indierpgnewsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, we talk to Hendrik ten Napel, a game designer from the Netherlands. He's self-published supplements for Brindlewood Bay, Bump in the Dark, and the Paragon system. His newsletter, Hendrik Biweekly, is a regular source of excellent game design thoughts. Today we're here to talk about his first crowdfunded game, The Girls of the Genziana Hotel, a gothic mystery PbtA game set in an isolated alpine hotel. You play chambermaids in the hotel trying to discover what happened to one of their own.

The crowdfunding page of The Girls of the Genziana Hotel on Gamefound: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/hendriktennapel/the-girls-of-the-genziana-hotel

Hendrik’s bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/napel.itch.io

Hendrik’s itch page: https://napel.itch.io

Show Notes:

Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Sally Rooney

Games Mentioned

Brindlewood Bay

The Between

Night Witches

Exiles

Crescent 2e

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, we talk to Emily Allen, the game designer behind Dying Stylishly Games. She's best known for her two now classic OSR adventures, the Gardens of Ynn and the ennie-award winning Stygian Library, which popularized the depth-crawl format. Both of which are now republished in new editions from Soul Muppet Publishing. She’s also designed Dungeon Bitches, a violent sapphic PbtA game about trauma and survival and the Yellow Curtain, a weird meta-storygame inspired by the King in Yellow. And then this year, we got Black Death Rising, an OSR-ish game of religious horror amidst the black plague where you can play vampires, werewolves, homunculi, changelings, ghouls, grotesques, ghosts, and waifs. And fight fascists, demons, and intelligent rats.

Emily Allen’s blog: https://cavegirlgames.blogspot.com

Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/cavegirlpoems

Games on drivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/8182/cavegirl-productions

Emily’s Games:

Wolf Pack & Winter Snow (2017)

The Dolorous Stroke (2018)

Gardens of Ynn (2018)

Stygian Library (2018)

Deep Morphean Transmissions (2019)

Esoteric Enterprises (2019)

Dead Girls in Sarkash Forest (2021)

Dungeon Bitches (2021/2022)

The Wounded, Hungry and Forgotten (2022)

Black Death Walking (2022)

The Yellow Curtain (2024)

Black Lung (2024)

Black Death Rising (2025)

Show Notes:

Book of Revelations

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Games Mentioned

Stars without Number

Beyond the Wall

Miseries & Misfortunes

Vampire the Masquerade/World of Darkness

Lacuna by Jared Sorenson

Mork Borg

Empire (larp)

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, we talk to Luke Jordan aka Wildwood Games, a queer non-binary game designer, writer, editor, performer, and professional GM. Their own games often combine a poetic sensibility, spooky themes, high emotion, and light mechanics. They've contributed to games like Girl by Moonlight published by Evil Hat and Koriko and The Slow Knife by Mouse House Press. Today, we're talking about two of their games that were crowdfunded in a double-barrel campaign with Possum Creek Games in late 2023. Grand Guignol, a second version of their game of queer gothic horror, and Harvest, a brand new folk horror set on some unnamed British isle. 

Harvest / Grand Guignol on Backerkit: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/jay-dragon/grand-guignol-harvest 

Wild Wood Games on itch: https://gamesfromthewildwood.itch.io/harvest  

Luke Jordan on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wildwoodsgames.bsky.social 

Show Notes:

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dracula

Jekyll and Hyde

Frankenstein

Penny Dreadful

The Wickerman 

The Apostle (2018)

Blood on Satan’s Claw

Witchfinder General

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (documentary)

Midsommar

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

Games Mentioned

Apocalypse World

Dream Askew/Dream Apart

Wanderhome

Stonetop (with annotated actual play)

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

Spoilers for Andor S2 from 04:30 to 10:30

Spoilers for Rogue One all through the episode

In this episode, I speak to Jess Levine. She is a teacher, organizer, writer and game designer.  She publishes RPGs under the label, Jumpgate Games. Her work includes I Have the High Ground—a game of "banter, posturing, and capes"—and her satirical military scifi game PLANET FIST. Today we'll be talking about going rogue 2e, an award-winning game of war, rebellion, and sacrifice.

