WS Healed, co-designer of Most Trusted Advisors, writes a long essay about games and interpretation that takes a very academic route but still ends somewhere extremely practical: “Don’t try to make your text a meddling busybody in the process of the game’s negotiation, whether to micromanage or to roll over and show its belly — not only can rules be opinionated, one of the best things those rules can do is invite opinions back.”

II. Media of the Week

• Dice Exploder did 2 hours on Triangle Agency and it’s a great discussion about its promises and frustrations. It’s a long discussion that gets to a lot of the core questions at the heart of the game.

• You too can support the newsletter 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 Old Men Running the World, Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol discuss Mythic Bastionland: “The king who had lied to his children for fifteen years about being injured, leaving them to run the kingdom and be driven away, all so he could try and trap his ancestral enemies into a final battle: everything cascaded out from that, all from the spark of something like “INJURED PILGRIMAGE” and rolling him as the FOX KNIGHT.”
• Tim Denee writes about the difference between rules light and rules heavy games using the metaphor of “gears” from cars and bicycles: “Low gears give more power (torque) but less speed. In a low gear you are very strong, and can build up momentum from a stationary start, or power up a steep hill. But you don’t go very far with each turn of the pedals; you’ll quickly reach a point where the gear is limiting your speed instead of helping you to get going.”
• Was it Likely has a charming table for determining how your commanding officer acts.
• TTRPGFans has an update on John Harper’s new game Ride or Die, a Fast and Furious style cars-and-robbers game based on Agon.
• There’s a TTRPG For That has a nice list of hidden gems from the No ICE in Minnesota bundle as as well as a review of Warrenguard, a game of dragon riders.
• The Monthly Mecha newsletter from Backwards Tabletop includes an interview about mechsploitation game Girlframe. (Also, features a link to my essay about Mike Pondsmith’s non-Cyberpunk games.)

IV. What am I playing?

I’ve got both campaigns going strong: Band of Blades as well as Gradient Descent via PsiRun. I think Band of Blades has got a comfortable rhythm to it. The whole “the main character is the legion” part of it is really coming through. It’s a game of smaller moments and smaller characters. If anything, I sometimes feel I need to put effort into making the missions sing.

PsiRun has a timer for the end of the campaign. Everyone has 6 questions about their past and when the first character answers all of them, the game is over. I think we have maybe 2 sessions left at most. So I’m excited to see how we cap it. Gradient Descent has been fun and even philosophical but navigating the space become more and more of a challenge for me.

The connectivity and logic of the dungeon is occasionally baffling — sections which should be more interconnected are actually isolated, and so on. It feels arbitrary and more linear than I would’ve assumed a real facility like this would’ve been. But that said, the randomness of dice has been quite triumphant. Rolling on encounter tables, making sense of the results, tying them into what’s happening has been regularly delightful.

V. 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 a text based RPG where you have the freedom to make your own decisions. Get married, join the military, start a business. What choices are you going to make?

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Age of Ambition, a full-line of fantasy RPG from Tab Creations.
• A collection of campaign starters, including maps, from 0one 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. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

On Notes From The Labyrinth, a delightful review of the erotic and violent work in progress PbtA game Praise the Hawkmoth King: “Praise the Hawkmoth King is fun, it’s just also a warning about how easy it is to become complicit. How easy it is, once you’ve been given modicum of power, to turn around and use it to punch down out of fear of becoming one of the powerless Them again — out of fear that if you don’t turn and take advantage of Them now, you’ll lose all your buttons and fucking die.”

The article, like the game, is extremely NSFW so please click the link only if you’re interested in that. But at the same time, the article, like the game, is very well-written.

II. Media of the Week

• On Yes Indie’d, I spoke to Gabriel and Le, the creators of YouTube channel, Weird Place. We talk about how they got started, their exploration of the international world of RPGs, and their game design projects.
• On Dice Exploder, a good conversation around the role of fictional details like the lightning barrier in Blades in the Dark and how they shape play in small and big ways.
• On the Rascal Reading Club, I deliver a lecture talk about Apocalypse World‘s GM section, discussing the framework it invented, how it thinks about its audience, and what “play to find out” has come to mean after all these years.

• You too can support the newsletter 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

• Ty Pitre of Mindstorm Press writes about designing settlements for sandbox play: “There was one important thing I wanted when I started designing this campaign. I want the PCs to visit settlements often, and revisit them over and over again. Each settlement should be worth exploring, spending time in, and engaging with. A good chunk of gameplay should come simply from travelling from settlement to settlement.”
• An interview with GR Michael on his urban horror skirmish game, Best Case Scenario: “Horror is a modern genre — that is, like modern art or modern poetry, it was born from political and artistic movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which formed in response to a growing cultural sense of alienation from a highly technological and increasingly deracinated and atomized world.”
• Valeria reviews fantasy juggernaut Daggerheart and sings its praises: “How funny is it that the best strategy to maximize market appeal is to look complicated while being simple?”
• The Triangle Agency team have been iterating on mission / adventure structures and formatting to make the game easier to run.
• Mint writes about her game Protect the Child and how it tries to facilitate a story about guardians and children, where they both help each other grow: “Protect the Child is, in part for all of those kids I know that did not get a happy childhood… It is a game of danger and heartbreak and struggle, but it is also meant to be a hopeful story. It is a chance to give the storytellers and the audience the ending that they wanted.”

V. 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.

• One of Us Will Die is a social deduction TTRPG where one player secretly knows that their character will die. Follow the Kickstarter now!
• desert is a free 42-page roleplaying game and toolkit for GMless campaigns in the near future. Create cities, run factions and navigate a point-based security economy.
• Live on Kickstarter: Native American creators (and allies) are building a fantasy setting based on Native American cultures and folklore. Rules light and indie system friendly!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Mists of Akuma, a setting and campaign for D&D 5e
• Good Society and its expansions that introduce other genres apart from Regency romance.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

The Bloggies begin and end in a whirlwind. The winners for the main categories have been announced. Here are my favorites among them:

• In Advice, it’s Writing Rooms in Pairs which is Sean McCoy’s technique for populating dungeons.
• In Critique, its How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons, which is the start of series on Jaquays’ influence.
• And of course, Mapping the Blogosphere is a cool project.

