There's a TTRPG for that!

Can't just work on releasing a TTRPG adventurer and not give the players some fun new characters creation options! So for my Reactors & Romance adventure, Powercores & Polycules, I designed some new mech options for the players.

hiiii my car needs various repairs, which means i'm setting all my tabletop games to 60% off for the next month or so! or get all of em for $20!

these games include:

toxic divorce reality-hopping simulator

pvp action movie time loop soundtracked by the mountain goats

house of leaves inspired map-making game

journaling game where you’re a slenderverse protagonist

Darkness and Distance; or, The Triumph of a New Prometheus is a retelling of Frankenstein in the form of a roleplaying game. It is also an oral storytelling game, an asynchronous card game, a character creation game and an embedded branching interactive narrative. In playing the game you’ll tell the story of a scientist, his creation, the pain they caused each other, and the explorer who bears witness to the end. Play requires a deck of Tarot cards and the gamebook itself. Chapters cover events in the story and feature card challenges that must be completed and key choices that must be made. The decisions and consequences will influence the narrative and point to the next Chapter. Between chapters the narrative is relayed through a Storytelling Scene, with a player performing as different key characters depending on where in the gamebook they are.

The idea of the game is it could be played completely solo, but its best version is playing it with someone else as a hybrid solo play-by-post game with storytelling handovers. I finished a draft of some rules text and the first three chapters of the game¹. I then conducted a short self playtest mainly focused on the card mechanics, as I needed to be sure they worked before I committed to writing more of the game. Here was the initial draft of the card challenge mechanic:

Before playing a challenge separate the Major and Minor Arcana into two decks. Remove The Fool from the Major Arcana, add it to the deck of Minor cards and shuffle them together. This will be the deck you draw from during a challenge. At the start of a challenge a player deals themselves a number of cards dictated by your hand size for this Chapter. Individual Chapters will have specific rules for discarding and drawing cards. A challenge is represented by a Major Arcana card, to triumph over the obstacle you must play a combination of up to four cards, either of the same suit or rank. If the combination’s total value is higher than the Major Arcana’s number the challenge is overcome. The numeric value of Aces is 1 and Page, Knight, Queen, and King are all worth 10. The Fool is a trump card. It can be played alongside any four cards and it will count as a valid combination, regardless of suits or ranks. Integrate how a character’s folly aided their triumph into the story. After a challenge a player discards their hand. The discard pile isn’t shuffled back into the deck until the end of a Chapter.

Just as a brief overview for the early chapters the Scientists redraws were linked to sacrificing resources, which broadly could represent attributes like Emotional Regulation, material resources like a Large Inheritance and connections like an Amoral Hired Assistant. Whereas the Creature’s redraws in their opening chapter would involve gaining scars and eventually killing people (with it left to player interpretation whether that’s accidental, self defence or pre-meditated murder) and building a death toll. How many re-draws something takes gives shape to the fiction². An immediately apparent problem with the mechanic in the playtest was that it was simply too easy to beat a challenge, there was no real difficulty or chance of failure³. I tried a couple of tweaks, first restricting you to only playing a pair of cards, then further the pair specifically having to be a match. This finally resulted in playthroughs that had a variety of results, sometimes I needed to discard and redraw a lot and some challenges I beat without losing anything. It was swingy but that wasn’t a problem⁴, but a problem still existed.

Even when I’d made changes to the mechanic it didn’t feel right, there was a lack of satisfaction. Drawing a hand and realising you can instantly win didn’t feel lucky, it left like being denied the chance to play⁵. Even though the fictional outcome could be interesting, the experience of play inspired no feeling. I went back to the drawing board, the Major Arcana as obstacles worked fine but I looked to move away from beating the Major Arcana through card values. Instead of playing a hand I decided to use a predicting based mechanic⁶. Here’s the new draft for card challenge rules:

Before playing a challenge separate the Major and Minor Arcana into two decks. Remove The Fool from the Major Arcana, add it to the deck of Minor cards and shuffle them together. This will be the deck you draw from during a challenge. The rest of the Major Arcana will act as the obstacles you encounter over the game, with higher cards representing more dangerous challenges. You complete a card challenge by building a pile of cards the size of which matches the Major Arcana number of a given challenge. You add cards to your pile by guessing if the top card of the deck will be higher or lower and then drawing, if you guessed correctly then the card is added to your pile, if your guess was incorrect it goes to the waste pile. For the first card you draw, you are guessing higher or lower relative to the value of the Major Arcana, for all the following cards you are guessing relative to the current top card of your pile. Pages are valued at 11, Knight at 12, Queen at 13, and King at 14. When you first draw an Ace you declare if it is valued at 1 or 15, this value applies to all other Aces drawn in this challenge. If the card you draw is a perfect match it is not immediately added to your pile or the waste pile, instead it is set aside and your next guess determines where it goes. If at any point you draw The Fool you succeed against this obstacle immediately, regardless of the size of your pile. The Fool is then set aside for the rest of the Chapter. When a challenge is over, the number of cards in the waste pile determines the consequences you suffered during this challenge. Each specific challenge will present its own costs. In some Chapters the cards challenges will have a fail state, where if a certain number of cards go in the waste pile the challenge cannot be completed. An obstacle revealed itself as truly insurmountable to your character and the story will take another direction. Some challenges cannot be failed, regardless of how much is lost, you will triumph no matter what it costs. Once a challenge is completed shuffle your pile and the discard pile back into the main deck.

From my own tests this feels better to play and let me explain why I think that is. One reason is that this inherently involves more effort. Even if you get lucky and call correctly for every draw you do still have to draw those cards⁷. There’s more moments of tension; if the top card is a Queen and a player predicts lower and drawing a Jack would feel like a near miss while a King would have an unfair feeling sting and drawing a 6 would feel exciting then intimidating as you realise you have to predict again. These feelings can influence the emotion of the fiction, you have a sense of struggling against a challenge before getting a lucky break and that bleeds into the telling of the fictional obstacle, whether that’s pilfering corpses, trekking through the arctic or conquering Death.

Other changes flowered downstream from moving to the prediction game. Using the waste pile as a results table unique to every challenge may mean moving away from representing things as resources, essentially speaking in plain terms about fictional consequences and how they cause divergences in the narrative and which chapter is proceeded to.

The next step will be moving to a more detailed re-write of the initial chapters to align with this change. From there I’ll see whatever changes I need to make to the rules text and likely run another self play test⁸.

Because of the nature of this book I imagine it will have a high page count. I predict it will be the largest title of the collection⁹ by far, which probably means I’ll cap the collection at four games before the physical book becomes unwieldy. This could change when I continue writing, if my length expectations are wrong, or the book could grow to a size the format of the collection has to change around it.

Kayla Dice’s Absolute Monsters is coming to Kickstarter in the future. Please do follow the pre-launch page, it will be a big help when the time comes. I’ll likely write more about the individual games and the collection as a whole as it develops¹⁰. I also have other stuff to work on, some much closer to sharing than others, so the next time I contact you there may be some announcements.

1. A preview of the game was posted on my Patreon for free members but I’ll replicate important things in this post. I’ve decided to make some changes Patreon going forward where it’ll essentially be a place mainly for cross posting the newsletter/blog. I explain more in a post over there.

2. The connection between a sacrificed resource and discarded cards felt somewhat abstract, which isn’t bad per se but asks the player to make that connection themselves.

3. Admittedly it’s not actually possible to meaningfully fail in the first two chapters. There are certain things that have to happen in the story, the Scientist always makes a Creature and leaves, the Creature always tracks them down with a demand. In those chapters the only scale is how much of a struggle is. I’ll likely write something about trying to strike an inevitably tragic note with those chapters, in every possible version of events certain fates can’t be avoided.

4. Something I have learned and try to catch now is that the most statistically unlikely outcome will happen to someone, so you should try and make sure that is still an engaging situation. As an example the initial timeskip mechanic in The Gallant and the Virtuous had the number of years just be the number you rolled, until I realised a game where people only ever got to skip ahead by one year wouldn’t actually be that fun. So I changed it so the results correspond to different lengths of time and you’ll always skip ahead a minimum of three years. For Darkness and Distance I need to make sure a playthrough where everything is accomplished without any major cost is as interesting as a playthrough full of struggle and suffering.

5. A bad run of luck felt more substantial but that ties in to the issue of having to account for all outcomes, someone could get implausibly lucky.

6. Fun Fact: I have an unfinished draft of a mythological underworld football game that used Tarot Cards. Very different mechanically from Darkness and Distance but penalties in that game uses a prediction mechanic, not identical but similar in ways. Maybe I’ll get back to the underworld some day.