Galactic & Going Rogue’s crowdfunding campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galacticgoingrogue/galactic-and-going-rogue-two-ttrpgs-of-war-among-the-stars

Jess Levine’s bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jessfrom.online 

Show Notes:

A More Civilized Age’s actual play

Guide to the BDS Boycott

AA Voigt’s video about Going Rogue

Gramsci?

Roleplay Public Radio actual play

Games Mentioned

hook, line & cyb3r by wicked glitch games

A Quiet Year by Avery Alder

Dream Askew/Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

Why talking about RPGs (and other things) can suck

Over on Bluesky, there was some conversation about one of the long-running cyclical conversation that happens in RPG spaces. This time, it was about the category of statement that goes something like “I hacked D&D to run Cyberpunk 2077, just as god intended” to quote the original poster. To put it another way, it’s about this idea that design doesn’t really matter.

In the case of when this is used to defend specific games like D&D 5e, this is just fandom. People want to like what they like and will say anything. It’s best not to take it too seriously. But beyond that, I think there’s a specific structural reason that this conversation keeps happening.

Let’s talk about the two ways that people judge something. The first is by outcome (or effect or output) and the second is by input (time, effort, ingredients, values).

Have you ever gone “this is really tasty”? That’s outcome. It’s good because the effect was pleasurable.

Have you ever gone “someone put a lot of thought or skill into this”? That’s input. It’s good because of craft and care.

You’re probably doing both a lot in your life. Everyone uses both methods probably every day.

“But isn’t it more rational to judge everything by outcome?”, you might be thinking. It’s an interesting thought. In science and policy, measuring outcomes is essential to ensure you’re not just making stuff up. But in many situations you can’t measure outcome in any real way. Like for example, art. (There’s lots of other examples including almost everything you do because “it’s the right thing to do”. But getting into this is literally a philosophy class so we must hurry along.)

Coming back to RPGs, the truth is that you can have a great experience roleplaying with good design, bad design, no design, whatever. At the same time, the craft and values going into a design are also a real thing that can be observed and discussed.

People talking about the former (outcomes, experience, their fun) and people talking about the latter (inputs, design, values) are going to talk in circles if they don’t acknowledge the difference in approach. This conversation will never resolve because it’s not about the same thing.

When I talk about games in terms of outcomes, I’m really talking about myself. I had fun. I laughed. I grew closer to my friends. Those are real things — important things. When I talk about the games in terms of inputs, I’m talking about rules, setting, illustrations, etc. Those are also real things — but obviously different things.

Saying “this game is good because I had fun” and saying “this game is good because it is designed well” feels like they’re doing the same thing because of the way language works. But go deeper and they’re simply not.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not some impassable bridge. These two starting points can be connected. Two people can begin at different places and still have a conversation… if they’re willing to talk about interaction, i.e., the space between inputs and outputs and what happens there.

But here’s the things: talking about interaction is annoying and hard. Very often, whether you’re talking about inputs or outputs, it’s easier to just ignore it. When we’re talking about design, it’s easy to say that, oh, this rule does this or this adventure does that. But for who? In whose hands? What inputs do they need to bring that isn’t in the text? A can-do attitude? How common is that input really?

When we talk about outcomes, it’s the same thing but in reverse. Oh, you had fun? Amazing. How did you get there? What led to the fun? Was it the text? Was it something outside the text? What percentage would you allocate to both categories?

Stop booing me! I’m just asking questions! I’m normal! I’M NORMAL.

[indierpgnewsletter]

What "Scenarios" Do In RPGs

I’ve been thinking about scenarios and railroading and ease of GMing.

Let me take a step back. GMing is hard. It’s not so hard that people don’t constantly just learn how to do it on their own but it’s hard enough that many people don’t do it. It’s also hard to talk about how hard GMing is because GMing isn’t the same thing. Different playstyles demand different skills. Different prospective GMs have different expectations for what they want to achieve.