I also enjoyed this critique of the Bloggies categories that asks: where is the poetry? Given that these change each year, it’s very possible that next year’s event incorporates something like this.

(I think it will always be a dungeon-y focused thing because that’s the focus on both sides of the equation: what the audience is interested in and what’s being blogged about. It’s a cool way to follow that scene.)

II. Media of the Week

• Quinns Quest is back with a review of, gasp, a PDF? People said it couldn’t be done! Anyway, it’s Public Access from The Gauntlet. (Can’t embed the video because it’s age-restricted, I think.)

• You too can support the newsletter 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

• It Came From The Bookshelf reviews another supplement for Mage the Awakening and comes away baffled: “If we could subpoena the emails of White Wolf, circa 2005-2009, we would see a conspiracy at the highest levels, where the people in charge of the editorial direction of the line knowingly, and with malice of forethought, pursued a calculated strategy to make the overall cosmology of the game as janky and unpleasant as possible.”
  • I find these reviews funny and I hope you read them in the same light.
• This is thorough overview of the way different PbtA games do “bonds” or generally try to connect the character together through relationships.
• Jeeyon Shim has a fun post about worldbuilding by creating a glossary of words and what they mean in the setting.
• Burn After Running has a nice breakdown of three different ways we read RPGs: The Daydream Skim, The Proper Read,The Prep Reference.

Opportunities

• The IGDN Tabletop Diversity Foundation is looking to support four marginalized and underrepresented designers through mentorship and grants.
• The Diana Jones Award for Emerging Designer is open for nominations for new designers (i.e. have not published before 2023).

IV. What am I playing?

I had my first moment of frustration with Gradient Descent this week. It’s nothing to do with the game really, more a by-product of dungeon exploration and PDF design. I had the party split up and go into separate rooms. This led to me furiously flipping through two sections and then one of the sections referenced an NPC that was sketched out in another section — so now I was getting lost between three different sections.

I also fell prey to an interesting thought pattern that was interesting to observe. Because it’s a dungeon with multiple entry points, the players might be moving “forward” but as the GM you have to flip “backwards” to a previous page. This is a very obvious thing to happen because it’s not a linear dungeon and so the book is sketched out in one direction but that’s not necessarily how people will move through it. I shouldn’t have been surprised but in play, I wasn’t prepared and getting getting confused. It’s a small thing, partly due to my own inexperience with running dungeons. But it’s also not a skill I expect to get much better at either!

I’m enjoying this game — the characters just learned of the central tension of the game, the existence of androids that are functionally human in every biological way but are controlled by Monarch, the AI that designed them. They immediately have to consider whether they are such an android, whether their friends are androids, and so on.

The whole experience of this space has been weird and surreal to them. They’re being treated strangely — sometimes friendly, sometimes threateningly, never getting straight answers. There’s a building sense of “something is up and we’re going to find out what it is”. The problem is of course I’m starting to worry is whether there is a good answer to that mystery or not.

So far, the answer to “why did these characters wake up in deep freeze with their memories wiped” has been “Monarch is running some weird experiment”. Monarch is running hundreds of experiments all the time, so it’s very plausible that this is one of them. But what is the experiment about? Something to do with infiltrator androids but I’m not sure what. I am to some extent playing to find out that answer.

This isn’t how some people like doing it — they want a concrete answer. But I’m not that person. I’m interested in keeping that question open and seeing whether my players force the game to resolve that tension or not. The joy of using Psi*Run is that the players answer their own questions about their backstory and discovering their backstory is the key driver of their exploration. They’ll need my help to do it but it’s going to be a collaboration and I’m keen to find out their half.

V. 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.

• From the creator of Goth Borg comes an all new Daggerheart C̶a̶m̶p̶a̶i̶g̶n̶ Villain Frame! Get 29+ new Adversaries and more HERE.
• Barkane: The RPG You Play With Your Dog is beginner friendly, action-journal RPG. Tail your wizard doggo through 10 walking quests. Now on ZineQuest!
• Barbabianca is a collaborative storytelling game for 3-4 players about treacherous memories and poisoned words set in rural 20th-century Italy, by award-winning studio NessunDove. Funding for Zinetopia till Feb 27!
• Play Fearless: Greatest Crits — curated RPG zine of table-tested GM insights shaped by actual play and lessons the hard way. Small print run, PDF available. One week left.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Downcrawl and Skycrawl are two well-reviewed setting toolkits from Aaron A Reed, bundled with some adventures.
• The giant hexcrawl Wolves Upon The Coast as well as the poetic sourcebooks &Monsters, &Treasure, some of Luke Gearing’s best work.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

The No ICE in Minnesota bundle is live. It’s already raised a ton of money for a immigrant legal assistance organization.

But if you haven’t picked it up, it contains thousands of games, including Exquisite Biome (a worldbuilding game), Demon Driven To The Maw (a nice Cairn adventure), Desert Moon of Karth (a Mothership setting/adventure), Girl Underground (Alice in Wonderland PbtA game), and so much more.

And some kind soul has made a spreadsheet with all of them sorted into categories.

II. Media of the Week

The Bloggies have begun and Clayton has released the list of post for those who want to read some of the best of the blogging scene. Voting will open next week, I believe!

But it’s in this section because some generous volunteers have been turning these posts into podcasts so you can just listen to them if that’s what you’d prefer.

• You too can support the newsletter 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, Essays

• I enjoyed this post called “Why I Like Binary Resolution” that basically argues that binary doesn’t mean “success/fail” but any two states, including “success/success with a cost”. But importantly, the two states can change from roll to roll. It’s a framing that I hadn’t considered and have decided I really like.
• The Triangle Agency patreon is publishing some useful GM guidance, helping people figure out how they want to approach the game. The first post is about how missions end, or how to end them.
• ElmCat blog has a nice post called “Common, Recalled, Obscure” that takes a framework for thinking about hexes and applies to character knowledge of the world. This feels like a natural extension and framework to me, very elegant.
• Since I’ve been running Gradient Descent, I was curious when found this post where Ben L elaborates on a minor reference to a sacrament of the Minotaur and turns it into a thoroughly defined part of the game. Because I chose to start my campaign differently, I am sure this will never come up but it was cool to see someone else’s process.
• A Knight At The Opera has a long essay about how the value of mapping and navigating the dungeon as the challenge that made that type of play interesting. I have never done this and probably never will but it does sound fun to play a game that gives mapping that central focus.
• Aaron Marks wrote an interesting piece called Five Tiers of RPG Publishing, which tries to divide the RPG scene according to scale of revenue. It’s a sharp exercise though the estimates are just estimates.
  • On Bluesky, Fred Hicks wrote a thread contextualizing Evil Hat a little better and sharing their financials.
• Not RPGs but I enjoyed this essay about non-commercial games festivals in the public arts model. It begins with the news that the venerable Free Play Australia, a games non-profit, might be shutting down and generally explores the challenges of organizing events for games outside the standard commercial convention model.

