a|state second edition is on sale at our webstore for a limited time. Check out the source of The Trouble Engine, and the faction rules used in Blades '68. handiwork.games/product/asta... #astaterpg

Super Nerd out with Lowell and I on Mutants & Masterminds!!

Another nostalgia game is building. TMNT & Other Strangeness is back on my desk. Prepping Wild Talents for Lifted and new tech at the IRL table. 50% funded and 5 days to go, Help me pull off an upset! Good Monday, Gamers! open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpg

“You're not having a good night, are you, John?” -Cassian I’ve been watching John Wick and musing about RPGs. So I wrote up a piece on running The Continental at your table. Focus on the institution — not the muzzle flash. Good Monday, Gamers. #ttrpg

"you not having a good night are you John?" --Cassian.

Week one in the books. A new update is live. Every piece in Play Fearless: Greatest Crits earned its place through play experience. Small run. PDF + print. If you believe good GMing is learned in motion, not in theory — I’m your huckleberry. Get in where you fit. Play Fearless.

#TurnBasedThursday Seeing everyone’s art/ui work today inspiring❤️ The diverse graphic details help me think about my WIP art direction. Zero Day Bandits (my Netrunner-inspired deckbuilder RPG) is still deep in prototype mode — placeholders everywhere. Thanks for hosting @runelightowl.bsky.social

all the boring, non-sexy stuff for prototyping card play of my deckbuilder: Zero Day Bandits. 'cause nobody's working on a Netrunner Deckbuilder game for me to play. 🤷🏾‍♂️ #indiegamedev

"Magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that, you can make anything happen." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Magic and frog monster shenanigans in Occulted KC (our Monster of the Week campaign), a Zine update and a Zero Day Bandits update. Good Monday Gamers!! #TTRPG #Gamedev

Alright, The Play Fearless Greatest Crits zine is live!! I’ve been writing Play Fearless for years. This is the part I wanted for my coffee table. If you’ve ever pulled something from this work into your own games, I’d love your support. You know what to do! #ttrpg

Hey in the run up to the crowdfunding campaign for Cold City and Hot War, (Both games are now out in PDF) I sat down with @malcolmcraig.bsky.social to chat about the upcoming new edition. You can watch (or listen) to all of the parts in one go: youtu.be/Hds6fbPzvJE #coldcity

This is one of those weeks where a bunch of small, separate things quietly click into place. None of it is flashy on its own. Taken together, though, it feels like momentum—and I’ll take that kind of Monday every Monday. Good Monday, Gamer! open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpg

Send in the Zines!! www.kickstarter.com/projects/mad...

A little something-something I’ve been working on with the most awesome @scorchadoom.bsky.social Creativity in the TTRPG space. Should be going live today, it’s been a while since I did any podcast work, a brotha’s a bit rusty!

Secret KC: Winter's Last Dance - Warm Rooms, Slow Vibes & Quiet Intentions! www.secretkc.com/p/the-big-th...

Someone ran the experiment anyway. It worked. It can’t be shut down. Occult infrastructure. Leaking systems. Bad assumptions baked into reality. Good Monday, Gamer. You Don’t Know Jack open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpg

just submitted two of my games, Birth of the Resistance Age (which is about fighting an authoritarian regime) and Imp of the Perverse (which is about ending the threat of monsters in your community), it’s not much but something’s better than nothing! abolish ice, all power to MN.

Behind the scenes of my weekly Monster of the Week campaign in an Occulted Kansas City. Practical prep, player-led discovery, table presence, and why I don’t stat baddies until I must. Friday Field Notes: Occulted KC. open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

Roll for Origin: Supers TTRPG History: Ep. 6 Godlike & Wild Talents In this ep @madjay.bsky.social and I cover Godlike, the WW2 supers game that leans into realism and consistency. Second Wild Talents, which can follow that first game's history or be recast into a generic supers RPG. #ttrpg

Your best NPCs aren’t planned. For me, they’re often player consequences. A failed roll created Bennie. Three sessions later, he’s an emergent antagonist with ambitions. I wrote about letting the table grow your villains vs forcing them. Good Monday, Gamers!! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

2025 by the numbers. Not the games I bought or meant to play. The ones that actually hit the table — plus what readers told me they need most right now, a check-in on play, people, and what really mattered. What counted most at your table this year? open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

🎷 Start Strong. Stay Out Late. 🍽️ Dive into Kansas City Restaurant Week (Jan 9–18) with prix-fixe menus & jazz vibes. Discover the best spots to start & end your night. Book early, stay late! More details: www.secretkc.com/p/start-stro... #KCRestaurantWeek #SecretKC

First Monday of 2026. No resolutions. No “must-play” list. Just a new IRL Monster of the Week table. Wrote this week’s Monday Musing about starting the year with play instead of promises. What are you carrying into your 2026 games? open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpg

🎉 Happy New Year!! 🎉 Dive into 2026 with SecretKC's guide to KC's best nights out! From First Fridays to jazz lounges, let's celebrate all month long. Check out the full scoop: www.secretkc.com/p/happy-new-... #KCnights #FirstFriday

Like most years, my ambitions far exceeded my calendar. Some games hit the table. Some lived in notebooks. Here's what worked—and my one secret weird trick for campaigns that actually get played. 🎲 Good Monday, Gamers! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

Legitimately the single best FPS campaign ever made. If you've never played it, get it.

