The state of the world is pretty bleak right now. State governments all across the United States, my home, are continuing to soldier forward in their efforts to write people like me out of existence and law alike. My country is embroiled in yet another senseless, meaningless, reasonless war. The global economy is strained. We find out every day that people we admired as heroes are actually monsters. Tech companies continue to push products that strip us of our ability to think critically and engage creatively with each other. Every time I see a post online, I have to spend minutes evaluating whether it's even real. We pipe our clean drinking water into unceasing machines while the atmosphere above our heads gets thicker and thicker.

It's easy to feel like reality is breaking down, like society is doomed, like everything is coming to an end. But I don't feel that way. And in large part, that's because I teach kids, and without getting into specifics about my students, many of them are extraordinary.

Collaborative Storytelling Through Tabletop

The wordiest elective offered to middle schoolers this side of the Mississippi

When I'm not moonlighting as a game designer of unbelievably modest renown, I work as a school librarian. I work with a pretty wide age range, but I want to focus on one very specific aspect of my job: I teach a middle school elective called Collaborative Storytelling Through Tabletop, and in my time at this school, it's become explosively popular. Last year, the elective was structured around a series of lectures and play demos that took my students through various genres and formats of TTRPGs:

The elective was tremendously successful, and I would love to devote a later post exclusively to the structure and content of the lectures and demos that I taught. This year, though, the class time for the elective was shortened considerably... and the number of students that signed up for my elective ballooned. Suddenly, I was looking at 30-minute blocks with 10 or more middle schoolers all wanting to play at the table together. How the hell was I supposed to swing that?

The solution: instead of finding a game for 10 players that supports a long-form campaign with half-hour sessions that are entirely school-appropriate (extremely difficult, if not impossible), go the other direction entirely. Go solo.

It's pretty elegant, once you wrap your head around it. If everyone is sharing a single character, they're forced to share the mic in order to progress the story. Students are forced to come to a consensus, or at least a majority agreement and compromise, so that they can move the game forward. Everyone feels like the game is at least partially their own—that they're a genuine stakeholder in the fiction. And if someone is sick for a day, we don't need to plot-hole their character, because their character is everyone's character. Once the idea occurred to me, it was a bit of a forehead-smack moment. How could I have missed this? It's just so obvious.

I did a quick trial run with another student group before the Collaborative Storytelling elective started, selecting Jason Price and Jack Harrison's exquisite Heavy Weighs the Crown as the guinea pig for my experiment. In case you haven't read it before, Heavy Weighs the Crown is a storytelling game "of magical crowns, the monarchs who wear them and the realms they rule together." I was drawn to it for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that it's a solo game that explicitly states that you can play it with a group.

The game is awesome, and we had a great time with it. I also noticed that students that tended to be quieter had an easier time asserting their opinion during the game specifically because their contributions felt lower stakes. It was a great blend of narrative tropes, and the story that we told felt bold, original, and delectably dramatic. I had a blast. Consider this a resounding endorsement of Heavy Weighs the Crown: if you're looking for a game that can help you tell a dramatic tale with all the ups and downs of an epic monarchy, look no further.

By the end of the playthrough (which lasted around three weeks), I knew that a journaling game was definitely the right approach. The question was... what to pick for a semester-long campaign?

Enter Koriko: A Magical Year

Who wouldn't like Koriko?

The first day of my elective, I prompted students to think about the kinds of stories they were interested in telling. As a group, we settled on something light-hearted but not too silly, something that skewed fantasy but stayed grounded in reality, and something with a narrator that the group could relate to. What better fit could there be than an urban fantasy coming-of-age story inspired by Kiki's Delivery Service? And to top it all off... it's one of my personal favorite journaling games (sorry Tim, but Thousand Year-Old Vampire isn't exactly preteen material, so it didn't make the cut for my class).

Koriko: A Magical Year by Jack Harrison of Mousehole Press needs very little introduction. The game got so popular that it's completely sold out of print copies. A lot of that, I think, has to do with the game's broad tonal appeal: Koriko bottles up the melancholy of teenage loneliness, the excitement of exploring a new city, and the bubbling magic of a bright and fantastical world and gives it to you in a digestible (yet expansive) game that guides you step-by-step through your own version of Kiki's Delivery Service. It's hard not to love it. I mean, Kiki's is my dad's favorite Ghibli movie, and that guy has great taste.

