Writing this part was very fun, but did make me feel a bit wicked.

Thank you for this. I'm always a little overwhelmed when someone devotes so much time and thought to my writing. More so when the writing is as personal as this one.

I wanted to make a solo or duet journaling game for a poetry inspired game jam a while ago, but my mood has stalled productivity for a few months now. Dusted off the notes yesterday and started tentatively putting something together. I am looking forward to working on it with my talented friend.

And now we get ready to endure the weekly ritual of being deadnamed by my parents, who absolutely know and choose to pretend that they don't. It's a complicated situation. I'm working up the resolve to confront them about it, but I'm not there yet.

As someone who has never enjoyed the more typical Tolkien and feudal European inspired fantasy settings, Gideon the Ninth really appealed to me. It's one of my favourite 'recent' novels, up there with Venomous Lumpsucker.

im working on a stretch goal for the extremely cool Ambition! it's currently $1k out from my goal 🥰 i'm doing some hound/handler shit with gun-witches in an academy haunted by fucked up jellyfish

IT IS THE DAWN OF THE FINAL WEEK and it comes with ANNOUNCEMENTS! We only $2500 away from funding the Tragedy of Cair Dormach, our Fable stretchgoal featuring @jdragsky.bsky.social Alongside TWO NEW RPG Party Fables with @deangkane.bsky.social and @shuinitsu.bsky.social ttrpg.link/Ambition

Was a tad held up with personal stuff over the week, but wanted to share this interview I did with @liz-shrikestudio.bsky.social for her horror TTRPG, for @rascal.news - one of the most fascinating projects I've read these days

Old Morris Cave is just an absolute sleeper hit that more of us ought to be trying out.

Stumbled across a tumblr post by someone who fell asleep after reading You Will Die In This Place and had a nightmare which inspired them to write a little horror vignette. I'm not sure whether Charlotte would be pleased or horrified.

Aaah, work starts back up tomorrow, I'm running a crowdfunding campaign, and various parts of my life are falling apart. But it's November, so that means we're writing a novel again. 15,000 words in two days. That's a sustainable pace, right?

Things been really hard, and we talk openly about the serious problems we are facing.

"There’s a lot of me in this project. Even if I’m often hiding behind the voices of Charlotte and Samantha." @liz-shrikestudio.bsky.social tells Rascal about the process of creating her pseudo-autobiographical horror RPG about finding meaning before death, but also accepting the unknowable.

Corpse Engineer?

i wrote some rules for a wargame www.patreon.com/posts/my-lit...

Finally visited @iglootree.bsky.social yesterday as part of a day out in London. Quite a long way from Norwich, but well worth the trip. Great guys and a great shop packed with all kinds of delightful roleplaying games, graphic novels, zines and the like. I picked up Troika, a long overdue purchase.

It was a very fun talk.

Hey bro, I promised a friend I would share this game with you, so do me a favor and share it with someone else. I'll teach you a pretty cool handshake, top secret stuff. splitparty.substack.com/p/zephyr-par...

Best day in a while.

Asa gave me the courtesy of taking as long as I wanted to formulate my answers to these questions. Can you tell that I chose to forgo that? I can, haha. Check out SPINE, it's a really interesting bit of writing and game design!

I've started reading You Will Die in this Place by @liz-shrikestudio.bsky.social. The essay and Samatha's following passage on pg 29 is a deeply personal horror. This is the nightmare, stomach-turning in how much anxiety it gave me.

In my final exploratory essay in this series, I mount a defense of reading ttrpgs, describing how reading is not only playful but also a critical part of play. And I briefly explain how that impacts the design of SPINE.

Existential horror meet game design meet fiction meet a dungeon crawler in You Will Die In This Place, a masterpiece in TTRPG design. Now in your hands at gamefound.com/pt/projects/...

I had a dumb indulgent idea to make a horror mockumentary about a Youtuber doing an investigative piece into the fictional making of You Will Die In This Place. I pitched it to my friend and editor, expecting to be shot down. Instead, they were fully onboard. It feels nice to be enabled sometimes.

