• If you're reading this on an RSS reader, please go and add the new feed here.

• If you didn't receive the full proper newsletter titled “2024's Project is 10 Games From The First 10 Years”, please also go here and resubscribe.

The rest of this section is just an explanation for why. Please feel free to skip this email and just read the other email you got!

This was a complicated decision. I wanted to leave Substack but at first, there were no easy options. My newsletter goes out to 5000+ people and most places would charge between 35-90$ per month for that - and the price would only go up as I got more subscribers. I just couldn't afford a growing monthly bill like that. Also, Substack was responsible for at least 30% of my subscribers and moving away would probably mean fewer new readers going forward. It's also clear that to me there are no "good" companies and every social space on the internet more nazis than I would like (ideally, zero).

But I decided to move away from Substack anyway.

Geoffrey Golden told me that Wordpress doesn't charge per number of subscribers and that solved my financial problem. But the thing that clinched it was that I got quite a few messages from people. There were some weird ones, of course. It’s the internet. But most of the messages I got from my regular readers were genuinely trying to be helpful - sharing potential solutions, voicing concern and solidarity. And that is basically what convinced me. People like receiving this email. I want opening this email every week to remain a simple pleasure. And not being on Substack will keep it that way for some people - which is a great reason to do it.

WordPress is opensource. It's old. I made my first WordPress blog more than 17 years ago. It's not "one of the good ones" or anything like that. It's just not actively being the worst right now. It’s too bad I might not go grow as fast before but it’s fine.

If you'd like to move from Substack, I've written up all my research into other options as well as a guide to moving to WordPress in this post here.

I’ll resend this email next week just to catch folks who didn’t open this one. Sorry for two weeks of double-emailing!

Happy new year, folks! I hope 2024 treats you better than 2023. It’s end-of-the-year wrap-up time for everyone so that’s a recurring theme in this week’s links. Enjoy!

Thanks for doing the survey and I will share one chart which was interesting which is that most of my readers are experienced players. Neat! I wasn’t sure about the break-up so this was useful to know!

I’m happy to see the patreon crowdfunding drive is now over. Thanks to everyone who now signed up! We’re at 112 patrons now which is almost double where we started! This quietens the nasty voices in my head and has filled me with enthusiasm and excitement for doing next year.

Yours 2024-ly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• The Open Hearth gaming community asked their members to send in audio messages discussing their favourite games of the year for an end-of-year special episode and it’s great as usual. A lovely list of games, showcasing so many small indie gems. It’s also available on youtube below.

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• There’s GeekNative’s annual best-selling on drivethru lists.

  • The Fantasy list features Fabula Ultima at the top which is no surprise as the game has been on the best-selling list basically since it came out. Nice to see Skerples’ Monster Overhaul on the list as I thought it was a great reworking of the standard fantasy bestiary.

  • At the top of the Scifi list was Warhammer 40k but close behind was the new adventure for Delta Green, God’s Teeth and Cities without Number by Kevin Crawford. Public Access, the weird horror game from the Gauntlet, is also on this list as well as the Horror list.

• On Dicebreaker, Chase Carter writes about 7 indie games released this year that you shouldn’t miss featuring games like Slugblaster and Gubat Banwa as well as a general round-up of this year in games including WOTC shenanigans, the release of Pendragon 6e, and the success of the Break!! crowdfunding campaign.

• Rolling Boxcar has a list of their best posts from 2023, including a reflection on the Great Pendragon Campaign and reviews of Ghostbusters and Pirate Borg.

• Polygon has a list of affordable, no-prep RPGs including some gems like The Kind is Dead and Rusalka.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Celebrate heroic fantasy worlds, unearthed magazines, forgotten gamebooks, enchanting artwork & the coolest fantasy products - old & new – with Rediscovered Realms free fantasy newsletter!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Trophy Dark, a one shot horror game, and Trophy Gold, a dark fantasy adventure game, bundled up with some adventures!

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Let’s take a look back at 2023! As far as my work goes:

• I sent out 51 newsletters, with 44 of them having some kind of original writing and 7 just being the links. This means I never missed a week!

  • I also started the round-ups of new games on itch.io, which was initially monthly and now comes out every two months.

• In my first year as host of the Yes Indie’d podcast, I did 14 interviews.

  • I also released 2 episodes of the Teaching Games series, featuring Apocalypse Keys and Girl by Moonlight.

• I released a game, This Ship Is No Mother, first in a series of games that explores all the cool stuff you can do using a standard deck of playing cards in an RPG.

• Last week, I released Fantasy Cities Vol 1, the first collection of essays about fantasy RPG cities. Maybe we can call it the Little PDF Series.

• I co-authored an academic paper about three games from Southeast Asia that is basically done but will come out in a year or so. I know that’s a long time but I’ve come to understand that this is just how academia works!

Overall, that’s a lot of stuff and I’m generally happy with all of it. I wanted to do 24 interviews (i.e. once every two weeks) but these turned out harder to schedule and organize that I thought. I’m really happy with the start of the Teaching Games series even as I struggled with the technical side of things a lot. But it’ll only get better, I feel.

Also, we celebrated three years of the newsletter and Issue #150. The most popular issue (based on likes) was the one about “Books on RPGs” and after that, “What is XP for?” and the analysis of Drivethru’s best-selling games.

My best bit of RPG theory was probably this one called the “Axes of Game Design” where I try to improve a framework to analyze games created by Ken Hite and Robin Laws.

Gaming-wise, I had a fantastic year. I played a little more than 100 sessions. I didn’t keep a very precise count so it’s a bit fuzzy. The game I played the most was Blades in the Dark, two separate series with my regular group. The games I played for the first include: multiple sessions of Apocalypse World 2e, Pasion de la Pasiones, Swords for the Serpentine, DIE, Bite Marks, Nahual, The Veil, and Capitalites. And one shots of This Discord Has Ghosts In It, The Ground Itself, The Giaccone's Rat, Torq, and Follow Me Down. Almost all of these games were made by one person or small teams. It’s amazing they exist. Actually, I realize now that I haven’t written about a lot of these games and should remedy that!

So yes, a busy year! Thanks for reading!

Take me to Patreon!

Last week, we hit 71% of our patreon goal, which is fantastic. If you can add to that, please do. But if you can’t, that’s totally fine. We’ll get there eventually — and I will stop going on about it very soon!

Another way that you can help me make the newsletter - for free! - is to fill out my end-of-year survey! It’ll take less than 5 minutes and is again just to help me figure out who is reading the newsletter and what to do to make it the best it can be! I know they’re kind of dull but if you can, that would be helpful because I don’t really know a lot about who you are and why you’re reading this!

Take me to the survey!

And of course, have a merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Yours retroprospectively,

Thomas

PS. Substack recently announced that they refuse to deplatform any nazis on their platform. This sucks and I'm currently trying to figure out if it's feasible for me leave. No other place will let me send emails for free so I think I'm stuck here till I figure it out. Thank you for your patience.

II. Media of the Week

• RPG historian, Shannon Applecline, goes back to the Dieku Games podcast for another year-end review. They talk about the OGL and other fiascos from WOTC as well as other more pleasant events across the year.

• Dice Exploder did a year end bonanza episode where the host and game designers Aaron King, Sharang Biswas, and Lady Tabletop shared their favourite games and other highlights for the year. (I call in and give my 2 cents as well.)

  Dice Exploder

  2023 Year End Bonanza

  Hello and welcome to the Dice Exploder 2023 year end bonanza! I love me a good ranked list of movies on an end of year movie podcast, but ranked lists are bad and this show’s about RPGs not movies, so you get this instead. It’s me, Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Lady Tabletop of the Alone at the Table podcast, and Sharang Biswas of winning tons of Ennie…

  Listen now

  3 years ago · 2 likes · Sam Dunnewold

III. Links of the Week

• On the Dreaming Dragonslayer blog, a case for “matrix games”: “Start with a problem. Say what happens next. There is no order of play. Anyone can add to what happens. Any player may challenge what another player says and tell them to roll 2d6. On a 7+, what was said happens and cannot be altered. On a 6-, it does not happen and cannot happen. The host may veto what another player says, but this must be done before dice are rolled. The game ends when the problem is resolved.”

• Vincent Baker with another great post in his series breaking down the PbtA philosophy. This is one about three different models of PbtA games - one is Apocalypse World, another is Under Hollow Hills, etc.

• On the rpg.net forums, there’s a massive overview of every TSR-era Dungeon magazine modules by level and theme from 2017. Worth bookmarking if you like the idea of exploring old adventures that you can still find in places like archive.org.

• A nice post about how to design a good pointcrawl

• Split//Party have a glowing review of Lancer: Battlegroup (which is a surprise - at least to me). Seems to be a skirmish-type game and not a RPG though!

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Coming soon to Kickstarter- The Magical Land of Yeld 2nd Edition! Starting January 2024- check out our pre-launch page here!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Two Numenera bundles with adventures, one shots, bestiaries and more. First one and second one.