But to me, the fundamental problem is the strength of RPGs: anything can happen. Tactical infinity, if you will. So how do you ever get comfortable with that? How do you prepare for everything?

The solution to the fundamental problem is pretty fundamental as well: you have to limit the possibilities. The typical way to do this is through your scenario. In fact, that’s the main thing a scenario does for you. The logic is simple: if the whole adventure happens in this 5×5 square, then you don’t need to improvise what the weather is like in Klatch.

The next thing a scenario does is help you envision an ending. In a location-based adventure, what’s at the end? In a monster hunt, there’s the monster. In a mystery, there’s the answer. The less obvious the ending, the harder the scenario is to run. Or to put it another way, the easier it is to hold the shape of the whole scenario in your head, the better.

If you’re interested in adventure or challenge or problem-solving, a dungeon with a clear goal (get the treasure) is great because the possibility space is literally bounded by the walls. Players aren’t going to ask to speak to their childhood friend, Zorp, or try to start a flying carpet business. They’re going to only engage with the ingredients listed in the recipe. Expanding this a little: What’s the difference between a dungeon and a long winding road through the desert? Or a creepy forest with a monster in it? The physical constraints are a little less obvious and the scenario becomes incrementally harder to the same extent.

But what about the GMs who imagine their games in terms of genre and narrative and not challenge? Here, the solutions are less well-theorized. All my favourite story games are all big lifts but not because the rules are more complicated necessarily. But because they don’t offer an easy way to limit possibilities into something manageable. They might come with scenario starters but they don’t tend to be starter scenarios. They don’t tend to be bounded enough so it’s easy to hold the possibility space in your head.

When I discussed my Blades in ’68 game, I explained my scenario: Suicide Squad-style team of criminals gets charged with killing 5 villains before they destroy the city in 5 days. I did this to make the game easier for myself. This scenario has organic limits: space, time, people. You can politely explain to players that no, there isn’t time to invent a whole new type of bomb. If they don’t stick to task, their handlers will chase ’em down with prejudice. (They can choose to abandon the mission of course but that’s a sign the whole game isn’t working. Time to talk.)

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, I speak to Navaar Seik-Jackson who is a game designer, writer, and the host of the Secret Nerd and other podcasts. Navaar makes action drama games — his The Last of Us inspired survival game, The Corrupted, is published by Plus One Exp through their Zine Club programme. You can listen to a lovingly produced actual play of the game called The Ties That Bind run by Navaar on the Secret Nerd podcast. He's currently working on Soothwardens, a diceless monster-hunting game of warriors eternally bound together.

Navaar’s itch page: https://navaarsnp.itch.io/

The Secret Nerd podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/secret-nerd-podcast/id1576080929 

Show Notes:

Rowan Zeoli talks about The Corrupted on Polygon

Transplanar, actual play show

Bloodhounds, TV Show

Castlevania and Castlevania Nocturne

Games Mentioned

Godkiller by Connie Chung

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, I speak to Paul Czege, a game designer with a deep catalogue that is hard to pin down. An article on RPG.net from 2009 reads "Paul himself defies any sort of easy classification" . It continues, "Depending on your viewpoint, Paul is either one of the most prolific of the Gaming Outpost/Forge designers or one of the least. Also, depending on you how look at it, his best contribution lies in a single game (the still popular My Life With Master) or in the thought and effort he has put into the hobby of role playing and the practice of game design." Apart from LWM for which he won the Diana Jones Award in 2004, he also designed the melancholic minotaur game, The Clay That Woke. Recently, he's been writing about solo journalling games, publishing two zines, The Ink That Bleeds and Inscapes about how to play them, as well as some actual games including the Balsam Lake Unmurders, about catching a necromancer in Minnesota who keeps bringing people back to life, which is crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

