Indie TTRPG Creator, LARPer, He/They

Hellwhalers is a No Dice, No Masters game where characters are damned sinners, cast to the seas of hell and now working on a whaling ship trawling the blackened seas, trying to hunt down a leviathan Hellwhale in a bid for redemption. It uses tokens VERY well in its design, tying it into one of the mechanical cores of the game: every midnight of in-game time, characters gather to gamble souls (souls being the tokens also used to fuel character actions in gameplay) at the Devil's Board, which the game mechanically does using a round of Sic-bo!

I've been running it with a group of mine recently, and we've been having a BLAST - it's the first game of this design structure this particular group is playing. It was a very quick game for us to learn overall, with some really tight design (particularly with its use of tokens, and how it interfaces with the game's gambling element - it really makes the resource management of the game stand out as something Quality) and has been real smooth sailing so far! I chose to spend some extra time on my own learning the Sic-bo element of the game though, as someone who really loves when games take inspiration from games used to gamble and who wants to get them right.

this is one of those games that I've, ever since I first saw it, thought would be a DELIGHT making props for. Tokens for the souls, using the Devil's Board from the physical version of the game, decorating the physical space the game is played in, really trying to capture the vibes with some table set design…

"If you can procedurally generate a dungeon, you should be able to generate a mountain."

A clarification: Not all of the people I've listed here specifically identify as trans women, but I'm fairly confident that the folks I've listed can resonate with transfeminine experience. Gender's a fun playspace that doesn't have solid barriers, and in my list of trailblazers there are people who align more closely with a non-binary gender or no gender at all. Regardless, I think it's beautiful that so many trans creators have had the ability to flourish in the design space, and leave a lasting mark, and first and foremost, the goal of this list is to honor and celebrate that.

snow

snow has quite a significant games catalogue, her two most notable games being .dungeon and Songbirds 3e.

The original game of .dungeon is about characters (and the people that play them) living in an MMORPG. It's described by Spencer Campbell as a classic dungeon crawler that's incredibly meta, a game that well, talks about games and what they mean to the people that play them. As a result, loss isn't just represented in hit points - it's represented in your ability to continue playing the game with your friends. Both the original and the remastered version put a lot of emphasis on making the game easy to learn, especially with the tutorial adventure that is the first thing you read in the remastered version.

Songbirds 3e is an OSR-inspired game that synthesises ideas from places such as Breath of the Wild, Dune, Dragon Ball, Disco Elysium, Fallout New Vegas, Into the Odd, and much much more. This game is consistently praised for its content more than anything else; the weird and fantastical, the depth of the lore, and the themes of movement between death and life. The setting is full of dungeons, but it's not necessarily fantasy; there's modern technology, shopping malls, basements, paintings, and strange growths in the wilderness that can all be dungeons. (Snow's kind of known for showing how anything can become a dungeon.)

I personally appreciate the game theory playlist that snow put together on Youtube. Most of the videos on this list are not about ttrpgs. But the thoughts put forward in these essays are really interesting, highlighting themes and mechanics in other media, including video games and music, that prompt you to re-contextualize and draw from the subjects of the videos in your game design.

Snow's work asks you to push fantasy far past the limits of typical sword and sorcery games, and challenges you to think about how to blend and mix genres into new and flavorful combinations.

Jenna Katerin Moran. @jennamoran

Jenna Katerin Moran is a prolific author, who has written for Steve Jackson Games and White Wolf, but some of her prominent works include Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Nobilis, and The Far Roofs.

Nobilis is a diceless game about people who are personifications of concepts; it's abstract, and pulls from modern mythology in a way that feels historied and yet new. Many of the reviews about this game praise its text and writing, while also admitting that it can be a terribly difficult game to pull off, because, for a 'narrative-style game', it's incredibly dense. In 2003, the 2nd edition of this game won the Diana Jones' Award for Excellence in Gaming.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, like Nobilis, is diceless, and like Nobilis, is set in the same game universe. Where Nobilis is grand and sweeping, Chuubo's small-town and slice-of-life, using character quests and goals to drive players to figure out what they do next. Like Nobilis, Chuubo's has beautiful writing, that draws the reader into the world and gently asks them what they want. The genres and arcs of the game help players highlight the story pieces that mean the most to them, and serve as guideposts, making very clear to everyone around the table what kind of themes and narrative threads you want to play with.