• Also, Kobold Press’ series of guides: gamemastering, designing boardgames, worldbuilding, etc.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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Around a year ago, I published a series looking at city settings from various fantasy games. I looked at 7 cities including Doskvol, Spire, Eversink, The City from a|state, Into the Cess and Citadel, Infinigrad, and Endon from Magical Industrial Revolution. I’ve now taken those 7 essays and expanded and improved them, added 2 more essays on Lankhmar from DCC’s boxed set and Freeport, a Pathfinder 1e city from Green Ronin. This PDF, Fantasy Cities Vol 1, is available now on my patreon.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction

In the history of the fantasy genre, cities have an interesting place. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which created so much of what we consider generic about fantasy, doesn't really care for cities. Which makes sense because the books themselves feel like an elegy for a time before industrialization, a love letter to the countryside - to woods and streams and the sands below your feet. The cities of Middle Earth are, at their best, noble and static, and at their worst, corrupt and fallen to the hubris of man.

The earliest thriving fantasy cities are probably in the sword and sorcery of writers like Fritz Lieber or Michael Moorcock. These stories were influenced by, among other things, the machismo of pulp magazine stories. The cities reflect this. At their best, they're a canvas for male bravado and havens for debauchery and dissolution. At their worst, they're predatory and authoritarian.

In modern fantasy, the city is ascendant. The old tropes withered under post-modernism's sarcastic glare. Now, you get Ankh-Morpork and Bas Lag and many more that capture the contradictions, potential, and romance of cities as places to spend your lives. But what about games? A city in a novel has to be interesting on the page. A city in a game has to be interesting at the table, it has to bear the weight of the imagination of 3-5 people over a shitty internet connection. That's where I started the series affectionately known (by me) as WWTAWWTAC (pronounced whatawhatac), i.e. What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities.

And here’s an excerpt from the new entry on Lankhmar:

Creating a roleplaying game supplement for an existing fantasy city is tricky. It's trickier when it's a place as famous as Lankhmar, the City of the Black Toga, the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes. Not only are the stories well-loved, the city is an inspiration for other well-loved cities, notably Discworld's Ankh-Morpork which started out as a loving pastiche before evolving into something deeper. (Even the word "ankh" comes from Lankhmar). This means that you have to walk the line between giving fans what they want and making it a useful, usable supplement. Basically, DCC's approach is to not invent any new lore whatsoever - as far as I can see. They lay out what Leiber's originally stories say about Lankhmar and then give themselves permission to colour within the lines with small, inoffensive details. The end result isn't radical or surprising but it does seem genuinely quite good.

I’ve titled it Volume 1 because if we hit the patreon drive’s goal, I’ll do a Volume 2. Maybe I can finally tackle Waterdeep or Ptolus. Maybe I can expand to cities in novels and actually compare them to cities in games directly. Maybe I can look at cities in video games. Where does Dunwall from Dishonored end and Duskwall begin? There’s lots of things to explore!

Thanks to the 30+ folks who signed up last week, we’re currently at 94 out of 150. So if you’re doing okay and able to support, please head over to patreon and subscribe!

Take me to Patreon!

Yours gratefully,

Thomas

And now we return to your regular newsletter…

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II. Media of the Week

• LegalKimchi, a youtuber who has made lots of videos about thorny subjects in D&D, made a video about fantasy religions this week. It’s one hour long so for those who don’t have that kind of time, the central argument is that a setting like Forgotten Realms in D&D seems to be polytheistic (a religious system with multiple gods) but it’s quite normal for a character to worship say Pelor and nobody else — with the implication that worshipping anyone else would be blasphemous. This is not really how polytheism works in the main world — you might have a main god but you probably worship all of them. The highlight of the video is Ed Greenwood, the original creator of the setting, showing up to say that was how the Forgotten Realms was always supposed to work and WOTC basically didn’t care to keep it that way.

III. Links of the Week

• If you’ve ever heard the word “blorb” or “blorbo” and been confused, this explains it and links to further context.

• The Soloist has a solo gaming gift guide with some solid recommendations.

• On Polygon, various contributors share the best game they played in 2023, including Linda Codega shouting out the lush storytelling game City of Winter.

• Layla Adelman aka Pandatheist blogs about recent games they’ve read with typically sharp takes on Fabula Ultima and more.

• Deeper in the Game recommends Hexroll App 2e, a sandbox generator that can make a generic old-school D&D hexcrawl in a click.

• There’s a TTRPG for that recommends Western-style games with a fantasy or scifi twist and also political intrigue games with a fantasy twist.

• Peach Garden Games that organizes the annual Solo But Not Alone bundle whose proceeds go to mentla health charities is soliciting submissions for the next one.

• Over on GameTek, a talk and essay about how boardgames design “cardboard AI” so you can play them solo. Plus, the process of making a solo boardgame that can respond to your strategy and become harder.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Beyond the Pale is an adventure inspired by Jewish folklore and mysticism. The adventure takes places in tight-knit but divided religious community, facing its efforts to fight the march of progress.

• Perfect World is a Free Cyberpunk RPG. The setting tells how AI, once humanity’s ally, became a tool of corporate subjugation. Rules-light with unique hacking mechanics integrated into the main gameplay.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Almost everything from Free League’s catalogue in a bundle: Mutant Year Zero, Dragonbane, Vaesen, Forbidden Lands, Twilight 2000.

• The Mongoose Traveller 2e bundle returns with corebook and supplements

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Welcome to the 2023 newsletter pledge drive!

I’m sad to announce that every year, I’m going to be annoying for exactly 4 (or maybe 5) weeks and explain to you why you should be actively supporting my work. The upside is that I will not be annoying for the rest of the 48 (or maybe 47) weeks of the year. This is my Promise™.

2023 was a big year for the newsletter! And I’ll do a more complete retrospective of all the stuff I’ve done this year in the next couple weeks. But in this email I want to keep it simple: Help me get to 150 patrons and I’ll make the newsletter better.

Writing this newsletter (and doing the Yes Indie’d podcast) became much more complicated for me as my regular work became extremely unreliable. Even as I had more time, I was feeling more burned out. I started a Patreon at the beginning of the year and it has been a true, genuine gift because it’s predictable and stable. If I didn’t have it, I think this year would’ve looked extremely different.

I’ve got two Patreon rewards lined up for folks who sign up. Today, let me tell you about the first one: the “Best of 2023” podcast episodes. The first episode has 13 writers and designers answering the question, “What’s a game you want to recommend to my listeners?” It’s 40 minutes of excitement and enthusiasm for indie RPGs and it’s everything that I want the newsletter to be. It’s in the regular feed right now, so you can check it out for free!

There are three more “Best Of” episodes that will only be available on my Patreon, one per week. Even if you don’t listen to the podcast, maybe especially if you don’t listen to the podcast, these episodes are the good stuff, distilled.

So, head over to Patreon and pledge your support if you can. We need just shy of 90 people to sign up. If we hit that number, we’re good to go for another year! Even at the 2$ level would be fantastic.

Take me to Patreon!

All that said, please don’t feel pressured. I know it’s tough times for everyone out there. I’m just glad you’re here at all.

Thank you for reading,

Thomas

PS. We all thought twitter was bad but one man single-handedly found a way to make it much worse. So that’s the power of one!

Subscribe now

And now back to your regularly scheduled newsletter…

II. Media of the Week

• RTFM point out all the flaws and silliness in the classic Keep on the Borderlands.

• Third Floor Wars speaks to Ben Robbins, designer of Microscope and the new In This World, which is a very fun quick game that I got playtest. More creative exercise than game if I’m being honest but we had a lot of fun doing it so maybe I’m just quibbling. Anyway, fun interview!

III. Links of the Week

• Dicebreaker announced their winners for the Tabletop Awards 2023 and congratulations to Cassi Mothwin, designer of the Sticker Game among others, for winning Rising Star designer.

• KNZ Arts newsletter has a quick overview of the recently released City of Red Waters, a new setting for Blades in the Dark that was pitched in the game’s original crowdfunding campaign.

• Skeleton Code Machine has a nice two part discussion for game design heads on Input and Output Randomness.

• GeekNative is a great source of news. This week, they have an interview with Free League about the new Electric State RPG based on a Simon Stalenhag art book as well as news about Shadowrun 1st Edition getting a reprint that will delight collectors even as it as, they quote, a “glorious dumpster fire”.

• As the earth revolves around the sun, the discussion around the challenges of reviewing RPGs continues. Cannibal Halfling weighs in: “reviewing a game through the lens of actually having played it does introduce its own weakness, although it comes in the form of a caveat: it is even more subjective than reviewing a game by reading it.”

• Games on Demand, an indie-focused RPG event, has got dates for an online convention in Feburary. There’s always some really cool games. I’ll try and run something too.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Beyond the Pale is an adventure inspired by Jewish folklore and mysticism. The adventure takes places in tight-knit but divided religious community, facing its efforts to fight the march of progress.

• Perfect World is a Free Cyberpunk RPG. The setting tells how AI, once humanity’s ally, became a tool of corporate subjugation. Rules-light with unique hacking mechanics integrated into the main gameplay.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Bundle of Blades in the Dark, heist card decks, and some forged in the dark games like Court of Blades and Mountainhome.

• Also, GURPS-powered Dungeon Fantasy from Steve Jackson Games

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Another regularly scheduled roundup of games that have been released on itch.io that caught my eye over the last two months. Usual disclaimer that I haven’t really read or played these games; they just seem cool based on the pitch alone. Also, most of them now come to me by people using this form.

