games from the wild wood

Grand Guignol gives us crooked alleys and foggy squares, charged touches and words left unsaid, lavish parties and faceless crowds, bloody hands and dangerous smiles, and always the darkness without and within asking ‘What lurks in the secret corners of your heart?’.

In Grand Guignol, each player chooses a Gothic archetype to play, such as the haunted Gate, the scandalous Patron, or the maverick Scholar. Together you’ll discover your own vision of London—revealing its hidden queer enclaves, uncovering the dark forces that loom over it, exploring the troubled lives of its citizens, and chronicling the occasions that may bring your characters together or drive them apart.

What secret histories will you write on dark streets where the gaslights don’t reach, in those corners of your tender hearts that neither God nor science has caged?

The Wheel of Fortune — What is a game you think is underappreciated?

Nobody is talking enough about Jason Morningstar's Desperation!!!

On the one hand, these are some of the most slick, reliable, provocative, delightful horror experiences designed within the last 5 years. The tone is bleak and human and sometimes terribly poignant; the historical periods chosen are evocative and the choices of details (a Morningstar special) is on point; the quality of the sparse, razor-sharp prose itself is excellent; and the characters are so well-drawn.

(I recently got to playtest a new scenario about a repressed middle-class family in 1907 Boston and a seance that goes brutally, awfully wrong and it ruled).

And then on the other hand, mechanically, the things that the game is doing with the "game of prompt cards" format is wildly cool. It's a lot like an anti-FTQ, really - instead of open-ended questions that you answer, fixed events/statements that you put in a character's mouth.

(It leads to a cool frame for content warnings, where Jason can say "pregnancy on card X, body horror on cards Y and Z, etc" and then kindly, firmly makes the point that if you're removing more than a third of the deck you should probably ask yourself if this is really the game for you).

The dynamic interaction of set characters, specific events, structural escalation (act 1 > act 2 > HELL), and the accretion of past choices produces a wonderful emergent magic trick where the pattern-finding instinct produces a combination of novelty and inevitability.

Sometimes you turn over the card, and it could be anyone, and you get to choose what's going to make everyone squirm most. And other times, you turn over the card, and based on vibe and past choices it feels like there's only one person this could possibly be—despite the fact that from a standing start, another table could reach an equally certain "this must be so-and-so" conclusion pointed at a different character.

Anyway Desperation fucking rules go play it now. There's even an excellent Roll20 module for the VTT heads.

And the art??? Jabari and Brennan fucking cooked the game looks incredible.

do you know if you’ll update it again?

Oy, fair question, to which the answer is probably not.

In the end, my working patterns (slowly ruminate on a big game in stolen time outside day job) and the ADHD of it all mean I'm just not good at or well-positioned for the kind of posting that a Patreon runs on.

I'm currently at the tail-end of a classics degree, of which anthropology is a big part. I'll be starting a Harvest/Grand Guignol double feature for a few of my friends. However, having gone through the Harvest playbooks again, it's only striking me now how brilliant the University Power that the Stranger has is.

It's kinda rare that media, particularly TTRPGs, directly addresses the problems with anthropology, and especially classical anthropologists (like Frazer and Tylor) whose work was largely built on boxing in and explaining away the beliefs of distant cultures. I'm especially appreciative of the earlier occult moves (using your expertise to establish your authority and undercutting peoples positions).

Just wanted to say, it's really cool to see that being well-represented, and I look forward to seeing how Harvest plays in a week or so!

Thank you so much! I'm really glad to hear that the University is landing in all its slimy culturally-violent glory.

I knew from pretty early on that I wanted to point the Stranger's "hey the mainland is kind of fucked" lens on the knowledge-producing institutions of the British Empire, and when measured against the church and the crown it was a constant worry whether I could lay bare the teeth of it enough to make that choice feel justified.

I'm going to be running Harvest in the next month or so, and I've been eyeing the Powers with a lot of interest.

One I've had my eye on for a while is the Slate House, the possessive manor-house that can claim the Homecomer. I wanted to ask, what sort of inspiration did you use in writing it?

The Haunting of Hill House! There's actually a beat in the Slate House blurb ("The house has stood for ten generations, and will stand proud for a hundred more.") that echoes the famous opening paragraph of Hill House as a little easter egg:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

In addition to that, more generally:

The long tradition of tight toxic chains of familial descent and claim (see: Wuthering Heights) in the Gothic

Haunted houses, more generally