This post is part of an ongoing exploration of Scenes in TTRPGs, scenic play, and skillfully adding drama and character to your sessions

Our games contain mechanics, procedures, and structures for advancing the “plot” of a game. We create problems, put our characters in front of interesting decisions, and see what happens.

Game rules hardly ever advance characters or relationships. To explore and advance character and relationship, we need to throw our characters into conflicts where players reveal their needs and desires, thwart one another, find ways to approach and appeal to one another, and discover whether or not differences are resolvable. All this happens alongside plot, and need their own proper time and space.

For many posts now, I’ve been simply calling these chunks of gameplay Dramatic Scenes. But it’s also useful, for this post, to call them what they are: Little made-up fights where we cause our characters to bicker and fight and yell and lie and kiss and argue for reasons totally unaddressed by the game rules.

For most TTRPGs, these conflicts look “meaningless” for the purpose of the plot, the adventure, the story, the quest. They don’t use anything on your character sheet, and they won’t tell you if you succeed or fail to pick a lock or slay the beast. Nothing in the game incentivizes you to make them up. If you wait for the game to tell you when to do this, a campaign can pass you by drama-free.

Most games do not have triggers for having dramatic moments. Chances are, if you want to explore more dramatic scenes, we need to insert scenes with made-up conflicts even when the game does not ask for them at any point.

Let’s take an example of a fight-for-no-reason:

Two halfling players, Elijah and Sean, are fleeing from an orc ambush that threatens to wipe the rest of their party. Elijah goes, “I’m gonna flee in a boat.” Sean agrees and asks if he can come, too. “Hell yeah,” Elijah says. “Sweet,” says Sam. They pass their Get-Out-of-Dodge roll, and the GM agrees that they get away. In most games, the consequences of fleeing are described and resolved.

“But wait,” Elijah says, thinking that he’d like to have some kind of big emotional moment. “I think now would be a good time to have a scene.” Sean agrees, and they decide to invent a conflict.

Elijah decides that his character is going to get busy escaping, but leaves Sean’s character, Samwise, behind, for his own good (or something). Sean says, “No way, I’m going to scream something like ‘Don’t leave without me.’” Elijah decides that his character Frodo is resolute and wants to go it alone, so Sean changes tactics, and Samwise begins to just swim.

The GM throws in a complication: Samwise can’t swim, and starts to drown! This makes Sean nervous for his character for a moment, but Elijah goes, “Ok, ok, Frodo turns around and pulls him into the boat.” The table goes awwww, and the GM says, “Great, let’s close with some final words in this scene, with Samwise huffing and puffing in the boat.”

Sean thinks for a second. “Uh, Samwise goes… ‘I made a promise: ‘Don’t you leave him, Sam!’ And I don’t mean to.’” Elijah decides that Frodo has no words and just gives him a big, sopping wet hug, and they row away.

Look what happened: They haven’t done anything new to the plot, which developed the same way: Orcs attack, but halflings escape, splitting the party. Two players just decided, unprompted, that they wanted to play-fight for a moment in order to advance the relationship between their characters.

We also learned something important we might not have known before: These characters are bonded by a promise and great love, but this bond is also a source of tension, and something one player may try to escape from again. Will this be a source of conflict for them again? If only we knew!

Notice, the GM didn’t jump in to ask for Swim checks or try to hit Sean with CON saves for drowning. If players are play-fighting to find out what happens in relationships, players must feel like they can take big swings without messing up the game state.

Players are desirous to explore their characters. It is a great joy to start playing a sketch of a human being on a character sheet, and realize that between the lines, there is the promise of more to discover, more that could emerge. Have you ever gotten to the end of a campaign and sensed that you never really got to the bottom of who your character is? Or, commonly, have you ever looked up in the middle of the campaign and wondered who these characters are to one another?

The best way to discover the answer is to make up little opportunities for characters to fight, huff, puff, scrap, make up, don’t make up, kiss, scuffle, and reconcile.

When are you supposed to have these scenes, then?

It’s unsatisfactory to just say “any time at all,” though it’s fine to answer. So, since making up character conflicts will often happen outside of game procedures, try putting them precisely in places where game procedures often fail to have a properly atmospheric payoff. Trying putting two characters into a scene during…

• Travel and otherwise uneventful overland exploration

• Routine shopping trips in town

• Setting up camp, or patching up wounds

• Looting, gathering treasure, or during long periods of stealth or dungeon movement

• Making preparations for big fights, or whenever characters are “getting ready” for a big in-game event

• During crafting, or right before players set out on their adventure

• Preparing or studying spells

• Doing archival research, or poking around in libraries

And how do you create a conflict in a dramatic scene? Well, there’s a lot more written for the Scene Kit series, but a quick and dirty formula is:

1. One player comes up with something their character NEEDS from another character

2. The second player comes up with a reason, at least at first, for their character to DENY that need.

3. The needy character ESCALATES by doubling down, or perhaps changing their approach

4. The second character responds, maybe by relinquishing, rebuffing, ignoring, delaying, etc

5. The scene finishes dramatically, like with an emotional outburst or a reconciliation, or someone else finishes it for them by introducing a sudden danger or other interruption.

The saying goes: Play to find out. We play to discover “What will happen?” TTRPGs are traditionally written to enable this play. There is a less obvious game-within-the-game where we play to discover, “Who is my character, really?”

During a session, ask for five minutes when you think there might be an opportunity, and say, “Let’s play out a little conflict here.” It’s better if you make one up on the fly.

Other notes

• Put out yet another video of TTPRG predictions for 2026, probably wayyyy too late for people to care, but I had all of the ideas written down. Besides, watch to the end, and you get to see a nice cat.

• Recently, I’ve been playing Public Access, which has mechanical triggers that you pull and cause players to have to narrate a character’s backstory, or bond over childhood memories with another character in order to explore new rooms or clear conditions. It’s in these scenes that we learn most about our characters’ inner lives, even if they almost never directly lead to discovering new locations, fighting threats, or solving mysteries. Still, this often doesn’t lead to relationship-advancing scene-work.

• Did you guys know it’s like, damn near impossible to find someone with PbtA chops to run you a one-shot of Urban Shadows 2e? Otherwise, I think I’m going to be running The Girls of the Genziana Hotel by Hendrik ten Napel soon, so I’m taking recommendations of your favorite Sarah Waters novel in advance.

• Probably the next post in this series is going to be about of shaping character interactions and scenes around broad ideas like character “beliefs” or more high-level “questions” you’d like to answer while exploring a scene and… well, why I don’t believe in that sorta thing.

I had a brief stint as a paid DM for online D&D 5e amid a very long stint of being a brick-and-mortar, home game, in-person D&D 5e DM. Online GMing in 2021 made me loathe online gaming generally. I would justify this by prevaricating endlessly about in-person gathering and the irreplaceable alchemy of real human contact.

On reflection, I really just hated, hated using a VTT. I realize now, as I took on a big life shift that requires me to move gaming online even with my local friends, that most of what I hate about gaming online is loading up modules, learning a new interface, integrated dice rollers and video, snapping grids, monster databases, all that shit. Even the simple stuff like Owlbear Rodeo was too much obnoxious overhead — setting up a room, dropping in a map, setting up a grid for locking tokens, and on, and on, and on.

In person, I could create brilliant pen-and-paper environments with giant sticky notes, printed maps, flip charts, vinyl play mats, and artsy handouts. It took me a while to figure out that what I needed to do this digitally was software I use nearly every day at my 9-to-5 job.

What is Canva?

Canva is best known as a software that lets basically anyone make simple designs for print and digital media. More and more, they’re also a go-to for experienced designers to throw little images together with a more lightweight kit than Adobe or Affinity.

What almost nobody uses it for is live online tabletop roleplaying.

How do you use it as a VTT?

Canva’s mighty underused feature is called Canva whiteboard. It’s a simple drag-and-drop environment where you can throw down any images, fields, shapes, text, icons, whatever you need, with no boundaries. You can drop in any image you like, edit it, crop it, scale it, and lock it.

Instead of maps, you can just drop in an image of a map and slide tokens around on top. You can drop in an image of a character sheet and just write, adding little sticky notes wherever you need.

All of these features are totally free, without limit to how many images you can upload, how many boards you can make, or how many people you can share the boards with. The table is always open for anyone to access, even if they don’t have a Canva account.

My players are having a blast with Canva. They drop in character art, landscape photos, visual references, sticky notes with important conditions or character notes, and little image cards that have special abilities. They even have fun hiding tiny little text Easter eggs for other players in very small type, discoverable on a close zoom.

Sure, it’s not good if you really need to lock a highly specific set of permissions for each player’s visibility, player-by-player. It’s not good if you’re playing a game with elaborate dice macros and built-in character sheets. It’s not good if you’re worried about players sabotaging the table in your off-hours (though you can always make a backup). It’s not good if you need a VTT to have things like automated fog of war and grid-snapping. None of these are problems I personally have, so I’m in heaven.

Canva VTT Tips

• Reference pages: I keep a region of the whiteboard with screenshots of key game pages and rules reference, and keep an entirely separate GM board with lots of notes, dungeon maps, and adventure outlines.

• Player materials: Not only are all character sheets on the whiteboard (locked image, editable text boxes over each field), but also retainers, stats for mounts, full magic item entries, special ability text, and other reference images about their backstory. Let your players drop in whatever they need to flesh out their space.

