#154: Books about RPGs
Some books I've been reading: Play Unsafe, Stealing Cthulhu, Age of Ravens, Knutepunkt, The Ultimate RPG Guide & more.
I. Dear Reader,
I’m always trying to level up my RPG knowledge and this has led me to look for books about RPGs. And there don’t seem to be that many! There are some academic books but while they have their strengths, easy reading isn’t one of them. Even as I wrestle with these academic texts (and I will emerge victorious), here are some books that are both interesting and fun to read:
Play Unsafe and Stealing Cthulhu by Graham Walmsley
Play Unsafe is a book of RPG advice. It’s a quick read (quicker than its 82 pages would suggest) and has some really gentle, grounded advice. For example:
If, while gaming, you can’t be clever or try hard, what can you do? The answer is: be obvious. Do the obvious thing: the thing that obviously happens next in the story; the thing that you think everyone expects to happen. Paradoxically, that obvious thing may, to everyone else , seem original and brilliant.
Stealing Cthulhu, by the same author, is about how to take inspiration from the stories of HP Lovecraft in a way that makes your own cosmic horror games feel fresh and unique.
Age of Ravens: Vol 1 and Vol 2 by Lowell Francis
These are two collections of various essays originally published on the Age of Ravens blog, formatted for easy reading. They’re essentially a greatest hits collection and do a good job of that. Volume I: Running has some of my favourite articles about running conspiracies, one shots, online games, and more. Volume II: Tools is mostly resources for play: story seeds and ideas to drop into your game whether sci-fi heists or apocalyptic hexcrawls. They aren’t connected by theme so you mostly can just dip in and out of them.
Unchained Mysteries by Jessie Burneko
Unchained Mysteries is a passionate call to ditch clue-based mystery design. Instead, the book proposes coming up with much more richly-layered scenarios where the players are drawn into a crime or crisis with no easy solution, where the players are caught up in a web of NPCs who are actively dealing with the situation, rather than passively waiting for someone to solve their problems. It ends up at around 100 pages so there’s real meat there if you want to engage with it.
The entire Knutepunkt line
Knutepunkt is one of the biggest larp events in the world - half conference, half festival, full of larps and talks and so on. Since 2001, they’ve been publishing books with essays (some more academic than others) about larp. They’re very well-respected. And as Evan Torner explained to me, if you’re not interested in larp, you can just mentally replace the word larp with TTRPG and still get lot out of these books. I’m nowhere close to finishing them but felt like I had to share them anyway. (Edit: Thanks to reader Mo, here’s the link to the books.)
The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D’Amato
I have not finished this yet either but I can already tell the voice of the Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide should resonate with newer players who don’t have a lot of set ideas about RPGs already. The author is the founder of the One Shot podcast network and clearly has a philosophy of play. For example, the first chapter is titled “Understanding Audience” and basically uses the idea that everyone has preferences in what they consume (books, moves, etc) to segue into the idea that RPGs emerge out of everyone’s shared preferences. It’s an interesting approach and if you want to know more, there’s a nice review here.
Yours bookishly,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
Over on the Yes Indie’d Podcast, I talk to actual play scholar Emily Friedman about how actual plays have matured and grown into a cultural force. There’s lots of general talk about the medium as well as a particularly fun anecdote about a D&D podcast that surprised their GM with time travel by literally going back and inserting new content into their second episode - a top tier shenanigan only possible with a recorded game.
On the Ain’t Slayed Nobody podcast, Graham Walmsley runs his new game, Cosmic Dark. If you listen to it, you’ll hear Walmsley start off the initial few scenes by giving the players a dialogue to repeat, almost like a prompter at an improv show. I haven’t seen that before and it’s a really interesting technique - GM as conductor or director.
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III. Links of the Week
Awards
Voting is open for the Ennies. For Best Game, I’ve gone with Pasion de la Pasiones by Brandon Leon-Gambetta so that’s my big recommendation!
The IGDN have announced their nominees for the Indie Groundbreaker awards. Lots of new, interesting games in this list!
Articles
On his blog, JD talks about what’s he’s learned from running games for young players who have come into the hobby, primarily from watching actual play. It’s a great read: “Are you one of those pieces of shit artists who sit around being like 'oh man we solved all these problems in 2005, these new artists are dumb and have nothing to show me and will do nothing to help the world'. Are you that kind of guy, where they'll laugh at you behind your hand because you're old and have nothing to offer them? I decided I was not that kind of guy.”
Monte Cook talks about players experiencing the story versus creating it and how it affects design: “It’s not just decisions and die rolls that dictate success or failure. It’s desire.”
On the Pretendo Games blog, a deep dive design diary on the latest 2400 game, Nuclear Family.
On a similar note, the Deeper in the Game blog draws a quadrant showing mandatory vs superficial, self-generated vs procedural and talks about how games fit across it.
The Indie Game Reading Club reviews cyberpunk-RPG-as-cards-in-box game, Atma.
On Tumblr, one group’s epic exploration of monster games, from Brinkwood to Apocalypse Keys and many more along the way.
IV. Small Ads
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On Bundle of Holding, Hydra Co-operative bundle all of their best adventures including Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Lorn Song of the Bachelor.
Legendary Beginnings is a bundle of family-friendly D&D 5e 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!
(Just to confirm that downloading (almost all of) the KP-books is absolutely fine -- all but two or three have been made freely available as PDFs. You can find a list, and links, here: https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Knutepunkt-books )
Thomas i would love to see your recommendations for the more academic books.