7. Yes, drawing The Fool is an exemption to this but that’s why you have to set it aside for the rest of a chapter. Every chapter tends to have around three challenges so its impact is limited. The Fool is only ever confined to a single challenge where you don’t have to try and that has its own narrative resonance, your character is succeeding through something without needing to put in effort but in all likelihood that’s something driving them to ruin. All the same I’ll keep an eye on The Fool as I keep writing.

8. I’ve been trying to rest mostly this week, well rest and watch football. I also have some layout work and other writing to do that’ll keep me busy for the rest of this month. Of course I often say this and then end up doing more work anyway because I get excited about whatever I want to write. Keep your eyes peeled I guess.

9. I’m not bothered by the disparity in length really. I have something I want to write about sequencing collections and how I think of priorities like an album sequence. Darkness and Distance was probably always going to be the last game in print order, it being much larger just gives it an effect like an LP where Side B is just one long ass experimental song.

i ended up binging the entire @tinytablepodcast yeld 2e arc yesterday

it was an utter delight. i was trying not to crylaugh in the grocery store. the characters were delightful (princess was my fave. love a fussy old lady dog). but mostly i was happy the tiny table crew had all the same praises of yeld that i've had since i first read it

as someone with cognitive and reading disabilities, the rulebook of yeld 2e has been one of the most accessible texts (not just ttrpg rulebook!) i've ever read. the clear visual signaling, the accessibly written text. but, of course, the big winner of the yeld 2e rulebook is the comics. having the rules broken down into comics, and having frequent examples of play in comic form (that, as the tiny table team point out, actually tell a story as you read through the rulebook) was such a game changer both in my access to the text, but also in opening up to me how ttrpg rulebooks could operate and be presented

and then there are the rules themselves. yeld 2e is truly one of the best designed games i have ever encountered, and it was easy to hear in the AP just how synergized the rules are with each other, the characters, and the world of yeld itself. games like yeld 2e are why im such a champion of bespoke games. everything is intentionally designed & harmonized to tell the story of yeld and the children who find their way there

the rules are simple, memorable, & deep. the core resolution mechanic stays the same, but situational effects, abilities, & PC options give that system so much depth. you're never going to have to ask "wait, which die do i roll for this one?" or "does this ability apply here?" there is so much texture to the world and so many PC options that increase over long-term play that get rightfully likened to an MMORPG

then, of course, there's the GM support & accessibility and the rotating GM mechanic. so good for new GMs or tables where everyone wants to collaborate on a story together while still maintaining narrative leadership

but what is yeld?

yeld 2e is a portal fantasy TTRPG in the vein of seanan mcguire's wayward children series, digimon, or the chronicles of narnia

the PCs, all aged 7 to 12, stumble through a magical door into the fantastical land of yeld. the door shuts and locks behind them, trapping them in yeld forever unless they find and defeat the 7 hunters of yeld who keep and guard 7 magical keys. if they can't, they'll have to stay in yeld forever. the catch is that upon turning 13, humans in yeld transform into monsters who can never return home

each player (including the GM!) will choose a friend type (like the know-it-all, big sibling, rival ... or dog!) as well as a heroic job (like the witch, shepherd, soul thief, or oathbreaker) as the core of their character. these options add to your stats, which are essentially pips that increase your dice pool for certain actions. actions are resolved by rolling your dice pool and adding them up - the more dice, the higher your potential result, which means you have a better chance of overcoming difficult challenges. some failures are a lack of accomplishment, while others can actually take dice away from your stats

the PCs can & will be harmed in various ways - but death is not the end in yeld. a fallen PC will remain as a ghost until revived, unlocking all sorts of cool ghost moves. combat is streamlined, collaborative, and creative - and also comes with consequences. while you can loot slain monsters and equip their parts for immediate cool effects, the world around you takes notes of your kill count. increasing the restless dead level will make monsters tougher, and nerf you and your friends. there are also nonviolent ways of ending combat, such as befriending or capturing monsters, or forcing them to retreat or surrender

as you continue your journey in yeld, there are so many options for customizing your character through their equipment, abilities, and jobs. PCs can go on mastery quests to level up their job skills, take on advanced jobs (like drudge angel, junk hound, or amazingly, tax collector) or, if they turn 13 while in yeld ... monster jobs like werewolf, magic eater, root warden, or oracle of the serpent god ...

while the PCs in yeld are children, and yeld is certainly engaging to and accessible for older kids & teens, yeld is not just for kids!! the rich world of yeld is full of strife, warfare, violence, intercommunity conflict, grappling with identity, and certainly at times some existential dread (all things kids & teens need to engage with as well!!). if you were turned away by the concept or (really charming) art, please give yeld a shot. as i said before, it's genuinely one of the best designed games i've ever encountered

Resource shortages driven by mass consumption

Urban decay brought about by austerity and the collapse of the American economy in response to globalization

Ultracomodification and alienation driven by unchecked capitalism

Increased corporate power subverting or even outright replacing governments

Information technology being used to reinforce state power, and subsequently take on it's own power outside of anyone's control.