• Font and visual references: Make the whiteboard thematic! Change the font to be genre-appropriate, drop in borders, images, backgrounds, and art that gives a sense of mood and landscape.

• GM Board: I keep an entirely separate second whiteboard open that only I have access to, where I lay out all of the GM material I don’t necessarily want players to have. For something like Public Access, I just screenshot the adventure pages of each active mystery and put them all on one big spread. You could do this with pamphlet modules, Mythic Bastionland Omens, etc.

• Back-ups: A whiteboard can have multiple pages. Since I like to keep everything on one page, I end each session by duplicating the main page, locking the duplicate, and putting the date on it as a backup in case anything goes wrong on the main board.

And on that note, what about Google Docs?

A bunch of us hopped online to spontaneously play What Dust Remains after Vincent Baker spent a few weeks hyping it in interviews. It’s a storytelling game played out with prompts and a deck of cards. At first, an industrious player started taking notes of our progress in Google Docs.

After half an hour, we were just playing the game in Google Docs. All of our prompt answers became notes, and each prompt we dealt with became a screenshot. With four people working in a doc, you get lots of storytelling done. I know lots of people have been running more narrative games out of Google Sheets for character keepers for a long while, but I think even very trad games can benefit from using giant online whiteboards as VTTs.

Recently, at PAX Unplugged, my buddy Hexed Press Todd and I walked the floor, looking at these wild multimedia booths for elaborate VTTs and virtual reality experiments. The booth for Foundry looked like something out of last week’s Game Awards. For a certain type of player, this style of highly programmed play has promise and appeal. Baby, I’m running in the other direction.

Notes

• Check out this livestream Todd and I did! I gave some tips on running Mythic Bastionland. It’s a long rambling conversation, but maybe you’ll like it.

• The last YouTube video I made was 2025 TTRPG predictions. Maybe I should go back and revisit those predictions, given the year is over and that video was so popular.

I’ve written a great deal about structuring scenic play in TTRPGs, and have started to create a master list of these posts here.

What do we mean by “scene” here?

Scenes are a special pillar of our play, common to most roleplaying games. They are distinct from time spent tinkering with character sheets, discussing our plans out-of-character, or engaging with mechanics that resolve actions or shape narrative. There is a distinct mode we drop into that you can call “scene time.”

When we’re in “scene time,” we drop away from viewing our fiction from a birds-eye view and enter near to our characters and their perspective. This can include playing out a scene in real time, play-acting, or simply narrating our characters’ actions and behavior.

Players generally know they’re in scene time when they begin thinking “in character” moment-by-moment. Scene time begins and concludes. We enter in, and we exit. Often, these bookends come and go without ceremony.

Many games properly called “roleplaying games” don’t formally mention scene play at all — the treasure-hunting, monster-killing dungeon crawl comes to mind. But for many games, scenes are the pillar of advancing play and resolving conflict, and we enter into scenes, structure them, begin them, and end them in all of our sessions.

So what do our rule books and written guidance have to say about how we spend this time?

In my reading, it seems most games don’t provide anything resembling a “structure,” but rather relegate the scene-making process to game master skill, or offer general advice on what techniques serve players well in spontaneous scene-making.

Many games don’t mention scenes at all, leaving scenic play as a self-evident pillar of the game experience. In these cases, the book presumes that when it’s time to have a scene, your instincts will kick in and you will know what to do.

My interest is in games that attempt to do more for GMs and players by adding structures and guidelines. It is a growing trend for games to explicitly name scene-play and give proper scaffolding, particularly for those games that have scenes as the primary arena for players to challenge one another and create satisfying game outcomes. Guidelines and processes are great tools for inspiring players and equipping them for success.

In my research, there are generally six approaches to structuring scenes, though some games use a hybrid of two or more structures. I’m not a big fan of taxonomies, but I couldn’t help myself:

The Foundation Scene

In these games, the procedure for scene-making is simply an outline for some information you can use as a starting point. The GM is advised to establish or ask for a list of ingredients, such as “Who is present,” or “Where does this scene take place?”, or the motivations of the various characters in the scene. Then, improvised play begins, often with general advice or guidance— but no further procedures — for how to develop and end the scene.

This is the most common starting place for building a scene, and for many games, there is little else in the way of structure. But it is common that this simple approach of asking “Who, what, where, when, and why?” is married with another of the following approaches.

The Framed Scene

Framed scenes flow from an initial moment, inciting incident, or provocative image from the GM. Like the foundation scene, the formal structure of the scene is just a launchpad, with improvised, free-form play following this initial frame. Framed scenes use initial circumstances to focus scenes on key moments in the narrative, directing a scene’s energy and improv by clearly identifying the conflict and the stakes.

Urban Shadows suggests that GMs “Jump straight to the good parts[...] Skip the boring stuff and focus instead on the core of what’s happening or what’s going to happen.” Regarding harder scene framings, Root says, “There’s no room for negotiation, no room to adjust and aim for a different kind of scene — the characters are in the scene, in that moment, dealing with that situation, and they have to react as best they can.”

From there on, the Framed Scene leaves player behavior to inertia, and often recommends the GM hold strong authority in terms of ending a scene in a timely way (See also: Cthulhu Dark, many PbtA games)

The Question Scene

This structure centers a dramatic question about the story or characters, usually a question that the table would like to explore as an unresolved point of thematic or narrative interest.

Orbital asks the player on their turn to create “a compelling story question,” then establish a foundation for the scene, and “continue playing until you feel the scene’s question is satisfactorily explored.” Microscope scenes begin with the question, written on an index card places in front of the players, and says that the “Question is why we are looking at the Scene in the first place, and the Scene isn’t complete until we find the answer.”

The Touchstone Scene

In these scenes, we are given an objective in the scene, such as something particular to say or include. This is our touchstone, a beat, phrase, or other story moment we must arrive at in order to say our scene is done.

In Dialect, a game about language, every scene indicates a particular invented word that every player must, at some point, say during the scene in a way that indicates their relationship to the word. In Cosmic Dark, players establish relationships with one another using flashback scenes that include a phrase at least one character must say. In Archipelago, players begin play by drafting “destiny points,” important story moments for players to eventually narrate in scenes.

The Process Scene

Process scenes are rarely included in games, but are effective. In the Process Scene, players have access to a list of step-by-step moments, prompts, or questions. Process scenes have clear beginnings and endings, and players know what they’re responsible for providing.

In The Quiet Year, a game about communities and collective projects, you can “Hold a Conversation” that includes the guideline: “Starting with you and going clockwise, everyone gets to weigh in once, sharing a single argument comprised of 1-2 sentences.” In Public Access, a game that involves a mysterious group of VHS tapes, players discover the contents of a tape by dividing up a list of prompts, and then narrating them one by one in order to flesh out the contents of the scene. (See also: The Between, DramaSystem, games with tactically rich combat)

The Dictated Scene

Simply put, these are scenes where one player or GM is given the opportunity to unilaterally narrate the events of a scene. These are also sometimes called “Minor Scenes,” and often exist in games to give a player an opportunity to write a piece of discrete fiction to complement the greater collaborative fiction. (See also: Microscope: Chronicle, Orbital, games where the GM is invited to “describe off-screen badness”)

Structures, launchpads, destinations — commentary on scenes and their approaches

Now I will reveal some of my personal biases. I find Foundation Scenes and Framed Scenes to be a great source of guidance. It’s in Process Scenes that I am currently seeing the most innovation and excitement.

So many common gripes or insecurities that come up around roleplaying, such as not knowing where to end a scene or not feeling capable of improvising with confidence, can find their source in a lack of structure. The great advantage of a prompt is that we know intuitively when a prompt is satisfied. The great advantage of a scene structure with a final step is that we know when we’ve reached our destination. Structures are comfortable containers that offer confidence and skillful behavior.

We might even say that combat in a game like D&D 5e or Pathfinder, laid out on a grid and mediated through ordered turns and action economy, is a sort of complex, maximalist Process Scene. Is it any wonder that players from these games often become curious about “mechanics for social encounters?” They are intuiting, correctly, that fights are simply scenes like any others, but have much more satisfying and inviting structures.

My belief is that most TTRPGs presume a baseline of very high capability in terms of dramatic ability and narrative instinct. More sharply: Our games presume and prioritize a certain personality type. This status quo simply leaves too many people behind, particularly players whose personalities or play styles thrive when offered structured opportunities for spontaneous creation, but withdraw when asked to do dramatic improvisation that they are not trained for. It is an accessibility issue and a design opportunity.

Lastly, a personal note: I am a boisterous and extroverted person, and I have a conservatory training in dramatic improvisation. My interest in scene structures comes from running games for people I love, but who may not have my personality or my training. I often see them struggle with this incredibly discreet slice of the roleplaying game experience. I have a big heart for them. I hope more designers will think deeply about what can be done to invite their participation and creativity. The players I encounter are hungry for greater innovation in formal scene structuring.

Over a decade ago, The DramaSystem from Pelgrane Press took this on in an interesting way, offering something like a foundation and then a process added on. Its dramatic scenes begin with information, but players are advised to center their roleplay around a rough process of dramatic challenges. It is possibly the greatest attempt I’ve seen at taking on the project.

If you are reading this post thinking to yourself, “I don’t see why any of this is necessary, I’ve never had any problem framing, developing, or improvising dramatic scenes at my table,” you should consider that this is probably a consequence of your talents and other skills, and that this exploration was written with people in mind who do not have your gifts.

