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I'm funding Dewin as part of Gamefound's RPG Party! Both the mentoring and the community of designers that Gamefound has provided have been great so far, and I'm sure it'll only get better!

You can follow the pre-launch page for Dewin now!

There are two factors of the Recluse’s ability that really interest me as a designer. Firstly is the idea of registering as something different to what you are, and secondly is the fact that the ability doesn’t have to trigger every time, instead it is up to the Storyteller - the facilitator of the game - to decide whether it happens or not. Generally, in the case of the Recluse, the Storyteller wants their ability to activate as much as possible, but there is nuance to this and the best Storytellers know when to have a recluse register truthfully.

I want to talk about both of these facets of the character and how they might be applied to more narrative focused games like TTRPGs. Some of this stuff would also be cool to see in CRPGs but, without a human brain running the game live, the section on “might” is definitely less relevant.

Misregistration

Misregistration can create some really interesting interactions in Blood on the Clocktower. I would love to see the potential for this in TTRPGs.

Keeping with the theme of misregistering as a demon, imagine a cunning wizard making their party register as demons at the gates of Hell, allowing them to slip in unchallenged; or that same wizard turning that magic against some goblins, and letting the Paladin strike them down with all the benefits of their sword that deals extra damage to demons.

Alternatively, perhaps a player character is cursed to register as a demon, meaning they can no longer enter the church that has been supporting their adventuring so far, or worse, that the monster hunter guild now has their eyes on them.

There are so many different ways this mechanic could be used, feel free to share your ideas in the replies! I only touched on four ways registering as a demon could turn out, think of what you could do with other creature types, or even completely different character traits!

“Might”

One of the reasons the Recluse’s ability (and other Clocktower characters’ abilities) works so well is because it doesn’t have to happen every time. In Clocktower, this can be used to cast suspicion on the Recluse player, but it can also be used when the events that would transpire if the recluse did register wrong would make the experience of the game worse than if the recluse registers correctly.

For another RPG example, imagine if that cursed PC from earlier was magically banished to Hell and they didn’t return because Hell is the native plane of demons, effectively removing that PC from play. There are definitely groups that would find that fun, but it creates a lot of extra work for the GM that I know I would never bother with if I could avoid it.

Frequently, when something “might” happen in a TTRPG, the designers leave it up to dice to decide. By giving that decision to a neutral player (or maybe the whole group in a GMless game), it allows them to have it trigger when it suits the story and gameplay best, and have it not trigger when it might ruin or break something.

Obviously this intuition for balance isn’t a skill all GMs share, so if you use this in your games, it’s probably also worth including a little disclaimer telling your GMs to keep fun in mind.

Misregistration in D&D 5e

D&D 5e has one spell that causes things to misregister. Nystul’s Magic Aura is a second level spell from the Player's Handbook that I have never heard anyone talk about in my life. It allows the caster to change how certain information might appear to a spellcaster using divination magic against an object or willing creature.

For example, you could have a humanoid appear as a fiend or a magic item appear to be nonmagical. This would probably work to get through the gates of Hell, but a lot of the other scenarios I have presented are not achievable using this spell, mainly because it cannot be used offensively as a curse.

This spell as it currently exists could be really interesting to use in the big reveal in a mystery adventure (maybe the wizard whodunnit tried to implicate the local necromancer by planting traces of necromancy magic at the crime scene!), but there is so much more potential for this type of mechanic to be explored, especially when it comes to mechanical interactions beyond gathering information.

Tag Systems

This type of design feels like it would work really well in games with tag systems (think: Fate or Lady Blackbird). It’s as simple as “Curse: Effects might treat you as if you had the Demon tag,” coupled with a sword that “Deals +1 damage to Demons,” or an NPC with the trait “Hates Demons”. Hopefully you can already see the types of gameplay or stories that can emerge here.

I hope something I’ve said today has inspired you as a designer! I’ve had these thoughts rattling around in my head since I first discovered Clocktower in mid-2023, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time I talk about the game here. I’m really proud of this post so it would mean a lot to me if you shared it around!

Thanks for reading this dispatch of Jackalope Mail,

CJ

Read more Jackalope Mail for free on Patreon

I was already a big fan of Mike’s series DownieExpress, which I like to pitch to people as chill Jet Lag. He takes these big travel challenges across the world, such as Arctic to Africa, where he travels from the Arctic Circle to Morocco in North Africa by train, or Europe to Asia, where he takes the train from the westernmost station in Europe to Istanbul, which lies on the Europe/Asia border.

