luck!