Paul Czege’s itch page: https://paulczege.itch.io/ 

The Balsam Lake Unmurders on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252728880/the-balsam-lake-unmurders 

Show Notes:

Mosaic Strict

The interview on the Indie Game Reading Club

Carl Jung, The Red Book

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

M John Harrison’s Viriconium

Games Mentioned

Earthdawn

The Clay That Woke

The Ink That Bleeds

Inscapes

Traverser (unreleased)

Earth Mother, Sky Father

A Viricorne Guide

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

New Itch Games Dec to March 2025

Missed an edition of this regular round-up of new games on itch. If this is the first time you’re seeing one of these: they are mostly games that came through this form. I haven’t played or read them but each of them has something that made me sit up and pay attention. This is a particularly bountiful episode because I would play all of these games.

Deluge at Drizzle Distillery: There’s a magical storm at the holy water distillery! Oh no! An adventure by Mun Kao for Kala Mandala, his fantasy SE Asia setting.

Land in the Mist Starter Set: This is a horror game where you play through specific scenarios set in the real world between 1750 and 1850. The starter set contains all the rules and has an adventure, Of Pagans and Reindeer, set in Northern Finland in 1811. (Rat in a Suit / PWYW)

unfamiliar: A game of magical familiars who have lost or been abandoned by their wizardly masters. It’s partially inspired by We3 which is one of those sad comics designed to hit you right in the feelings. (Feature Creep / PWYW)

What Happened To Margot Kwan: This is a mystery for Girls at the Genziana Hotel, a PbtA game of maids in a hotel investigating the disappearance of one of their own. This moves the game to an American university town. Genziana Hotel is a really interesting game and this adventure/setting moves it into more explicitly Life is Strange territory. (Mynar Lenahan)

Tactical Espionage Action: Dice Goblin Games wrote 16 adventures for FIST, the occult espionage game, in two months. They include: infiltrating casinos, volcanic lairs, frigid research stations, colonial horrors, and of course, Satan trapped in a beach ball. (PWYW outside the bundle)

Alone in the Loop: A solo journalling game of a time traveler experience hope and despair as they explore the same loop over and over again. Great premise. (Paul Doyle / PWYW)

Mum Chums: A slice of life game about motherhood and looking after children from Tanya Floaker. It’s a real world game exploring real world themes, simultaneously high stakes and low stakes in the best way. (Unlimited community copies)

Faire Season 2: A group of historical reenactors at a Ren Faire-type event get pulled into an actual quest of myth and magic by the power of The Dream. It uses the Belonging outside Belonging system to explore our relationship to our roleplay alter-egos. (Okami)

Ringmaster: A Descended from the Queen game about a dark, magical circus. Honestly, that was enough for me. Like For the Queen, it revolves around a powerful NPC, the Ringmaster, and ends with a pivotal question: is the circus your home or your prison or both? (Spotless Dice Games)

One Of Us Will Die: A social deduction RPG of tragedy and fate. One of the characters, the Mark, knows they will die at the end but can’t say so. One of the characters is trying to kill the Mark before they can fulfill their destiny. The rest of the group are trying to save the Mark and maybe sacrifice themselves instead. (Titus Villanueva)

The Archivium: A solo dark academia game. By day, you’re a student. By night, you’re a guardian of a secret, magical library. You build out the archive and its weird classification system and play towards one of 16 endings. (Lich Light)

In Love With The Moon: The year is 1968. You are a team of scientists, crowded in an old castle where the air flows thick with LSD and there is a maze of rooms below you stocked with every scientific oddity, all for one purpose: to get you to the moon by whatever means necessary. (James Kerr / PWYW)

Ring-lationship Disc-ord: A game where you play Crokinole (!?) to tell the story of two people who are locked in an argument that stems from their past and identity. Truly one of the worst names for anything ever (I say this with love) but I am a sucker for using folk games to explore a story that resonates with their existing mechanics. (Colin Mancini, Sociable Turtle Games)

Codename: Cinderella: A cute one page game about espionage agents working for the Fairy Godmother to execute nursery rhyme-inspired missions. (Fuzztech)

The Burning of the Free Port of Dohn Amuran: This is an adventure for Grimwild from Natalie Ash. It’s a powder keg situation featuring a violent dockmaster, a free union of boat captains, and the adventurers with a chance to prevent bloodshed and broker a fragile peace.

