I tragically couldn't fit this screencap into the post but it's too good not to share. This is campaign slogan material right here.

I'm back on Backtracking, my blogging project about working through the years and picking backlog games to finally get to. This time I played the cult hit The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay! thoughtsabout.games/blog/posts/b...

I was surprised to find one of my free #ttrpg titles (available on itch) re-uploaded to Scribd, so I reported it for removal. But looking at the account, most of their uploads are random rpg materials like character sheets. Was reporting it an overreaction? Was there a valid reason to put it there?

I'm still thinking about this show two years later.

Local bookstore chain is having a warehouse sale at one of their locations and the boxes are peppered with probably 20+copies of this book and I *have* to imagine that these were ordered because of a misreading North Carolina as Northern California

I've only worked in a couple of niche corners of the games industry (in software roles) but I constantly saw disdain and disrespect for QA folks, especially from leadership but also from engineers. It's viewed as an unskilled stepping-stone role, part of a hustle to advance into "real" contributions

Today's blog post is a little retrospective of the other thing I've been posting about incessantly this past month. Here's some stats, thoughts, and highlights from my #ttrpgpromptober posting last month! thoughtsabout.games/blog/posts/d...

Back to blogging weekly, I hope! I wrote a bit about how roguelite progression works (and works for me) and why Absolum's early hours are engaging me far more than Hades II's mid-to-late hours. thoughtsabout.games/blog/posts/g...

New Side Story is up! Austin is joined first by Keith and Janine to talk Pokemon Legends: Z-A and then by Art, Dre, and Keith again to dig into roguelite beat-'em-up Absolum! sidestory.show/15-the-mama-...

I'm still deep in my game design daily challenge rabbit hole and I haven't played as much video games as lately, so I'm going to skip my weekly blog post today. It's nice to post regularly just to practice getting thoughts out there, but anything I'd want to talk about this week is too half baked

The blog post for this week is slightly indulgent, because as anyone watching this feed knows, I've been deep in the promptober mines. So, I went ahead and did a little brief commentary about how it's been going and some of the highlights so far!

played brief D&D campaigns (4e and 5e) in college, Call of Cthulhu with coworkers a few years later, then in 2018 stumbled onto @friends-table.bsky.social and was inspired to start GMing for some college buds! Dungeon World was the first game I ran, and FatT's output kept on expanding my taste

For my weekly blog post, I wrote about how Hades II is, despite it's many triumphs, far less daring than Supergiant's earlier work. I hope the praise in here doesn't come off as hedging; I really do believe that there's great stuff in Hades II! And yet, I yearn for something more experimental...

#ttrpgpromptober sorry that there's maybe nothing funnier to me today than someone illicitly gaining the powers of ROT CLARIFICATION and PROPHECY LUNG and GOSSAMER AMPLIFICATION and CHITIN NULLIFICATION and

If I keep writing Far Too Much™ I'd better make these actually available in text form, so I'm just gonna publish the notion pages: day 1: thecastlebuilder.notion.site/promptober-D... day 2: thecastlebuilder.notion.site/promptober-D...

I'm terrible at keeping up with these daily-thing-for-a-month challenges but I also chicken out on posting them when I try, so maybe if I share then This Time Will Be Different

Tell your favorite artists you love their work

A couple weeks ago I shared a one-shot TTRPG called Dump Stat, a silly game about playing RPGs while trying to figure out what your stats/skills even are. Today, I broke down some of my design intentions. It's a little meandering and longer than I anticipated, but hopefully still pretty interesting!

this week, I made a meandering attempt to wring something fruitful out of a truly rotten topic: the Difficulty Discourse TM. I do this through the lens of its latest subject, Silksong (which I continue to avoid actual spoilers for, in case that matters to ya)

i actually love it when i lose my 500 rosaries. i am freed from the burden of devotion and can now roam pharloom with the serenity of the faithless

Last week I got to introduce some friends to tabletop RPGs, and I did so using one of my favorite nothing-like-D&D one shot games: Fiasco thoughtsabout.games/blog/posts/d...

I made a silly little one-page, one-shot #TTRPG for Dice Exploder's "1 hour or Less" jam! I proooobably missed the mark (it's more of a 90-120 minute game) but I'm still happy with how it turned out, and had fun running a playtest last week and polishing it a bit yesterday!

Here I touch on a few more thoughts about Silksong's place amid the tumultuous state of the games crit industry. But before that, I share my approach to playing a game I've been excited about for 8 years and some first impressions that I've had so far

We appear to be in the difficulty discourse mines again, which was inevitable but it always feels strange how pissed off people are. There are a million ways for a game to alienate people but for some reason difficulty seems to create the most negative emotion in the people it alienates.