In no particular order:

1. RAD: A Mausritter-style OSR game set in a post-nuclear fallout Soviet Russia. (Hipólita)

2. Five Fires: A game about being a hip-hop whose art can change the world. This is a free ashcan of a game that has been in development for a long time. (Quinn Murphy)

3. Tabletop Gone Mad: This game features Madlibs-style adventure sheets where you all sit down and make it up together and that alone seems fun as hell. (Linnie Schnell, Twice Rolled Tales)

4. Ara Ġejja l-Mewt Għalik: A game about the personification of death in Maltese folklore. Uses blindfolds and spinners! (Għar Gremxul)

5. // electric sheep //: A solo journalling game where you document (made-up) dreams and make friends. I found the idea of a playalong audio version really neat. (Skylar K. Swift)

6. Vanity: Glass & Stone: A solo game inspired by Snow White and Medusa where you explore a labyrinth of mirrors, trying to outrun a curse. Based on the Wretched & Alone system so you play with a jenga tower. (Marco A. Torres)

7. Sound Check: A Firebrands-hack about being in a band. You rehearse, party, fool around, and get ready for the big show. (Misha Grifka Wander and Envi Wiklund)

8. Insatiable Cravings: A two-person game where one person plays a ravenous monster and the other person is making a meal for them. Supposed to be half-sexy, half-spooky is my read. (J Strautman)

9. Meet Me Where I Am: This is a larp-ish game about intimacy and negotiating boundaries that is clearly very personal. (Morgan Eilish)

10. Salvager’s Isle: A supplement for Bump in the Dark, a lovely monster of the week and blades in the dark hybrid game. This has three scenarios or adventures all set in the same weird location, Salvager’s Isle. (Mynar Lenahan)

Yours with a big announcement next week,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

A lovely essay by Aaron Voigt about Moby Dick, the Christian idea of hell, and a new TTRPG called Hellwhalers about damned sailors trying to kill a demon-whale and go to heaven.

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

III. Links of the Week

• Cannibal Halfling reviews the new edition of comedy scifi game, Paranoia.

• Roll20 is finally getting a complete overhaul called Jumpgate.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• A wondrous worldmaking game with tension, traitors, and a living chimera you call home — The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri by momatoes. All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders.

• Beyond the Pale is an adventure inspired by Jewish folklore and mysticism. The adventure takes places in tight-knit but divided religious community, facing its efforts to fight the march of progress.

• Dive into the darkness with Spirit Fall. Immerse yourself in a stress-based dice system, rewarding teamwork, and a post-apocalyptic NYC transformed into a haunting nightmare. Our Kickstarter has just launched!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• A bundle of Sly Flourish’s DM advice books including Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

• A bundle of Bluebeard’s Bride, the iconic game of gender and horror from Magpie Games

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Been a busy week so just a round-up of the links!

See you next week,

Thomas

Subscribe now

II. Media of the Week

• I enjoyed this interview with the very poetic Luke Jordan of Wild Woods Games over on Third Floor Wars. There’s also an actual play of Grand Guignol by the same designer that was featured on Party of One.

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

III. Links of the Week

• Vincent Baker writes the final word in the “What is PbtA?” discussion. Generally, as far as debates over definitions go, this is an easy one because we’ve got the person who coined the term exerting a moral right to claim what it means as it refers to his copyrighted creation. It’s better than people arguing over what hard scifi means, I can assure you.

• On the broken pencil blog, a wonderful profile of award-winning game designer, Jeeyon Shim.

• The Vast Guide by Brian of Stout Stoat and Yubi Coates is an attempt to codify their knowledge about creating accessible games (books/PDFs) and turn that into an easy-to-use guide.

• POCGamer gives the new Pathfinder gamemaster guide the highest rating possible.

• On EnWorld, an interview with Luka Rejec about Ultraviolet Grasslands 2e

• On Deeper in the Game, a good point about why early playtesting should be short and to the point. All my early playtests are also an hour long because they happen at Playtest Zero and that’s how the event is structured.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• A wondrous worldmaking game with tension, traitors, and a living chimera you call home — The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri by momatoes. All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders.

• RPGXray is a podcast that looks inside what makes RPGs tick. Join us for a regular discussion of the hidden systems that effect the theory and practice of roleplaying games.

• Do Not Adjust Your Set is an anthology of system neutral scenarios based on urban legends. The Kickstarter runs until 28th November so this is a great time to back!

• // electric sheep // is a solo journaling TTRPG about dreaming in the digital age. It comes free/pay what you want, with a booklet and an accessible play-along audio game!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Shadowrun 3e megabundle! All the supplements for the 1998 edition of the legendary technofantasy game.

• Also, a cornucopia of indie games including World Wide Wrestling 2e, Spectaculars, Into the Odd Remastered, Outgunned and more.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

The Awards are a frustratingly-named but wonderfully pleasant , grassroots attempt at celebrating unique indie RPGs. Their tagline is “Make Weird Shit. Make Shit Weird.” Every year, a whole new roster of judges spend months picking what they think of innovative games worth celebrating. This year’s winners were announced over video stream here and it’s quite an interesting list.

There doesn’t seem to be a list of games that won apart from this twitter thread but it seems like a really interesting list. Definitely worth checking out, submitting your game next year, or even nominating yourself to become a judge. Seems like a good initiative worth engaging in.

The 20 winners:

1. The Wildsea: An original system and setting where you play the crew of a ship sailing on an endless sea made of the dense canopy of trees.

2. This Machine Has Meat In It: A rules light, tongue-in-cheek cosmic horror RPG about a nightmarish workplace that deserves to die.

3. i remember you: A game of stacking rocks, sharing memories, and figuring out who you are.

4. Kosmosaurs: You play a space dinosaur saving the galaxy, based on Lasers and Feelings as well as other games.

5. Fedora Noir: A game about a detective and their hat. One of you plays the hat.

6. FIST: A game of paranormal mercenaries doing jobs, half PbtA, half OSR.

7. Meanwhile in the subway: A giant whimsical subway map with both character creation, surreal setting and original rules.

8. Flabbergasted: Light comedy, genteel 1920s era adventures for those who like Wodehouse and social clubs.

9. The Cross Stitch: A Mork Borg adventure about a being from outside reality and other weirdness.

10. Beam Saber: Forged in the Dark game of pilots and their mechs, as seen on Friends at the Table.

11. MIRU: A solo-first hexcrawl about killing god in a solarpunk future.

12. Outliers: A solo journaling game about a research assistant in an eldritch lab.

13. A Collection of Improving Exercises: A game? I think? From the designer of Ten Thousand Year Vampire.

14. Downtime in Zyan: A supplement for downtime activities in the OSR space, system agnostic but flavoured with bits of an original dreamlike setting.

15. One Breath Left: A scifi horror, solo journaling game where you investigate a destroyed space ship.

16. Moonlight on Roseville Beach: Pulp horror, queer romance, all woven together with a Psi-run inspired system.

17. The Electrum Archive: A quirky, science fantasy setting for OSR-adjacent games.

18. Bibliocalypse: Rogue linguists explore the Forbidden library in this improvised dungeon crawl that uses words to do everything.

19. Saltfish & Almanacs: Merchant sell goods and explore new places in this short, card-based RPG-in-a-box.

20. CBR+PNK Augmented: The box version of the one shot, cyberpunk heist game based on Blades in the Dark.

Yours celebratively,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Yes Indie’d, I talk to game master, game designer, and game studies academic Evan Torner about the academic study of games, game design as media analysis, and other interesting subjects.

• Just going to mention an entire podcast: The World of RPGs. It’s by someone in Germany who spends an episode talking to people from different places around the world (mostly Europe) about their local RPG scenes. They have a two part episode on Poland, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

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Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up. This is the last week before I do the roundup for October and November next week.

III. Links of the Week

• On the Indie Game Reading Club, a fun post about GM personas. Do you look like a stern judge but are actually a friendly collaborator?

• On Rolling Boxcars, a review of the Mothership anthology, Hull Breach

• Magpie Games have a nice post about their pirate game, Rapscallion, which I believe is out only in free quickstart form.

• On Gnomestew, a nice post about why ‘short campaigns’ (i.e. games meant to last less than six months) are a fun way to play.

• Alex Rinehart has a post about the XCOM videogames and how they inspired his game, Cyberrats. It’s tricky to translate video games into tabletop games and Alex shows how you can make a dozen different games inspired by the same mechanics from

• Burn After Running blog has a gushing review of Justin Alexander’s upcoming book about being a game master. It has a good preview of the contents of the book including the fact that it starts out with a 150 pages about running dungeons.

• Also, in other award news, Dicebreaker announce their nominees for their 2023 Tabletop Awards

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• A wondrous worldmaking game with tension, traitors, and a living chimera you call home — The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri by momatoes. All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders.

• RPGXray is a podcast that looks inside what makes RPGs tick. Join us for a regular discussion of the hidden systems that effect the theory and practice of roleplaying games.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• There’s a bundle of Mongoose’s fantasy game, Ultimate d20

• Also, two Torg bundles. The essentials bundle with the core rules and a new bundle with two new settings.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Another quick recommendation this week: I’ve been watching the animated TV show, Scavengers Reign this week. It’s a far future scifi drama about a group of people marooned on an alien planet who are trying to survive. A major emphasis on alien there. Every aspect of the planet is full of wonder, feels heavily influenced by the art of Moebius but also just the feeling of playing Pokemon Red for the first time and having a whole ecology of strange creatures unfold before your eyes.

The world is weird and creative and is a tremendous canvas for a gripping story of surviving inhospitable conditions. Highly recommended though just a note, it’s very much aimed at adults and has some real tragic and occasionally scary moments weaved in.