Reviews

• TTRPG Fans has an overview of the new Pendragon sourcebook, The Sauvage King.
• On the Valeria Loves blog, there’s a cool interview with Isabelle M Ruebsaat, the designer of Girlframe, a lesbian mechsploitation game. If you don’t know what any of that means, the interview will help but Valeria digs into the game as a trans work: “Girl Frame is the first game I’ve read since Dungeon Bitches that feels by us and for us, instead of merely about us.”
• Kieron Gillen counts down from 97 to 90 in their list of favourite RPGs of all time.
• On tumblr, 6* Things I Love About Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics (as a non-tactics gamer).

Misc

• I’ve been watching Judd run The Bureau, an adventure for Liminal Horror, and is clearly meshing with it much more than Impossible Landscapes. It plays in a similar thematic space but has a completely different design and play philosophy. Very good point of comparison for people who want that.
• Chimera Hearts is a discord server that incubates some cool community-sourced projects, like the TTRPG Tree, which is a wiki to catalogue the lineages and inspirations between games.
• For layout folks, Fari RPGs has a cool tutorial for using text styles to make text look like tables without using the often janky table tool.

IV. What am I playing?

I missed two weeks of the newsletter, which is why this week is even more packed than it usually is. It was mostly personal stuff, like my weekends being eaten with care responsibilities, but we are back now!

Band of Blades and Gradient Descent continue to happen. We’re getting into the groove for both and I’ve more or less stopped having to think about the game at all. I can show up 15-30 minutes before the session is supposed to start and be fine.

One of the things I’m playing with in Gradient Descent is how random encounters work. In the game, it happens when the GM rolls doubles on their encounter check, which is very rare. I could’ve houseruled it into something I liked more but since we’re playing PsiRun. I turned into something that the players had control over.

So this is a weird array of results but the key detail here is that the players assign a die to this out of their pool and so they decide if there is an encounter and what’s the tenor is. So it’s the encounter check and the reaction roll, if you want to use the technical terms.

It’s been really interesting to see my players take to the fact that they are completely in control of how complicated their lives get. That transparency has made them comfortable and they are occasionally deciding that things aren’t exciting enough and they want something potentially dangerous to happen. My belief is that this is an approach which is going to pay dividends even in games where they don’t have this control. Taking risks is good!

But even if they never picked the bad option here, I’d be fine and it would also fit with the intent of the game, because Gradient Descent goes out of its way to encourage GMs to make every encounter a talking one, rather than something violent. Combat is a powerful spice, as the Warden’s Operations Manual goes.

V. 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.

• Slightly Random Tables is a motley assortment of inspiring ideas to slot into your games, from Slightly Unpleasant Diseases to Slightly Unsociable Aliens. Part of Kickstarter’s Zine Quest.
• Want to play a TTRPG about kids with extraordinary powers on the run from danger? Back Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter in February 2026!
• Punderworld is a new tabletop *wordplaying* game by Linnie Schell powered by puns, wordplay, and groan-worthy Dad Jokes. Join the campaign now on Kickstarter!
• Mystery Snacks, a collection of easy-to-use TTRPG mysteries, is funding during Zine Month! This game features drop-in scenarios that serve up cozy, silly, and twisty whodunit vibes to your table.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Shadowdark-compatible adventures from various creators. Only 2 days left to check this out because of the skipped weeks!
• Forbidden Psalm, miniature games based on Mork Borg.
• A bundle of two-player games for Valentine’s Day including I Have The High Ground, Chiron’s Doom, and A Modern Prometheus.
• Neon City Overdrive, a cyberpunk RPG based on Freeform Universal.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

Apologies for spotlighting myself but: over at Rascal News, I’ve launched a new podcast called the Rascal Reading Club. It’s a book club podcast in two parts. The first section is where I read a book (the first episode about the Wardens’ Operations Manual for Mothership) and the second part is where I respond to listeners’ comments. The episode comes with some discussion questions but you’re also free to just share whatever comes to mind.

Our first season is going to be about GM advice and so I’ll be reading either the GM sections of books or standalone GM books. I’m calling this season ‘The Most Impossible Fun Thing’ because GMing is simultaneously this thing that is talked about as very hard to do (and can feel like that) but at the same time is something that people are just doing all the time.

Anyone can join in the conversation, you don’t have to be a subscriber. So check out the first episode, share your thoughts with me, and join the club!

II. Media of the Week

• See above!
• But also, Dr Emily Friedman is doing some fun vlogging about organizing game nights and an ongoing experiment in playing more RPGs.