The Far Roofs is Moran's newest game, a game about talking rats and the people who perhaps might have once been rats but are now heroes. It's an urban fantasy game that pits tiny creatures against moon-stealing monsters and dead gods.

Moran's work is beautiful and poetic, exploring fantastic and emotional worlds while proving that just because a game feels narrative doesn't mean it can't be just as complex as a tactical game. Her games ask you to think about the world your characters live in, not just the characters themselves, and in many ways I think it can be difficult to pin her work into one specific genre. Reading her work is rewarding even if playing the game is difficult; Moran's work touches your heart and asks you to walk away from your experience with a new perspective.

Jay Dragon, @jdragsky

I was gobsmacked to find out that Jay Dragon started publishing games one year after I discovered ttrpgs, because Wanderhome exploded onto the scene in a way that took the indie world by storm. Wanderhome looks like a cozy game on the cover, but buried inside its pages are themes of grief, trauma, and loss, in a world where the good guys didn't win. Wanderhome is a game about community, the journey between disconnected places, and a world where hospitality and the kindness of strangers can make a big difference in anyone's life.

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, another game spearheaded by Dragon, takes away the option of creating your own character, and instead introduces the players to a vibrant cast of characters, asking you to place them into pre-written chapters of a piece of lost children's media, unlocking new content the longer you play the game. Similar to Wanderhome, Yazeba's is a game that can be played with a different play group every time; both of these games refrain from punishing players who can't make it to every session, while keeping the anticipation of wondering where each character is going to go next.

What I appreciate about Jay's work most of all is the consideration both of these games have for folks who have different gaming needs. Wanderhome and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast reduce the barriers to play, from giving players the ability to step away from sessions without falling behind, to giving play options that allow players to participate in the practise of roleplaying without feeling the pressure to contribute to the story in the same way as everyone else.

Jay's most recent game, Seven Part Pact feels like a considerable step away from her previous work, I've already heard stories from play-testers about the ways the game affects them after they play it, particularly the strange trend of "wizard dreams." I'm curious to see where this game brings us once it's been published.

Avery Alder / Buried Without Ceremony

Avery Alder is the mind behind Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, and The Quiet Year, three games about community, queerness, and existence on the margins.

Apocalypse World is a game that introduced a whole new style of design to the indie scene, but Monsterhearts was the first game built on the Apocalypse Engine that proved that you didn't have to make the game about combat. Monsterhearts emphasized the personal conflict between characters that can be fruitful story seeds for roleplayers who truly feel fulfilled when their characters are emotionally backstabbing each-other. At the same time, the game was honoring media that was often derided due to the fact that it was loved by teenage girls - movies like Twilight, and monster romance fiction. Monsterhearts also took away a player's choice about who they were attracted to; being a game about teenage sexuality, it left attraction up to whatever happend when the dice hit the table, which, considering the way games can often be a way to explore identity, blew a lot of players' minds wide open.

The Quiet Year, and its partner, Deep Forest are GM-less map-making games that have provided the bones for various other map-making games. The games separate players from individual characters, instead asking you to introduce new people and make a few statements about them before handing them over to the table, their stories free for anyone to pick up and examine. Both of these games are about communities that are attempting to rebuild, and the obstacles & opportunities that stand in their way. One of the most poignant pieces of these games is the way that characters express dissent: if a character feels left out of a decision or harbors dissent, the player representing that character takes a Contempt token. These tokens give those characters justification for actions taken that harm the community as a whole, but they also sit as silent reminders to the entire table that the community is out of step with one-another; the lack of trust that can sit and simmer until it's too late.

Dream Askew is a product of the Powered by the Apocalypse design ethos, but re-contextualizes many of the processes into a new line of games, styled as Belonging Outside Belonging, or No Dice, No Masters. These games are known to typically be diceless and GM-less, with players taking ownership both of a major character as well as an element of the world they live in. This form of design democratizes decision-making at the table, both removing an element of power imbalance that exists at a GM-led table, as well as encouraging all of the players to contribute in similar ways. It gives players ownership over the setting, and invests the table heavily into the game.