One of the things I've been pondering to myself since attending Games Transformed is how to make an inherently anti-fascist game. That is, one which is mechanically so, even divorced from its themes and aesthetics. Something that couldn't easily be reskinned to enable the opposite perspective.

It's very early days, but I wanted to share this awesome commission that @redregenmann.bsky.social has done for the anime mecha ttrpg that I'm starting development on.

At the end of October, I’ll be releasing a physical beta of SPINE. While still beautiful, it will be made with uncoated paper, inviting you to spill ink in its margins and tear its pages.

My second interview in the SPINE design series is about book design with @explorersdesign.bsky.social. He discusses how designs can ground play, how book formats engineer expectations and use, and how books emulate other genres and objects. We also open the floodgates on the book design for D&D 3E.

Chris Hutton did an overview with some short interviews about Gamefound's RPG Party here: www.ttrpginsider.news/p/gamefound-... I am, of course, prone to going off and writing massive walls of text. So, if you want to read my unedited thoughts, you can here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

@plusoneexp.bsky.social sits with @cambr-found.bsky.social of Gamefound to discuss RPG Party, and we get some Ambition-talk along the way! Check it out! #AmbitionTTRPG #TTRPG #TTRPGs #TTRPGSky #Tabletop youtu.be/UXww62lS8JU

Thank you for the very thoughtful article. I'm glad that my game connected with you so much, but also sorry that it did at the same time.

Tabletop Time did a summary video of the participants in Gamefound's RPG Party. It always amuses me to see other people attempt to explain what You Will Die In This Place is, given how bad I am at doing that myself. youtu.be/XlCJCctCqjY?...

Well. That was a pleasant but shocking surprise. Finished teaching a year 11 revision lesson about electricity and You Will Die In This Place is already funded. Thank you.

Oh, this has me excited. Nobilis is my favourite game that I never get to run.

SPINE is a really fascinating piece of work that I've been reading through and playing around with when I've had time over the last few days. I'm obviously biased as a fan of the weird and ergodic, but it's well worth a look.

Did a very rough sketch of a design for the mecha game I've quietly been working on. I'm commissioning art for the final thing, but it's nice to rough out some ideas.

gamefound.com/en/projects/... Oh, right, this goes live today. I should probably say something.

The Cassette Case Game Jam wrapped up with 27 entries! Thank you to @liz-shrikestudio.bsky.social for kickstarting the jam, and to all creative participants 🎉 I was genuinely surprised by the interest and positive response. Here are some of my favorite entries:

"A thing that I'm really thinking about is the holistic quality of the game. This is a game that, even if you don't ever actually get a group together to play it, it enriches your life and it provides you with meaning and you can sit down with it and engage with it."

In SPINE, I want players to play with the ttrpg's rulebook in innovative ways. I wrote this essay to think through the design. It describes the various ways we play with books in ttrpgs, with examples of how we use books as props, as anchors for fictions, and how we recreate them as art.

VOID_SHIFT is out (digitally)! It's a solo deckbuilder that takes like, I don't know, half an hourish to roll through a job. 30 cards to assemble a 15 card deck, 6 job cards that comprise what you're doing. binary-star-games.itch.io/void-shift

NEW (FREE) GAME FORTHCOMING: SPINE is a dark solo ttrpg about losing yourself in a book. In SPINE, you are a researcher who has inherited a strange book from an estranged relative…

Oh, this was a surprise. Listening now.

Everyone should get down to @iglootree.bsky.social ‘s new shop in Lewisham. Amazing to see such a great range of books and zines in one place, beautifully presented. Number one Ttrpg Mecca in the UK. Get down today to play games run by Luke Gearing, Andrew Walters and win cool stuff in the raffle!

Thanks Thomas for this great interview! ✨ Sewer Sanctuary is featured on @rascal.news !

Colin Devouring His Son

Currently listening to this and pausing to cringe for a bit every time it's my turn to speak.

Gamefound launch got pushed back to mid-October along with the rest of the RPG Party games. A few people asked, so I thought I should probably clarify that. Hopefully, no more delays, but I'm beholden to Gamefound on this one since they control the launch date.

3 days left everyone www.kickstarter.com/projects/lau...

I cannot describe what I have seen and felt over the last few hours but I don’t think I need to see another movie ever again.