Finally, if any experience stood out to me most in this exploration and evaluation of a few dozen TTRPGs, it is how very many of them do not offer any guidance at all.

Varieties of Scenes in TTRPGs — a taxonomy and exploration of the state of things

Struggling with “Scenes” — Playing ‘Follow: A New Fellowship’ by Ben Robbins, the post that started it all

The Scene Kit Series

1. Everyday gamers CAN make great dramatic scenes — let’s find the method.

2. How to ‘Set the Scene’ for ANY scene in your roleplaying game of choice

3. Adding tension to narrative TTRPG scenes, step by step

4. You need a way to stop a scene while roleplaying

5. Ending each Dramatic Scene in your game with a few great vigettes, or ‘minor scenes’

6. Putting together the Scene Kit and boiling it waaaaay down

7. When one player is in the spotlight, give everyone else a job

The riddle is a test of worthiness. The riddle is the guardian standing at the doorway to mystery. The riddle is a contest of great stakes between adversaries in wisdom and willpower. The riddle is a pastime of friendly boasting and bonding between old and new friends by a fireside.

Tabletop roleplaying games, particularly those downstream of faerie tale and “Tolkeinesque” fantasy, often include riddles as tests for player characters. Typically, the game will pose a literal riddle for players to bash their heads against or, in the case of Free Leagues The One Ring, gives you a skill called “Riddles” and you can simply make a Riddles Check to see if you are victorious.

To my yearning heart, neither of these approaches gives the feeling of creative puzzling, journeying wit, or sudden triumph that I desire from a folkloric tussling of minds.

I am proposing a small procedural game to replace these methods wherever you find them. In stark contrast to those game mechanics, the Ancient Game of Riddles invites players into the fun of puzzling not by asking them to solve a riddle, but by asking them to design one.

Let’s play…

Playing the Ancient Game of Riddles

The game begins when, through the course of normal repartee, one fellow proposes a game of riddles to settle a dispute or content. The adversaries in the game should negotiate the terms of victory or some prize to be won. One player, representing his side, begins by Composing a Riddle, then Gathers the Stones, and then Matches Wits to see if the game continues or concludes.

Compose a Riddle

The player matching wits against the adversary in the ancient game first spends ample time inventing a riddle, leading a collaboration with the other players.

The player begins with an answer. Answers can include:

• Everyday objects: a key, a candle, a thorn, a comb, a door.

• Elements of nature: an echo, beasts, a pine tree, a hidden stream, a star.

• Abstract concepts: time, age, silence, a secret, memories, today.

• Places: a guest-house, a cemetery, a library, a bridge, a well.

• People: a tax-collector, a butcher, a bee-keeper, death.

• Containers and keeping-places: a book, a deck of cards, a footlocker, a map.

Particularly clever riddlers might use local legends or place names from your game world as the answer, such as “The Good King Medwyn” or “The Owereth Forest.”

Then the player designs a riddle. Riddles have many schemes:

Enigma

A poetic description that twists around the expected, so you always lose its trail. To design this riddle, brainstorm many features of your riddle’s answer. Then, list them, and find twists on these features to obscure their nature.

• What runs, but never walks. Murmurs, but never talks. Has a bed, but never sleeps. And has a mouth, but never eats? (a river)

• I have keys but no locks. I have space but no rooms. You can enter, but you can’t go inside. (a keyboard)

Narrative

The narrative riddle might be a process, a life cycle, a passage through time, or simply how an object changes as we encounter it. With your riddle answer, sketch out a way your answer changes over time, and then find a simple story that tells that change symbolically.

• Thirty white horses on a red hill. First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still. (teeth)

• I am born in the sea, live in the sky, and die on the earth. (rain)

• I am taken from a mine and shut up in a wooden case; I never see the sun, yet I help others to see. (the lead in a pencil)

Paradox

The paradox describes the answer in simple terms, but in a way that uses wordplay to create a contradiction. These are difficult to design!

• The more you share me, the less I am. What am I? (a secret)

• The more you take, the more you leave behind. (footsteps)

Once you have your riddle, write it down or compose it well so that it can be said aloud clearly. When the player is finished, they can recite the riddle to their adversary. Then, gather the stones.

Gather the Stones

For your stones, gather at the table two sets of tokens of equal size and weight, but in two distinct colors — poker chips, playing cards, mancala beads, or dice of a uniform size will all work. You will be gathering them into a pool together.

Begin with 1 red and 1 white stone in the pool for each player.

• Add 1 white stone if the riddle rhymes, or is in a pleasing meter.

• Add 1 white stone if the answer to the riddle is a specific object, person, or place known to legend, history, or local custom.

• Add 1 white stone if the riddling character is a particularly proficient riddler compared with the adversary.

• Each player may add 1 red stone if they believe the riddle is either too obvious or too obscure to be reasonably guessed by an average wit.

• Each player may add 1 white stone if they believe the riddle is tricky, but guessable given some time to ponder.

Once you’ve completed the pool of stones, put them in a gathering place like a hat or a bag. It’s time to match wits with the adversary.

Match Wits

Mix the stones together in secret, so that the adversary can draw stones without looking. Two stones are drawn, one after the other. Interpret the results below:

WHITE…

The adversary cannot guess the riddle…

….then WHITE

The adversary concedes that they are no match for the riddling character’s sharp wit and clever tongue. The riddling character triumphs!

…then RED

The adversary demands another riddle so they might have a fair shot. The game begins again, but for the rest of the game, begin with only 1 red stone in the pile, instead of 1 red stone for each player.

RED…

The adversary correctly guesses the answer to the riddle.

…then WHITE

The adversary insists on another try, or else takes their own turn, depending on their nature. The game begins again, perhaps with the roles of riddler and adversary reversed.

…then RED

The adversary declares themselves the victor and insists on their prize.

The Ancient Game of Riddles, in part, uses the Red & White rules from Follow: A New Fellowship by Ben Robbins, lamemage.com.

More notes

• Maybe I should flesh this riddle out, put it into a little tiny zine, and hand it out at PAXU or something. I don’t even have tickets yet.

• I’ll be at ArcaneCon in Northampton, MA, November 7 & 8! I’m running Mythic Bastionland for whatever three players show up and register. I’ll have to prep and do a quick playtest of the one-shot I’m going to run. This post got me thinking that maybe one-shots should really be structured in a way more divergent with a first session of a campaign than I am initially inclined.

• I’m glad I wrote this little game, maybe now I’ll finally be ok with running The One Ring. Except I’m too desperate to run shorter CfB games instead, like By Endurance We Conquer. Anyhow, I’ve actually had this game on my mind for a year, but I went on a beautiful hike today and fleshed it out while walking, so here it is.

• Speaking of which, go back The Girls of the Genziana Hotel by Hendrick ten Napel. It looks so fucking good! And it’s already done, “backing” it just means buying the zine.

• The illustration at the top is Bilbo and Gollum by Cor Blok. I love historical takes on illustrating Tolkien.

I get why nobody wants to talk about Twilight 2000. The setting is alienating and grim, and the rules, while elegant, are so crunchy that one player in my first home game said they were “right on the edge of what [he] would consider playable.”

But Twilight 2000 (T2K) is also beautifully designed, and one of its best triumphs in its product line is the campaign box: The Black Madonna. Not enough people play T2K for The Black Madonna to get the attention it deserves.

The campaign’s primary, rare achievement is this: The Black Madonna is a treasure hunt. That’s it? Yes, that’s it. But what this means is that The Black Madonna fits a particularly common niche — it’s a long-term campaign format that also takes place in a pre-existing open hexcrawl.

Here’s how the campaign works:

• There is a religious object, the Black Madonna (a real icon), that is thought to be destroyed in a nuclear explosion, but is possibly still out there. Recovering it would have epic symbolic importance to whoever can get their hands on it.

• Players begin the campaign by coming into possession of a journal found on a dead American soldier suggesting the Black Madonna is intact. The journal is provided in the boxed set as a physical clue that players are handed. The journal suggests the Black Madonna is out there, and gives some spooky, evocative geographic clues about where players might begin their search.

• The campaign book takes the pre-existing map from core Twilight 2000, and simply layers on a pile of new rumors, NPCs, factions, encounters, and adventure sites, scattering clues across a pre-existing setting to entice players to explore, poke around, and search rural towns, ruins, encampments, and occupied cities to find the Black Madonna before the competing cast of militarized bastards, spooks, and religious ideologues get there first.

What this results in is something beautiful: A campaign where players can explore the hexcrawl in whatever way they choose, taking on faction play, equipment, survival mechanics, combats, negotiations, and side-quests. They can take their time with social errands, or make a beeline straight for the goal if they’d rather.

Mostly, The Black Madonna gets players moving across the whole map in whatever direction they want. I’ve been scratching my head for a comparable product in TTRPGs generally.

The Black Madonna is flawed, sure. For one, it left out a lot of the actual central clues and signposts it might have included, as though A and Z were hand-crafted and the rest of the alphabet didn’t make the publishing deadline. If I had to guess, it simply wasn’t play-tested much, or not at all, considering no play-testers are credited. Still…

The Treasure Hunt is a format I wish I saw much more of in written modules, adventures, and campaign settings.