There were a few logistical problems with the game that I had to solve before I got it off the ground. For one, there was the practical matter that Koriko required dice stacking. We play in the school library, and I was not confident that a rogue third grader wouldn't knock stacks over in between play sessions. Luckily, Harrison included alternate rules involving pulling stones from a bag, which has worked brilliantly for us. A couple of velvet bags with colored glass beads did the trick, and the tactile nature of the game was preserved. Some of my favorite moments in the game so far have come from a student slowly pulling stones one-by-one as everyone leans over the edges of their seats and tells them not to screw us all over by pulling the wrong one.

The second practical matter: if we're playing a journaling game with over 10 people, who's going to do the journaling? I devised a system in which one student would write each day, acting as the live editor of all our thoughts and dialogue. Another student would handle all physical materials (largely to avoid arguments about who gets to touch the shiny, shiny tarot cards). I drafted it all up in a handout which I gave to the students on the second day of the elective:

We're now a few months in, and it's gone better than I ever could have hoped. Our journal is teeming with sketches, commentary, and delightful moments with our witch (whose name is Pidgin). Everyone has found a voice in the story, whether they're someone who typically steps up or sits back. We're halfway through the Arrival volume, and I can't wait to see what the rest of our journey is like.

Hey folks, Sylvan here. This one is going to be a little weird, and quite long.

Originally, I was planning to continue my series on the Loom system this week. I have most of that post drafted, actually, and it's going to be the next one that goes out. This week, though, I want to focus on something different. This is a topic that's been on my mind for a little while now, and if you're at all tapped into the indie TTRPG scene, you'll understand exactly why I think it's so important to talk about.

Today, we're going to be learning about a key theory in Information Science: the Principle of Least Effort.

Stay with me.

You may have encountered this principle before in other domains or fields of study, but for our purposes, the Principle of Least Effort (PLE) is as straightforward as it gets: readers gravitate towards the path of least resistance, not towards the richest or most accurate source. In other words, once you find a result that's "good enough," you stop looking. In information contexts, this means that users pick the most convenient source and the least exacting search method, regardless of their expertise, and quit when minimally acceptable answers appear.

I want to talk about three different ways that this principle affects us within the indie TTRPG sphere: design, play habits, and discourse.

Designing Low-Effort Bridges

If we're centering our design around PLE, there are a few major takeaways that the principles has for us on how we can design games to be accessible and readable to our audience. For one, it tells us that players generally favor documentation that's easy to access and skim. Snippets, callout boxes, examples, bulleted lists... think about what your eye is immediately drawn to on a page of rules text, and whether or not you're going to want to keep reading afterwards. Players often stop reading as soon as they find a procedure that they deem acceptably functional.

This section is mostly aimed at designers who are looking to make their games more accessible to the average reader or player. These are not universal pieces of design advice. I'm specifically talking about trying to design a game that prevents playgroups from yelling "read the fucking manual!" Some players really enjoy a game that incentivizes high-effort engagement! I am one of these players! I dream of Invisible Sun at night sometimes, and mentally page through its rules as if I am counting sheep.

However.

Most players aren't like that. Statistically, overwhelmingly, players take the path of least resistance. PLE is applicable to most players, even though there are exceptions, and games made for those people that are exceptions. For now, though, let's take this example:

Horace is playing The Game Ever with her friends. Her character, who is a Crystalline Freak-Rogue, has just fallen from the top of a building onto the ground. Horace wants to know whether or not The Game Ever has fall damage rules, so she flips to the chapter about combat, because she knows that there's a section on how to calculate damage. In the damage section, she finds a yellow box labelled "Fall Damage" that reads:

If a character falls from a height, they may take up to 1D100 Pure Damage, depending on fall height, weight, and velocity. For complete fall damage rules, refer to page 274.

"Good enough," Horace thinks. She rolls a d100 and marks 32 points of Pure Damage on the sixth page of her character sheet (you know, where HP is marked in The Game Ever) and proceeds with play. Little does she know that her character could have taken as little as ONE point of damage if she had calculated the damage using weight and velocity, given that Crystalline characters have hollow bone structures! How foolish! Perhaps if she had read all of the rules as instructed, she would not have been burnt to a crisp by the Psychic Demagogue Humpdragon in the next session.

I can't really blame Horace for failing to check the full rules on fall damage. For one, she's a strawman I constructed myself for the purposes of illustration, and assigning fault to her feels particularly cruel. But more importantly, Horace hit what we call an information gate, and it's not unusual for that to stop her. If anything, it's entirely expected.

The moment that a player is asked to flip to a different section to get more information, there's a really high chance that they simply... won't. When information is gated behind a series of actions that you have to take (clicking from one page to another, flipping to another chapter, checking another book, looking back and forth from a reference card to a page in the manual), people just won't do the action. The path of least resistance is to do what's "good enough."