Yours xenologically,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• A fun talk about worldbuilding for RPGs, both collaborative worldbuilding done at the table and the kind that you prep before and after.

• Chaoclypse collects 5 resources for adventure creation that they use when they do solo and other kinds of gaming.

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• If you wanted a high level overview of what’s happening with nordic larp in general and knutepunkt festival in particular, this talk by Jaakko Stenros might be helpful.

• On Polygon, “I met my husband in a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP group and I’m not alone”.

• On Cannibal Halfling, Aaron Marks reviews one of the first ever academic studies about RPGs, Gary Allen Fine’s 1983 book Shared Fantasy,

• The term “invisible rulebook” is a useful phrase when talking about games that are “rules light”. In this article, S John Ross unpacks that term a bit.

• On Rock Paper Shotgun, a look at the computer RPG, Roadwarden, and how its design is based on the tabletop RPG campaigns of the designer, including classic player behavior around money and magic.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Daemognosis is a free scenario for Heirs of the Leviathan, full of intrigue, jealousy, and a mysterious occult dealings. Check it out!

• RPGXray is a podcast that looks inside what makes RPGs tick. Join us for a regular discussion of the hidden systems that effect the theory and practice of roleplaying games.

• A wondrous worldmaking game with tension, traitors, and a living chimera you call home — The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri by momatoes. All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders.

• DAGGERS & HEART in its final days on Kickstarter! This hack of Lasers & Feelings uses the best die, a d12, costs only $1, and you get instant access when you pledge!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• City of Mist, the game of mythic, comic book characters doing noir things, has two bundles - a core one and one of the supplements.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Been incredibly sick all week. Have gotten zero work done but have been recuperating alongside Elden Ring. The game was on sale and I had heard that unlike other FromSoft games, you can run away from monsters. That’s all I want really, the option to not learn how to parry and instead run away. And it’s been tremendously accessible and rewarding. I’ve never felt the kind of excitement and joy and wonder for exploring what’s around the corner in a game before. There’s some drop-dead gorgeous vistas to experience. And also some really freaky beasts and fetid swamps. But also gorgeous vistas. There’s a lot of creativity and artistry on display here and if you’ve held out because you’ve heard the horror stories of Dark Souls, Sekiro or Bloodborne, I think you might want to give this one a try.

Honestly, it’s making want to play some fantasy tabletop games after a long time.

(There’s a small cottage industry of help, advice, how-to guides, etc to help you with the game. You’ll probably need it because even as the game tries to accommodate many skill levels and playstyles, it’s not obvious how they’re doing it at the start. I’m playing a mage and while that makes adventuring a little harder (because you’re so squishy), it also allows me to stand far away and hit monsters and run away if they look too scary. )

Yours runefully,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• AA Voigt shares his deep excitement for Emily Zhu’s new WIP tactical wuxia game, Ten Thousand Days For The Sword.

• Party of One celebrates eight years with a great run of one shots as usual. I highly enjoyed this one called Upon A Pirate’s Sea with designer Kendo. It’s a testament to how good a show it is that this was the first time the designer played the game but with Jeff Stormer, it came across as creative, smooth and fun.

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• In the “big IP” corner of tabletop RPG news, Dicebreaker reports the legendary Diablo videogame is going to be adapted into an RPG.

• Egg Embry interviews the husband-wife duo Carlos Hernandez and CSE Cooney about their unique card-based game, Negocios Infernales.

• On reddit, an interesting post where user RollForThings summarizes a video about the “pitfalls” of the boardgame hobby and how they resonate with RPGs as well.

• Sidney Icarus talks about their WIP game, The Tapestry, which tries to let players choose the stakes for every action that needs to be resolved and discusses what resolutions actually are.

• Not about RPGs but a great historical dive into monsters and monstrosity, relevant to all you fantasy worldbuilders.

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All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Vergence, the game of dimensional conflict and family drama, is crowdfunding in November. Explore infinite worlds, make use of cosmic powers, deal with complex politics and ancient forces.

• WW2 game Deployment is now crowdfunding! Deployment includes fast-paced combat, a campaign that tackles important social themes, vehicles, and more! Back the project here and receive a limited edition print!

• DAGGERS & HEART is now LIVE on Kickstarter! This hack of Lasers & Feelings uses the best die, a d12, and costs only $1. Plus, get instant access when you pledge!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• High concept scifi game full of lost memories and a big mysterious ship, Nibiru.

• Funnels for Dungeon Crawl Classics, all bundled up like your level zero NPCs

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

I’ve been a playing a lot of games recently where the players’ characters and many NPCs are all part of the same organization. This could be a pastoral community, a military unit, a corporation, a crew, and so on. And I started to use a naming convention that is both easy, very flavourful, and a lot of fun.

Basically, everyone uses relevant, coherent nicknames.

Let me explain. These are all groups or communities of some kind and so everyone knows each other. So no one needs to use their full name. They use nicknames. Nicknames that they didn’t choose. Nicknames that were bestowed on them. Maybe they’ve been a part of this group since they were young. Maybe they joined recently but have a reason for keeping their real name private. Regardless, in this group, everyone’s got a nickname.

And these nicknames have a convention. My go-to naming convention is common nouns or verbs. Some might have “cool names” like Razor. Some might have funny names like Potato Chip but if its a joke, it’s a joke for the characters in the game too. But most have normal ordinary words for names. Words like Barrel or Biscuit. This, for me, is simpler to do than coming up with more, authentic, real-sounding names. (Just think of whatever earworm is in your head and you’ll get a bunch of great names - like uhm, Bucket and Mop, an iconic duo from the town of... what, it’s a good song)

But it’s not just simple, it’s also worldbuilding. All of these characters have their nicknames for a reason. There could be a character called Mumbles because they mumble a lot. But also, there could be a character called Mumbles because they talk really well. The first is one kind of a nickname and the second is another, funnier kind. Is this a good world-building and easy characterization? Yes. Does this make their names easier to remember? Also, yes!

If the names sound too simple to your ear, add an adjective. Need names for pirates? Well, that’s Greenplank and Oldmast. Why are they called that? Well you tell me…

Yours nomenclaturely,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On the latest Design Doc, Hannah and Evan talk about Questlandia 2, the game that was the initial reason they started the podcast and where their interests currently lie. Like so many of their episodes, this one is also an honest and vulnerable look at what game design feels like on a timeline of days, months, and years.

• A flipthrough of co-host of the Vintage RPG podcast, Stu Horvath’s new book of RPG history. It’s called Monsters, Aliens and Holes In The Ground and seems to be pretty interesting.

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

• On Mazirian’s Garden, a new type of magic for a naval society including a kind of necromancy that works on ships.

• Meguey Baker, co-designer of Apocalypse World, talks about mortality, why we might include it in games, and why we want to play with it.

• S John Ross, designer of Risus, has this term he keeps throwing around called “high trust trad”. As far as I know, he’s the only using it. This is a post that tries to understand what the term means and explores this alternate stream of trad adventure writing that isn’t as popular anymore.

• Josh Hittie publishes a design dive into his NSR-ish game about exploring an absurdly huge space, Deathgrind!!Megastructure.

• On the Mindstorm blog, a fun post about using seasonal cartoon favourite Over the Garden Wall as an inspiration for adventure design.

• Alice is Missing is one of those games that has gotten a lot of rave reviews. This one from Jack Edward’s newsletter is an interesting counterpoint with a lot of interesting exploration of what the game is doing and not doing.

• Graham Walmsley talks about what dice actually do (going beyond success and failure). Good post, and it has diagrams!

Misc

• Bundle of tabletop games to raise funds for humanitarian aid in Gaza. Notable games include Beam Saber, Godkiller, Monster Care Squad and more.

• November has a couple different community events happening:

  • There’s National Game Dev Month (inspired by NaNoWriMo) where you design a game over the month.

  • The unofficial Powered by the Apocalypse discord is organizing a “make a move” event over the course of the month.

• You know the classic “talk to your players” or “get a new group” advice? There’s a flowchart I’ve somehow missed that illustrates it (original link).

  

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Play out your own found footage horror experience with Don’t Play This Game. A legacy solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Back the Kickstarter’s final week here.

• Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.

• Planar Compass issue 3 is an Old-School Essentials zine that takes you to the plane of Law and Time. Featuring new classes, spells, monsters, dungeons, and more!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Arkham Gazette, a magazine of supplemental material for Call of Cthulhu, from Sentinel Hill Press

• Apocalypse roleplaying via Palladium with a huge bundle of sourcebooks

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

The problem with asking if games are art is that the answer can be as simple and as complicated as you have time for. In some sense, anyone trying to be stingy about what qualifies as art is fighting a battle that was decided a long time ago. Today, anything can be art if you're willing to give it your attention and let it move you.

The more interesting question when it comes to tabletop games is, which art are you talking about?

The most common is the art in the books - beautiful illustration and beautiful writing that makes an RPG book an “art book”. I was recently posting on the site formerly known as twitter about how momatoes’ ARC was a work of art. As evidence, I posted screenshots of the PDF. The pages were filled with art, words, and layout that was dark but not scary, a kind of modern fairytale aesthetic that hints at hidden depths. Like a sculpture where marble looks like cloth, it's a feat of technical skill that can both humble and inspire you.