Here I touch on a few more thoughts about Silksong's place amid the tumultuous state of the games crit industry. But before that, I share my approach to playing a game I've been excited about for 8 years and some first impressions that I've had so far

This is a good read, and the piece that it responds to is worth reading as well. My thoughts about this are complicated; I've had several people tell me they're excited to hear my thoughts on Silksong, which is really touching and a great reason to write about it! But...

My new new take on Rule Zero: Don't you fucking dare mess with these rules until you've played them. You think you know better than me? For my game!? Play the game the way I made it before you start tinkering. Bet you salt your food before you taste it, don't you? You make me sick. Too harsh?

Wow. Still can't wake up the Switch 2 from sleep in the dock with a controller, Nintendo? Ok.

I did a big roundup of all the things I did at PAX West, which I thought was not all that much, but then I wrote it up and realized it was a fair bit. This is a long one but it ought to be super skimmable

Until 5pm (Pacific) today, the game is still free to pick up on itch. Even if you don't check out my dev commentary post, do still pick up the game while it's free and save it for later!

I had the pleasure of doing some late-stage playtesting for Pale Dot. Not only was it great fun to play, but Devin really put a lot of thought into tying it all off into something slick, approachable, and evocative. Don't sleep on it!

I continue to post weekly, while failing catastrophically at keeping it brief! I had a lot of fun writing out some design thoughts on my little solo RPG I released earlier this year. I’m also making the game free for a week, so please grab a copy and follow along!

this is obviously very encouraging to hear but I'm also actually struggling to imagine being so completely normal about art you've been making full time for so many years. truly some wise old hermits on a mountaintop type shit

I've been playing Donkey Kong Bananza lately. It's really smartly constructed, but it's often only "fun" in a very literal chemical sense. In its pursuit of endless delight, it builds a lot of empty interactions into an otherwise interesting game.

The Indie RPG Newsletter is such a well-honed little publication, a masterclass in formatting a digestible newsletter while maintaining both breadth and specificity. It was such an approachable place to start when I became interested in following these scenes more closely

Last week I professed a desire to try blogging in a more digestible, manageable format to improve my consistency and work on my breadth. Well, this week I went back to the old me and wrote far too much, then edited it down to only a little too much. It's about reading TTRPG rulebooks.

Yo internet! I’m a composer and my finances are a little shaky at the moment and I need some work to get me through the summer till my other job as a teacher resumes. I can make you a groovy, catchy, vibey, or spooky song like the one below for between $350-$500. (Reposts appreciated!)

Trying to start doing some shorter-form #TTRPG game design blogging that's easier keep up with. Digestible word count, less structure and images, and permitting myself a little more looseness and brevity with topics and arguments while (hopefully) still being insightful Here's a first crack at it!

people talk about how negativity sells and gets clicks and it is true but more rarely people talk about how relentless, forced positivity also sells and i think is like the main mode of "content culture" of the past 5-10 years. i feel trapped in a landscape of relentlessly positive fandom culture

214 i went to see ARCHITECTS live in concert with ERRA and HOLYWATR.

in cyberpunk games you shouldn’t lose humanity for modifying your body you should lose humanity the more money you get

Last week I wrote about my faltering first blush at running Spire: The City Must Fall. Today, I expand on it by talking about running Heart: The City Beneath and going into where the games differ and how Heart encourages something I love about running story games

In other words, if anyone decides today is a good day to make a plucky rival to itch* to capitalize on this, you damn well better have a good answer to the payment processor problem or you are deeply unserious. *& itch’s problem IS that it’s tiny relative to its importance, as has been noted OFTEN

Lately I've been running Heart: The City Beneath. I have thoughts to share, but first I want to start with its predecessor, Spire: The City Must Fall. This one is about expectations, GMing habits, and the rift between player and GM experience

Unfortunately there is no morning ritual that ever hits quite the same as grinding fresh coffee beans and making a nice mug of pour over black coffee, RIP me

im always taken aback by just how much cis people will humiliate themselves to be dicks to trans people. like sorry, youre confused about pronouns? how did you make it thru 6th grade english you slimy dipshit? why are you going on podcasts to advertise youre too stupid to understand simple concepts?

when you ask a AAA developer if their game was inspired by current events and politics

i know this is a controversial opinion (maybe?) but i think people should want to experience stories (books, movies, tv) not just because they are entertaining, but because they make them think.

i think it rules when people express an opinion with "i think..."

Burnout is clinically understood as a combo of 6 factors—work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown in community, absence of fairness, & value conflicts—and only a fraction of it is under your control. Burnout is a systemic problem, so be kind to yourself and hard on the system.