The really big takeaway that I want designers to have from PLE is that they should be designing what information professionals call low-effort bridges. Low-effort bridges are access points that are easy to step across (as opposed to an information gate, which serves as an obstacle) and give incentive to seek further information. Indexes are a great example of a low-effort bridge. So is a table of contents. Even though these are technically cross-reference points that ask you to flip to other pages, they don't offer the reader enough information for anyone to deem the index to be a "good enough" source of information on its own.

There's more you can do, though. Prioritize key rules and procedures early in the book so groups can start playing quickly, then layer optional detail later (repeating the previously established fundamentals with their added context). Avoid layering many interdependent subsystems (conditions, tags, edge cases), since these tend to force players to track too many moving parts and constantly reference the book.

A lot of this sounds daunting, and more than a little of it may come across as vague. But there are tons of great examples out there of this sort of solid information architecture... they're just mostly not in TTRPG manuals. They're in technical writing: documentation, how-to articles, tutorials, walkthroughs. Fundamentally, TTRPG design is a form of technical writing. We just often don't treat it as such because what we're writing is supposed to be fun.

No Thank You, I'll Stick With The Game Ever

PLE applies to habits of play just as much as it applies to design. Effort, in this case, is married strongly to comfort—systems and patterns of behavior and play that are comfortable for someone tend be less effortful. To me, the principle is one of the simplest and most straightforward answers to the age-old question, "why don't people try out indie games if they like D&D so much?"

Familiarity breeds comfort, comfort breeds routine. When the choice is between playing a game you're familiar with and a game you're not familiar with, it's no surprise that the more popular choice is to stick with (or modify) what you know, instead of starting fresh.

For those of us embroiled in the indie scene, learning new systems is a bit of a different ballgame. Like any other skill, learning and adapting to new systems can be mastered with practice and repetition. The first time I played a PBTA game, it took a lot more effort to figure out than when, a decade later, I ventured into games Forged in the Dark. Even though Forged in the Dark was a new system to me when I first picked it up, I had years and years of experience rifling through game manuals, learning rules systems, and fitting together mechanical pieces into a cohesive whole.

That first step, though, is mighty daunting. I've heard people talk about "gateway RPGs" for D&D fans, and that's a great example of a low-effort bridge like I was talking about before. For some people, maybe that was Pathfinder or Daggerheart. But I've found in my anecdotal experience that if a bridge is too short (a game too similar to what's familiar), you won't end up stepping off that bridge into truly unknown territory. In my experience, games like Wanderhome, Mothership, or Fiasco have been much more successful at converting one-game exclusives into multi-system enthusiasts. They're different enough from what's familiar to be a meaningful bridge to cross, but they lay out information clearly enough and with a minimal amount of required buy-in that players can sit down and start enjoying the game quickly.

(I would be a fool not to mention that I've witnessed my own game, Gravemire, do this for people at conventions on multiple occasions)

Let's take this a step further, though. In addition to applying to what games we play, PLE also applies to how we play them. In recent conversations with friends of mine, I've come to the realization (or rather, I have been informed by people who play with me frequently) that I have an inexplicable but unstoppable penchant for creating diplomatically-minded, transient chroniclers and postal workers. It's very specific, and yet I keep. On. Doing. It.

I'm not the only one with a character type. Most people I talk to that roleplay frequently have an archetype—something they naturally gravitate towards when creating characters. Unless I work actively against impulse, I will make some variant of my stupid little busybody mailman every single time. The archetype delights me, it's easy for me to play, it's just got The Sauce, you know?

It's not a bad thing that we tend to follow the path of least resistance in creating and embodying our characters, but it's definitely something that I like being aware of. Knowing what I tend towards can give me the power to intentionally play against type when the game demands it, and understanding how the rest of the table naturally leans can help me to craft stories that are fun for everyone involved.

My point here is that patterns of behavior are reinforced by our tendency to retrace familiar paths. I return to what a friend of mine charitably called "larping the pony express" time and time again because that's what I've already established to be easy and comfortable for me, which allows me to focus on other elements of the game that I otherwise might not have the capacity to pay attention to. As long as we're aware of the play path we're on, familiar or otherwise, and as long as we're taking steps to make sure that everyone is being taken care of at the table, retreading familiar ground should be entirely welcome.

What's most important to remember is that a familiar play path for you may not be familiar for everyone else at the table. My weirdo mailman characters and your weirdo mailman characters may hit all the same key aesthetic points, but if I assume that you're fulfilling the exact same archetype that I am, we're both going to be in for a world of hurt. Where my representation of a character in that niche might be nosy and pensive, yours might be lofty-minded and oblique. If we assume our patterns of play to be the same just because they seem at first blush to be similar, we risk leaving with a half-baked understanding of each other, the characters, the game, and our experience as a whole. And unfortunately, the reality of the TTRPG scene is...

