nailed it

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure 'storygames' is an exonym. like the stuff that gets lumped together as 'storygames' is wildly divergent from each other in terms of structure, specific mechanics, themes, and intended goals.

like i dunno, fundamentally i do not think that: "Get XP when somebody spends a String to influence you and you do what they ask" and "Get XP when you find a big pile of treasure and take it home" are super different conceptually.

ok so let me lay out some basics of why I think OSR/NSR stuff is good, actually, even if the scene seems to regularly terrible oppinion-havers like some geothermal geyser. in short, its because the osr framework of what you do in the game *works*.

hard agree with this. I think the best examples of a carrot are just mechanically hard-coded that when you do X, you get Y. Like "When you [do action/achieve result], get [metacurrency]" just *works*. Nice and neutral, easily understood and fluid in play.

>be tabletop gamer in 2025 >buy Black Death Rising pdf >page 1: “Do not fear your death. For when that moment arrives, I will draw my breath and your soul will come to Me like a needle to a magnet.” -Mechthild of Magdeburg >rest of book is about killing fascists and/or zombies

people please dont make me defend OSR as a design philosophy, i'm so very tired

I see the latest iteration of That Discourse is going around

older cenobites not happy that keeping up with ever more complex and bizarre human sexuality for their torture dimension means there are now at least 6 cenobites that are anthropomorphic fighter jets with enormous breasts

Songbirds is a survival horror dungeon crawler where the dead come back to life and you just constantly get brutalized. It's more disco elysium than D&D. It's got unique classes, body mods, otherworldly beings, and all you need to run the game packed into one PDF. snowttrpg.itch.io/songbirds-3e

I am in no way trying to be a buzzkill, but one thing I would love to see more of in 2026 are conversations about time, labor, & the fact that artists in many mediums are held to truly unsustainable expectations of pace and output. I'm thinking specifically about ttrpgs, but it applies broadly.

“And three wise men from the East came, bringing with them gifts of gold, frankincense and zip ties”

a fresh rework of a bit of fan art i made for the late, great Yasushi Nirasawa's signature character Nina Dolono >:3 (cw for gore and nudity)

enjoy some lesbian smut this winter ogre festival

Meanwhile in Australia: Call that a pothole?

happy festivus! shamelessly stealing the idea from @barilleon.com it is time for the annual airing of grievances. So, per tradition, for each like, I'll reply with one of my many, many grievances.

drukhari, who are living their best lives and i uncritically support

i still believe in ttrpg horseshoe theory, and think that nsr design and pbta design inevitably loop around and resemble one another

If you accuse a trans woman of being a predator/pedophile/abuse/etc because she's being rude to you, you should get you knees and your head [redacted]. You are trying to make a member of a vulnerable social group a target of social and sometimes physical violence, you should face consequences

[throwing more molotovs into the bonfire] if any chaos god deserves to be associated with the queer community, it's Tzeench.

authentic osr is from the Keep On The Borderlands region of france, otherwise it's just sparkling retro.

silent hill christmas edition confirmed?

RIGHT LETS FIRE UP THE DISCOURSE ENGINES: I think a degree of cross-compatibility is necessary to call something OSR, if you cant frankenstein it together with other OSR games then you're doing something else. NSR, maybe. And NSR is good! I love Into The Odd! But the compatibility element matters.

i should probably go on record to say that I do actually like Dungeons & Dragons, the game that exists in the text where you go into a 'dungeon', and face perils such as 'dragons'.

i struggle to think of any other creative medium where the very basic craft of the medium is so utterly disregarded that people sincerely argue that there is no such thing as 'being good at it'.

it should not be contraversial to say that D&D is not a game about cosy pastoral whimsy where you go to feasts and maybe flirt with a handsome blacksmith and nobody ever raises their voice, holy shit.

Periodical reminder that Noora Rose was ousted from this industry under false plagiarism accusations by Marcia B, involving texts that we ran thru anti-plagiarism academic software that found no instances of it, and nobody has retracted from what they did to her.

Reminder that Marcia B's "Plagiarism in Unconquered" was a piece of utter crap coasting on hbomberguy's video and already established ill will towards Noora Rose, to oust her from the community under false accusations of plagiarism. The fact it got an award is shameful.

so what im getting is that some idiot has absolutely rancid oppinions and will never be taken seriously ever again not gonna give him my rage clicks

hard, hard agree with this. people are putting effort into this shared experience, do them the courtesy of taking it seriously and engaging with it sincerely.

we have records of various larp groups (mostly on university campuses) in the late 1960s, well before the first publications of D&D. if we only include the stuff with a direct continuity to the modern hobby, larp is an older medium than ttrpgs.

they're gonna transition to playing daggerheart so slowly the audience doesn't notice

lets suppose i was thinking of publishing something for Vampire on storyteller's vault. Do people reckon it makes more sense to write for v5 or v20? Or both?

🎧 Ever wandered into a garden so beautiful you forgot the way out? 🌿 In this week’s Mage: The Podcast, Adam explores The Gardens of Inn — a decaying fae realm from the OSR classic by Emmy Allen — & shows how it can bloom in your Mage: The Ascension game. Listen

gonna be honest, I think the only viable way to make a Mage The Ascension 5th edition set in the present moment is to pull the technocracy out of power. Have a world where the technocrats have lost their control, having been usurped by technocrat-adjascent nephandic mages.

tbf as much as MtA is tricky to update to a modern day 5th-ed setting, it pales in comparison to the tonally contradictory nightmare that is changeling. I mean, I know how *I'd* do changeling, but I suspect perhaps paradox would not like my pitch of "the sidhe are the bourgoisie".

I'm loving the discourse around Mage and the Technocracy I'm seeing over on the clock app. The OWoD is all about shades of grey, and the Technocracy lives in every part of the spectrum. It's super easy to sympathize with them too, especially if you know about the state of the world *before*...1/10

This is on my mind. I have seen projects fund in 16 hours. This has dragged for 9 months, which boggles my mind. And it's only 5k? What? Sorry, I can't math. This doesn't make sense. It should have been funded in 9 hours. ko-fi.com/africantrans...

Our All Fonts Pack is on sale again for 30 days! All 1200+ fonts we've ever made, commercial use, one low price. Pay once and use the fonts forever for game dev, TTRPGs, web comics, videos, streams, merchandise, whatever! ci.itch.io/all-fonts-pack #gamedev #fonts

here's an idea, next year lets also have Cis Day Of Fucking Do Something

serious question: who is clamouring for a Thundercats rpg?

I see we're doing "systems matter" discourse again. Cute.

and that someone? hp lovecraft himself...

ok lets go changeling the dreaming kiths by their favourite musicians this is entirely vibes based and based as much on what sort of *image* would appeal to said kith as the music itself

night owls are a structurally oppressed class and subject to pervasive normalised bigotry

on the topic of cultures of play, I also think that in yet another case of horseshoe theory being real, both the most hardcore osr nutters and the artsiest storygame pseuds loop around and merge together into their own distinct subculture of people doing ttrpg theory.

I think any attempt to define modern ttrpg 'cultures of play' is a failure if it doesn't classify "5e/critrole fandom" as its own thing largely disconnected from other ttrpg (or analogue game) play-cultures, and instead largely drawing from fandom and fanfic subcultures.