Deadline: A GM-less, map-making, news-chronicling game. Play journalists who are capturing the story of a changing city with their headlines. The city itself is in the grip of an industrial revolution and all that entails. (Wanderers Tome)

I really enjoyed making this list. It just reminded me that there’s so many interesting games out there and I wish I had time to play them all. These designers are all doing fascinating work and making weird art. It makes me happy and I hope making this stuff made them happy too.

[indierpgnewsletter]

TTRPG's Godzilla Cipher

There are lots of Godzilla movies—around 40 across Japanese and English. Each of those movies showcase a monster but at the same time, they showcase more than that. Godzilla is usually born from nuclear fallout. The destruction he causes are the ripples of a greater disaster, the fear he elicits an echo of a greater trauma. In later movies, Godzilla becomes a kind of anti-hero, protecting the world from other, worse monsters. In the most recent Japanese movie, Godzilla Minus One, even as they kill it, the soldiers reverentially salute the monster. You know, what’s scarier than a monster? A metaphor. Especially if you have to write a book report about it later. Or worse, if it suggests rising nationalism.

In his iconic essay, “D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are“, Dan D writes, “Monsters have a cause… Monsters are made to be so.”

The crux of the post is that monsters are created by social circumstances. Or to put it another way, monsters are made by people. It is a powerful idea. It’s an axiom that if you accept, has a domino affect on all of your worldbuilding. It also means that, for heroes in such a world, “Violence is not a solution, it is a stopgap measure. The root cause that has created the monster is the real challenge to overcome, and it is likely to be much more complex and rooted in past events than not. Sometimes, there’s likely to be no solution, or at least no solution that the players can enact. The damage might have already been done, and you’re just trying to plug the holes in the hull.” If monsters are made and every act of violence has an institutional or systemic cause, the story becomes about those institutions and systems. The characters will live their own narratives in the cracks of these systems, perpetually compromised.

When I first read this post, the thing that struck me about it is that it was a decision point. Now, every time I ran a game with monsters, I had to decide what kind of game it was going to be: which Godzilla do I want this time?

If I want a game where the characters are small parts in a world that has its own logics, its own politics, its own reality outside of them, there is a Godzilla for that. If I want a game where the world is framed around the characters, where monsters reflect their stories back to them, there’s a Godzilla for that. If I want a story where my characters dropkick the big lizard, of course, there’s a Godzilla for that too.

In your instance, this might not be a decision. You might like all your games a certain way all the time. Or you might be like me and oscillate.

The last case, that’s just ordinary D&D, I don’t think you need examples. But want to see an example of the first case? See any of Zedeck Siew or Goblin Punch / Arnold K‘s work. They’re both excellent at grounding a monster in a social circumstance. There’s lots to learn from them.

Want to see an example of the second case? The bestiary in the DIE RPG explicitly constructs its monsters around psychology and theme. To pick a couple at random, it suggests using giants to echo parental figures or gorgons to echo victims of exploitation. It’s a very steal-able idea. But this can never be cookie cutter. At the very least, you have to consciously pick from the bestiary based on what will resonate with the characters and players.

The tricky thing about this case is that it requires collaboration with players. Characters need to have qualities that you can mirror back at them—broken friendships that see their cracked reflection in the collateral destruction of two big lizards fighting, unspoken wounds that resonate with the big lizard who’s only angry because there’s a thorn in his claw. To make good psychodrama, you need the raw material.

You can skip this step having a focused game from the start: a game about teenagers doing illegal skateboarding so when the monsters reflect authority figures, that’s a slam dunk. I mean, an ollie or whatever, I don’t know anything about skateboarding. Basically, Slugblaster‘s godzillas are good because it knows what its about.