"I feel like no one can handle any nuance"

I was talking to a friend of mine in the TTRPG scene a few days ago, and something that he said really struck me: "I feel like no one can handle any nuance." My first instinct was to argue with him: I can handle nuance, and you're talking to me right now. What gives?

The more that I thought about it, though, the more I realized he was right. The indie TTRPG scene is a corner of the internet absolutely embroiled in discourse. Every few weeks, a new fire is stoked. Every few months, another person is shattered. It's a tense, contentious space, as is the case for many small and insular internet communities like it. And with that tension and friction comes a frightening speed of communication. Ideas and opinions are exchanged at breakneck pace, and much of that occurs in unmoderated or unmonitored spaces: direct messages, Bluesky posts, Discord servers.

Because the pace of information exchange is so rapid, opinions come to a boil quickly. Conflict bubbles and pops at the surface of the discourse cauldron, but the pace of formed opinion does not always lead to breadth of the same degree. Within days (if not hours) of news breaking, lines have already been drawn, arguments have calcified, and everyone is expected to have Something To Say.

To me, this indicates PLE at work. The emphasis is not placed on having the most thorough opinion on the discursive subject of the week, but having an opinion ready that conforms to one side or another of the argument. Participants in discourse are encouraged to gather their information quickly so that their voice is not drowned out by the oncoming tidal wave of posts that inevitably follow in the wake of discourse breaking on the shores of our fair city.

When speed is what matters most, people tend towards whatever source is "good enough," not whatever source is "best." If you have a choice between reading two paragraphs that give you the gist or sixteen paragraphs that give you the details, you read the synopsis source first. And when you're approaching your sources with the goal of forming an opinion, as opposed to the goal of informing your opinion, your priorities shift. Persuasive sources becomes more valuable; informative sources become less so. If a source tells you how to think, that's less effort that you have to take in order to formulate your own perspective.

This, I think, is what my friend meant when he said that no one can handle nuance. As a community, we're capable of nuanced discussion. Time and time again, one-on-one conversations with my colleagues, peers, and mentors have proven to me that on the whole, the indie TTRPG community is whip-smart and deeply passionate. When we want to, we can dive deep, we can tackle multi-step problems, we can handle nuance.

But discourse prioritizes quantity. Arguments require alacrity, lest you be caught flat-footed. When so much effort has to be put into defending your position, paradoxically, less effort can be put into building that position in the first place. Passion can turn to poison, and poison can be amplified to an astounding degree.

While these three subjects (design, habits of play, and discourse) might seem unrelated on the surface, I hope that it's a little clearer now that all three of them are driven by the same underlying principle. If rules are hard to understand or unclear, our first instinct is to filter out what we consider to be too much effort to be worth it. The filter that we apply is the fundamental lens of our own bias: what we believe to be important and what we believe we can discard. Our patterns of play are the same way: we build our characters on familiar foundations, leading to familiar houses. We miss a lot when we approach problems with the goal of solving them quickly and filling in the gaps fast. We miss even more when our methods to backfill those gaps are to grab on to what is already familiar.

This post is part of a series of articles I'm writing about the Loom system, a diceless, GM-less game system I designed. If you want to tune in and get the posts straight to your inbox, you can subscribe to the Clawhammer Courant for free!

In the last article that I posted, I introduced the concept of player-GM tug-of-war: the table dynamic between GMs and players that results in an "us vs. them" mentality in many traditional roleplaying games. In particular, I concluded that a play-to-die horror story turns this dynamic on its head, aligning the objectives of players and GMs more closely to the interests of a shared narrative. This time, I want to talk about how playbook moves in the Loom work, and how they compare to and are inspired by other game systems that I often see the Loom compared to.

The primary engine behind the Loom system is a series of moves that each playbook has access to. For the most part, in this post, let's focus on Character Playbooks, since that's what I started with when designing the Loom itself.

Character moves are split into three different categories: moves that your character can Always do, moves they can do Once Per Session, and moves they can Never do. At first glance, this is remarkably similar to Realis, Austin Walker's excellent game that wields the power of language to alter the firmament of reality itself. If you want to learn all about Realis in detail, my dear friend Nic Ambrose has a fantastic writeup about it on his new blog, Notes from the Labyrinth.

For our purposes, I'm going to focus on what makes Realis different from the Loom system: the distinction between a "can always" and a simple "always." In Realis, sentences about your character are fundamental truths about them. My Xenagogue, for example, has the sentence, "I always find my way through a conversation by testing limits."