Best of all, I can’t think of a pre-existing hexcrawl that couldn’t use the help of a treasure hunt structure. Without the need to set out breadcrumbs and railroads, the treasure hunt provides…

• … a simple goal, emphasis on ‘simple!’ We’ve all heard players ask the dreaded question, “What are we supposed to be doing again, exactly?” When the answer is close at hand, players thrive.

• …room to side-quest! There’s always an excuse to stop in a local hex and do some random rescue mission or political encounter if players suspect there might be a clue nearby. Even if not directly relevant to the task at hand, Players can rest assured that if they pursue other goals, they can return to the hunt whenever they get the itch.

• …a reason to explore lots of territory. So many hexcrawl systems offer whole systems for exploration that players never fully utilize. A treasure hunt gets them headed from one place to the next, never settling down for too long.

• …motivation to suffer through the tough stuff. Losing all of your money, getting injured, having retainers or even companions die can be demoralizing if your goal was either too personal to a character, or based on accumulation. The treasure hunt always means that as long as you’re living, you’re on the way to that X on the map!

They also seem easy to construct! After all, The Black Madonna is the shortest game booklet Free League publishes for the Twilight 2000 product line. I’d go further and suggest it’s the shortest campaign they publish for any of their many product lines.

Outside of The Black Madonna, I can’t think of a hexcrawl at all with a central campaign premise of “Seek the McGuffin.”

But boy, oh boy, do I wish I had one for Dolmenwood

I really wanted to run Dolmenwood. My trouble is, having now read most of it, I’m not sure what I’m meant to tell my players to do, exactly. Dolmenwood, like many beautifully designed sandboxes, is just loaded up with a fantastical menagerie of toys for players to poke and pursue, and very little suggestion for why players would bother.

I can hear you saying “Players are meant to set their own priorities, that’s the point of the sandbox!” But I’m not sure any of the players I’ve ever met sit down to play games with the fantasy to set their priorities from scratch, so much as they want to know what they’re meant to achieve and have freedom to pursue those goals creatively.

I don’t mean to pick on Dolmenwood. Loads of hexcrawls have this problem, in my experience. Anyway, I’m not sure who’s itching to write some third-party Dolmenwood content, but the Creator Kit is available, so I hope someone hops to it!

Here’s the treasure hunt sandbox recipe:

• Take a map/world/hexcrawl that is already fleshed out, and design a cool hidden treasure with a cool location, maybe with some sort of defenses, or at least some defenders.

• Start players off with some kind of “treasure map,” or hyper-rich clue to get them started on several possible leads.

• Make a few factions and NPCs that are pursuing the treasure separately from the players. Some are allies, some are enemies, but all should be considered the competition. Plop them down all over the place.

• Design a bunch of rumors and random encounters that make it seem like the world at large is either interested in, or affected by, the big important McGuffin.

I’m savagely hungry for it.

Other notes

• Honestly, I’ve got several other observations about Twilight 2000 I’d love to give. I’m amazed people don’t play it more often, considering the renaissance in grid-based tactics RPGs.

• Should I write a little conversion guide for setting The Between in 1880s Gilded Age New York City? I’d sure like to! But this gets me blogging about why we’re so interested in history RPGs generally.

• I’m getting more interested in playing games online. I just can’t be bothered with all of that damn VTT software. It just seems so clunky, man… but maybe it’ll finally mean I can find someone with whom I can run The Black Madonna.

• Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, lots of life has happened. Got married, moved into a big intentional community, etc. More soon!

So, I brought it to my mother, who always liked to hear about what I was reading. She’s the one I got all this chattiness from.

“Well, I think that’s wrong,” she said flatly. Huh?

“But look, he’s got this argument about how those who wield ultimate authority should be willing to pay ultimate pr—”

“Ok,” she said. “Well, when I was young, my father served as a surgeon in Vietnam, and I was there with him as a middle schooler. I saw firsthand how it ruined something in him permanently. Nothing good ever comes of war, ever.”

And with that, she no longer had any interest in talking about the book. I think I continued on for a moment, but she just shrugged and went out for a cigarette. Why didn’t she sit there and argue with me? Wouldn’t she at least hear me out, and debate it for a bit?

I bring this up because this week, there is another dust-up about a TTRPG company and its potential affiliations with unsavory characters. This time it’s Goodman Games. Strangely — or should I say “yet again” — the conversation across Reddit and Discord is often centered around discussing the optics. Have they changed their PR strategy? Are they hypocritical? What is their legal obligation? Does this give the OSR a bad look? Are you, upvoted poster, creating a bad look for us right now? We will restart the clock on all of this again next week.

I propose this: All of this prevarication is a waste of time and breath, which are, in fact, a limited resource. We cannot exercise any control over Goodman Games and how they manage this weird mix of Kickstarter obligation and money movement. All you can do is stand in your integrity.

Do you think Goodman Games is in the wrong? Great, don’t buy their products, and next time someone wants you to play Dungeon Crawl Classics, politely say, “Thank you for inviting me, but I don’t like that company’s association with Bob Whatever and his anti-Semitism, so I don’t want to play those games. Please let me know if there’s something else you’d like to run sometime soon!” You will have done enough.

But what about the internet strangers!? There is nothing you can do for them. Perhaps you are worried about the norms in the community! I’m going to say that there is only one meaningful, world-changing thing you can do to fight anti-Semitism in the TTRPG community. It is this:

Get together with your friends, and commit to new ways to bring more Jewish people to your TTRPG table as friends, and build a community of play where Jewish people feel welcome, in your home and in your city.

Everything else is wasted breath.

You may disagree, and I respect that. But don’t waste your time telling me about it, because I don’t know you, and so expressing your disagreement to me will not make your Jewish neighbors or community spaces any safer or any less anti-Semitic, which is what I urge you to focus on. I want Jewish people to feel safe in our hobby, and the people God put on earth to welcome and greet our Jewish neighbors into the hobby are spending their time arguing about a press release with someone they will never meet and never change.

I’ve used this before, because it’s a good one:

“What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’? Usually, we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about.”
- Dr Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, on theological argumentation

In other words, integrity is simply about what it says it is about.

That afternoon in 2006, when I wanted to regale my mother by repeating totalitarian propaganda and she simply shrugged and stopped the conversation, I was pretty indignant at her closed-mindedness. Didn’t she want to discuss further? Also, I never picked up that line of debate about Starship Troopers with anyone ever again. I caught a glimpse of something I needed to change in myself in order to fully understand.

That is the effect that integrity has on a person. My mother was a Christian Pacifist her whole adult life, though to my recollection, she never used the word “pacifism” once. She didn’t have to — she simply stood in her integrity and felt no need to attempt to change another person. When you experience integrity firsthand, it inspires you to change yourself. And all throughout her life, until she died yesterday morning, people of integrity gathered to her like moths to a flame.

And not a breath was wasted.

I see the question is asked all of the time: Is there a game like Elden Ring, but for TTRPGs? We get this around every pop-cultural phenomenon — “Is there a game for like the show/game/movie I just watched/played/saw?” but the Elden Ring question comes up a lot, and I think is often answered poorly.

I believe there is an answer to this question. It’s obvious to me: It’s Trophy Gold, or rather any of the Trophy games.

I’m not even talking about the aesthetics and genre; the moldy, haunting grandiosity, the crumbling Celt-ish creepiness that normally draws the comparison between Elden Ring and Trophy, what with its starlight serpents, babbling grafted god prophets, gallows hills, and Old Lost Kalduhr. Similar vibes, but still, you can’t capture Elden Ring through a Pinterest board or proper nouns.

And also, I don’t think that when people are looking for an “RPG like Elden Ring,” they’re looking for an analog to the “player skill” aspect of Elden Ring, wherein you learn a series of timed moves and ripostes to bring down a challenging foe with practice. Brad Kerr of Between 2 Cairns once said, I believe correctly, that Elden Ring has more in common here with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than anything like a “roleplaying game.” The impolite truth is often that roleplaying games are just a very poor medium to chase this particular high, in the same way that a roleplaying game will never be a platformer or a rhythm game.

What I think most folks want out of the Elden Ring game is the mysterious encounter that curious players have with the lore, dripped out in diegetic fragments, hidden away in pieces of poetry and item descriptions. Exploring Elden Ring feels like bathing in a landscape whose mysteries are too time-worn to neatly index, and whose scale is too grand to take in at once. In lieu of wikis or the experience-annihilating deluge of lore videos, players are only left to discover luminous fragments and create a mosaic of their own devising.

This, my fellow TTRPG sickos, is something we can accomplish. Let’s call this particular experience…

Emergent Lore

Emergent Lore is fiction from our game world that begins as disparate, seemingly-unconnected bits of information that, through accumulation, imagination, and intuition, begins to coalesce into canon.

Emergent Lore thrives in game practices like collaborative world-building or anti-canon worlds, wherein we don’t refer to a hard body of lore for our games, but attempt to mold one together. There is an important difference. Emergent lore isn’t simply the “Yes, and” compilation of additional parts, but a natural way fragments of fiction begin to form a complete picture, sometimes in a way that feels out of our ability to control or manipulate.

This brings us a new, important ingredient of emergent lore: epiphanic discovery. The epiphanic discovery is a moment of dawning mutual realization among players that certain disparate elements must be connected.

