the realest thing jeremy "5e" crawford ever said was that there are fundamentally only two rules questions he got asked: 1. "The rules say if X, then Y. But let me ask you: if X, then Z?" 2. "The rules say if X, then Y. But let me ask you: if X, then Y?"

Hey folks, My team went through restructuring and eliminated my position. I'm open immediately to any tabletop game design and senior game designer positions you might see. I have a plethora of games in every genre under my belt. I'm tired of the layoff cycle and am just trying to survive. 🙇‍♀️🩷

new DEAD LETTERS! new DEAD LETTERS! new DEAD LETTERS! this episode, we're reading a game studies article about the meaning of rules, the role of the game designer, and Tati's "Playtime": Miguel Sicart's "Against Procedurality!" give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/7ETC...

tomorrow!! come talk with us!!

121 of my supporters provided feedback on why my (canceled) Rust Wings campaign failed to gather the funding of previous campaigns. Here are 7 lessons I took from their feedback and hindsight: open.substack.com/pub/worldsby...

sometimes the museum makes and exhibit just for me!!

hello gamers I am back with another book club poster: this Thursday, the 23rd, we're discussing amanda lee franck's YOU GOT A JOB ON THE GARBAGE BARGE at boshi's place! come chat and discuss with us!

this is my UNHINGED rpg for TRUE SICKOS. only FREAKS get how DERANGED it is. if you're not a REAL PERVERT or ESOTERIC DEGENERATE you won't get it. it scares off NORMIES and CHUDS by being TOTALLY RADICAL. it's EXPERIMENTAL and AVANT-GARDE and OUTRAGEOUS and OUTRE. how do you play? okay roll 2d6

oh yeah since I got a couple of messages asking, here are the cards to sift through. probably uninteresting unless you're a gwent pervert like me but docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

luv to cause a stink

did you know that we do classes? this summer find out whether GAMES CAN CHANGE THE WORLD in this 8-week seminar & speculative game design workshop class taught by @hatimb00.itch.io more info & apply here: hatim.tips/can-games-ch...

one thing in particular that gets me about the $20m cyberpunk TCG is that CD Projekt Red already made a pretty darn good TCG: gwent! it was a lot of fun! gwent was digital, but the bones could easily transfer to being played by hand."cyberpunk gwent the TCG" sounds rad, I'd love to play that game!!

played in a playtest of this today and had a delightful time bullying @seanireland.bsky.social with increasingly silly physics-geometry problem-solving techniques and asking the NPCs questions like "How do you all get to your dormitories from here?"

tonight! come chat with us!

new episode of DEAD LETTERS is up! this one's about Luka Rejec's HOLY MOUNTAIN SHAKER! we discuss physical space, non-standard fantasy sources, map design, parentheticals, context-dependent AAA videogame interactions, and more. check it out! open.spotify.com/episode/1bOw...

very good post!!! RPGs have a ton to learn from urban design! also, if you're a sicko radical theory pervert and Frederick & Mehta / Marohn / Jacobs / Speck / Alexander aren't enough, you should read James C Scott's SEEING LIKE A STATE

I've been re-reading a lot of books on urbanism lately. It's going to be hard not making this profile all about urban design. www.explorersdesign.com/5-urban-desi...

good post! good post! good post! everyone in RPGs could stand to spend more time thinking, writing, and designing around explicit and implicit goals

fromsoft game narrative discourse often misses how the words are very good. item descriptions blah blah yeah sure. but "all things flourish, whether graceful or malign" is very good words

wait so can you not filter for specifically modules or adventures on DriveThruRPG anymore? am I missing something obvious?

ran to catch an impromptu bus and the driver opened the door just for me. new york I love you you're the best city in the whole world

imagine if tabletop RPGs had caught on a century earlier, in the 1870s instead of 1970s. we debate the Moscow School vs. the Tunisia School of designs. we have a decades-old subgenre called "verdylikes." some pith-helmeted Victorian makes a stat array using phrenology. there are modernist RPGs

oh, yeah, as of yesterday—more DEAD LETTERS! this time we're talkin about the (current) best Mothership module, GRADIENT DESCENT: open.spotify.com/episode/7r5S...

NYC TTRPG book club! Thursday the 9th, a week from today! we're reading Amit Moshe's LEGENDS IN THE MIST! come chat and discuss with us!