Note that these sentences all assert a truth about what my character is. Not only what they can do, but a fundamental part of who they are. Prothysteron (my Xenagogue character) isn't just able to announce her presence with unmistakable flair in order to draw attention to herself, she always does it. It's not about capability so much as foundational identity.

The conversation between Realis and Belonging Outside Belonging has been better articulated and discussed by smarter, kinder, better looking people than I, but it's a conversation worth at least mentioning here. Realis takes BoB's move structure and juices it to the gills. Characters no longer can, they do. If they don't, that's because someone else's version of reality has been realized instead—a reality where your character's qualities aren't necessarily the same. Your character's reality always allows for you to enact your sentences. If you can't, it's because you've been countered by someone else, not because you chose not to use a move.

Wait. Wasn't this supposed to be an article about the Loom?

In the Loom system, your Always moves are much more closely related to Belonging Outside Belonging moves of the same ilk. I actually started working on the Loom while puzzling over a Belonging Outside Belonging game I was drafting four years ago. What started as a BoB game with a bad case of writer's block evolved into an increasingly desperate series of mechanical maneuvers to find a way, any way to keep working on the game. Eventually, I had contorted the playbooks so severely that they were no longer mechanically recognizable or coherent. Oops.

Once I'd had a sufficient amount of time to bottle up my emotional distress at yet another halted project, I returned to the corpse of my game and sifted through the viscera and giblets to see what I could salvage. (Side note: I'm actually working on a completely new iteration of that game again, four years later, with the incremental help of the undeniable Elliot Davis) Upon my return to the whalefallen Google Drive folder of drafts, snippets, and sundry mechanical tidbits, I noticed a fascinating trend in my own writing habits: I seemed, in retrospect, utterly enamored with contorting moves to assert that you can't do things.

Ultimately, I dropped the tokens from Belonging Outside Belonging entirely. For whatever reason, it wasn't clicking for me in the project I was writing at the time. And in sorting through the carcass, I realized that what I actually wanted wasn't a better way to write Belonging Outside Belonging games, but a new system to write with entirely.

What the Loom does differently from Realis is what it does the same as Belonging Outside Belonging—that its Always moves are enablers, not strictures. But this is where the similarity in move structure to either system ends.

At its core, the Loom is a system about archetype. Where Realis is a game where your character individualizes and self-actualizes over time, the Loom is a system where your playbook is, for the most part, static. Your moves don't change, at least according to the base text. The tension comes not from breaking the rules or altering them, but from getting as close as you can to breaking them without doing so. You're in a cage, and that cage is immutable, but you can throw yourself against the bars in as many different ways as you can think of. Your character doesn't grow mechanically. Instead, the way you play them grows as you find ways around the constraints and limitations put in place around them.

Let's take the Bouncer playbook from the SRD's Appendix B as an example. The Bouncer can Always "clock someone with relative accuracy." When you start play, this might mean that your character is pretty reliably able to punch someone in the jaw, or at least in the vicinity of the jaw. But clocking someone is a phrase with multiple meanings. Over time, as you play The Bouncer, you may find yourself drawn towards alternative interpretations of your moves. A character that starts with a strong left hook can evolve into someone who is a consistently shrewd judge of character, able to clock someone with relative accuracy with a glance.

In this way, the most interesting moves to me in the Loom are your Never moves. In a system where the cage bars are indestructible by design, how can you bend them to give yourself wiggle room? The Lawbringer (Appendix A of the SRD) can Never "compromise on their morals." But can they change their morals if the situation alters their systems of belief? They can't compromise on their morals, but can they compromise their morals directly?

In this way, I use the Once per Session moves as guides for the players to think flexibly about the archetypes they're working with. Once per Session, characters are allowed to bend the rules of their own cage, to buck the trends and expectations of their rigid cast and momentarily become something more. While the Lawbringer can Never compromise on their morals, Once per Session they can "break a law they enforce," communicating to the player that the Lawbringer's morals and their laws are not synonymous and should not be treated as such.

These moves are also subject to flexible interpretation. Once per Session, the Lawbringer can "introduce someone to a different moral perspective." Is that perspective the Lawbringer's, or someone else's? Is the someone another character, or the Lawbringer themselves, choosing to expose their own perspective to a new character's ideas and values? How does this affect the way that you as the player conceptualize the Lawbringer's moral code, and the way it interacts with the laws they enforce?

Realis is a game where you change the mechanical representation of your characters to fit a growing realization of that character's identity. Belonging Outside Belonging is a system where your character's ability to affect the narrative is in constant negotiation with the rhythm of play, ebbing and flowing with the tide of tokens passed around the table.