• You too can support the newsletter 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

• For the AV Club, Cameron Kunzelman writes about A Land Once Magic, a worldbuilding game by Viditya Voleti: “The game is, in essence, a provocation to the genre, asking “how do we move fantasy in a new direction?””
• Grant Howitt previews Salt, the third game in the Spire and Heart series. Howitt is such an engaging writer and there’s some really lovely insight to the process here: “Salt is, then, a love-letter to a man I admire and adore. And that’s how most games happen, really, isn’t it? You find a group of people and you make something for them, about them, and about you… Games are things we do for each other.”
• On Rascal, designer Gwen C writes some charming responses to our new questionnaire about Infinite Revolution: Overdrive, her colourful game about mechs and magical girls and going very very fast. (Free to read, membership required)
• It Came From The Bookshelf writes about Imperial Mysteries, a supplement for the first edition of Mage the Awakening: “The new mechanics – being able to bundle up your body and spirit onto a mystic pathway across the Abyss, to actually, literally enter the Supernal Realms as part of a quest-driven magic system that allows players, through the in-setting actions of their characters, to rewrite significant parts of the setting – they’re really fucking good.”
• Malcolm Craig gives an interview about his research into apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic games as a part of the Doominations series: “These games and their play are these kind of unofficial narratives of the nuclear age, of fear of apocalypse, of dealing with the nuclear threat of interpreting the world around them.”
• Clayton Notestine writes about the idea of “dominant mechanics”, which are mechanisms in a game that “will take precedence and replace the effects of other mechanics regardless of how those other mechanics are designed or presented.”
  • The example here is HP and how if it’s there in a game, players will focus on reducing it to zero, even if there’s other ways to win a combat.
• Geek Native writes about Acheron Games, the designers of Brancalonia, and their new game about witches running a cafe.
• If you haven’t heard about Zine Month, the upcoming event in February, this post lays out some of the history.
• Emily Entner writes a bookmark-able post for designers about the ideal way to deliver your manuscript to a layout artist.

IV. What am I playing?

I employed one of my great roleplaying insights in Band of Blades this week and want to share it with you. It’s for both players and GMs but GMs will particularly get tremendous mileage out of it.

It’s simple: When trying to roleplay a powerful character, never answer the question.

There will be many situations in which you’ll be trying to play somebody who is in some way meant to be more powerful than whoever you’re talking to. One way to do that is to never answer their questions. But, and this is very important, you must say something that isn’t “no”.

It’s actually important to move the conversation forward and you do this by answers another question. You see, powerful people don’t tell you what you want to know, they tell you want they want to tell you. You can ask them a question but if it’s the wrong question, they’ll imagine you asked them the question they wanted to answer and answer that.

Here’s two example scenes. In the first one, we’re going to do it straight.

Player: Do you know where the monster’s lair is? Can you tell us?

Powerful Wizard: I do and I’ll tell you if you do me this task first.

In the second one, we won’t be answering the question.

Player: Do you know where the monster’s lair is? Can you tell us?

Powerful Wizard: Yes, you can be helpful to me.

Player: What do you mean?

Powerful Wizard: I don’t expect you to come back alive. You’re too weak. You lack the necessary experience points. But if you do, I’ll share the information you seek.

In some sense, this is just good writing. You’ll see this is all your favorite shows. People don’t reply to questions directly. Everything is processed through preconceptions and emotions. I like this technique because it helps me portray characters that aren’t on the same level as the players. It takes a little practice because you have to do it consciously. But it does make almost every scene more interesting.

Maybe to flesh it out more: When trying to roleplay a powerful character, never answer the question that was asked, answer the question you want to answer.

PS: Remember to break this rule, when not doing so would be nonsensical.

V. 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.

• Nothing this week!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Sleepy Hollow, a 19th century horror RPG that uses the Year Zero system.
• Dead Air: Seasons, a post-apocalyptic game with a focus on base building from Italian studio World Anvil Publishing.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

Carouse Carouse is a group newsletter that started last year and I’m not sure I’ve ever linked to it before. It’s great! The latest issue has an end of year awards style post, curated links, and a wacky review of Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?!, a solo game by artist and designer Wym Lawson that oozes with charm.

Here’s a taste of the review: “Reincarnated has a nested bedrock of meta-horror that bangs supremely hard because it is both perfectly appropriate for the genre and pushing at the edges of what the genre allows. As you tinker with the game trying to get your perfect ending, it splits apart, unravels, distends into new and unrecognizable shapes. All changes to all things are permanent forever, and how ethical can a seduction be when you have knowledge from across multiple timelines and lifetimes?”

II. Media of the Week

• Weird Place made another video exploring the global RPG scene and they used some of my reporting to do it (which was a pleasant surprise).

• You too can support the newsletter 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

Reviews

• On Old Men Running The World, there’s a fun discussion of Deathmatch Island that touches on the beautiful visual design, the strengths of the Paragon system, and the important of good endings.
  • I’m really drawn to the idea of a “who is best / i am best” dynamic as the authors put it but there was this weird thing that happened when we played Agon where it seemed like there was a lot of stuff that being shoehorned to fit into that shape. I think Paragon games handle the core idea well but I’m still looking to understand how they envision everything else that happens at the table.
• On the Monkey X blog, a look at Hillfolk and the Drama system: “If your group lights up when someone says, “I need you to say you’re proud of me,” this is your dessert.”
  • I’ve never read the original game but I’ve always wanted to play Malandros, Tom McGrenery’s adaptation that moves the action to Brazil. There’s something about how it imagines play that I feel is useful to have experienced and considered, even if it’s not to your taste.

RPG Theory

• Jeff Stormer writes “Against Games That Say I Can Do Anything (But That I Can’t Play Sonic the Hedgehog)“, which is a nice critique of some bad discourse.

Fantasy Games

• Mazirian’s Garden, one of my favourite OSR blog, is back with a niche but insightful post. It’s about what’s important to express when writing monster encounters in RPGs. Essentially, it takes the ‘reaction roll’ as sacrosanct and then gives the monsters unique and flavourful responses to it.
  • A lot of OSR games assume that encounters aren’t automatically fights and the reaction roll is key to that. But they also just assume that the GM will interpret the reaction roll and figure out an interesting non-combat context for the encounter out of thin air. Which is weird because that’s actually the most important or useful thing a scenario designer could be telling me.
• The Was it Likely blog recommends a dungeon and describes the rules they’re using to run it and it sounds so wild and fun: “Each of your HD is someone in the city of Emermeraan who believes you will be the one to undo Mordrannen’s Truth, and sings for you while you are off questing. each point of HP is a song they will sing.”
• Yggdrasil is a fantasy games magazine by artist Keith Senkowski that I think some people out there will really dig. The latest issue is a bestiary inspired “by the interview work of Studs Terkel and the second Ravenloft Monster Manual“. It’s full of weird, horrible, and original monsters with descriptions written like they’re oral histories.
• On that note, Stu Horvath is spending the next 12 weeks looking at non-RPG monster books, some of them for kids, some of them for adults.