So: The players find a bunch of old tomes on dead languages during their heist — oh, that must mean the library’s owner has been studying the old ruins outside of town! Or, a murder victim had a paternity test in her purse when the body was discovered. Oh, she must be the secret daughter of that one dowager, which explains the empty photo frames in the old lady’s house! That must be it!

Emergent lore has a mysterious and exciting quality, and it is one of the best ways a TTRPG can give players a feeling of exploration and discovery outside of a GM simply handing out trivia from a pre-written sourcebook. Emergent lore has a noetic quality that insists on its own realness beyond our own agreement. Once it is said, you can’t stop seeing it. It takes a life of its own.

There is plenty of mutual world-building that does not rely on emergent lore. Ben Robbins’ games, Microscope being the most famous, is a game that is a “Yes, and” game, or a “Yes, but” game that asks players not to over-collaborate, but rather to take turns building unilaterally. Jason Cordova, perhaps the great high priest of emergent lore games, has tools like Paint-the-Scene questions that mutually build an imaginary space without expecting contributions to take on an emergent life of their own.

Let’s bring it back to Trophy to see how a game can build this right in.

In the Trophy games, backgrounds and adventures are regularly throwing evocative characters or locations at you, gently telegraphing their meaning, but never taking the final say from the players. You might generate a character whose goal is to “Seize absolute control of Kormoran’s Wheel.” What the hell is Kormoran’s Wheel? It will emerge.

Here is the guidance from both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold, referencing terms buried throughout the character creation process:

What is a Beastbitten or a Faeborn? Is a Snake a smooth-talking charlatan, or a literal serpent-person? What happens at Countess Shima’s Forbidden Festival? Who is Cyrus, and why do you need to take their place at the Earthen Council? What even is the Earthen Council? A player who selects one of these options should feel free to make up an explanation for them, either during character creation or during the course of the game. […]

It’s much more important to make something memorable and immediately useful at the table—that everyone is invested in the story and feels able to expand on it during the game.

At first, it might seem that this lore is just “made up by the player.” But to hear the testimony of players at my table, emergent lore takes on the quality of revealed truth — something that “couldn’t” have been any other way.

Another example: A group of mine was using The Perilous Void last week to build a setting for some sci-fi games. One player generated a species of giant mollusks that are great technological innovators. Another player generated a group of octopus people. Someone said “Oh, maybe they’re from the same planet as the mollusks. Maybe they work together!” Suddenly another person said, “Yeah, the mollusk people are like the brains of the operation, the octopi are the diplomats and translators!”

If you’ve ever seen this sort of collaboration take on a life of its own, you can see it in the face and the body. Players lean forward, their backs straighten, and their eyes grow bright. Yes, of course. That must be it.

My first exposure to emergent lore, personally, came from solo play, specifically the work of Shawn Tomkin of Ironsworn and Starforged fame. Without the GM, the emergent lore experience generated by oracles and keywords is the best opportunity you have for enlivening the imagination.

There will be some who respond that emergent lore can never replace the feeling granted by “hard” lore, a fully indexed and taxonomized reality, represented by either words on a page or good ol’ GM say-so. In this view, mysteries are simply an agglomeration of withheld data. It’s just some stuff you don’t know.

To those who believe they can only find what I often heard as “satisfaction” in exploring these predetermined canons, I say: There is another land, with firm terrain and mossy, worn-down, toppled stones, scattered with fragments. An entirely mythic landscape. Legends will animate before your eyes. There is no guidebook to that place! It is only for those who journey there.

Some games that encourage emergent lore:

• Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold

• Carved From Brindlewood games, specifically the way they resolve mysteries.

• Collaborative world-building games like Ben Robbins’ games, or Dialect.

• Some Forged in the Dark games like Bump in the Dark.

• Games with either life-path or bonds-based character creation processes, wherein it’s often the case that players, as they develop bonds with each other, have sudden mutual realizations about relationships between characters.

• Solo games that use oracles, such as Mythic GME, Ironsworn/Starforged, the Strider supplement to The One Ring.

• I’m sure there are others. Please share you experience with emergent lore and epiphanic discovery in the comments!

An idea struck me: I do a lot of group facilitation, and I have some of these “jumbo sticky notes” around. By jumbo, I mean giant sheets of paper, sometimes on a cardboard easel, that can tear off and stick to surfaces. They look like this, and you can get them at Staples, Amazon, wherever you get office supplies:

What if I just took everything from behind the screen, so to speak, and just threw all of the little pieces of game info on one of those? Folks generally think it helps “immersion” if you leave this stuff in notes, or ask players to remember it all. But that night, I couldn’t be bothered with illusionism. Asking my players to remember all that data was asking too much. So we tried it.

It was a phenomenal success. They loved it.

So I tried it for Scum & Villainy with the clocks. I tried it using Public Access. I tried it when playing Freebooters on the Frontier. It comes up as a highlight in all my debriefs. Anything where the players needed reliable access to a major goal, or a ticking clock, or a cast of NPC names, it went up on the board. Since I sit against the wall, that board is over my shoulder at all times, and players are looking in that direction.

That’s my message for today: Put a big board up in your space, on a big-ass sticky note with a marker, or a dry-erase board, and just throw shit on the board.

Another option here is a giant roll of “butcher paper” to cover the surface of your table. You can also get it at the hardware store as a giant roll of brown paper. Tear off a sheet, cover your table with it, and your players can write on it, take notes, doodle, whatever. Again, a $20-$40 roll will last you the rest of your life.

On that note…

Externalize your thinking

I went on a self-improvement journey during the writing of The Roaring Age which a lot of folks liked reading about. Here was the quote that launched it, from Getting Things Done author David Allen:

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

His point is that if there’s a persistent idea that you’re meant to remember, you should get it out of your head and put it somewhere you can reference. This leads to the practice of always “closing all open loops.” Open loops are anything you’re meant to do or remember that you’re just holding in your head to mentally remind yourself over and over again.

Thinking well can be like juggling, and the more things you have to remember, the more balls you have to keep in the air. Externalizing anything that you need to return to, like a goal or a future task will clarify your thinking so you can focus on what matters presently.

The more players have the remember, the less they can improvise, role play, and make fun decisions. In a particularly messy session, you’ll hear often a player say “Wait… so what are we even supposed to be doing again?” This is a surefire sign that they are trying to remember too many things.

Get out of your head, and onto the board.

Removing the veil

I recently ran some sessions of Trophy: Gold for some of the Brooklyn OSR folks. One thing Trophy: Gold does is divide the imaginary landscape of an adventure into room-like “sets,” and instructs you to inform the players what the goal is as soon as they enter the space. They might enter a farmhouse and find out that their goal is to “learn the Scarecrow Ritual,” even if they have no idea at the outset what the hell that means.

When I read this, I hated it. I balked at the idea that players should just be told what the goals are. Sometimes discovering the purpose or destination of a space is its own mystery.

As it turns out, the mystery of what the players are even supposed to be doing is not a very fun mystery. Once you liberate players from the fumbling endeavor to articulate their own goals, they can set about confidently pursuing them.

So, for example, you might have a set called ‘The Hedge Maze,’ and the goal is “Reach the center of the maze.” That sounds straightforward, but as a directive, it does a ton of work, because it makes it clear when the set is over. You might accomplish all sorts of little adventure milestones in the hedge maze, like finding treasure, or fighting monsters, or learning a lore secret. But it’s only when they find the center of the maze that they can say “Ok, we’re officially done here.” Players are never going to ramble around a room, find a secret scroll, and wonder “So, is this what this room is for? To get us to this scroll? Or should we keep searching?”

We often hear things like the Five Room Dungeon for its design elegance and beginner-friendly simplicity. Or we hear about Clocks as a revolutionary way to abstract progress toward a goal in a satisfying way. But another secret success of these game tools is that they clearly say “This is how far you are from X goal, and then you will be done.”

GM superstar Brennan Lee Mulligan once said something like, “In D&D, the fighter has two special abilities. The first is to hit something with your sword. The second is to always know the best thing to do when your turn comes around.”

Help your players remember less.

What else is going on…

• On an ironic note, I’ve been playing Twilight 2000, and I’ve become sorta enamored and romantically fixated on this high-crunch survival simulator. I have lots to say about non-heroic tactical combat that I’m saving for another post.

• Folks went nuts over my write-up of Worldwizard, it’s my most-liked post by a long-shot. I’ve written a ton of personal notes, but the initial blog post was written in a 40-minute fever pitch. Funny how these things go.

• A written round-up blog of my recent diet of films, games, and books I’ve experienced feels, to me, like it would be self-indulgent slop. Then again, when others do it, I absolutely eat that up, so maybe I’ll try a few. People seemed to love that Worldwizard post. I’m a marketing professional who has no idea what people really like.

• One of my next campaigns is of Public Access. Another campaign is Scum & Villainy. We’re just having a fucking blast with these games. More soon.

I ran it with several groups. I wrote up playtest notes. I fell in love. I think that Worldwizard is just the Best In Show for games for a group that wants to sit down and build an epic fantasy world from scratch.

Here’s a simple summary: In Worldwizard, you and your friends start with a literal blank hex map at the scale of an entire world, usually several large continents, and end up with hundreds of thousands of years of history, a detailed landscape, the epic history of several fallen civilizations, and a world of fantasy races and peoples leading right up to the “present day” of your campaign.

Some day in the past week or something, Lutes dropped the final version of Worldwizard on itch for $5. You can get in on DTRPG, but he gets less money.