In the Loom, the only negotiation you engage with is the negotiation of your interpretation of the text itself. You are not working with or against another player to push your character in new mechanical directions. You are not working with or against the GM to achieve mechanical objectives.

You're not really playing tug-of-war at all, anymore. If you're playing the Loom, you've dropped the rope.

Gamers, I have a confession I need to make. The Loom SRD is not a brand-new game system that I came up with overnight and then posted to Itch.io on a whim. Unlike everyone else on social media, I lied to you. I led you to believe something that wasn't true.

The reality is, I've been playing with the Loom system for years. It started as a tool I used in horror games—a way to make sure that even once player characters died, the players could keep participating in the game. At the beginning of the game, I would write out a series of short playbooks to represent the various monstrous and supernatural forces in the story. When a player character was killed off (or otherwise rendered unplayable), that player would then get to pick up the playbook representing whatever killed their character... and suddenly, they were playing that entity. Over the course of play, the games would naturally shift from player characters vs. the GM to player characters vs. players and the GM.

I should say: I am not one to encourage adversarial relationships between GMs and players. This probably speaks more to my personal taste than it does to any particular objective stance on table dynamics, but the framing of a GM (or, more aptly, a DM) as an opponent of the player party is as unhelpful for me as it is unfun. Positioning the GM as an enemy is a deeply one-note dynamic, and it encourages modes of play that I personally really dislike. The GM is encouraged to come up with new and brutal ways to one-up, trick, punish, and outdo the players. The players are encouraged to surprise, outwit, and outplay the GM. Any information the players provide to the GM comes with the implicit or explicit expectation that it will later be used against players in unexpected ways. Any information the GM provides to the players comes with the expectation that the players use it to progress the GM's game plan and path.

The main problem I have with this dynamic is that it does not encourage the table to approach the story in a meaningfully goal-oriented manner. The goal is always the same: beat your opponents. Without necessarily meaning to, the table railroads themselves into an ongoing tug-of-war with no perceptible path out. Unless everyone puts down the rope, everyone has to keep playing. I call this dynamic the tug-of-war dynamic.

That being said.

In a horror game where the expectation is that the player characters will almost all bite it, that dynamic tectonically shifts. In the face of ensured loss, players are no longer restricted to the same tug of war—instead, players can put their characters at a disadvantage without worrying about sacrificing their own agency over the narrative.

In the tug-of-war dynamic, losing a conflict means losing agency over the story you're telling. If the GM wins, they get to assert truth over the party. If the players win, they get to influence the story. Losing means handing over your ability to impact the story. Defeat is not only an in-game consequence, but an act of ceding control to your opponent across the table.

In a game you're playing to lose, the defeat of your character is not a loss of your agency as a player. And in a game where the loss of your character is merely a change in game-state for your playstyle, defeat is doubly encouraged.

The idea behind the Loom was to make a system that could be integrated into any story I was telling, no matter what game system I was using to tell it. Because the Loom doesn't use any dice or tokens, its moves can function entirely outside of the ordinary resolution mechanics seen in whatever game you're playing in. Because the language of Loom moves is absolute, it's easy to use them to embody unstoppable monsters. If the monster can always rend you limb from limb, there's no die roll you can make or spell you can cast to stop that from happening, regardless of what the rules of your game otherwise tell you. There is no question of which side wins the tug-of-war. The only question is how long it takes.

This post is part of a series of articles I'm writing about the Loom system, a diceless, GM-less game system I designed. If you want to tune in and get the posts straight to your inbox, you can subscribe to the Clawhammer Courant for free!

Hey folks, Sylvan here!

Welcome to the Clawhammer Games website! We're just getting started here, and things will be up and running shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!

The site itself is going to serve a few different purposes, but the main one is to give me a space to post my thoughts on game design and tabletop play, as well as to give you a chance to see what I'm working on.

The Loom System is a tabletop role-playing game system that replaces dice and the Game Master with player-driven, archetypal storytelling. The Loom empowers players through shared and individual playbooks, and pushes you to ask the question: what does a game look like where progression is mechanically irrelevant?

The Loom System Reference Document is a toolkit that contains everything you need to design a game that is Woven on the Loom. It is a box of toys, spilled out onto the table. It is a belt of tools, unrolled and dangling in the air. It is a hook on the end of an invisible thread, splashing into the water. It is as much yours as it is mine, and over time, more so.