Misc

• There’s a game jam collecting games that will eventually be in a charity bundle raising money for orgs in Minnesota fighting ICE.
• EnWorld readers voted for a list of their most anticipated games in 2026 and as is the norm, it’s a list that reflects the popularity contest nature of the exercise. A couple of games made by Youtubers (Deathbringer and Broken Empires), a couple of big IP stuff (Invincible and Discworld), and a couple of new editions (Warhammer and Ars Magica).

IV. What am I playing?

We kicked off the new Band of Blades campaign last week and I really enjoyed using my opening spiel to just hype the game we’re going to play: “A lot of games want to be Band of Blades but they aren’t. Only Band of Blades is Band of Blades. Lucky for us, we are going to be playing Band of Blades.” I’m so comfortable selling (maybe even overselling) this game because I know how good it can be, which is the joy of replaying something you love.

One of the interesting things that this game does is that it kicks off with a tutorial mission of sorts. It’s not expressly framed as a tutorial but that’s what it is. It’s a hot start (hey, reference to last week’s issue!) and plays fast and straightforward, letting everyone make a few rolls and understand th mechanics, including the GM. As I was running it, I kept going, “Oh right, I need to look up how this works and maybe write it down so I have it handy next time”.

It’s not something every game needs to do but it’s something that’s going to happen in every game (the rough first session) so it’s nice to see a game think about that. This is a sentiment that’s going to keep coming up — how much the designers seem to have thought about the act of playing their game. It’s not perfect (like I could’ve really used more specific details about the obstacles that might arise) but it’s pretty great.

V. 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.

• Mystery Snacks, a collection of easy-to-use TTRPG mysteries, is funding during Zine Month! This game features drop-in scenarios that serve up cozy, silly, and twisty whodunit vibes to your table.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• A bundle of Mork Borg adventures and scenarios from Christian Eichhorn, one of that scene’s most prolific creators.
• Arden Vul, one of the most iconic megadungeons, along with VTT support.
  

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

A couple of links that are interesting to put next to each other:

1. Martin Ralya has a very thorough post about how they’re running a zero prep (well, they do campaign prep but almost nothing session-to-session) improvised sandbox campaign with Traveller.
   • While most sandbox theory comes from the OSR or older trad design, it’s nice to see someone approach from the position of “how to do this while making everything up one the spot more or less”. The answer is oracles and, you know, just making stuff up. What? You wanted more? The answer wasn’t going to be mindblowing! It’s an old conversation, what did you expect? You’ll have to read the post for the finer points and the details.
2. Orthopraxy blogs about trad adventure design, in response to a Questing Beast video that criticized the layout and structure of modules from Goodman Games. The author quotes a paragraph from Impossible Landscapes about how the adventure required you to eat it, chew it, and then internalize it. Using this metaphor of “eating a book”, the post argues that there is a pleasure in consuming texts.
   • Again, it’s the olde “reading versus referencing” conversation about what a book can and should be. But it’s useful to surface this once again as it is a conversation that every book in the RPG space might have with itself.

II. Media of the Week

• Nothing this week!

• You too can support the newsletter 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 the Thought Crimes’ newsletter, Quinn Murphy publishes his key note speech about TTRPGs and Hip Hop. Don’t go in expecting a graduation lecture. It’s an introduction to how these two mediums have more in common than you might think. It’s FUN to hear from someone who cares about both.
• TTRPG Fans has two posts sharing the news of what to expect from Crows, an early-development dungeoncrawler from MCDM, and Blades ’68, the imminently-crowdfunding expansion for Blades in the Dark that trades grunge for classic rock.
  • I’ve played Blades ’68 and it’s great. If you like the original, I think you’ll like this too.
  • I’m a bit disappointed with the news about Crows because I was hoping for a lighter version of Draw Steel but I feel like we might be getting a different game. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s easy enough to make a lighter version of Draw Steel — I should actually just read it.
• On tumblr, Talen Lee writes a nice post about David Prokopetz’s Eat God, which is about weird muppets trying to well, eat god.
• As the Bloggies continue, Clayton Notestine rounds up the winners across all the categories in the previous years.
• There’s a TTRPG For That makes a cool list of games aimed at kids in grade school.
• Age of Ravens posted their deep dive into Mutants and Masterminds 2e as well a guide for 3e for new players.

IV. What am I playing?

We played the first session of Gradient Descent via Psi*Run. Gradient Descent is a mini-megadungeon by Luke Gearing for Mothership. It’s an achievement of form factor, fitting in a giant, sprawling space in just 60 pages. It’s core question is a version of ‘what maketh a man’. If androids can be made that are functionally the same as people, what does that mean for humanity? It’s an almost 20th century question, something that people wrote about in ’60s sci-fi novels. I’m keen to see if it feels good in play.

Psi*Run is one of the classic storygames from Meguey Baker. It’s about amnesiac mutants running from unknown men in black. It’s famous for being the primary vehicle for the very satisfying Otherkind dice mechanic, where you roll and then allocate dice to outcomes. It’s a bit like Citizen Sleeper the videogame if you’ve played that.

I chose this combination because there’s a suggestion in Gradient Descent for starting players off in a cryopod without their memories. It seemed to fit well and I was excited about the odd combination. But I knew — and this proved to be true — that the “you start the game with no memories” is the coldest of starts.

If you imagine a hot start as being thrown into the action in media res with action and explosions happening right away, a cold start is when things take a while to warm up. Players can feel lost when trying to decide how to roleplay so actions are tentative. We only get to do 15-30 minutes of actually playing so I’m not worried yet but I’m hoping after our first full session of play, we’ll be fine. Psi*Run as a system should do its job and get us going.