Then, there's the art of playing RPGs. This is a tricky one because there’s lots of things this isn’t: this isn’t acting, this isn’t the same as performing in an actual play. It’s adjacent to performance but not exactly the same and its importance varies across playstyles. But if comedy is an art, then people are busting their gut laughing in their games. If drama is an art, well, often it’s much more moving when someone you know adds the slightest quiver to their voice than when someone in a movie bursts into tears in the rain as a violin plays in the background. Sometimes its just knowing who or when to pass the ball to, and doing it deftly.

And then, there’s the art of design. Which I think Robin Laws referred to as “the hidden art”, though that is probably a little controversial. It’s not exactly writing, it’s more about what or how to write. It’s not exactly the sum total of everything that goes into a book. In some games, the bulk of the design is just the premise. The rest is left to the players. In some games, it’s carefully choreographed ritual. Eithery way, like all art, most of it will leave you cold but some of it can grab you and change you.

Yours artfully (and craftfully),

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

Nothing this week!

• Please consider joining 60+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• A good interview with Tim Denee, designer of the new Battle Royale-inspired game, Deathmatch Island.

• Rise Up Comus talks about why he used tarot for his OSR megadungeon crawler, His Majesty The Worm.

• On Polygon, a nice feature on the D&D AP, Transplanar, “an all-transgender, people of color-led dark fantasy TTRPG show set in an original noncolonial, antiorientalist multiverse”.

• Another round-up of great RPG mechanics, including how The One Ring does journeys, how Exalted does Loresheets, how Fate of Cthulhu does shifting timelines, and more.

• It Came From The Bookshelf talks about another interesting transhuman Eclipse Phase supplement, Sunward.

• Wyrd Science, the tabletop magazine, has made its first four issues free as they get ready to crowdfund their fifth issue.

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All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Roleplaying doesn’t have to finish at the table. Don’t Play This Game combines journaling, crafting and LARP. Back now on Kickstarter for a terrifying solo experience.

• Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.

• The Central Market is full of shops to add to your next 5e shopping session. With 30 shops from fishmongers to tattoo parlours with item tables, plot hooks and backgrounds.

• Do you remember & love the D&D Endless Quest books? Check out Rediscovered Realms' brand new exclusive interview with Rose Estes, the creator and original author (while it's still free!)

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Two bundles for Kult: Divinity Lost, there’s the core collection and a bundle of supplements.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Befote I get to talking about roleplaying games but before that, if you can contribute to humanitarian aid in Gaza through orgs like PCRF or MAP, please do.

I'm running two sessions of This Ship Is No Mother during the Shared Hearth online event. It's a kind of mini online gaming convention run by the Open Hearth community. There'll be lots of other games (including the excellent Hearts of Wulin and Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast) and some talks. It's well-managed and fun and free and you can learn all about the event here.

If you'd like to play a game with me and see the power of This Ship Is No Mother’s excellent pacing, signups open on October 24th. I'm always happy to show the game off!

Yours conventionally,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• New episode of Yes Indie’d this week: I talk to Josh Fox, co-founder of Black Armada Games who have published bangers like Lovecraftesque, Bite Marks and Last Fleet. We try to tell the story of the publishing company over the decade it has existed. A great study for those wondering what running a RPG business is like.

• Please consider joining 60 other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• On Deeper in the Game, Chris Chinn talks about The Magus, a solo game about a mage hungry for forbidden power, and Procedures To Discover The Path Ahead, a supplement for adding that cool detail to your location prep.

• Sandy Pug U collects some resources for starting and running a co-op. It’s not only an RPG thing but I think about this literally every week (way more than I think about the roman empire) so thought it was worth sharing.

• On Enworld, a review of the latest edition of scifi comedy game, Paranoia.

• On Fail Forward, a fun post about the possibilities of running a living world with multiple groups operating in the same location. Inspired by Death Stranding.

• Dicebreaker features a cool cardgame that apparently does very satisfying duels, uses 16 cards, and takes 5 minutes to play. I’d love to know if you can just use something like this for duels when playing trad games. I mean, 5 minute duels? Yes, please!

• RPG freelancing and publishing advice from people taking notes at conventions:

  • a recap of a bunch of cool panels from Big Bad Con 2023 which has a lot about marketing, pitching, social media, etc.

  • notes from panel from Gen Con 2023 that fits in as a nice companion to the above

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All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Pokemon Go meets The Blair Witch Project. Don’t Play This Game, a legacy solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Grab your journal and prepare to be scared. Back now on Kickstarter.

• Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.

• The Mending Circle is a gentle, gm-less RPG about healing, where three witches try to heal the world, one person at a time. The Kickstarter for a print edition and wooden tokens is now live!

• Strike Force Omega is a fast-paced tactical game of science-fantasy supersoldiers who got out and are now being dragged back in, and I need some folks to help me fund a physical print run.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Best Left Buried, the old-school horror fantasy game, has a bundle with a lot of great adventures and setting material.

• Also, an Arcane Library bundle with 9 5e adventures and combat cards.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

I’ve been playing the wonderful telenovela game, Pasion de la Pasiones, recently. (I talked a little about one playbook, El Jefe, in an earlier issue - comparing it to Apocalypse World’s Hardholder.)

For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game, designed by Brandon Leon-Gambetta and published by Magpie Games. It’s a game where you play out the latest season of a long-running telenovela - one that’s romantic, melodramatic, maybe even, dare I say it, trashy? In my game, almost everyone has revealed that their parents aren’t their real parents. It’s that kind of game.

But even as it tells these stories that don’t take themselves too seriously, its design is sharp, slick, erm, straight fire? (Is that a thing? Do people still say “straight fire”? Sorry, English is my first language.)

Anyway, here’s 5 reasons why Pasion de la Pasiones is Real Good:

1. The design gets everyone on the same page fast. When I talked to Chris Chinn on the podcast, he complained that games still required stuff like his Same Page Tool, 15 years after it was invented. Well, this game doesn’t really need stuff like that. You look at your playbooks, you look at your moves, and everything is communicating a vibe.

   1. Even if you haven’t seen a single Spanish telenovela, I think you’ll still pick this up easy. I haven’t seen a single Spanish telenovela but as a kid, I had one grandmother watching the American soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, while the other grandmother was watching Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii which, if you don’t know it, is a classic of the India’s saas-bahu genre (meaning mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, and yes, it is exactly as bad as you think…)

   2. Still do your safety tools though because the characters gets toxic faaaast. Best to make sure, it stays in everyone’s comfort zone, you know, toxic-fun rather than toxic-toxic.

2. Rolling with questions! This is probably Pasion’s most influential innovation. Okay, so in this game, you don’t have stats in the game. Instead, when you roll the dice, you add +1-3 depending on specific questions attached to your playbook and the move you’re making. For example: In the move, Accuse Someone of Lying, the questions are “Do you have an audience?” and “Do you have evidence?”. If you answer yes, you get a +1.

   1. This is super interesting because it makes you pause out and flesh out the scene a little bit. Is someone watching you make this accusation? Who? How many?

   2. It makes the fiction (fictional positioning, if you want to be technical) matter in a very simple way. If your character has evidence, they’re more likely to do this successfully. Neat!

   3. It does all this super fast while giving you something more interesting to ask than, “What’s your Charisma modifier again?”

3. Let’s stick with the Accuse Someone of Lying move because it’s got a piece of design that embraces the game’s genre while harnessing TTRPGs’ specific strengths. So if you score a hit with the move, one of the options you can choose to happen is “You are right despite what the audience has already seen.”

   1. Let me unpack that a little. When you accuse someone of lying, you can be correct even if it contradicts something we’ve previously played through. An example: Your character, Eladio, stole money out of the safe. Another character, Anjelica, saw it happen and tells the police. You can Accuse Her Of Lying and if you hit, you can declare that actually you didn’t steal money from the safe. So then what actually happened? Well, maybe someone dressed up like you to frame you, maybe it was your secret evil twin brother, maybe it was your own money in the safe so technically you weren’t stealing it, maybe-. Is this confusing? Yes. Is it extremely fun to do? YES.

   2. This basically gives you a straightforward tool to bring in incredible (in the literal sense) twists and bombshell reveals.

   3. At the same time, like Flashbacks with Blades in the Dark, it’s a way of skipping strictly linear storytelling. The narrative is in our hands as players and we can jump back and forth as we please. (This game also has a more straightforward flashback move so you don’t have to accuse people of lying if you want to just do a bombshell reveal.)

4. Every session starts with each character answering a prompt about something that happened in an earlier episode. It’s mimicing the “Last Time On” part of TV shows and the idea is that when you start playing, it’s Episode 70, not Episode 1. So there’s a bunch of stuff that’s happened that we haven’t pinned down yet. Every session, we learn some new thing from one of those previous episodes and if you want, it can be something that absolutely wrecks everyone’s plans. It keeps every episode chaotic and dramatic in a way that is almost impossible in other games.

5. Your characters don’t really die. It’s not that kind of story. But if you’re ever fictionally at a place where you should die, you can come back with a “distinctive, sexy scar” or an eyepatch or as “a twisted, evil version of yourself”. Come on!

The big reason to not play Pasion is if your table isn’t into romance. But even then, it’s a great system to understand from a design point of view. It’ll give you ideas aplenty.

Thanks for reading.

Yours yoursfully,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• AA Voigt goes down a deep rabbithole talking about weirdness, body horror, and worldbuilding in this video essay about Heart, Annihilation and Friends at the Table’s Sangfielle season.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• Plus One Exp launched a subscription-based RPG Zine Club which delivers new zines every month with options to choose from storygames, OSR adventures, or both.