Make a Bond movie casual Live and let Dance!

Last two Mondays of the year are easy to skip. But I’m still here — coffee in hand, Bolognese sauce simmering, writing words... open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpgs

Dogs walked, coffee brewed. back to discovering the shape of this cyber-hacker deckbuilder thing. Night club system nodes at the top, card 'deck' at the bottom. Thinking about card resolution mechanics, turn structure, stealing from Netrunner and SR:Crossfire until I figure it out. #indiegamedev

🎷✨ Winter Date Night Vibes in KC! Cozy up in igloos, sip holiday cocktails, and enjoy live jazz. Perfect for a magical night out. Naughty or nice, see you at the bar! More info: www.secretkc.com/p/winter-dat... #KansasCity

My friends! The Apocalypse World 3rd Ed kickstarter ends on Friday night. We launched with a Q&A on Reddit and I think we'd like to wrap up with a Q&A here. Ask me anything! Ask @megueyb.bsky.social anything too! www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

It might be nothing. But it doesn’t feel like nothing. This week’s Monday Musing is about: 🎲 LFG IRL 🕰️ Scheduling is the real end-boss 📚 William Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy ⚡️ dumb random inspiration Scheduling: weekly, bi-weekly, or sporadic? Good Monday, Gamer! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

Day 14 When the first babe was born glowing, the world changed. We didn’t know, at first. We, who dug in the ruins of What Was, daring monsters & each other. Lilah Blackthorn said it could live, and we would watch to see what would follow. What followed was more. So many more. #AW3rd #ttrpg #pbta

Dumb, stupid, random Inspiration. Comes at you like a train when it's ready. Gets you off track from the thing you doing, the thing you need to be working on. Got ya all wide-eyed, how didn't we see it before?! Happy Saturday. Me, coffee, fresh field notebook, riding this bullet train.

Looking back fondly on the Horde Knight and the Vulture Knight with @newmadras.bsky.social and @madjay.bsky.social, whose young knights were violent jocks from the jump, having just defeated the Ogre... youtube.com/clip/Ugkx7c-...

Easy Sunday morning. Working my Advent coffee calendar and 'discovering the shape of fun' in a prototype for a deckbuilder game that should already exist. Discovering things you can do with a digital card deck that you can not or wouldn't do with a physical one, like destroying a card! 👀🤬 #indiedev

Reminder applications for our yearly turn-based games festival, Steam sale, & showcase are open now until Dec 12th. 412 games submitted so far, hope to see even more #IndieDev / #GameDev applying over the weekend. Gaming content creators, we have visibility + keys for you too, check it out!

Vincent is threatening to write a beginners guid to designing a game the Powered by the Apocalypse way and I'll be honest, I kind of need y'all to step up so that goodness can come into the world. Just, like, 10.000 dollars more to go.

Secret KC: Jazz, Festive Vibes & Cozy Holiday Magic! www.secretkc.com/p/a-holiday-...

Who's making this a game!!

18 Days of the Apocalypse. Let's go. #AW3rd #PBTA #ttrpgs www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

I had some thoughts post-turkey, and pumpkin pie: Story first is prolly alright, and Break!! RPG is even better! Plus some stuff you might have missed! Good Monday, Gamer! open.substack.com/pub/playfear... #ttrpg

Good morning! Meg and I just added community copies to all of our games on Itch. I always say "if times are tight," but we all know that times are tight. lumpley.itch.io

This week’s Monday Musing is up: • Max turns 18 • Played a Jiangshi one-shot • Built the Anadyomene Artifact Hard Zone for AW: Burned Over • TinyCon is officially back on the workbench Good Monday, Gamer!! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

Secret KC Cocktail Run: Drinks, Vibes & City Nightlife Adventure! www.secretkc.com/p/the-kc-coc...

This week I’m playing Cairn, running Mekton/Titanfall with Max, prepping Wild Talents, sketching UVG + Burning Wheel, and the Grave Belt Hard Zone for AW: BO in the Kuiper Belt. And a thought sparked by Keith Senkowski: third spaces. I miss them. Good Monday, Gamer! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

🤯 NICE!!

Veterans Day thoughts. I’m fine — still kicking the ass of diabetes — but a lot of veterans aren’t fine. If you’ve got time, check in with your local VA or social services. Small things matter. 💪🏽 Also: Apocalypse World in space, Wild Talents and a UVG mashup! open.substack.com/pub/playfear...

Normalize Sunday Morning RPG sessions!!

Re-Sharing an oldie PSA for Veteran’s Day weekend. I’m doing fine, still kicking the asses of Diabetes, PTSD, and high BP. I got games to get to. But many veterans aren’t doing fine. Check in with your local VA and social service agencies to see how you can help out open.substack.com/pub/playfear...