So now I’m gonna tell you about it because it fucking rocks.

It’s like Sid Meyer’s Civilization meets the Silmarillion

First of all, let’s talk about how it goes.

At the beginning of the game, you start with a giant hex map, like 50x27 hexes, each representing possibly a hundred miles. We’re talking your whole planet. You and your friends just start drawing some continents, dividing the land and sea however you like, making some cool islands. Lutes includes some blank maps with continental boundaries if you like.

The game is played in four ages. The first age is the Primordial Age, representing millions of early years of your planet. All you do is make terrain. Start building mountains, add forests, lakes, rivers, jungles, whatever. Everyone goes around the table building the landscape on the map, spending an hour drawing together.

The subsequent three ages are Prehistoric, Ancient and Present. In these ages, you spent a simple resource called action points to make up little people groups, develop them into civilizations, expand them, send them to war, create new technology or religions. Or you can spend your points making “avatars,” which can be a god, or a hero, or a monster, or a mythic figure.

Wanna save your action points? You can “pass” on your turn, generate more, and hit the world with a cataclysm, or an earthquake, or a monster attack, or a demon incursion. Most of the game is rolling on tables, or picking from tables. Whatever you do, it’s all history.

Here’s the kicker: Between each age, every civiliation or avatar you make has to roll to either continue to the next age, die out, or spend action points to survive. Which means you can spend all of the Prehistoric age building a people group with a mighty citadel with some sick aqueducts only to watch them disappear suddenly into obscurity. Twice while playing, I spent the Ancient age creating a people group that took over the world like the Roman empire, only to have them collapse spectacularly (the Present age usually becomes largely about the fractious infighting that comes in its wake).

What the magic of this game is:

• Without needing to brief your players on a ton of backstory, you get the feeling of a rich setting with a true time abyss. One player I ran for wasted a bunch of action points in the Prehistoric phase making a ton of doomed people groups. But all of those freakish dog-men and snakefolk left their ruins behind on the map! We wrote some explanations for how some of those civs died, but others are a total mystery to still be explored.

• When players have a hand in writing the lore, they get a deep command of the world in a fun way without having to learn all that shit. For one world, just tracking all of the developments created a 17-page lore document. But everyone at the table knows it all inside-out already, just by dint of having made it all together!

• Naming conventions!! In true Perilous Wilds style, every civilization you create is given a real-world linguistic root that it uses for its naming conventions. Then that group begins to apply its naming conventions to both itself and everything around it. So, for example, we’ve got a group of stone giants that use Arabic, who call themselves the “Eimlaq” and have no name for their mountain home. But the Herrians use Basque, and to them, the Eimlaq are called the Ondegai, and live in the region they call Ibiltaria. Continents are named by those with the power to name them. Events take on vastly different meanings that live on in linguistic differences. Watching this shit develop in real-time is absolutely nuts.

• Different player behavior emerges. You have some people who want to conquer the world, some who want to take on a little island all their own, some who want to just make up gods and heroes, some who want to make faction fights using everyone else’s civilizations. And it all works together! No matter what, you end up with a living history.

• Honestly, drawing together is fun, drawing maps is fun, and labeling maps is fun. Nobody dislikes this.

What do you do when you’re done? Pick a hex and start your campaign. Use Perilous Wilds, use Microscope, use The Quiet Year, whatever. By this point in your play experience, you’re going to have tons of places you’re curious about, lost civilizations, ruins, political rivalries. Play Dungeon World, play Cairn, play whatever. I played Blades in the Dark in our world, and now we’re going to play Freebooters on the Frontier. Or set it aside and never return to it again.

Anyway, I think it’s all sick, and soon I’m going to run Lutes’s other game Freebooters on the Frontier 2e, which is playtesting now, in the world we made. The guy also just finished his Kickstarter for Perilous Voids, which is the best alternative to both Shawn Tomkin’s Starforged oracles and Stars Without Number, in terms of sci-fi world-building. All around, good year for Lutes.

What else is going on:

• I finished a Brindlewood Bay campaign, maybe I’ll recap my thoughts. I think we had a killer time, and I’d run it again for a one-shot, but I’m gonna need a big ol’ break before running another Gauntlet game again.

• Last month I published my biggest YouTube video so far, and it didn’t bring me any closer to wanting to continue doing YouTube videos. It also led to a bunch of new subscribers here on Substack, and the first thing they’re now seeing is a review of a game they’ve already seen an early review of.

• I ran my first ever Scum & Villainy and it was incredible, and my first ever Blades in the Dark and it was bad. I think I have this funny thing where I’m better at improvising in sci-fi than fantasy? Maybe I should be a sci-fi GM…

• I’ve finally got Urban Shadows on my shelf, and I think me and the guys in Brooklyn are itching for some vampires/werewolves/wizards stuff.

• I’m writing fiction again.

Leave me love in the comments, I read them all.

As with last year, I didn’t provide commentary. If you have any questions about anything on this list, feel free to hop into the comments and say whatever you’d like.

Reading

This Book Is Full of Spiders — Jason Pargin

Artificial Condition — Martha Wells
All Systems Red — Martha Wells

The Obstacle Is the Way — Ryan Holiday

Pirate Enlightenment — David Graeber

Surprised by Joy — C. S. Lewis

Carmilla — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler

Norse Mythology — Neil Gaiman

Shards of the Earth — Adrian Tchaikovsky
Eyes of the Void — Adrian Tchaikovsky
Lords of Uncreation — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lets Go Play at the Adams — Mendal W. Johnson

Doppelganger — Naomi Klein

Tender Is the Flesh — Agustina Bazterrica

Nickel and Dimed — Barbara Ehrenreich

Gilead — Marilynne Robinson

The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe — M. Gabriele, D.M. Perry

Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber

The Library at Mount Char — Scott Hawkins

Home — Marilynne Robinson

Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood

The Magic Christian — Terry Southern

The Soul of Shame — Curt Thompson

Only Yesterday — Frederick Lewis Allen

The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan — Anthology

Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

New World Coming — Nathan Miller

The Undocumented Americans — Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

Building a Second Brain — Tiago Forte

So Good They Can't Ignore You — Cal Newport

Murder of Roger Ackeroyd — Agatha Christie

A Sunlit Absence — Martin Laird

After the Quake — Haruki Murakami

The Palliative Society — Byung-Chul Han

Save the Cat! — Blake Snyder

The Colossus of New York — Colson Whitehead

The PARA Method — Tiago Forte

Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss

The Daughters' War — Christopher Buehlman

Genesis — The Bible

Reading Genesis — Marilynne Robinson

Deep Work — Cal Newport

Exhalation — Ted Chiang

The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien

The Drowned World — J. G. Ballard

The Word for World Is Forest — Ursula K Le Guin

The Extended Mind — Annie Murphy Paul

Getting Things Done — David Allen

Wintering — Katherine May

Ship of Magic — Robin Hobb

Steal Like an Artist — Austin Kleon

Orbital — Samantha Harvey

The Blade Itself — Joe Abercrombie did not finish

The City We Became — N.K. Jemisin did not finish

Playing

Monster of the Week — Michael Sands

Brindlewood Bay — Jason Cordova

In This World — Ben Collins

Follow — Ben Collins

Ironsworn: Starforged — Shawn Tomkin

Worldwizard — Jason Lutes

Freebooters on the Frontier: 2nd Edition — Jason Lutes

Blades in the Dark — John Harper

Scum & Villainy — Stras Acimovic & John LeBoeuf-Little

Slugblaster* — Mikey Hamm

CBR+PNK* — Emanoel Melo

Pirate Borg* — Luke Stratton, aka Limithron

Cairn — Yochai Gal

The Roaring Age — Jack Edward

Trophy Gold — Jesse Ross

Mausritter — Isaac Williams

Triangle Agency* — Caleb Zane Huett & Sean Ireland

*played in a convention one-shot or similar semi-public setting

Today, I’m publishing a quest for Follow: A New Fellowship by Ben Robbins. It’s called the Feast, and it’s available for free on my itch page now! Everything you need to play this GMless, prep-less game is free and ready to go.

In the Feast, you'll tell the story of a family preparing the dinner of a lifetime in order to bring lasting reconciliation, union, or peace between you and your approaching guests.

Will you master that recipe in time? Will you finally break through to that wayward son, or win the approval of a feisty elder who won't pass down the family secrets? Will you find that one perfectly preserved ingredient for the main dish in time? Will you heal the divide between your family and the visiting guests that's been holding you apart for generations?

No preparation. No facilitator. One session. One meal to remember.

Inspired by books like the Redwall series, and films like Babette's Feast (1987), Pig (2021), and Phantom Thread (2017).

I didn’t intend for this to come out in time for Thanksgiving, but here we are. I hope you’ll play it, or read it, and let me know what you think. It was copy-edited, of course, by the impeccable .

On that note, I’ve been struggling with myself over idea of coziness, particularly the idea that the “cozy” genre of media, “cozy games” or “cozy sci-fi” or whatever, is typically described as a genre that has “no conflict.” I’ve cobbled together some notes.

On Coziness

1.

I’ve never liked the idea that cozy fantasy and cozy games can be described as being “without conflict.” Rather, I believe coziness locates the conflict of the story in the intimacies of small relationships. 