• There’s An RPG For That recommends games where you run a store and (the easier prompt, I imagine!) games inspired by gundam.

• Another roundup of great RPG mechanics on the Age of Ravens blog. This time, Lowell covers characters defining the world, Moment of Truth from Masks, over the top powers and more.

Misc

• The Tabletop Awards from Dicebreaker are open for submissions again.

• IGDN’s Diversity Scholarship opens up today as well. It’s primarily a mentorship program with a monetary component, I believe, and you can apply here.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

• Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.

• Vynestra: a 5e high fantasy world and city setting with 1,000 pages of lore inspired by ancient civilizations such as Rome. Live on Kickstarter now!

  • (Forgot to insert the link last week, so bolding it this week to be fair!)

• Role to Cast is an award-winning Actual Play podcast, bringing you a variety of TTRPGs performed by professional actors, with original stories, and interviews with TTRPG designers. Subscribe now!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Scarred Lands 5e, a post-apocalyptic setting from Onyx Path

• Bundle of 13 horror novels and short story anthologies with some great writers (Tim Powers, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lauren Beukes, etc)

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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Welcome to the bimonthly round-up of interesting games released on itch.io. I find these games through the form linked below (where readers can submit their own games) or I just stumble across on twitter or while browsing itch (which I do, purely for this issue). Like every edition of these, this one is also jam-packed with the creativity, joy, and weirdness of the itch design scene.

My usual disclaimer that I haven’t read or played these games. Usually, I have only seen their store page. But they look cool and sound interesting and they might be something you want to buy. Or you might give the creator a follow on itch. Go wild!

1. Hark! Says the Frog Magus: An ENNie-nominated, system-agnostic dungeon delve born out of love & fascination with all things amphibian, gets a new version which looks wonderful. (Diwata ng Manila, Dinoberry Press)

2. Bracknell Horror, Roseville Beach Zine 3: I recently checked out Moonlight on Roseville Beach and it’s a really interesting Psi-Run hack for running very pulpy, very queer mysteries with a cosmic horror angle. I think if you like Brindlewood Bay, you’ll also really like this game. (R Rook Sutdios)

3. This Mortal Coil: This is setting/hack for Liminal Horror with a weird sci-fi bent. You’re “a space traveler-turned-necromancer on a quest to achieve eternal life by constructing a magical device known and… mastering the forces of the Negaverse”. Seems like a really lush production. (David Garrett)

4. Dolly, We bought A Dream House: Barbie-inspired game of building a dream house. Think a map-drawing game but way more pink! This can be played be solo or with friends. (Plotbunny Games, also available in German)

5. Bxllet Clip, The Pinxp Issue: Celebrating the third anniversary of the very punchy, very metal gunslinger game BXLLET, a big zine with expanded content for the game, including a whole new hack by Adira Slattery about girls with demon guns. Most indie games don’t ever get long-term support so this is really cool to see. (Wheels within Wheels Publishing)

6. Eleventh Beast: A solo monster-hunting trifold game with a very slick design and heaps of grungy Victorian vibes. Exeunt Press, publisher of the Ennie-nominated Exclusion Zone Botanist, do very good work.

7. Esper Kids: A free one page Lasers & Feelings hack of middle schoolers with psychic powers, inspired by Mob Psycho. Also, someone’s first game, yay! (Robyn, Bitbirdy)

8. Hiss, A Village Doomed: A creepy town, a pressure cooked scenario, dungeons, NPCs. This is a horror-themed, 30 page module with some great design, meant for an OSR style game. (Idle Cartulary).

9. Coffee & Chaos: This is a coffee shop game where you bring your characters from your main game (D&D?) to play a one session of low stakes alternate universe shenanigans. (CobblePath Games)

10. Adventures in Purva City: This is an alternate setting for teenage superhero game Masks. It’s a far-future Mumbai/Bombay and comes out of a huge West Marches style Masks game that I never got to play but have heard lots about. Very cool! (Illicit Peanuts)

Alright, have fun, folks!

Yours a perfect ten,

Thomas

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Oh wait, there’s more I had to say. This week, after much struggle, I released an experiment on the Yes Indie’d Podcast feed. It’s an episode where Rae Nedjadi teaches you how to play his Hellboy-esque PbtA game, Apocalypse Keys.

Listen Now

A long time ago, I talked about how teaching people how to play games was a bit of missing step in the journey from “buying game” to “playing game”. And while Actual Play is great for this, they often have to cut off the essential learning stuff for entertaintment reasons. It’s my attempt at helping all the GMs out there who have to teach their players the rules on top of everything else they do.

I’m planning to doing at least four of these before assessing whether people find it valuable or not. Does this help? Let me know!

II. Media of the Week

Storybrewers give a short talk about (storygame) design called “Who Says What When”.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• On Cannibal Halfling Games, Aaron Marks compares Mothership and Death in Space from Free League.

• On Age of Ravens, Lowell Francis discusses his new PbtA game, mashing up Changeling the Lost and Hearts of Wulin.

• A fun post about why seminal anime Madoka Magica would be a great OSR game.

• Black Armada Games discusses all the new changes in the upcoming second edition of Lovecraftesque (which I’m writing a scenario for!).

• On Rolling Boxcars, a look at the old Ringworld RPG.

• Lancer, the tactical mecha game with all that great art, is getting a reprint from Dark Horse Comics.

• Geeknative write about a Wordpress plugin that can bring rollable tables directly into your website.

• Evil Genius, a game publishing company, is suing Netflix over the cancellation of their Rebel Moon RPG.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.

• Vynestra: a 5e high fantasy world and city setting with 1,000 pages of lore inspired by ancient civilizations such as Rome. Live on Kickstarter now!

• Step into a bizarre, post-apocalyptic America and explore four regional settings inspired by American Gothic fiction and with contributions from local artists and authors. Follow the prelaunch page for Backwards: Regional American Gothic Horror on Kickstarter!

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• A bundle of solo journaling games like Apothecaria from Blackwell Games, Jack Harrison’s The Slow Knife, and Cezar Capacle’s Not a Demon!

• Flying Circus, the cult classic airplane industrial fantasy game, is all bundled up with supplements.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

This week got away from me for a number of reasons so enjoy the links and I'll catch you with more stuff next week. Take care!

Cheers,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• Dice Exploder features Jason Morningstar talking about a very abstract (but cool!) feature of RPGs: transparency and secrets. This really speaks to me because I’m a big fan of total transparency, which doesn’t mean that surprises don’t happen. It’s that they happen spontaneously - as choices made in the moment, rather than planned before hand. And they happen to everyone at the same time, more or less!

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

• A nice post on trying to roleplay technical or “hard scifi”.

• A nice interview with solo RPG designer and reviewer, Philippa Mort.

• A very zany but rocksolid post about why “depiglio is the perfect blueprint npc”

• Another post in the great RPG mechanics series. This one is getting a bit abstract with mechanics like Long Term Consequences, Slices, Lifepaths, Flashbacks and more.

Reviews

• On It Came From The Bookshelf, a great review wrestling with the big ideas in Eclipse Phase’s Transhuman supplement.

• Quick reviews of Beyond the Mountains of Madness (a Call of Cthulhu campaign), Cults of Glorantha, and Winds of Magic for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

• On The Rathole, a review of Pirate Borg from Free League.

Misc

• Editors are great! Here’s a nice page from tennpenjenn with a breakdown of all the different kind of editing that a RPG could benefit from.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• The Ascended Court is a six session Monster of the Week campaign where hunters can make deals with demons, attend a Spiritualist ball, collect fun treasure, and uncover a conspiracy.

• HellWatch 5e: Infernal Oath is coming to Kickstarter this October. A brand new campaign and setting with a 320+ page hardcover book, hero and monster miniatures, striking battlemaps, and more! Sign up for the launch on the following link.

• Step into a bizarre, post-apocalyptic America and explore four regional settings inspired by American Gothic fiction and with contributions from local artists and authors. Follow the prelaunch page for Backwards: Regional American Gothic Horror on Kickstarter!

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• The Yellow King, a GUMSHOE game from Robin Laws, collected with a bunch of extra goodies, including the original story annotated by Kenneth Hite.

• A bundle of the Mistborn adventure game based on the Brandon Sanderson novels

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

It feels like there’s been a recent spate of discussion in RPG circles about the role of incentives (usually just referring to experience points, or XP). While a lot of that discussion has been mean-spirited (with a lot of conflating preference for “the only correct way to do things”), I would like to contribute by try to describe the role of XP is in modern tabletop RPG design, using Blades in the Dark as an example. If you’re a designer or a player, hopefully this helps you think about the role of a mechanic like this.

1. XP paces out advancement

This is probably the number one reason that we have XP in games. Historically, in this hobby, games have offered players to way to advance their characters, letting them grow in a way that makes them more powerful or interesting. For example, in Blades in the Dark, by requiring 6-8 XP to upgrade your character, the game paces out the process of getting new abilities to around every 2-3 sessions or so. By tweaking the amount required, it could’ve made this process shorter or longer.

The primary critique of this use of XP comes from people who question whether advancement is necessary at all. These usually come from folks who are who are either perfectly happy with their character “improving” in non-mechanical ways (like buying a house in-game) or people who prefer changes rather than improvements (getting a cool scar rather than getting better at punching).