A decidedly unfunny, non-jokey newsletter for April 1st, it's The Explorateur! This month's issue has a landslide of design links including a call for volunteer judges for The Awards. Oh! And there's a non-rpg link all about book cover art rates 👀 www.explorersdesign.com/explorateur-...

i may have been too harsh on a few of my ttrpg opinions

So excited to announce the second game in the High Tide quadrilogy!! Low Tide 🌊💨👃

The answer to this question was DEAD LETTERS

new episode of DEAD LETTERS just dropped, this one about Thriftomancer's exceptional meta-system, NULL. this one's about rules and games and play! open.spotify.com/episode/2UNx...

hello gamers I have a new blogpost up, a review of a massive $4m Kickstarter third-party 5e adventure based on an AP, called THE CROOKED MOON. it's a big old honkin review, talking about info design and 5e creative direction and folk horror. I hope you enjoy! samsorensen.blot.im/review-the-c...

I spent nearly 4k words analyzing individual keys from 10 TTRPG modules and looking at how each of them chose what types of information to include and how to format it. I must regretfully admit that I'm joining team anti-bullet-points, after years of enthusiasm for them.

“It's not that our characters cannot do the things we think they should do without rules, it's that it feels fake without rules, it feels arbitrary. Systems, then, have become more real to us than our own stories, than our own characters.” Smart boy. jaredsinclair.bearblog.dev/jouer-sans-j...

one oddity I've noticed in my RPG habits is that I am pretty bad at tracking rules values—clocks, phases progression tracks—but the minute you say "this exists in the world" I transform into a logistics goblin. yes of course I would like to know which hip my scabbard is belted to, thank you

if you meet an RPG Guy and don't know his age you should always guess thirty-nine years old. not always correct, but you'll be right more often than you're wrong

we have enough one-page RPG rulesets. where are my one-room RPG adventures. I want to play Sam Barlow's Aisle (1998ish?) but it's an RPG adventure. I want to zoom in to such fine and specific detail that one room takes a whole booklet, yet also there are still things to do and problems to solve

one thing I love in my RPG games is ~tactility~. love to take my backpack off to fit through a small crevice. love to rotate a puzzle box to find the secret latch. love to learn distinguish between brick and mortar for hammering in pitons. delicious, scrumptious, fractious little details

it's Cataphracts Design Diary #5! this one has a link to the official unofficial Cataphracts HQ Discord server (link below), as well as rules update v1.2, and a big old list of all the cool posts people other than me are making about Cataphracts! samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-...

it's Cataphracts Design Diary #5! this one has a link to the official unofficial Cataphracts HQ Discord server (link below), as well as rules update v1.2, and a big old list of all the cool posts people other than me are making about Cataphracts! samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-...

We are all someone’s random encounter in this hex crawl we call life

NYC TTRPG book club! a week from today, on Thursday the 26th! at @boshis.place! we're reading Patrick Stuart and Scrap World's VEINS OF THE EARTH! be there or be square!

hello gamers did you know that I and @the-goblin.bsky.social and our offline friend Walid have a podcast now??? it's called DEAD LETTERS, episodes come out on Thursdays, and it's about—what else?—tabletop roleplaying games! this week's episode is Apocalypse World! open.spotify.com/episode/67Bj...

Have been working on a new project for blog discovery. It's now live! Check out rootr.ing! A new small hub and webring for ttrpg blogs. Read about here: elmc.at/rootring-is-...

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think the Cyberpunk TCG should be on Kickstarter.

just write one option but make it really good instead of 6 or 10 or 20 of middling quality

>walk into r/rpg >about to buy adventure >ask sub if the adventure is prose or strahd >they don't get it >pull out bluesky thread explaining what is prose and what is strahd >the comments laugh, downvote me >modmail says "it's a good adventure ma'am", locks the thread >buy the adventure >it's strahd

just cos you're writing for rpgs doesn't mean you need to add arbitrary randomisers to the text

I seriously cannot get enough of all the scenarios made recently for @lukegearing.bsky.social's Violence. Was just thinking about how I would love to see more #OSR stuff set in the real world, too.

Game Systems/Engines are not fully fleshed out Games until they have at least one introductory Adventure.

read this or else

I bolded your mom's full paragraph inside of a bullet point.