Plus a million other things the genre grew to include

Problem is, the cyberpunk dystopia happened: We hit the upper limit of what dysfuncitonal economies and broken goverments and capitalist profiteering were able to exploit and it's all down hill from here as the value extraction systems cannibalize each other.

Cyberpunk has gone from being dystopian to being nostalgic, a retro throwback to the days when the cultural assumptions about personal agency in a world full of infinite growth were still somewhat possible. Yeah, the world was shitty, but you could still be an ultracool badass who smashed the system before going down in a blaze of glory.

Flash forward to the day and systems are smashing themselves (plus all of us, and the world in general) to pieces trying to siphon the last little slivers of market percentage into shareholder's pockets.

If you wanted to make a genre that was as topical for right now as cyberpunk was for it's time, I think there's two directions you could go..

Fantasy of Reform: Stories that are based around people's resonances to these massive systems breaking down and how to subvert/repair/overcome them. Society is worth saving, we just need to steward it through the birthpangs of latestage capitalist collapse. Shoutout to Cory Doctorow who's been writing in this protogenre since the bush administration.

Some ttrpgs I think might be worth exploring, if you're looking at sci-fi/fantasy genres about rebellion, reform and post-apocalypse:

Detente for the Ravenous, by A.A. Voigt: The Cold War if Henry Kissinger was the Pope. About colonized peoples organizing to bring down the Kaiju-as-metaphor for colonialist and capitalist attempts to consume the world around them, it feels heavily inspired by Heart, Babel, and F.I.S.T..

Rising Tide, by cosmicbeagle: A PARAGON playset about ecojustice pirates striking back against oil companies and other multi-conglomerates by destroying their assets while on the high seas.

Hunting Billionaires for Sport, by hexavexagon: A game where hunting billionaires is a legitimate practice that provides a media company with plenty of profits due to the popularity of live-streaming these hunts. You are some of those hunters, going up against everything those billionaires throw at you.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan: In a world overtaken by aliens, cryptids, kaiju, and secret government entities, your home has quickly fallen apart. Travel from place to place keeping each-other alive using whatever technology you can get your hands on.

Red Markets, by Hebanon Games: The zombie apocalypse happened and we just kind of... kept going. Try to make a living while on the wrong side of the economy by recovering proof that certain people died, so that your employers can claim the contents of their wills.

Sea Legs, by Jack Blair: The rich have left our climate apocalypse behind. We are left with a world where most cities have sunk beneath a rising ocean. You are a crew scavenging in order to keep your community alive, and sometimes fighting with others to get precious resources.

A lot of news from just last week: There is now a new zine on saving bugs rather than squashing them

Then a micro RPG for solving boss fights without dice: https://ranarh.itch.io/showdown-from-memory

And my most recent jam game that I did with the team:

There's also a new art asset pack with 19 assorted dark fantasy and horror illustrations: https://ranarh.itch.io/artpack-sketchy-horror-vignettes

Finally, the Summer Sale on Itchio is still running at a whopping 80%: https://itch.io/s/188364/hot-games-summer-sale-2026

(or listen here)

Everyone remembers beloved Monster-Of-The-Week serial drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by significantly less beloved Joss Whedon, right? Good! Because we made a cat in it! Happy Silver Screen Summer!

It's Kiwi RPG Week! While ideally you'll hear about kiwi ttrpg content year round, this is the week where we really focus on sharing the cool stuff made by our community- from standalone games, to supplements, to actual plays.

This year, I'm going to introduce a kiwi-made rpg each day! Today we have:

Na te Puhipi nā Kelly Whyte

(Ko Pākehā te iwi)

Na te Puhipi is a journaling game about the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The bulk of gameplay consists of reading and reflecting on speeches made at the 1840 signing, from the perspective of an attendee. At the end, the player writes their own speech in response to what they've read.