2. XP as recap procedure

As Judd Karlman mentions on his blog, having an end of session xp procedure is a way to give everyone an opportunity to “think back on when they were kicking ass or being cunning – remember it and celebrate it while ticking off a box”. The idea is that the end of session procedure becomes a kind of ritual to share your favourite highlights from the session, aiming to deliver a good note for the game to end on.

3. XP as incentive

Some games use XP to encourage players to do things that they might not ordinarily do. This is quite common in the kind of games that I play. For example, in Blades in the Dark, you get XP when your character is in desperate situations. The game is trying to encourage players to take risks as opposed to playing it safe (because they might be coming from games where taking risks was less fun).

These kinds of incentives are usually criticized for two main reasons. One, it is unnecessary, i.e., it encourages behavior that needs no encouragement. Two, it has a negative effect on freedom of roleplay by pointing at a “right way to play”.

Stepping back for a second, I think these are both good criticisms that can be more or less valid, depending on the specific game or style of play. In my experience, in general, they’re least valid when they are theoretical, armchair criticism and tend to be most valid when they come from direct play experience.

With Blades in the Dark specifically, I think XP for taking big risks does lead to players shifting gears and playing differently. Not by itself though! It works because it fits within a whole system meant for that kind of story. The XP is just a tiny little signal.

As for narrowing the realm of roleplay, I think this is broadly true of hyper-specific storygames. They are a kind of game that actively tries to provide constraints - but in the same way a writing prompt is a constraint. It’s hard to be creative without them! Some of these games - not all - tend to involve some amount of discovering who your character is, rather than coming in with a specific idea.

That said, it can be frustrating in Blades in the Dark to pick a playbook with a particular character concept in mind and find that you’re out-of-sync with the game’s XP triggers. This kind of misalignment can happen, for sure, and it is a limitation of Blade’s specific design. The solutions tend to be some form of hacking or just switching playbooks but even with that frustration, I would hesitate to say it’s a problem with XP as a mechanic though.

Though XP doesn’t actually need much defending - like so much of game design convention, the main reason games will continue to include it is because games tend to include it. Players have come to expect it! I’m excited for people to look at these functions of XP and innovate, keeping what excites them and finding ways of changing the rest.

Yours experientially,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Roleplay Rescue, Justin Alexander talks about his upcoming book, So You Want To Be A Gamemaster. Alexander is a very popular voice but his advice is often very trad because he assumes (probably rightly) that his audience is playing D&D. Not sure if the book will be useful to me but I’ll try and review it when it comes out.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• On Mazirian’s Garden, a review of Hull Breach, the Mothership anthology.

• Big fan of POCGamer’s underwater series. The latest posts are about Underwater (2020), a horror movie set in a research station in the Mariana trench, and a podcast episode about Cyberpunk RED’s Deepdown setting.

• I initially thought Wilderfeast was a 5e thing but it’s not. It’s an original game - half boss battler, half monster eating. From the Polygon review and this interview with the designers, it does seem like a nice, colourful take that cartes equally about monster hunting and monster cooking.

• The Golden Cobra challenge is happening again. It’s an annual, themed, very beginner-friendly larp-writing contest.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Step into a bizarre, post-apocalyptic America and explore four regional settings inspired by American Gothic fiction and with contributions from local artists and authors. Follow the prelaunch page for Backwards: Regional American Gothic Horror on Kickstarter!

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

• From the minds of creators from around the scene and the creative team at Far Horizons Coop, Afterwords: The Far Horizons Guide to Death is an anthology of short games and essays on the subject of death. Crowdfunding NOW until the end of September.

• Ecryme is now live on Kickstarter! Navigate intrigue, discover secrets, and fight for a better world. Jump into this narrative-focused, dystopian steampunk RPG today!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• New bundle for Knights of the Dinner Table, the long-running comic about roleplaying games.

• Based on Traveller’s Cepheus Engine, a bundle of space horror game, Hostile.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

People seemed to like last week’s post so I thought I’d expand the charts to include Mithril-winning products. Mithril is the second highest medal you can win behind Adamantine. A product at the Mithril level has sold more than 2000 copies (but less than 5000 because otherwise it would be Adamantine). There are 451 products with Mithril status according to DTRPG. That is a shockingly small number in the grand scheme of things.

Here’s the same chart as last time. Each product is classified into a category and this chart shows which categories have the most products with Mithril and Adamantine status. If you’re wondering why there are so many more Trad products than the others, I think the answer is basically Storyteller / Onyx Path Publishing. They are easily the biggest label in the Trad category with so many different games as well as a whole bunch of splatbooks. Also, a lot of D&D products aren’t on DTRPG and are on DM’s Guild so it makes the category seem smaller than it is.

Again, the OSR and the storygame folks have similar numbers. The Misc category is very big now because it includes products which are system-agnostic advice and products which are just random tables (d100 treasures, etc).

And since pricing is the only other hard data point I have, here are three charts on pricing. The first one is just the average price of every item in the category and the other two try to identify which are the most common price points for four different categories.

Seems like for most categories, the most common price point (for the PDF, I believe) is 20$. A lot of Trad games seem to be at 25$ and the OSR sells a lot at 10$. IP is again the biggest just because it has very few products in it (around 5).

I have some experience with data journalism. I did all of this stuff in excel but if I had more time, I would’ve done it programmatically using R and made something shiny and interactive. Anyway, here’s the data if you want to do something with it.

I think to get more out of this, there would have to be more manual data addition. I would love to know how big these products are, whether they’re indie or corporate, etc but I’d have to manually classify or enter new data for each item and that is way too much effort. So from next week, we’ll get back to more wordsy, less numbersy content.

Yours datafully again,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• The Dice Exploder podcast is back with their Season 2. It’s as good as ever and their latest episode features game designer Tan Shao Han talking about Stress in Brinkwood, where you play robin hood-style vigilantes killing vampire dukes.

  • I’m going to be on there in a future episode of this podcast talking about Band of Blades so stay tuned for that.

• Geek Gamers has a nice look at the contents of Hull Breach, an anthology setting for Mothership.

• This GDC talk is a nice intro to jubensha, the larp/murder mystery hobby that is a billion dollar industry in China.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

• On Gnomestew, Tomas Gimenez Rioja reviews Forgery by Banana Chan, which smashes together a horror RPG, choose your own adventure, and colouring book.

• On Cozy Cauldron, a review of the short point-crawl festival/forest adventure, Tannic by Amanda P.

• On Seed of Worlds, a review of City of Crescent, an Istanbul-inspired setting from Historica Arcanum.

• On Bloody Disgusting, a review of you’re in space and everything is fucked by nevyn holmes, which doesn’t really need a tagline.

• On the Age of Ravens blog, another excellent round-up of cool mechanics. This week, we’ve got Approaches from Fate, Icons from 13th Age, Secondary Characters from Star Trek Adventures, Death moves from Legacy 2e, and Sleeves from Eclipse Phase.

• This is a nice non-antagonistic post about the difficulties of picking up the OSR playstyle from Pondering Song Games.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

• From the minds of creators from around the scene and the creative team at Far Horizons Coop, Afterwords: The Far Horizons Guide to Death is an anthology of short games and essays on the subject of death. Crowdfunding NOW until the end of September.

• Ecryme is now live on Kickstarter! Navigate intrigue, discover secrets, and fight for a better world. Jump into this narrative-focused, dystopian steampunk RPG today!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Delta Green megabundle that includes campaigns like Impossible Landscapes.

• Also, a second bundle full of Delta Green props and assets for play.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

If you’re not aware, DriveThru allocates medals to products based on the number of sales. Their highest medal, Adamantine, is given to products that have sold more than 5000 copies. Only 180 products have crossed this threshold.

I thought it might be cool to classify these products into categories and see what that tells us. Please note that sometimes I’ve put a product in two categories, like Against the Cult of the Reptile God is classified as both “D&D” and “Adventure”.

Here’s the result:

Some things worth pointing out:

• The most popular categories are “Trad” and “D&D”. The “D&D” category is first-party products like handbooks, older adventures and settings (Dark Sun) as well as third-party products. “Trad” is a fuzzy category (like all the categories) but it consists of all games that essentially keep the same player-GM relationship as D&D. It includes all the World of Darkness games, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and so on.

• Maps are the third-highest category which is interesting but it’s almost all by one place, Seafoot Games. Kids are also a surprisingly large category but again, this is almost all Hero Kids stuff - more than 20 of their products have sold more than 5000 copies.

• Storygames and OSR are almost equally popular.

  • You can probably guess most of the games in the Storygames category: Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Fate (Core, Accelerated, Systems Toolkit), Fiasco, Microscope, Dread, Ironsworn, Ironsworn: Delve, Masks, Monster of the Week, The Sprawl, Wicked Ones.

  • Same with OSR category: there’s Beyond The Wall, DCC, Five Torches Deep, Knave, Maze Rats, Mothership, Dead Planet, Stars without Number, Worlds without Number, Black Hack 2e, Gardens of Ynn.

And just because I can, here’s the average price for products in each category:

• The IP section only consists of the Alien RPG and the Witcher RPG and hence the average is very high.

Disclaimers: The categories are unscientific. But hey, what are you going to do? Here’s the raw data.

I think one of the struggles with talking about a scene like “indie RPGs” is that there’s lack of any actual numbers. And in that situation, it’s easy to assume that the loudest voices on social media are the most correct. So when I find some numbers, I like to share them. Let me know if you’d like to see this expanded to the Mithral tier which has about 450 products there. And also if there are specific questions you have with this list that I can try to answer.