V. 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.

• Fellow creators! Get some art for your next release without resorting to DEMONIC AI. My creepy hand-drawn ink illustrations are SUPER CHEAP and come with a very generous Creative Commons license.
• Archmage’s Gate is a standalone, open-world solo adventure RPG gamebook. Compatible with 5e & OSR.
• Double, double, toil and trouble! Wizards in Elizabethan England, wielding spells based on 16th century grimoires and folklore. Forget fireballs. Magonomia is the TTRPG of Renaissance wizardry!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Painted Wastelands, a dangerous, pastel setting for Old School Essentials.
• A historic archive of Strike Force by Aaron Allston, including the original 1988 superhero adventure and thousands of pages of notes from his 22 year campaign.
• And alongside, a bundle of Champions 6e.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

It’s a new year and so welcome to the new format for the newsletter! Like I said in my previous post, I’m taking the pressure of having a whole post every week ready to go and focusing on curation. The main change is this new section at the top, which I’m calling the spotlight. It is going to be the place for highlighting either the most interesting thing of the week or a collection of links that together make up what I think the previous week was “about”.

In that vein, lot of the writing I saw over the last couple weeks were retrospectives about the year that just ended. So here are some I found interesting:

• First, the most thorough round-up of the ups and downs of the last year for TTRPGs is probably Shannon Applecline’s post about 2025. It covers tariffs, AI, censorship, crowdfunding, and more — not exactly the happiest list for obvious reasons.
• Geek Native has some very cool tidbits of the business side of game publishing. They’ve published a manually-collated list of DriveThruRPG’s best-selling products (Daggerheart and Fabula Ultima) as well as a less labor-intensive list of the same for Exalted Funeral (Old School Essentials and boxed sets).
  • They’ve also got this slightly bleak look into how many products used genAI.
• Interested in crowdfunding? Skalchemist’s Cloud has an analysis of 2025 in the context of the last decade. The most executive of summaries is that it was more projects than ever but less money going around.
• I saw a small handful of “Endies”, essentially talking about your favourite games as if you were giving them awards, and there was a fun trend on Bluesky of people posting 10 games they wanted to play in the new year that I found very enjoyable and inspiring. Too many to link but I enjoyed this list by Hendrik Biweekly of games they played.

II. Media of the Week

• Instead of recapping the year, what if we recapped the last 15? Aaron Voigt’s video explores the idea of the last decade and a half as a golden age for indie games. It’s a huge sweep of time and I love this attempt to summarize it through important milestones. I got jumpscared as I watched and my own name popped up, luckily it’s only for 5 seconds so this video remains blissfully me-free otherwise.

• One of the podcast episodes I always look forward to: the Open Hearth’s Game of the Year discussion where 30+ members (including me) share their favourite game that they played in 2025. It’s just a nice, fun, warm listen.

• You too can support the newsletter 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

Essays

• The Weeping Stag blog takes on an interesting challenge: drafting a post-colonial approach to a very cool Traveller adventure with some problematic themes. This is something I’m regularly thinking about and I enjoyed watching someone think through the specifics of what they would change.
• This is a cool bit of RPG theorizing. It’s called “Books [Verb] Play” and it’s about all the things that RPG books do. They inspire play, but also align, incentivize, limit, and so on. It’s very common for people to theorize narrowly but I love this approach that tries to describe widely.
• Gus L writes about what he sees as the future of OSR: “I propose viewing the present crop of games and scenes derived from OSR designs and OSR spaces as new approaches to indie RPG design and play, loosely linked by the Post-OSR term. No one gets to wear the rotting crown of “THE” OSR – but we’re all its horrible little children.”
• With the caveat that I haven’t verified a word of this: Some solid sleuthing into those ads for huge bundles of D&D maps that you might see on instagram and similar. The content seems to be AI slop, which is unsurprising. But the companies themselves seem to be using AI to pose as family businesses, with fake photos of the founders and so on.

Reviews

• The Dicepool are blogging about their impressions of the new Call of Cthulhu campaign, Sutra of the Pale Leaves, which is a take on the King in Yellow set in Japan. I enjoyed the readthrough but the book isn’t for me, which is a very useful thing that a series like this can do!
• Ram S talks about Tania Herrero’s dark fantasy adventure Crown of Salt and got me excited about it again.

News and Misc

• The IGDN has opened nominations for its 2025 Indie Groundbreaker awards.
• The Bloggies are open for submissions and have already gotten more than 300 nominations. While it tends to be OSR-focused, this year’s organizer Clayton Notestine is pushing for more mixing.
• Yochai Gal talks about going full-time publishing Cairn and supporting supplements for it.
  • On that note, Judd Karlman has been adapting Forgotten Realms into Cairn backgrounds and published it for free.
• Building off a thing that Gal did for Dungeon World and Into the Odd, here’s the Mythic Bastionland syllabus, which tries to collect all the most important links for people interested in that game. (and you can contact the author to add more.)
• A nice list of recommended GMless games.

IV. What am I playing?

With the new year, I have to get my games back up and running. I’ll be running Band of Blades which will be a return to that game I love. It might be my favourite game ever. Because it’s a campaign and ruleset combined, it’ll be much more of a “replay” than say playing Blades in the Dark again. And I think that’s a really rare and cool experience in TTRPGs, outside of classic D&D or Call of Cthulhu modules. I will be channeling Andor and my feelings about the state of the world into this in what will hopefully be a rewarding way.

I’m also going to be running Gradient Descent with either ARKYVR, the Mothership hack where you’re a investigative documentary crew, or with PsiRun, which is a classic storygame that is not at all meant to be used to run modules. If I do go with PsiRun, which has the incredibly satisfying Otherkind dice mechanic, I will have to do some hacking, which is its own kind of fun. I’m considering it because I’m want to add some velocity to the process of exploring the megadungeon, rather than going room-by-room. PsiRun‘s conceit of being chased by forces, gives us that. It also has the central mechanic of recovering your memories which interlocks neatly with the killer feature of Gradient Descent, which is the question of exploring whether you’re a human or an android.

V. 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.

• Nothing this week!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• DIE: The RPG, the game based on Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s comic series, alongside some really clever scenarios.
• Old Gods of Appalachia, the podcast-turned-Cypher system RPG, with all the source books and supplements.
• The Burning Wheel, the classic character-driven fantasy game that wasn’t sold in PDF for the longest time.
• Dread Thingonomicon, a massive collection of random tables and inspirational material for GMs running fantasy 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. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

We skipped last week (unplanned) and we’re going to skip next week (planned) so this is officially the last newsletter for 2025 and since it’s the end of the year, let’s talk about my plans for 2026.