Overall, Alder's design seems to prompt new ways of playing at the table, and her work is a priceless contribution to both storytelling-type games and GM-less tables. I'm personally touched by the ways her games aim to confront a sense of community and care even in moments where conflict isn't easy to navigate.

Jennell Jaquays

Jennell Jaquays is one of the early pioneers of games, known for both he work in ttrpgs and video games. Her work is a fundamental pillar of dungeon design, particularly her adventures titled The Caverns of Thracia Dark Tower, (adventure modules for D&D) and Griffin Mountain (for Chaosium's RuneQuest). Her dungeons exhibited a previously-unseen flexibility, and even gave birth to the term "Jaquaysing the dungeon", which referred to creating a dungeon that had multiple paths for players to follow, allowing a nonlinear progression. A dungeon with multiple pathways and entrances can be traversed multiple times over, with new layers and added complexity as the players grow in skill and knowledge.

Adventure modules in the OSR do this pretty much all the time now, but Jaquays is considered the godmother of the idea. The decision to give players options about what to tackle and what to avoid increases player agency and makes the game feel less scripted. While Jaquays passed away in 2024, her work leaves a legacy that has likely left an impact on any dungeon you pick up to play.

Adira Slattery

Adira's work is quintessentially indie, in that I feel that her games are made for her 30 sickos, and then outside of that, anyone who's willing to dip their toes in. I can't pick just two or three games to highlight when it comes to her work, because her ideas are unique and punchy and vibrant.

Deadly Weapons is a game about girls with guns who hunt demons, and hacks the BXLLET system in a way that removes dice and randomizers, instead asking players to take on risks in order to achieve their goals, all while being haunted by the guns that force them to kill demons.

Bad Moon is a cathartic game about yelling at the Moon, because you love her and she has wronged you.

No Love's Land is a duet game about lesbian robots working for opposing forcees in a war, assigned to assassinate each-other.

Feedback is a solo drawing game about answering surveys and drawing chairs.

Slattery's games are weird, they're messy, and they ask you to be vulnerable and engage with ritual. She uses unique mechanics and approaches to game design to give you new play-tools and challenge you to re-define what a game actually is. Her work is intimate and violent and I love the contrast that exists between the two.

Nem, the founder of Sandy Pug Games

Sandy Pug Games is a game-production co-op with a huge library, the most notable game being Monster Care Squad, a game about healers in a fantasy world working to take care of sick creatures in a humane way, and the most recent game being Hellpiercers, a game about breaking into hell after all the gods have died to free those unjustly imprisoned.

Nem is certainly not the only person who helps manage a co-op, (and certainly not the only trans fem person doing it either), but Sandy Pug is emblematic of what collectivist labour looks like; it's a studio that lifts up the work of all its contributors in a way that is heartening to see in an industry that commonly has various solo hobbyists trying to figure out how to make their passion a reality, figuring out the steps on their own. The community aspect makes their work special, and as the group's founder, Nem deserves some credit for spearheading the charge.

Emily Allen @cavegirlpoems

Emily Allen is the author of Dungeon Bitches as well as the adventures The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn (to name a few).

The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn are both system-agnostic adventures that work exceptionally well in various OSR-style games. Allen's adventures invented the idea of the depth-crawl, a method for procedurally generating a location as you play. Disparate locations and encounters are written up in the adventure, but the order in which they appear isn't set in stone; they show up according to player choice and GM dice rolls. The rolls generate different locations depending on how deep the players go, allowing for compact dungeon design that feels different every time you run it.

On the flip side, Dungeon Bitches is a PbtA game about queer women trying to survive in a cold and unforgiving world, with space for romance, sexuality, and the catharsis of grappling with abuse. There is no respite for your Bitches; polite society has no place for them, and the dungeon doesn't care about who they are or how they feel, it wants them dead all the same. The game embraces the ability of PbtA playbooks to make bold statements about the kinds of characters that live in this world and the specific struggles each archetype is going to face.

