KTW Productions

Rebuilt from the ground up! Much prettier, more navigable, more accessible, and more me!

I spent a few months on this and I'm very happy with how it's turned out! Even sharpened my JS to create a fancy interactive gallery! Only art back to 2025 is present, as it's a Lot of work to properly tag and set up a block for every image-- I'll be backfilling older stuff over time!

A necromancer AND a gardener (5 year redesign) 🌸

Red Queen Frame

Enforcer who jerks off in your dirty laundry

The umpteenth pick-me playbook

A chaser rebel faction and playbook

A full rewrite of the Strain system

Frantic is WAY more fucked up

I really really really really didn’t want to go back to doing this as regularly, but A.N.I.M. really needs money. The past few months for us have been pretty bad, and I’ve been making less than minimum wage with my cut of the profits for a while.

We make sure not to paywall the majority of our project so as not to bar them from people who can’t afford them, but that means we’re reliant on the good will of those who can afford them to choose to pay.

If you like what we do, want us to keep doing it, an want to keep a disabled game designer who can’t do other work able to pay their medical and food bills, please consider paying for one of our games on itchio, and/or subscribing to our patreon for more regularly updated versions of all our projects.

If you can’t do that, rating them 5-stars on itchio, downloading them, and playing them/talking about them/sharing them is a huge help too. Like, it really can’t be overstated how reliant we are on word-of-mouth.

I am going to have to reinstate the Income Goals to make sure we make an income of at least $2,000 every month across both itchio and patreon, gradually increasing that goal probably until we are making at least $3,000 every month.

"Tell me what you did wrong." Said as evenly as she might tell you what she had for breakfast that morning. Her grip grows tighter and you feel something throb in your head.

"I..." You struggle at the answer for a moment too long—the fingers close tighter.

She pulls you up, stronger than she has any right to be. You're lifted like a marionette, your feet barely touching the ground.

"Tell me what you did wrong, Pilot." Not a hint of emotion in the words, but the meaning is clear.

You nod, and the anger threatens to burn its way out of you. She lets you back down and loosens her grip and you feel the edges of the flames on your tongue.

But you hold it back—and you tell her.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.

Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.

So, I've got a little experience with playing in APs, and it's a subtly different medium to a home game: the audience's presence nudges things in certain directions. In my experience, the thing isn't scripted per se, although it often tends away from sandboxy play and closer to a train-ride, because the key thing is minimising friction. Likewise, there's a tendency to play fast and loose with mechanics, to just kinda roll something and go with it because you don't want to bog the game down in minutiea. Likewise tactical play isn't super engaging for an outside audience - particularly combat or exploration - so you want to lean towards other avenues. Social drama, politics, mysteries and comedy-of-errors work pretty well.

That being said, none of the AP's I've been involved with have been scripted, and generally dice haven't been fudged (indeed, dice-rolling has generally been minimal enough that there was little call for fudging). You don't need to ~cheat~ (pre-scripting, fudging the maths, etc) to make an entertaining AP, just to lean into the incentives of the medium and play for an audience not the table.

I do think there are games that are better or worse suited to AP play because of how well they facilitate this particular style of play. Modern D&D is pretty low down on the list, whereas I can see

So I don't want to devalue APs as a medium: there's a lot of skill that goes into it. But Best Practice in one is different to Best Practice in another (and indeed, Best Practice in playtests is different again, etc etc).

The Catalogue is a system-agnostic collection of 13 of the most despicable companies ever, designed for sci-fi or dystopian future settings, created by 4 excellent designers, and also me!

This project could not have happened without collaboration: @dericbindel, @in-case-of-grace, @crackerjackalopegames, and Not Writing Games absolutely nailed it with some truly EVIL companies!

Check it out now on DriveThruRPG!

It is a body horror and transformation role playing game.

Record how an alien virus changes you each day.

150+ prompts for the tarot deck including the minor arcana, major arcana and reversed cards.

A grotesque body horror and transformation RPG.

Document the alien virus as it ravages you whole.

Make choices: Embrace mutation, become beautiful and strike terror.

150+ tarot card prompts. 8 endings.

Play and get a free community copy at the link: cabbageheadgames.itch.io/chimera

Witchflip is out now!

You are an undying witch that needs to skate!

This is for the 48-Word RPG Jam! It was a ton of fun to make.

Check it out!