Coziness reduces the stakes below certain thresholds by lowering the threat to home, the threat to society, to body, to family, to safety and sustenance, not to create perpetual safety and euphoria, but by allowing a subtler element of friction to shine out.

There’s a video of Fred Rogers, a canonized saint of coziness, speaking to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, discussing his concerns with the growing tendency toward violent conflict in children’s’ media. “We don't have to bop somebody over the head to...make drama on the screen,” he says of his show. “We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively.”

2.

From “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by 

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

3.

Then again, the definition of coziness as being “without conflict” is held so widely. Why do I shake my fist and rage at all at a perfectly functional definition, one that helps people find three more books just like Legends and Lattes? Fans of Spiritfarer aren’t routinely misled to their next game by failures of categorization, are they? And yet here I am, blogging.

A close friend described coziness, similarly, as without violence, drawing the boundary line in the wrong place all over again. When he says this, I grow frustrated with him. Doesn’t he get what I’m getting at here? Fred Rodgers, an ordained minister, would remind me that all of this teeth-grinding isn’t a war with another, isn’t a failure to love him, but rather a failure to love myself.

“It's very important to look inside yourself and find that loving part of you,” Pastor Rodgers says. “That's the part that you must take good care of and never be mean to.”

I’ll mull this over with prayer beads, on a walk in Prospect Park this warm November. I block off time for this walk on a Google Calendar.

4.

There is a book called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a lexicon of words that puts a name on otherwise unnamed feelings of loss, yearning, aching, sorrow. Some words are new, some are old, others are tailor-made by the author, John Koenig, “not necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake.”

Here’s a good one:

Ringlorn

adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

Here’s another:

Etherness

n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won’t always be this way—that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time when you’ll look back and try to imagine what it felt like to have everyone together in the same place.

One of the most powerful tools we have for self-making, recreation, and restoration is resonant language. Resonant language is the set of words that put shape and form on the unformed chaos of our inner life. If you’ve ever seen your horoscope, or a Meyers Briggs, or your Enneagram number, or a medical diagnosis, or anything that gave you that, “Aha, that’s it! That’s me.” That’s resonant language. A feeling of being known.

Coziness cannot be about impermeability, because resonant language pierces the heart from without. The language came from another. Coziness cannot be about protection only.

“It’s a calming thing, to learn there’s a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else” Koenig writes. “It’s even oddly empowering—to be reminded that you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.”

5.

Make your cozy list! Tea, candles, fireplaces, feasting. What is the role of comfort in coziness, besides that the genre is named for comfort? Perhaps because comfort softens us, which allows for the vulnerability of small things to enter in.

Clearly, leisure is some major of coziness. I’d argue, with one last addition, that cozy leisure is unhurried. This leisure is limitless, a cathedral in time. Respite gives us a calm before the storm, to recover before we re-enter the fray. Leisure is willing to wait out the storm, and the next storm, and the rest of the season if needed, without pressure or measure.

During the pandemic, Andy Serkis narrated the entirety of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. It’s about 100 hours of audio, and he did it for free, with voices for all of the characters. I’m doing my first listen-through, and one thing I underrated as a fan of the moves is how much more unhurried time passes between major events. The movies are a triumph, but they are also a cinematic triumph with the demands of dramatic tension, and so it doesn’t represent some of the following major periods of downtime:

• 10 years: The time between when Gandalf visits the Shire for Bilbo’s final birthday party and when Gandalf returns to set Frodo out on his quest.

• 5 months: The time Frodo spends preparing to go on his quest, selling properties, buying properties, giving things away, taking long walks with his friends.

• 2 months: The time the Fellowship spends in Rivendell after its formation but before they actually leave Rivendell,

How do they spend that time? Feasting, observing the weather, sitting by the fire, composing songs. Enjoying it, to the very brim, without hurry.

6.

Funny, then, that “cozy science fiction” is a genre that emerges. Science fiction has no candles, no fireplaces, often no open flames of any kind, or elaborate feasting. And yet we have The Wayfarers books.

I confess, I ran aground on The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Somehow it felt as though the fantasy of such a story is being bound up in small space with your coworkers, who are also your polycule. It wasn’t for me.

Then again, there are some folks in my day and age who don’t look nostalgically back at hearth and home, who jump ship from their place of birth as soon as they can get out. Part of me wonders if cozy sci-fi resonates with people who first found their quiet room for personal flourishing not in their childhood, but at college.

7.

I watch a YouTube essay about Animal Crossing. It turns out to be a YouTube essay about how Animal Crossing is about the comfort of a capable capitalism.

There is a discourse about cottage core, about the concept of “coziness,” consumption, Whiteness, cultural cannon, volkishness, nostalgia. You can spend your life staring askew at comfort and its reflection in the looking glass of digital media.

This year’s most overhyped trend is a wholesome Danish concept of cosiness, used to sell everything from fluffy socks to vegan shepherd’s pie. But the version we’re buying is a British invention – and the real thing is less cuddly than it seems.

That’s the beginning of a 6,000-word feature in the Guardian about the Danish concept of hygge. I put the article in my Instapaper to read later. Actually, just a few days ago, the New Yorker published a sneering piece about “cozy tech.” I put that in Instapaper, too. Maybe it would be better as an audio essay?

I look for it in Spotify, but then I see that I still have like 6+ hours left in the Andy Serkis Fellowship of the Ring. I delete both articles, and my heart breaks hearing Samwise agonizing over that poor old pony and how frightened he is of the mountains. Speak friend, and enter.

8.

“Maybe you’d like Stardew Valley,” I tell my fiancé. She’s never taken to video games, but another couple we know is playing their own couch co-op sessions while stuck at home with the new baby, and my fiancé will watch a trailer for anything. I pull it up on the living room TV.

Learn to live off the land…

She’s already shaking her head and bringing her hands to her chest defensively, like a cat being carried slowly toward a tub for a bath.

Become part of the local community…

“That’s not your local community!” she screams at the television, gesticulating wildly around the apartment, pointing to the apartments out of our window and across the barren courtyard of our pre-war building, “This is your local community!”

9.

One more:

Occhiolism

n. the awareness of how fundamentally limited your senses are—noticing how little of your field of vision is ever in focus, how few colors you’re able to see, how few sounds you’re able to hear, and how intrusively your brain fills in the blanks with its own cartoonish extrapolations—which makes you wish you could experience the whole of reality instead of only ever catching a tiny glimpse of it, to just once step back from the keyhole and finally open the door.

There is simply no better way to open a new campaign than with collaborative worldbuilding. My home group is playing lots of collaborative worldbuilding games to establish the setting for an upcoming campaign.

But the worlds we’re making have a hole in them: Gods.

We’re a table of all faith backgrounds, some steady in their faith life, some recovering, some totally allergic. But we all agree: There is a symbiotic and reciprocal relationship between the social culture of a society and that societies theology, ritual practice, and sacred stories about origin and purpose. Gods are rooted to landmarks, to favored relationships, animals, trades, practices and purposes, and where cultures collide, Gods meet and often mix.

A Simple Process for Pantheon-Making

I love processes, those elder cousins of what we call “mechanics.” As we develop cultures and people-groups for a fantasy campaign, I started longing for a procedure for quickly sketching out a pantheon. So I decided to make one!

Although there is a glut of tarot-driven TTRPG games available, I think tarot is a great oracle and resource for building a small pantheon for a particular culture or tribe of people. Tarot is typically laid out in “spreads,” a schema for laying down cards in a particular order or arrangement in order to drive interpretation.

Below, here is a simple process, using a single, three God spread. It takes only a few minutes. I’m calling it Earth & All Stars.

Not sure how tarot works, generally? That’s ok, everything you need is below! Let me know how it looks, perhaps I’ll build it out into several spreads, or an entire zine. Maybe it could use some oracles and random tables!

Begin with a culture, a tribe, or a people group. Give them a name, a language, and a region. Divide the cards into the major and minor arcana, and shuffle each.

Draw cards according to the spread, put them in place, and reveal your pantheon. Do the following:

Inspire - Consider the card. Examine the art for signs and ideas. Look at the card’s suit, associated element, or numerological significance. Research the card’s meaning from multiple sources of tarot wisdom. Find meaning and imagery that provokes.

Intuit - What ideas are coming to mind? Throw as many ideas out as possible, anything you feel attracted to. Trust your instincts. If you’re struggling, change what you need to. Swap a card, or reverse it, or draw another card to inspire further.

Interpret - Decide what is true about your God by chatting it through as a group so that it makes sense to everyone. Once you’ve got the idea, write down words and phrases that highlight what you’ve created. Give them a name, one of a God’s many names.

Cultural Pantheon Spread

1. MAJOR - Creator God (Creator, Originator, People-Maker)

   1. MINOR - Theology Card (Our understanding of what God made us for)

2. MAJOR - Prophetic God (Elemental, Tutelary) Associated with: Geographic features, Natural Elements, Major Events, Historic Themes, Cultural Values

   1. MINOR - Ritual Card (What observances, sacrifices, celebrations honor this God)

3. MAJOR - Messenger God (Angel, Counselor, Realized Being) Associated with: Animals, Trades, Relationships

   1. MINOR - Manifestation Card (How this god relates to us, and how we are meant to relate to others)

Other notes:

• I’ve been playtesting some of of Jason Lutes’ worldbuilding games, and I can’t wait for them to drop so I can tell you about Worldwizard. I really believe that when this thing drops someday, it’s going to be the new standard in fantasy worldbuilding games.