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, I’m talking to Viditya Voleti, a game designer and interactive artist. He's a visiting instructor at the Pratt Institute in NYC. He's freelanced for Paizo, Possum Creek Games, Evil Hat, and RRD. His own tabletop designs include vampire cowboy game, Bloodbeam Badlands, GMless optimistic scifi game, Space Between Stars (forthcoming from Possible Worlds Games), and A Land Once Magic, a post fantasy worldbuilding game currently crowdfunding on Backerkit.

Viditya’s itch page: https://vidityavoleti.itch.io A Land Once Magic on Backerkit: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/moreblueberries/a-land-once-magic?ref=yesindied 

Show Notes:

Action Button Reviews Tokimeki Memorial (6 hour video essay)

Kekkai Sensen // Blood Blockade Battlefront (anime)

The original post coining the term Fruitful Void by Vincent Baker

++ Here’s a good Levi Kornelsen article about whether D&D has one

Ludonarrative Dissonance

Games Mentioned

Ithaca in the Cards by Aaron Lim, crowdfunding on Kickstarter 

Free from the Yoke (Legacy) by Mina McJanda

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

So I published an article on Rascal News this week about the Korean RPG scene and I thought I’d tell you the story of that story. Around late November last year, I was listening to the Korea episode of the World of RPGs podcast. In that podcast, the host Moritz speaks to a number of people from a country to try and paint a picture of that country’s scene. One of the people he spoke to was Oh SeungHan, who is a translator and indie publisher.

SeungHan tells a story about an incident in 2016 in the RPG community where an anti-feminist mob attacked one of the most prolific indie designers in the community for a t-shirt she owned. The t-shirt said, “Girls Do Not Need A Prince”. It sounds like a mild statement but due to complex political reasons, this slogan had become a rallying point for some very angry, right-wing men. The thing that grabbed me about the story was that SeungHan said that the biggest publisher in Korea, Dayspring Games, came out strongly against the hate on display. Apparently, this was the catalyst for an influx of women into the hobby and led to the demographics of the community shifting – from majority male to majority female.

I was fascinated. So I reached out to Moritz for SeungHan’s email. Then, I reached out to SeungHan. I thought I was just going to talk to them but they amazingly put me in touch with Choi Mika who was the woman at the centre of the incident in 2016. Luckily, Mika was kind enough to speak to me. I didn’t really ask her a lot of questions–since this was email and I wanted to the conversation to happen in Korean, I basically said, “Can you tell me what happened in your own words?” and let her tell it how she wished.

Mika sent me two long emails telling her story. SeungHan acted as the official translator but despite the language barrier, it was clear to me that Mika was a really clever and funny person. Even Google Translate was good enough for that!

I had initially reached out mid-December but by the time, we had gone back and forth twice, it was suddenly February. Emails were missed, personal events got in the way, you know how things are. Sometimes that’s how long it takes.

Then, through Chaosium, I got the email of Kim Sung-il, co-founder of Dayspring Games, and exchanged emails with him to get at what he remembers about the incident. He responded instantly and explained why he felt it necessary to make a strong political stand–a risky action because at the time, the majority of the country was voting the other way! (When the same thing was happening to employees of videogame studios, almost all of them bent over backwards to assuage the haters.)

It’s rare to find a story where a terrible incident (that Mika still finds it difficult to talk about) led to something positive. And honestly, the truth might be more complicated than I can perceive. But both Mika and Sung-il tell me that no such incidents have happened since and RPGs are now seen as a safe space for women. At a pre-pandemic convention that Dayspring organized, about 70% of the attendees were women.

It was such a blessing to share something as wholesome as that and I couldn’t resist another chance to talk about it.