Between these works, Allen also has war-games, lyric games, osr games and experimental metafiction, wrestling with surrealism, whimsy, pain and queerness. She has range and depth in astounding abundance, and it makes her accolades well-deserved.

And now, a lighting round…

April Kit Walsh, designer of Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which as a naming convention, is probably the most transparent label you can give a game.

Evey Lockhart, who writes wild and weird content for Troika, the science-fantasy multiversal ttrpg.

curatrix-ribston, @ribstongrowback, a horror connoisseur and author of doll.bod, a cyberpunk game that lives rent-free in my head ever since I found out about it.

@thydungeongal is the world's foremost Rolemaster fan and her thoughts on what games do and what game design does have resonated in the the works of designers and games academics.

Austin Ramsey / @austinramsaygames is the designer of Beam Saber, as well as a radiant and enthusiastic contributor to the Forged in the Dark design space: her game of mech pilots and an unwinnable war has inspired the PARTIZAN season as found on Friends At The Table, as well as CalazCon, a mega-campaign actual play featuring 30 players.

Kayla Dice of Rat Wave Game House @ratwavekayla is a Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award Winner who is behind The Fight Card System, a dueling game system that uses trick-taking games as a resolution mechanic. Kayla is also the host of the podcast This Is Your Lifepath, which interviews various designers.

Tanya Floaker is the designer of games such as Lo! Thy Dread Empire, Mum Chums, and Be Seeing You, games about capitalism, community, and surveillance, and their work examines the way things are while asking if the structures we live in have to stay that way.

wendi yu, @wendiyu, is a Brazilian game designer known best for her game here, there, be monsters!, an unapologetically monstrous game about being queer, being monstrous, and resisting the boxes that capitalism and fascism try to shove us into. The game flips monster media on its head and asks you to embrace your weirdness and cherish the outsider.

Lex Kim Bobrow, aka @titanomachyrpg, is a non-binary game designer and the creator of Caltrop Core, the first of many SRDs that made it easier for newcomers to try out game design for the first time. Lex's work is also aggressively human-made, a testament to the beauty and uniqueness of personal creativity.

(as someone who isn't trans, I welcome criticism from trans creators who find any remarks in this essay that turn out to be insensitive, inaccurate or thoughtless)

Shout-out your own fave trans creators! I'd love to add to the list.

Every good mech story is about the people at the center of conflict; the big robots a thing that emphasizes the story’s themes. To bring this forward, Pilots in Dragon Reactor, our mythopoetic mech tragedy #ttrpg, have two kinds of special relationships: Rivals and Anchors.

Rivals are pretty straightforward: special antagonists with unique abilities and a connection to your character. You can make one during character creation or choose to make any NPC encountered during play your Rival moving forward.

They change every Conflict simply by being there.

Anchors are the people that Pilots care about the most, but aren’t specifically friends. You care about what they think, and to reflect this you track positive and negative Moments that occur during Conflicts.

These Moments reflect how they feel about your actions, and directly lead to different scenes and resources.

Anchors aren't just boxes on your character sheets, they give an extra-personal punch to Pilots' actions, giving the game more dimension.

Plus, they're NPCs! And the more characters in an ensemble tragedy like Dragon Reactor, the better.

Follow Dragon Reactor on BackerKit:

Find the demo here:

By Brewist Tabletop Games

HELLWHALERS is a game of damned whalers hunting a monstrous whale across the seas of hell in a bid for salvation. They'll gamble, fish, sin, and suffer on their journey to defeat hell's most vile sea beast, and should they taste its flesh, discover the rewards of hell's promise.

Expanded content is currently crowdfunding till July 9 on Backerkit here :

I want to post details from more of the art that's going into this book. Back the Kickstarter for the Defy the Gods RPG to see all of it!

Kanesha Bryant ( @theveryworstthing ) made some amazing creatures. Here you can see details from the Anqa bird (with elephant skull for scale), and the Sphinx. I also love her Bull of Heaven (with lightning coming from his flanks) and Manticore (looking like a malevolent Siamese cat with a stinger in her tail).

Ezra Rose ( @sheydgarden ) made some great creatures too. Here are details from their take on a Lamassu and Mushussu.