But I’m here to talk about Jet Lag! In Taiwan Rail Rush, the two teams travel around Taiwan earning chips and spending them to claim stations. The real trick here, though, is in the level design. I mean, obviously Taiwan’s rail network wasn’t designed for this game, but I’ll explain.

The whole rail network is one big circle. With the east and south coasts of the country having only a single track clockwise and anticlockwise, while the western coast (and part of the northern coast) is a more complicated network with several intertwining routes. The Zhongyang mountain range that runs down the middle of the country blocks direct transport from the east and west coasts.

This leads to a really effective map for a turf war game. When the two teams are battling it out on the east coast, the game feels like a tug-of-war. While contests on the west coast feel like an infiltration mission, with the attacking team hoping to sneak through the defending team’s least protected line. The whole game was super dynamic and exciting, whether the teams were directly competing or across the country doing their own thing.

Most of my favourite Jet Lag seasons are the ones that highlight really specific things about the places they’re in. I really enjoyed the Aotearoa season and Schengen Showdown with Tom Scott for similar reasons. In Taiwan, I really loved the animal challenges (a cat village AND monkey mountain??) as well as all the cool public art projects you get to see (a statue garden and so many gorgeously painted buildings!). Speaking of public art, one thing I kept noticing was that there were statues outside basically every train station the players left. They were really cool and gave such a lovely vibe to every place they visited.

This season really had everything I love about Jet Lag in it. The next season, Stateside Scramble has already started and I’m loving it too! It’ll probably be in next season’s post.

Tom Scott: England

I’ve also been really enjoying Tom Scott’s new series on YouTube and Nebula. Tom Scott: England sees Tom travelling through each of the historic counties of England, experiencing and discussing… something in each. The activities are super varied so I feel like the best way to get it across is with some examples. My personal favourite has been the exploration of the world’s first smart house in Northumberland. I’ve also loved the fake hospital for medical students in Sheffield and the fake mining disaster for rescue training in Nottinghamshire.

I’m really hoping that this gets a series two featuring the rest of the UK! But every England video so far has been super interesting, check it out!

The Gallant and the Virtuous

Pick it up physically here or digitally here.

I briefly mentioned Kayla Dice’s new game The Gallant and the Virtuous in the links section of the last Things I Liked, her blogpost about the design process put the game on my radar, and I was hooked immediately. The digital release came out not too long after, but I waited until I could visit her stall at UK Games Expo to pick up a physical copy, I'm so glad I did!

It’s a GMless game where you play knights from different kingdoms, who meet at jousting tournaments throughout the years. The game is a series of scenes at these tournaments, with large timeskips (3-10 years) between each one. At the end of the game, one of the competitors is killed in the tourney and jousting is outlawed in the kingdom forever.

One of my favourite things about the game is its framework of a theatre play. The introduction begins with “Enter Chorus, dressed as a town crier,” and is written as an opening monologue, introducing the “cast” and foreshadowing the ending. All the examples of play are formatted like scripts, and the gameplay is strictly structured as a loop of scenes within acts, three scenes before the jousting, the tourney itself, then two scenes afterwards. All of this gives the game a unique voice that I really enjoyed reading. I played the game with some non-RPG friends and just read the intro verbatim because I think it’s perfect.

I also really love the playbooks! All six of them (the Bastard, the Heir, the Veteran, the Dandy, the Courtier, and the Commoner) are full of flavour and offer some great character creation prompts. Each playbook has one Belonging Outside Belonging-style “You can always…” move, as well as three moves that interact with the Doom and Fortune system, which is where the real juice of the game is.

At the end of every scene, players may mark a Doom and/or a Fortune if they met their playbook’s triggers (the Heir marks a Doom “if you leave a scene feeling that you’re unprepared for the crown that awaits you”, and the Commoner marks a Fortune “if you leave a scene determined to prove nobility wrong”) Each playbook also has a spotlight move, where they can call on another player competitor to act with them in exchange for Fortune or Doom. For example, the Dandy can “invite another competitor to break a norm,” and each participant may gain Fortune or Doom depending on how the act plays out. Each player has just enough moves and triggers to keep each scene fresh without so many that it becomes overwhelming for the players to track all the things they can do.

I’m sure you can tell that I really love this game. I’ve got a bunch of different people who I think would love it, so I’m hoping to get a lot of playtime out of it, which is refreshing!

Links

I think I’ve found a groove for the links section going forward. I’ve split it up into TTRPGs, other games and non-game media (which will mostly be history and graphic design):

TTRPGs

WATCH: Jame Introcaso is killing it on the MCDM YouTube channel right now. Check out Dungeon Advice Ep. 001 and Inventory Management in the upcoming CROWS.