While I’ve been a journalist off and on since 2015, I’ve never actually done it full-time at a news organization. I was one of the world’s permanent freelancers. This newsletter, and the podcast, fit very well with that lifestyle. But being full-time at Rascal this year, I was reintroduced to the predominant anxiety of journalism: of not working faster, of not covering everything, not reading enough, not being enough. Either too much is happening or too little — it’s a life of dissatisfaction. You set an impossible goal — everything — and then when you don’t meet that goal, you sharpen knives of self-recrimination against the whetstone of your confidence.

Feeling overloaded is a near universal feeling, of course. Even as readers, there’s this flood of information. Wave after wave of new thing, and newer thing. It’s not new. This newsletter exists because of that feeling. It’s an act of curation in a sea of information, boiling it down into a swimming pool.

When I started in 2020, I called this the “indie rpg newsletter” because it was going to be a catch-all for everything that wasn’t well-covered. The biggest games and most active communities quickly develop little information ecosystems of their own. And if you want the dam the flood into a trickle, there are enough places to follow that only document the biggest releases. But what about everything else? Nobody’s replaced this newsletter yet. Nobody has saved me from my Sisyphean labor.

So the bottom-line is that this newsletter continues, focusing on curation. My criteria will be the same: either it’s well-written, useful, surprising, or under-discussed. It’ll be wide rather than focused on specific scenes. While it’ll remain weekly, it’ll be less consistent. And there will continue to be a bias towards games about character drama because that remains My Thing.

See you in 2026!

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

• It’s the Yes Indie’d end of the year episode: As per annual tradition, I’m once again joined by Quinns from Quinns Quest to talk about the year and forge our friendship in the fire of podcasting. It’s a good episode. It’s a fun episode. Enjoy!
• In the same spirit, three game designers, Aaron Lim, Aaron Voigt, and Aaron King got together to start a tradition of their own and record a podcast called Aaron on Aaron on Aaron, where they talk about games, novels, and 2025.

• You too can support the newsletter 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

Reviews and Retrospectives

• This is why I’m still on reddit: someone wrote a smart retrospective on runningThe Glass Maker’s Dragon, a campaign for Chuubo’s Marvelous Wishgranting Engine. This is probably of niche interest, like all of Jenna Moran’s work, but I’ve regularly seen references to this specific campaign as someone’s favourite adventure. And this review says it is “a work of immense scope, and the fact that it’s far too complicated can, I think, be forgiven, in the face of its sheer ambition.”
• Talking about campaign retrospectives, Whale Roads is a free PDF that documents a 30 person, 3 GM campaign of The Wolves Upon The Coast by Luke Gearing. It’s got art, house rules, stories, so much. I’ve only read a little bit of it but it’s truly wonderful that not only games like this are happening but we get a peek into them through these artifacts.
• Valeria has a nice review of Menagerie of Unbearable Things, “a heartbreaking 132-page full-art storybook that Tania Herrero insists is a bestiary”.
  • Herrero is one of this year’s revelations to me — an extremely talented artist and writer that started out in the Mork Borg community and won an Ennie this year for Crown of Salt.
• Indie Game Reading Club blazes through more than a dozen reviews / impressions of games that Paul couldn’t do full deep dives into. There’s a real breadth of games from Perilous Void and Ashes without Number to Exiles and Rapscallion.
• Seyed Razavi reviews Dolmenwood with usual flair: “It arrives in a cultural moment full of 5E-adjacent fantasy and neon-OSR curiosity; Dolmenwood plants a hedgerow and says “back to the woods, then,” with standing stones, saints’ bones, and a wicked sense of whimsy.”
• Idle Cartulary is doing Critique Navidad where she reviews something every day of the week in December and it’s an impressive achievement.
• Not tabletop but: In the light of censorship from VISA and Mastercard, I enjoyed this review of Horses, a video game that was taken down from Steam and elsewhere. It’s called “I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human Being“.

Articles

• The Bloggies are going to start soon but before that, we get the Gloggies, which are the best blog posts from the Goblin Law’s of Gaming community.
• MurkMail has a nice post outlining 12 NPCs archetypes that form the backbone of most adventure writing.
• Via GeekNative, I discovered this feature story on Margaret Weis and her influence on fantasy.
• I somehow missed that Stu Horvath has a newsletter for his posts about the history of the hobby. I thought they were still only on instagram.

RPG Theory

• Aaron Marks uses the onion framework from Vincent Baker’s PbtA post that was applied to the OSR and then extends it to Burning Wheel and DIE RPG. Marks highlights that by this model, you might “character” as the core of the onion for Burning Wheel which is an interesting claim that I don’t know if I agree with. The important thing is that onions remain fruitful which is good because vegetables don’t exist.
• On tumblr, Snow (Songsbirds 3e) writes insightfully about how time — the time it takes to roleplay — is a resource: “If you think of time as a currency which can be spent with your attention, then the weight of roleplaying is equal to the weight of a dice roll, or any traditional mechanic. When you decide to stop and talk, you are engaging in the game… A clock, then, is just a representation of that real world time.”

News and Misc

• Backerkit has announced April as Megadungeon Month. While it looks like it’s primarily a Goodman Games show (I’m still unhappy with how they handled their ongoing relationship with the bigots over at the Judges Guild), there’s a couple other projects. The one that seems made for me personally is a “metadungeon” for DIE written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan where each level corresponds to a decade in RPG history. I don’t know if the ghost of Gygax is showing up (for libel reasons) but I love the idea. I’m sure it will be a good read if nothing else.
• RPG Major are doing a musical theater actual play show. They’re playing Genesys but also making up songs on the spot? Wild.

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.