Core Principles

1. Playbook-Based Mechanics: The game's structure is driven by the capabilities and limitations outlined in these two types of playbooks, which provide a framework for gameplay.
2. Diceless Play: The outcomes and story progress from player choices, negotiation, and the interplay between Character and Domain Playbooks.
3. Collaborative Storytelling: Players share responsibilities for building the world and advancing the story, with no single Game Master to guide or dictate the narrative.
4. Thematic Contrasts: Character Playbooks and their associated Domain Playbooks offer contrasting perspectives, creating dynamic narrative tension.
5. Abstraction of Concepts: Language in the Loom is intended to be simultaneously interpretable as literal and as metaphorical. A big part of the game is thinking laterally about the way moves are written and enacted, and abstracting moves to gain surprising and unexpected flexibility in a scene.

In This Document

• Playbook frameworks
• Rules skeletons
• System interactions
• Functional examples
• Third-Party License
• ...more?

Download the SRD

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The Loom SRD by Clawhammer Games

archetypal exploration in a diceless, GM-less system

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Long ago, before our world, there was another. 

There was a Flood once, or so I have heard. It was vast and terrible in the way that only the greatest of disasters can be, a cataclysm so total in its destruction that when it swept the world, there was nothing left.

This is not the story of that Flood. This is not the story of how it came to pass, or what it broke, or what came after.

This is the story of the world that came before it, a world lost to the sands of time and the waters of inevitability. This is the story of when magic was material, and the ones like us were lions on the prairie. This is the story of Before the Flood.

Before the Flood is a map-making game for six players about working together to discover a world that existed long before our own. Each player will take on the mantle of one of the fundamental forces that shaped this world, using their own unique mechanics, tools, and perspective to create a map of the world that existed before it was all washed away.

Six mantles to build the world...

The world is built through the collaboration of six mantles: Land, Legend, Nature, Nation, Weal, and Woe.

Land is the mantle of the earth itself, carving valleys and building mountains. It is that which marks the map while the rest deliberate over details.

Legend is the mantle of histories, those stories that only become greater as they are lost. It is the adviser to both Nature and Nation, and that which marks the details that Land does not.

Nature is the mantle of all that is wild and untamed, the magic and mundane that grows from that which is left untended. It is that which sprouts landmarks as a matter of course, growing ever larger as it does.

Nation is the mantle of the forces of humanity, in all their glory and hubris. It is that which builds landmarks with structured purpose, forever looking to better its odds and create something more.

Weal is the mantle of good fortune, sharing its joy with all those who would take it. It is that which pulls meaning from the arcane and promises the sunrise will come again.

Woe is the mantle of ill fortune, but I ask you not to assume their intent. It is often the worst times that bring out the best in us, and while their game can be difficult to understand from the outside, they only seeks to bring the world closer together.

Long ago, before our world, there was another.

Before the Flood is a lushly illustrated, beautifully produced game with over 70 pages of artwork and written content for you to enjoy. The game was written by Nicholas Ambrose and Sylvan Lawrence, and was edited by Dominique Dickey. Art by Reese Hill, and layout & design by MC Bacon.

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Before the Flood Print + PDF Bundle

Buy the zine in print and get a bundled digital copy ready for immediate play!

Buy on IndiePressRevolution

Before the Flood is also available for purchase as a PDF through itch.io.

Before the Flood by Clawhammer Games

A six player map-making game of utopic creation

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These lands are wild and untamed, and the journey you set forth upon shall be perilous. Prithee, take care, brave adventurer. Thou must traverse many obstacles to deliver thou’est most magicalest of art’efacts to the most neediest of people in need. Of course, thou must not goeth alone, for it is most dangerous to do so. O mighty hero, heave upon your muscled shoulders your bag of magical items and powerful weapons! Set forth, and conquer these wild lands!

Also, be quick about it. Recess is almost over and you gotta get back to class!

Ack! Too Many Words, Give Me The Short Version

In The Backpack Game, you play as a kid on the playground who is playing pretend. Using only what’s in their backpack and the power of their imagination, they’ll go on an epic quest to deliver an item of great importance to someone who desperately needs it. Over the course of the game, you’ll fill your backpack with powerful, made-up objects, and then you’ll use each one to solve a new problem and progress on your journey. At the end of the game, you’ll only have one item left… the item you were sent out to deliver!

The Backpack Game is a 1-2 player TTRPG played with a ten-sided die and something to write with.

It was written by Sylvan Lawrence and Nicholas Ambrose for the One Page RPG Jam. Art by Melena Johnson.

Welcome to Gravemire, a horror TTRPG by Sylvan Lawrence, published by Clawhammer Games. Set in an uncanny, creature-infested version of 1890s Louisiana, Gravemire uses an original D12-based system of mechanics and a deliberate focus on character relationships to help players tell meaningful stories of fallible people coping with unfathomable odds.