READ: Asa from Backwards Tabletop declares The GM is Dead in Firebrands.

READ: Clayton from Explorers Design discusses 5 RPG Ideas from Urban Design.

READ: watt writes a post-mortem for their cancelled crowdfunder Rust Wings, this was a real shame and I wish them the best on their next project!

LISTEN: I’ve listened to three amazing interviews with Tim Denee (the designer and layout artist for Blades ‘68), listen to him talk about Maximal Minimalism on Yes Indie’d, wearings lots of hats on Talk of the Table and drawing maps and leaving blanks on Dice Exploder.

READ: Murkdice offers A Myth of Many Scribes, an exquisite corpse-esque collaborative worldbuilding procedure to get your table on the same page.

READ: Lars from Dice Goblin describes mechanics for a Shadows of Mordor-style nemesis system in Triangles, Relationships & Archetypes.

WATCH: Quinns Quest reviews Stonetop, I especially love the bit at the end about the question system and the metaphor of giving the players colouring pencils. Excited for season three!

READ: This is a classic now I think, but Rise Up Comus writes about Information Architecture in Non-RPG Books, a great layout analysis using cookbooks and government documents.

READ: Jay from Play.Fearless presents a lovely oracle system in Cards Remember. I really really love the voice of this post.

READ: In the Against Actual Play Manifesto, Jellyfishlines writes in favour of games that are unmarketable to an actual play audience. PWYW on Itch.

WATCH: Cozy RPG Reviews has two great videos covering UK Games Expo: The Most Obscure TTRPGs I Found at UKGE2026 & I Left UKGE With 4 Tough Questions. Here's What I Found. It’s really exciting to see my game Visitations in the B-roll! Both at the UK TIN and Fumble Folks tables.

READ: At Backwards Tabletop, Asa Donald interviews 6-time Public Domain Jam winner David Harris about adapting public domain works into his games. I hadn’t heard of Harris’ work before but all of the games discussed here seem really interesting!

READ: At Rascal, a listicle from Thomas Manuel: Top 10 inspiring quotes from the first TTRPG Manifesto Jam

Other Games

WATCH: Mark from Game Makers Toolkit asks Has Zelda Changed Forever? I love how much series director Eiji Aonuma seems to have been radicalised by the design shift of Breath of the Wild, even if I don’t think that’s the only way Zelda games should be.

WATCH:Peter Austin explains Why the king of hearts has a sword in his head and other quirks of playing card designs.

WATCH: People Make Games’ new video about Jerry’s Map has blown me away. I had vaguely heard about the project from the Brain Trust Discord server, but I had no idea quite how gamic and ritualistic the thing is. The full shots at the end of this massive, 63-year project are stunning.

Also WATCH the Nebula exclusive companion video, featuring additional footage and stories that couldn’t make it in the original documentary.

And READ the Quinns Quest Patreon announcement for the video, featuring a lovely reflection on designers taking inspiration from game-y things that aren’t “games” in the typical sense.

WATCH: Mell Aguiar discusses the racism of assumed “common knowledge” in puzzles, tests and culture in When the World Tests Your Whiteness: NYT Puzzles, You the Birthday, & White Supremacy.

WATCH: Jacob Geller writes about body cam footage, first-person shooters and body cam first-person shooters in Reality is a Camera Trick.

Not Games

WATCH: J. Draper discusses the pros and cons of heavy plate armour in Is wearing armour as hard as it looks? 

WATCH: Another one from J. Draper: Masculinity Has Always Been "In Crisis", at least since the Georgian times.

READ: Present & Correct is a London stationary shop with a blog full of graphic design inspiration, check out these 1950s Milwaukee bus tickets, these pre-war Japanese tourist maps or these cassette players.

READ: The first animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. To celebrate, Animation Obsessive republished a 56 year old journal article about the making of the film from director Lotte Reiniger. I saw this film a couple years ago and its absolutely stunning, do read the article, even just to see some screencaps from the movie!

WATCH: Cambrian Chronicles explores how a hoax on Wikipedia changed Welsh history.

WATCH: I love B. Dylan Hollis’ longform videos, including his new one cooking beef desserts from the 1981 All-Beef Cookbook.

Read more at Jackalope Mail:

Excerpted from my blog post, Design Diary: A Witch's Pilgrimage. Read more about the game here.