Then there's Kanesha's breathtaking, truly original vision of the Underworld and its Queen. I don't want to give too much away, but if you're a fan, you won't be surprised to find that she can make a faceless, decaying body ... kind of hot? Her demon courtiers are also inspired.

Finally, Katrin Dirim ( @kleioscanvas ) made the definitive image of the Pantheon, drawing inspiration from Sumerian iconography, ancient Egypt, and the Ishtar Gate.

You can see more on the Kickstarter page—as long as the campaign is still going on! Reserve a beautiful book full of all this art and more, 8"x10" art prints, cuneiform dice, and sweet hard-enamel pins.

If you've been following my posts you might remember a game I was working on and posted about called WildSpace which is a Sci-fi Furry RPG. Little bit of Starfox, little bit of Firefly, little bit of Cowboy Bebop. It was a game I was going to launch via KS which I can't do because Skies Above is currently in Prelaunch. WildSpace ended up being a smaller project than I initially thought it would be. It's about half the size of Skies Above both page size and page count. I'm planning on doing a digital launch first and if people seem to vibe with it them maybe raise some funds for a printed version!

HELLWHALERS: Book of Leviathan is dropping into BackerKit on June 10th.

The original HELLWHALERS, back in print. A 40 page expansion of new content.

Grisly whale hunting by damned souls in the afterlife. Hell's promise for bringing down a cursed sea monster is salvation.

How will you fare?

Whether you're a grizzled veteran sailor of hell's waters, or still getting your sea legs, we've got eternal damnation in abundance.

This game of nautical and Christian-religious horror is churning with maritime terrors and biblical traumas.

Between both books, we've got nearly 100 pages of torments.

In HELLWHALERS and its expansion, take the role of damned whalers, sinners in life and afterlife, hunting a demonic whale for the promise of salvation.

Collect enough souls, through roleplay, challenges, or gambling, and use them to call the hellwhale by the beats of its own disembodied heart.

Follow along with the BackerKit and get ready for a nautical journey through hell with some powerful themes. It's gonna be a hell of a time.

Book of Leviathan crashes into BackerKit on June 10th.

HELLWHALERS: Book of Leviathan is dropping into BackerKit on June 10th.

The original HELLWHALERS, back in print. A 40 page expansion of new content.

Grisly whale hunting by damned souls in the afterlife. Hell's promise for bringing down a cursed sea monster is salvation.

How will you fare?

Whether you're a grizzled veteran sailor of hell's waters, or still getting your sea legs, we've got eternal damnation in abundance.

This game of nautical and Christian-religious horror is churning with maritime terrors and biblical traumas.

Between both books, we've got nearly 100 pages of torments.

In HELLWHALERS and its expansion, take the role of damned whalers, sinners in life and afterlife, hunting a demonic whale for the promise of salvation.

Collect enough souls, through roleplay, challenges, or gambling, and use them to call the hellwhale by the beats of its own disembodied heart.

Follow along with the BackerKit and get ready for a nautical journey through hell with some powerful themes. It's gonna be a hell of a time.

Book of Leviathan crashes into BackerKit on June 10th.

It's been a couple years since I played Fatal Frame and it dragged out of me a bite-sized TTRPG that you play with your camera.

Shudderspeed is about lonely, weird people banishing ghosts. It was written as one page, and then expanded iteratively until I had enough to assemble into a complete edition.

It's designed to be played in person (as the GM waves around a "ghost" that the players have to try and photo,) but there's support for other modes of play---including a solo version where you run through your house in the dark.

There's also a bunch of third party stuff that people wrote that's linked on the page, including scenarios and whole new systems about doing technical photography.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (IoDM) is a campaign horror/romance roleplaying game for a GM and 2-6 players where one player leads the story as Dr. Moreau, guiding and clashing with the other players in the roles of the doctor's unlucky guests subjects. Slowly being altered by Moreau's mad science, these 'Islanders' must overcome dangerous adversaries both within the Lab and stalking the jungle, all while finding love in the strangest places. As the erosion of Dr. Moreau's authority brings the taste of freedom ever closer, it also carries the harsh realities of survival on a remote island inhabited by man-made monsters.

The only way to escape is together.