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, I’m talking to Gabriel Robinson, a writer and game designer. He's the lead writer on the Silt Verses, an RPG published by the Gauntlet press adapted from the hit audio series. He's contributed to a number of other Gauntlet publications like Trophy, Brindlewood Bay, and more. Through his own imprint Glowing Roots press, he's published Token, a two-player tragic fantasy game, and Candlelight, a GM-less game of lost spirits revisiting their final moments. His games often have a folk horror aesthetic, dark and mysterious but usually stopping shy of macabre.

Gabriel’s website: https://glowingroots.carrd.co/

Gabriel’s bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/glowingroots.bsky.social 

Show Notes:

The Silt Verses, horror-fantasy podcast

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

Games Mentioned

Silt Verses RPG

The Wassailing of Claus Manor

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

In this episode, I’m joined by Caro Asercion, who is an interdisciplinary artist, game designer, and theatre person. They do a lot of work in theatre as a dramaturg and producer of various kinds. In games, they're best known for im sorry did you say street magic, a game of cities and their secrets, based on the classic world building game, Microscope. They've also co-designed supplemental material for Beam Saber with Rufus Roswell, coining the mantra, "bangers only", which was all about how much a precise and skillful use of language gives to game design. Last year, they released Last Train To Bremen, a 4 player game of doomed musicians trying to outrun a deal they made with the devil.

Caro’s itch.io page: https://seaexcursion.itch.io/ 

Show Notes:

Chase Carter’s review of Last Train to Bremen

Article about all the Rascals playing the game

Cheap Bots Done Quick

Games Mentioned

CJ Linton’s Prince of Nothing Good (unreleased, work in progress)

Space Between Stars by Viditya Voleti

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

You can support this show on Patreon⁠⁠!

On this episode, I’m joined by Levi Kornelsen, previously known as Amagi Games. He is a Canadian designer who's been part of the scene for a long time. He's designed a bunch of games like the Schema framework and the recent Saints of the Empty Throne but is probably best known for his RPG theory, such as the essential Manyfold Glossary. He's a big open source advocate and most of his work is distributed for free under a creative commons license. Everything he writes on his itch page is worth reading for designers looking for language and tools to diagnose or just better understand what it is exactly they're doing.

Blog: https://levikornelsen.wordpress.com/

Itch store: https://levikornelsen.itch.io/

Show Notes:

Praxic Compendium (by Levi Kornelsen)

Manyfold by (Levi Kornelsen)

Rec.games.frp.advocacy

rpg.net

The Phoenix Guards by Steven Brust (novel)

Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien de Castell (novel)

Games Mentioned

(Too many to list them all)

Saints of the Empty Throne

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

 The Whispering Vault

League and Fathom

Castle Falkenstein

Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast

Under Hollow Hills

If you liked this podcast, check out the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter

[indierpgnewsletter]

Incomplete Games

So before I talked about the quest for complete games and mentioned that one of the reasons they’re so rare is because some people like them that way.

The other reason is that they’re really hard to do.

Complete games often feel like the realm of professional businesses (and of course, they often fail to reach the bar too) because of how much work is involved. When an individual creator makes a game, they have no idea if it’ll do well – they probably have no idea if anyone will even give it a second glance. In these situations, it’s absurd to do all that “extra” work to make complete games.

There are very few instances of designers releasing games and instantly receiving overwhelming positive feedback to continue. I can think of maybe a handful of people, like Kevin Crawford, who put out their first game and were told, “do more”. But almost no one can or does release something with the polish of Ironsworn or Lancer as a free PDF. In fact, the opposite is true, for a lot of landmark games, they needed to get a second edition before they became the polished gem that people cherish. Monsterhearts, for example. Maybe even Apocalypse World.

What happens if they never get that second edition?

This is worth saying because for indie design to flourish, we need a culture where people play incomplete games. Because often, that’s the best way to encourage and support their improvement. This isn’t a “responsibility” that falls on anyone in particular. But a culture that embraces the messiness of play is the one most likely to incubate great games.

To get complete games, we need to play the incomplete ones.

[indierpgnewsletter]

pretty much the only good thing about the paper of record anymore, the crossword