Inspirations & Early Ideas

I started noodling the idea for this game at the beginning of the year when I played Hades 2. One of the new things I really like about that game is the resource collection. As you travel from room to room, there is a chance of finding metals, fish and plants that you use to cast your incantations. It really fed into the witch-y feel of the game, which is one of the big things that differentiates it from the first Hades. I was really drawn to the idea of a solo RPG about doing the same.

Then I was thinking about Stoneburner by FariRPGs, specifically its expedition generator. Before delving into one of the demon-infested asteroids of the Long Belt, you roll a set of polyhedrals on a sheet of paper and turn them into areas with events based on the size of the dice and their results. For example, if you travel to Kazab Baram, a d4 that rolls a 4 becomes a “crashed space ship” and a d12 that rolls a 7 becomes a “corrupted greathall”.

I tweaked this slightly so that each die is always the same type of location. The d12 is always “The Cave of” something, for example, unlike in Stoneburner where the prompts on the same die are more distinct.

I’ve found the fill-in-the-blank-style prompting to feel really novel and compelling. Multiple of my playtesters pointed out that it was a simple system that led to evocative names. This was exactly what I was hoping for!

At this point, I had a narrative genre and a core system, but I was stuck with an incomplete hook for the game. I knew you were collecting ingredients for a ritual, but what did the ritual do? I spent a while mulling on this idea while I was working on my university projects, until tragedy struck.

Tragedy.

In February 2026, my dog Timmy died at nearly 15 years of age. Up until this point, the game was just notes and ideas. But after this happened, I took some time away from uni to clear my head and focus on this game instead. The first full draft was written in a fit of grief during that first 24 hours after he died. It’s fitting, really, because that’s exactly when the game is set.

It’s interesting looking back at it a few months later, especially the endings (I’ll talk more about the mechanics of those in a bit). The ending that’s hardest to get sees your familiar coming back to life with a full extra lifespan ahead of them. He was nearly 15 when he died, I’m 22! He’d been in my life for basically as long as I remember, and it won’t be until 2034 that he’ll have been in less than half of my life. That’s staggering to think about. When I wrote the endings, I wanted nothing more than to have him back and redo everything, taking better advantage of the time we had together. But, as much as that seems like the “best” ending (in the sense that it’s the hardest to get and sees the spell you’re casting at it’s most powerful), it’s not the ending that I would want now. Instead, all I’d ask for is the middle ending, to have him back for a single day. And I’m sure, as time passes even more, I wouldn’t want to attempt this ritual at all.

Endings

Once I had worked out the player character’s motivation, I could see an ending and a final resolution mechanic. At the end of the game, you choose three of the cards you have collected to make a hand and the quality of the hand determines the ending you get. From best to worst, the hands are: three of a kind, straight flush, straight, flush, and then anything else. I spent a while looking at different card games and the hands they used. My first thought was poker, but poker has 10 different hands (and still 7 if you counted everything using 4 or less cards as one outcome), which felt like far too much nuance. Would there actually be a meaningful difference between a 4/7 ending and a 5/7 ending? I looked around for card games with other hands and stumbled across Brag. Brag is traditionally played with 3-card hands, which led to 6 possible hands. I then combined the two hands that don’t use all three cards into the “anything else” category, leaving me with 5 degrees of success. I’ve never played a game that features more than 5 degrees of success, but my gut told me that anything higher was going to be difficult to write.

Since the procedures that lead up to the ending feature a large amount of randomness and player choice, I have no idea what the odds are of getting each ending. If anyone is interested in running the numbers for this, let me know and I’ll add an addendum here! But currently I have no idea where to begin with that.

Optional Tables

After the first couple of early playtests, I started to think about any extra support I could provide for the players. Things like character names and additional prompts for the ingredients you are collecting. I already spoke about this in a recent post, Musings on Randomness, but spark tables are really inspiring me right now. I love how a few simple words can prompt so much creativity, and wanted to put some of that in the back of the game.

Each table is a d4/d6 table, which leads to 24 results in total. This was mainly for space reasons, it meant each table could fit exactly on 1 page. But it also feels big enough that you probably won’t get a duplicate if you roll on it 4 or 5 times in a game.

I’m really happy with the entries in each table too. Some personal favourite names include Hotaru (the Japanese word for firefly), Perecles (in honour of an NPC from my Godkiller game), and Starpot (this just came out of me, but I think it’s really cute).

Conclusion

This feels like the first game I’ve made that is really personal to me. Up until this point, my games have been about genres I like or mechanics I found novel, but it’s not really felt like you could look into my soul through my work. This is different. It’s still a genre I like, and it’s still mechanics I find novel! But I’m also in there in a way I’ve never been before. It’s a weird feeling, to bear my soul like this, but it’s exhilarating! This definitely feels like my new favourite project, the new thing I’m proudest of, the new thing that represents me best.