• Creators with Native American heritage (and allies) are building a fantasy setting based on pre-colonial North America. Rules light and indie system friendly! Coming soon to Kickstarter.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• A Forged in the Dark bundle featuring the Chew RPG, Neon Nlack, and Family of Blades.
• Magical Kitties Save The Day, a delightful game designed for play with children form Atlas Games.
• Mongoose Traveller: a grand 800-page Ancients campaign as well as a revived bundle of supplements and source books.
• Tales of the Valiant, Kobold Press’ 5e alternative, with the core books and five 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. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

People are posting about their favourite games of the year (regardless of when they were released) using the term Endies 2025. I did this last year but Endies does have a certain ring (maybe a worse ring) than Games of the Year so let’s try it out. Here’s what I got:

One-Shot Game I Played With Everyone I Could: Last Train To Bremen by Caro Asercion

Last Train to Bremen ended up being a game I trotted out to so many people. I played with my friends, my colleagues, different gaming groups (who are also friends but you get the idea). The groups who embraced the petty drama of band members who hate each other had the most fun but mostly everyone had a good time. It’s got a lot of design that makes it easy to introduce to people: pre-written roles, a tight structure, rounds of liar’s dice as the core gameplay. And the loop of “let’s play this dice game” and “let’s do storytelling” is a steady and comforting rhythm that I’m going to seek out in more games. I think it would work particularly well for sports-themed games so if someone is looking for a project, please go for it.

One-Shot Game I’m Going to Play With Everyone Next Year: Decagone by Waco Matrixo and Bodie H

This is a one-shot Mothership scenario that revolves around a real-time ten minute time loop. So every ten minutes, the players restart in an elevator and have to start again (with knowledge of how the loop works). I don’t think you need any kind of system for this one-shot. You could literally toss a coin as the resolution mechanic if you don’t want to use Mothership (and want to finish it 90 minutes versus 3 hours). But it’s a very tight design. Almost too simple on the surface. But it’s just serious and silly enough in the right places to work. I’ve run it once and everyone had such a good time, a lot of laughter all around. I’m going to pre-generate some more explicitly absurd characters with secret agendas and keep them ready for when I run the game next. Maybe finesse the ending. But check this one out.

Funniest Pre-Gen Characters: False Kingdom by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol

Because we’re on the subject, there was so much sheer delight at my table in just picking who to play in this free game. There are a dozen or so characters and each of them are either comical, gross, or both. There was a lot of laughter!

Favourite Ending of the Year: Harvest by Luke Jordan

I can’t believe that a GM-less game gave me a good ending. It’s a sign of good design, a great table, as well as how much better I’ve gotten at improvising over the last 5 years. Hopefully it’s not gauche to say something like that but I think it took confidence and experience I didn’t have before to play this game well. You can read more thoughts about the game on Rascal if you’d like but the gist of it is that I played around 6 sessions of this folk horror masterpiece and had a fantastic time.

Favorite Sandbox: Beyond the Pale by Yochai Gal

I played three sessions of this and thought it was an extremely well-designed town and scenario. It has the gentle charm of a morality story or wisdom tale as well as the sharp edge of commentary. Apart from Mythic Bastionland, this was my primary taste of what OSR sandbox play has to offer and that fairy tale nature of both is making me have thoughts about Dolmenwood for next year. It feels like a very good mode for this kind of adventure play. I don’t have fully formed thoughts on this but I find the room-by-room play of dungeon-based play very unappealing. I come to games for drama, character, theme, etc (not challenge or mastery of a space) and there’s something about the fairy tale aesthetic that makes it seem easier to find what I enjoy in these games.

Game That Made Me Want To Do Some Game Design: Oddfolk by Maxwell Lander

Similar to moves in PbtA, Everything is an action in Oddfolk. And the modular trick at the heart is that every action is a set of four options and you roll a 1d4, choosing a number of actions equal to the result. So if you roll a 4, you have to pick all of them. It’s really simple but see how Max and his guest writers played with the options on each action, it made me really excited to write my own. Especially because it looked so easy. I can write a list of four things! Anyone can! The action called ‘Try A Weird Sex Thing’ made me laugh. The four options are:
    – It’s good, actually
    – You get an inopportune cramp
    – It becomes named after you
    – Someone is trying to have it banned

Oddfolk is free and you should check it out and see if it inspires you to write your own little game-poems.

Well, that’s it for me. 

If you want more lists, check out posts from Chris Longhurst aka Potatocubed (who has some really cool picks including a Microscope-based game I hadn’t heard of before) and Caradoc (who among other games played 30 sessions of Candela Obscura).

Yours best-of-ly,

Thomas

PS. Rascal has a Christmas sale and you can get a subscription for 1$. That’s literally as low as we could go. I’ve written about a lot of these games already at great length on that site and you could read all of that for basically free!

II. Media of the Week

• Weird Place have a slick vlog-style peek into their time at PAX Unplugged.

• Quinns did a very cool video about four boxed games. This one is one of my favourites because I love the weirdness of the games on display. Tacklebox sounds amazing. And for a very brief second, you can see my name in the credits of Lovecraftesque 2e.

• You too can support the newsletter 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

• Sigh, I forgot to link Valeria’s house-rule for Mythic Bastionland about making promises so here it is. Apologies,will make sure this doesn’t happen EVERY week.
• Judd has a new crew for Blades in the Dark that I really like called Necronauts, basically rogue scientists doing crime to fund their experiments to maybe, if you want, save the world. I really like this campaign idea and I’m reminded me again how much “design a crew sheet” is a great way of expanding the game towards new horizons.
• It Came From The Bookshelf reviews Arms of the Chosen, a supplement for Exalted: “Arms of the Chosen is one of those rare books where I love everything about it except certain fundamental, load-bearing design decisions so I kind of feel obligated to effusively praise it even as I propose tearing it down to its foundations and rebuilding it from scratch.”
  • The problem is, of course, the idea that of grand power that you will spend a year playing to unlock so you can use it once, maybe.
• Walking Mind has a nice “wheel of values” as a tool for worldbuilding. Instead of good and evil, by building out communities based on values, you get to map out natural alliances and divisions to inspire the political dynamics of the setting.
• Ben Robbins is organizing his website with over 20 years of blogging through an index that highlights his best work.
• Cannibal Halfling Gaming write up a review on Last Kiss by Brian Liberge: “Ever feel like the world is out to get you? It is. Five radical teens with attitude should not be responsible for saving the world. …. What will you do before it all ends? Perhaps there’s enough time for one Last Kiss…”
• The Make Moves Jam is a year-long jam to write one (or more) PbtA-style move.

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.

• Nothing this week!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• From the creator of Stars without Number, here’s Worlds without Number and its two supplements in one bundle.
• Shadowrun bundles continue with an adventure / mission collection showcasing what fifth edition has to offer.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.