The Game

Gravemire is a tabletop roleplaying game about death, growth, horror, and survival, based in an original mechanical framework and set in the churning waters of the Louisiana bayou circa 1894. Players slip into the roles of outsiders arriving in the town of Scarstone, a rural outpost that has been warped by a terrible transformation known as the Convulsion. Once, Scarstone was surrounded by similar towns. The Bayou once had an end. Now, unknowable numbers of horrors seep through the uncharted backwaters, strange magic contorts reality to its whims, and the settlements that called Scarstone their neighbor jut half-ruined from the mire like bones from a wound. Times have changed.

Folk like you drift into Scarstone in a steady trickle. Maybe you’re a researcher, or a monster hunter. Maybe you’re just on the run. Whoever you are, the good people of Scarstone will not open their hearts to you easily; they’ve grown used to the stream of hopefuls, all trying to make their mark on the shifting swamp. One day soon, they expect you will find your place there, buried under that mud that sucks at your shoes even now, and they’ll never see you again.

They’re right, too.

You see, Gravemire is a game about surviving the Bayou, but it’s also a game about not surviving the Bayou. Every time you push your way through the Border, you gamble with the life of the character you play. It is a gamble that you are likely to lose sooner or later. When you do, the waters will be waiting to claim you, and the boatman on the other side will be waiting to help you pick up the pieces, escort a new soul into the light of the boarding house, and try again. This, then, is the driving crux of Gravemire: how do you try again? How do you commit to a character you expect to lose? We leave it up to you to decide; all we can provide you is the tools to make your journey. Welcome, friend. Here... we saved a ticket just for you.

The Book

Gravemire is a 130 page tabletop roleplaying game, and has everything you need to play through your own stories in and around Scarstone. It features gorgeous full-color, black-and-white, and sepia artwork, brought to you by Clawhammer's incredible art team, directed by Sara Belote.

The book has eight chapters, including advice about getting started and session 0, rules for play both beyond the Border and within Scarstone itself, a full chapter just for the Dealer, and a chapter on Gravemire's unique magic system.

What folks are saying 'bout Gravemire

Gravemire's been well received around the internet. Check out what people have said about us online here, and scroll down for quotes and feedback we've received from friends, playtesters, and the tabletop community.

From the web:

Jeff Stormer played Gravemire with Sylvan on the Party of One podcast 

Sylvan & Gravemire were featured on the Draw Your Dice podcast

Dicebreaker wrote an article introducing Gravemire

From the community:

Gravemire is a brutal action-horror game that dares to stare into the pit of death and beg for more. Its rules are systematic without being smothering, and the whole game balances on that perfect precarity between an uncaring society and the nightmares of the deep.

 — Jay Dragon, Possum Creek Games 

Gravemire is a tight game of confronting otherworldly horrors with a lot of player-to-player safety and control built in - all nicely wrapped within a rarely seen 2d12 system!

— Viditiya Voleti, creator of SWORD&BEARER and Basic TCG 

Gravemire is a game that explores tropes and genres that can feel overlooked or left behind in our American history. If you are familiar with works like Will Jobst’s Black Mass or the tales from the audio drama Old Gods of Appalachia, pull up to the campfire and tell a spooky tale or two with your bravest friends.

— Jeremy Gage, Draw Your Dice Podcast

 This is a game that takes care to take care of its players and I dig that. The mechanics are simple and designed in a way that they all interact with each other to limit cognitive load so you can focus on the story and the creep factor...I recommend this game to anyone that wants a easy to pick up horror game with simple, but evocative gameplay.

— Nick Butler, creator of Tide Breaker RPG

The bayou in Gravemire is a dark and twisted place, make no mistake. It can legitimately be the stuff of nightmares. But what sets the game apart is the way it leads its players to make bold choices. What will you do with your character when you know their life is fleeting? How will you connect with other players through a world where the characters can be so ephemeral? The game inspires us to conjure a tremendous amount of heart, which gives it real weight and power, and makes me a better player for every RPG I'm part of.

— 90south, playtester

Gravemire was written by Sylvan Lawrence, which is the pen name of David Gales.

Buy Gravemire!

Gravemire Print + PDF Bundle

Buy the book in print and get a bundled digital copy ready for immediate play!

Buy Gravemire on IndiePressRevolution

Gravemire is also available as a digital PDF from itch.io.

Gravemire by Clawhammer Games

A tabletop horror RPG about mortality and growth, set in an uncanny, creature-infested version of 1890s Louisiana.

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