Yours datafully,

Thomas

This newsletter celebrates reaching another milestone this week. We saw our 5000th subscriber! I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has read, shared, and support this newsletter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I’ve taken this as an incentive to add two things to the site:

• a Best Of page which lists some of my favourite issues

• and a How To Get Featured section in the About page because people keep reaching to me about it.

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II. Media of the Week

• On the Yes Indie’d Podcast, I interviewed Layla Adelman, critic and co-designer (alongside Stras Acimovic) of Critical Role’s Illuminated Worlds system. We talk about how Layla reviews games as products and how that has changed after reading thousands of games.

• On the RTFM podcast, Max and Aaron continue their quest to read the f**king manual and this time the manual is Pasion de la Pasiones. I’m a big fan of this game and this episode does a goob job of explaining why the game is great - with help from Quinns from Shut Up & Sit Down and People Make Games.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

Support on Patreon

• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

• CBR reports on Apocalypse World co-designer, Meguey Baker campaign to raise funds for medical expenses.

• On Polygon, how the new scifi computer RPG Starfield owes a debt to Traveller.

• On the Age of Ravens blog, Lowell Francis starts a new series about great mechanics. This one covers Stress dice in Alien, Gear in Blades, and Scale in Mouseguard.

• On tumblr, windienine teaches Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine in one blogpost.

• POCGamer continues their amazing series about being underwater and how to think about underwater games.

• How Beyond Cataclysm had to buy all the d13 dice in Europe for their game.

• On the Exeunt Omnes newsletter, a list of combat mechanics to steal from boardgames and some advance notice on their MORKTOBER initiative.

Reviews

• Aaron Marks reviews Fantasy World, an Italian game that looks to replace the other game as the best D&D-like fantasy PbtA.

• The Alexandrian writes about Kenneth Hite’s famous series about conspiracies and more, Suppressed Tranmissions.v

Misc

• On the Elven Firefly blog, a fun heist for Blades in the Dark with a neat switcheroo

• Handiwork Games have released an SRD for their Trouble Engine from a|state. As the game was based on the Blades SRD, I think it’s really nice they took this step. The Trouble Engine is a thorough procedure for the GM to invent and implement dangers and escalations that make a location feel dynamic and real.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• HULL BREACH now available! Our massive anthology and setting for Mothership contains everything you need for the perfect sci-fi campaign. Dozens of new scenarios and toolkits in one beautiful hardcover.

• Into the Veils Kickstarter is near it’s 2nd Stretch Goal reward. All backers are entered to win a free printed copy of the adventure (2 winners). Join the Adventure today!

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Big bundle of The Nightmares Underneath with all the dungeons you can eat!

• Also, pulpy science fantasy game, Atomic Robo, considered one of the best Fate books.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

On tumblr, designer David J Prokopetz posted 10 points titled as the The Gremlin Game Designer's Creed. I really enjoyed and found it swirling around in my brain so as I did with Ken Hite and Robin Law’s discussions about Axes of Game Design. I’m going to go just go over the points and talk about them. Everything in quotes is written by Prokopetz and you can read the entire thing properly here.

So, my response to the Gremlin Game Designer’s Creed:

1. Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

This is a complex two-part statement. First, "Rules are toys", which is already a big claim. A gremlin game designer becomes someone who sees new games (new "systems") in the same way as they might see new recipes - opportunities for new experiences. This is as opposed to the camp that understand game rules as an extension of rules parents might give to a child - roadbumps in the journey to some spontaneous, organic fun.

(Further reading: Vincent Baker on RPG Essentialism and RPG Exceptionalism).

Secondly, there is the idea that good rules are completely enmeshed with other rules. Good design is when rules are interlocked with each other. The big thing that finds itself staring down the barrel of this statement is dangling subsystems. Grapple rules in D&D3.5 for example or initiative systems that employ procedure used nowhere else in the game.

But I'm not sure how this principle interacts with the idea of mini-games though. A mini-game is a kind of subsystem. But the difference between Firebrands' mini-games and D&D's Grapple is huge. I don't know how best to articulate it but the difference is that Firebrands' mini-games rhyme with each other in a way that Grapple does not.

2. The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

The way I've been articulating this is that good RPG design is about giving people cool things to say to each other. This lines up exactly with that. Great design also cuts out people saying boring things to each other. But that's a whole other level.

3. The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

Yup, saying cool things and not saying boring things applies to the GM as well. A good game knows and cares about the GM's fun.

4. The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

I think the proliferation of "ticking clock" mechanics is completely in line with the last point. From Girl by Moonlight's series track (where you try to fill your track before the darkness fills its track) to Apocalypse Keys, where this could apply to the doom clock or a character's ruin (when you reach max ruin, you become one of the baddies).

5. Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

This connects back to "rules are toys" but what also comes to mind is C Thi Nguyen's book, Games: Agency As Art, which is a philosophical text that I haven't fully read. The core argument is that a game designer's medium is agency in the way a photographer's medium is light. Rules are the tools to shape agency in the same way a camera is a tool to play with light. Playing with agency leads to narratives, playing with light leads to images.

The last statement here is again a very striking one. I recently shared a video on the newsletter that made a similar point. All of a game's mechanisms affect the experience, which is another way of saying all the game's mechanisms create narrative. It's not a very long video, worth a watch.

6. Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

Playtesting is one of the most complex parts of the game design process. It can be uplifting, frightening, vindicating, draining, delightful. My friend, Aaron Lim, is one of the great promoters of playtesting as first and foremost a kind of play. And while it can be fraught, one of the best things you can do for yourself as a designer is developing a positive relationship with the act of playtesting.

Aaron runs a playtest meetup called Playtest Zero (which I helped start and still attend). There are two sessions - one in SE Asia friendly time and one in a American / PST friendly time. It's open to anyone and happens over Discord. More info here.

7. Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

This is interesting. Randomizers (dice primarily) are one of the key pillars of RPG design. I'm not sure what exactly "made mandatory" means here because most modern design has rules about when to roll dice (and when to not).

I do think that sometimes a game positions the dice as an arbiter of what happens next. But giving the dice the power to ruin the fun isn't a good thing. The way I see it is that dice (or cards) are best used in a role where players can use them as collaborators. In some sense, this is what makes "mixed success" results important - they prompt you to add to the fiction but leave a wide space for what that addition could be.

8. Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access

I think arrogant is a strong word here but I understand it. I love the point about knowing when you're departing from a rule.

I was talking to someone recently that described game designers as being extremely "coy", writing rules but refusing to say why, as if finding out the intent of rules was a mystery to be discovered in play. I don’t want to be coy! Sure, there might be a place for that kind of emergent surprise. But like 99% of the time, its probably best to let people know why they're doing what they're doing.

9. If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

I'm a big fan of implied setting but it does interact with "don't be coy" in an interesting way. I'm a bigger fan of a facilitated, co-created setting. Love making the world with my friends at the table as we play.

But yes, paragraphs of lore are something that is a bad idea most of the time. It often just doesn't work. Assuming your goal is "communicate why and how this setting to people", paragraphs of lore might do the why but it almost always fails on the how. So much of lore books from the past ended with people going, "Cool, but like what do I do with this?"

10. You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

Ending with a joke is good.

Yours annotating-ly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• Wait, Roll That Again is a podcast with a fun premise: Alex, the host, is designing a game and talks to a series of designers about various steps in that process. This episode with Morgan Davie about figuring out your game is particularly good.

• On Dollars and Dragons, James D’Amato talks about the business of podcasting. A lot of talk of passive income, second jobs, and so on.

• Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Black Armada Games talk about their extremely positive experience with Backerkit’s advertising services.

• Cassi Mothwin reviews Luke Gearing’s experimental adventure module, The Isle

• Mikael Andersson, game director of Paradox, talks about teaching systems thinking with games.

• Two interesting articles about smash-hit videogame, Baldur’s Gate 3. One about the problems of using the 5e system and one about how it helped to be an independent, privately-owned studio.

• It’s impossible to be a small business: Handiwork Games had £25,000 of stock stolen on the way to backers in the US. This is the kind of thing that can destroy a business but to their immense credit, they seem to be okay.

• On the Indie Game Reading Club, a written actual play of a|state, the cyberpunk forged in the dark game from Handiwork.

• EnWorld have done another survey about freelancer pay rates in the industry.

• On tumblr, Luke of Wild Woods Games has a design diary about overhauling an old game and breathing fresh life into it with new writing. It’s a BoB game called Heaven in the Dust and there’s some great insight into the poetry of those games.

• On board game designer Geoff Englestein’s newsletter, he talks about boardgames and victory conditions. It’s in response to designer Amabel Holland’s video about whether board games need victory conditions at all.

Misc

• There’s now an official Mausritter library with all their third-party content, currently more than 500 different items.

• Charity bundle to help stray dogs in Curitiba, Brazil

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Into the Veils Kickstarter is near it’s 2nd Stretch Goal reward. All backers are entered to win a free printed copy of the adventure (2 winners). Join the Adventure today!

• Embrace the will of the dice gods with this bundle of gamemaster resources from Dicegeeks, designed to help you improvise fun and imaginative scenarios at the table.

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Everywhen, the system that powers Barbarians of Lemuria, is on sale with the core rulebook and a bunch of supplements!

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