What’s Next?

Big news! I’ve been accepted into Gamefound’s RPG Party 2026! The Gamefound team will be mentoring a group of crowdfunders from teams of various sizes and various levels of experience. This is my first time running a crowdfunding campaign which is scary but also really exciting! There’s a hugely diverse set of projects coming out, from solo stuff to original trad systems to third party Daggerheart material! I’ve particularly got my eye on what Tori Truslow is working on, their previous game Tending looks absolutely gorgeous!

I’ll be making Dewin, a solo RPG inspired by Welsh ghostlore that uses the same system as A Witch’s Pilgrimage! I had the idea for this game back in 2024, when I read The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts by Delyth Badder and Mark Norman. I actually wrote a review of that book back on my old blog, where I first said I was making Dewin. I’ve been shopping it around different systems this whole time and it finally feels like this is the one.

Since I’m making a second game in this system, I’ll also be working on a Creator Kit for other designers interested in using the system! This will be my second creator kit, after the RPTree kit I made back when I released ABODE. You can check out the page for the Pilgrim’s Path Creator Kit on Itch now, although there’s only a logo there at the moment.

This is all really exciting, and I’m sure I’ll be telling you more about Dewin soon. Join the Patreon at the free tier to get my writing in your inbox, and consider subscribing for $3 per month for access to my Work-In-Progress games, there were three drafts of A Witch’s Pilgrimage published here before it released!

Thank you so much for reading, just a reminder that you can purchase A Witch’s Pilgrimage on Itch right here!

Speak soon!

CJ

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If you roll too high on some of these moves, you get an overkill: a success with a consequence because you were too powerful. This is a wonderfully flavourful mechanic that prompts you to consider whether you want all three statements to be true all the time. Maybe it’s safer to hold back so you don’t hurt someone close to you. The randomness becomes a big factor in establishing your character’s position in a scene. Especially when the odds of rolling 10+ on 2d6+3 are just over 58%!

Another important factor to consider when designing for randomness is the dynamic between the randomness and player choice. With the previous example of a move in Godkiller, the player’s action triggers the move (“When you inflict violence on someone...”) and then the player rolls to determine the outcome. The decision comes before the randomness. This is called output randomness. Output randomness can sometimes feel very chaotic, since players are forced to react to the consequences of the randomness as they appear, rather than be able to plan based on the results they know they could get.

The opposite of output randomness is input randomness, where the randomness occurs before the player makes a decision. A classic example of this is a hand of cards in Poker. The player gets their random hand at the beginning, then chooses how to bet based on it. In the comments of the Skeleton Code Machine post about Input and Output randomness, Exeunt Press describes input randomness in TTRPGs as “inherently limiting,” using a hypothetical example of a game that gives you a hand of random actions to choose from. But I don’t think this is the only thing that input randomness can mean in RPGs. For a different mechanical perspective, I want to propose Spark Tables, a mechanic that I love from the works of Chris McDowall, especially Mythic Bastionland. See the original post about spark tables on Chris’ blog here.

Spark tables are a GM’s best friend. I’ve been obsessed with them in my recent designs. They’ve shown up in my previous and upcoming solo games: Visitations (which came out last year) and the upcoming A Witch’s Pilgrimage (WIPs are available to paid subscribers!). They are a great example of input randomness: you are given some random words, then “react” by interpreting the words into a more fleshed out and meaningful narrative.

For a while I believed that input randomness was inherently better and lead to more player agency because of the greater information, but I don’t buy that any more. I think it depends on the range of the randomness in your game, something I have also previously written about. If the range of randomness in a game includes situations where the next decision is obvious, that will always have lower player agency than a game where the randomness always leads to interesting decisions. This can be okay! Especially if those non-decisions feel thematically appropriate. But they can also be frustrating if used in the wrong place.

I think this is why I find spark tables so compelling. The entries (at least with Chris’ tables) feel like there are almost always multiple ways to interpret them. Then, when you begin combining multiple prompts, the people, places and things you create feel completely bespoke to your game.

It’s like GM prep magic, I’m obsessed.

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Thank you for reading! I really wanted to do a full rundown of Uncertainty in Games, but like I said I didn't have the time. All my blog posts are available for free, so join at the free tier to get them in your inbox!

Read more at the Crackerjackalope Games Patreon:

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!

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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

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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

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