• I’m absolutely loving the TTRPG blogging that’s happening where people are bringing it the practices of facilitation and group brainstorming (), mindfulness and brain science (). And boy, that YouTuber Man Alone is developing quite the following. Almost enough to make a gal jealous. Maybe I’ll have to return to the platform.

• I’m about to publish the Feast, a short quest/adventure for Follow, inspired by movies like Babette's Feast, Pig (2021), Phantom Thread, the Redwall books, and other great feast media. I want to write an accompanying diatribe on “cozy” media first, though, so diatribe incoming.

• This episode of the Yes Indie’d Podcast has three South Asian creators of TTRPGs in just about the best, most intelligent, emotionally open, self-responsible, expansive conservation I’ve ever heard on the topic of TTRPG Orientalism, cultural authority, and worldbuilding as self-expression I’ve ever heard. A must-listen:

Let me know if you try Earth & All Stars! Just another project I feel I should expand into a zine-length product. Or maybe I need to re-think the format of a zine altogether!

I joined Bluesky in the past week, along with a large swathe of the TTRPG “community.” It’s been really fun, lots of good vibes over there. And I got “jackedward” as a handle! How rare is that!

Here are some things I’ve experienced:

• I’m discovering new products, projects, and creators I wasn’t previously exposed to. (Good)

• I am sharing little updates about my own creative work more unselfconsciously, though in a way that seems implicitly tied to marketing. (Sorta good?)

Here are some other things I’ve experienced:

• Now, when I want to share projects, ideas, and articles, I’ve moved away from sharing with friends, associates, and my tiny blog audience, and toward broadcasting them to a vague or even imaginary “public.” (Seems bad)

• I’ve felt a compulsion to share not based on worthiness, but based on timeliness and regularity — to appear “active.” (Bad)

• I have an app that, without even sending notifications, subtly impels me to check it at any time of day, and often leaves me uninspired or with zero concrete take-aways. (Bad)

• I’ve found myself encountering attitudes, disfunctions, and forms of debate that I’d either not seen or long abandoned since leaving behind platforms like Twitter.

• For the first time in years, I have my finger back on the pulse of the topics that dominate 24-hour news networks like CNN and Fox News. (Bad)

Does the bad outweigh the good? Hard to say! I’m not sure the things in my “good” category can only be found on Bluesky.

I’m going to keep using it for a while, I believe, see how it feels. So far, I’m not sure it always feels great, even though there seems to be a culture of encouraging one another to always feel great.

So my question is:

Why did we want a Bluesky in the first place?

From what I can tell, the answer to this question is “For the same reasons we’d like something like Twitter, but before it was ruined!” But wasn’t Twitter, before it was ruined, still just simply terrible? Not because of some problem with moderation, or the culture of the platform, but because the tool itself is fundamentally broken, and given to thin, un-nuanced dialogue robbed of context, and thrust into semi-public space? Is Bluesky just Juul, or Diet Coke — an allegedly better version of an implicitly bad thing?

Doesn’t the blade itself, as Homer Joe Abercrombie put it, incite to deeds of violence?

I think another good argument is that it’s good for marketing or promotion, and the healthiest relationship you can have with it is as a marketing and promotion channel. Treat it sparsely, and spare, watch out for para-social relationships, and be vigilant against the compulsion Bluesky Twitter always imposes to discipline your emotional response to marketplace events.

One slogan on Bluesky I’ve heard is “block and move on.” It’s a good one! I just didn’t realize how badly I’d need it.

Progress into the past

Really, the vibes are very good on Bluesky, as they have been with every new and trendy social media platform, at first. You already see some folks mourning for Bluesky — see, they were there a few months ago when Blueky was, well, more like the subjective experience of a Discord server. To this crowd, it already seems like a strange, outwardly-expanding environment.

But to me, it just kinda looks like early Twitter, which is to say, it looks like we’re going backward.

Anyway, I’m working on two little projects I’m set to put out very very soon! The first is a quest for Follow called The Feast, inspired by films like Pig and Babette’s Feast, and the other is a tarot-based worldbuilding game that generates a pantheon of gods for your TTRPG city or culture!

You can check out little glimpses of The Feast and Earth & All Stars over on Bluesky.

At some point writing my Scene Kit, I started accidentally writing Safety Tools into the game. I was writing something like:

“Remember, if you don’t like how this part of the scenes play out, you can always ask to pause the scene to talk it through, or rewind unti-”

Where had I heard that before? I realized it had been Trophy Dark, borrowing from Script Change, a set of safety tools by Beau Jágr Sheldon, that encourages players to use cinematic terms in order to manage their roleplaying experiences. But I wasn’t invoking them in their usual way.

Typically, we think of Safety Tools as a set of procedures that help us flag content and subject matter that is emotionally activating and makes us feel bad so that we can avoid it. A typical list of these include torture, sexual assault, animal cruelty, emotional abuse, and kidnapping. Flagging content like this is important for the group health and dynamic. If someone at your table asks for certain content to be disallowed, it simply should be disallowed.

But in my experience, when it comes to players and GMs becoming activated, hurt, confused, or uncomfortable, content and subject matter has little to do with it.

“No D&D is better than Bad D&D.”

This is one of those quotes that gets bandied about a lot whenever you hear an RPG horror story — I used to hear it often from Mike Shea over at Sly Flourish on his podcast. And I firmly believe it. When I have a session that frustrates me, or hurts my feelings, or leaves me feeling off, I generally conclude that I wish I’d done anything else with that time. It sucks, a lot.

Here are just a few things that make me feel bad:

• Being bulldozed, or totally misunderstood.

• Going off on totally on the wrong track as everyone else because my understanding of a game event or character diverged from the rest of the group.

• Doing something I thought was cool, but someone else thought sucked, and then finding this out when it’s already too late to do anything about it.

• Thinking something sucked, but everyone else really liked, and concluding resentfully that I was the only one not having a good time.

• When I feel like a session didn’t go how I was hoping, even if I can’t describe why.

Any of these can just ruin my evening for a bit if I ruminate on them. But they’re not really issues of “safety,” are they?

The “subject matter” approach of staying safe by avoiding certain tropes or topics can only anticipate so much. The one time I actually used Safety Tools to “fast forward” past a scene was when someone in my D&D game romanced an NPC and it was clearly gonna turn into a sex scene. This wasn’t flagged content at all. I just suddenly realized “Oh, of course I don’t want to actually play this out.”

I love that tools like Script Change use natural language! But mostly, when I have a player go “Wait, pause!!!” they follow up with a clarification about the fiction. And when they want to “rewind for a moment,” it’s usually because they realize they made an unsatisfying character choice, or that they were operating under a false understanding of something happening in the game, or didn’t know how a rule worked. (I also don’t love when guidance around Safety Tools encourages discreet options that players can opt for either with subtle gestures or privately to the GM, but that’s another story)

And so for the sake of my upcoming set of procedures, my Safety Tools probably won’t be focused simply on helping players identify specific subject matter. They might not even be called “Safety Tools.” Being able to say “pause,” or “rewind,” or “fast-forward” will simply be presumed to be a constant part of the conversation whenever we might misunderstand each other, hear something we dislike, encounter something emotionally activating, or just aren’t having fun.

I know I’m saying nothing revolutionary, but I’m trying to work it through by typing it all out. Maybe you found value in it too.

Probably the text will look something like this…

Pause, Rewind, Fast-Forward

Scenes should be fun for everyone at the table, but when we’re sharing a collective imagination, there’s a lot of potential for frustration, misunderstanding, or hurt feelings. If there’s anything that comes up in a scene that makes you uncomfortable, or you’re not sure what’s going on, or you feel yourself losing control of your character, feel free to use the following terms:

“Pause” — If you ever want to stop the scene for a moment to clarify something or get on the same page about the state of the scene, you can always call on a “Pause!”

“Rewind” — If something in a scene just went down in a way that leaves you feeling bad, ask the others at the table if you could Rewind and come up with something else that happened instead.

“Fast-forward” — If there any content that you want to skip, whether it’s gratuitous descriptions, something boring, or anything you want to move past and not dwell too much on, just ask to fast-forward.

Examples…

After Elga and Reginald have a fight, Elga’s player says, “Can we rewind? I actually feel bad that Elga said those nasty things about Reginald’s family and upbringing, I don’t want my character to be, like, a weird bigot, or narrowminded or anything." Everyone agrees that Elga said everything else she said during the fight, but that those particular comments will be left out of the fiction.

Elga draws her sword to go into the fight with the yeti. Bramdal’s player says “Wait, pause. We’re not in the fight yet, right? I thought the yeti wasn’t here yet. Can we keep the scene going? I had more to say!” The other players remind Bramdal that he still has an opportunity to say some last words before they roll initiative. Bramdal’s player says “Oh great, if I still get some parting words, that’s fine, let’s keep going,” and play continues.

I’ve been reading the Asked Questions blog by Hendrik ten Napel, who is writing wonderfully about Archipeligo, a game that, like Follow, is a sort of universal story game that allows you to create epic quests in a scene-based format. Hendrik’s writing inspired me to read Archipeligo III, available for free here.

Archipeligo doesn’t have a section on “safety tools,” but rather uses two (or perhaps more) key “phrases” that can be used to edit the fiction as part of the free-flowing conversation of play. The first is called “Try a different way,” and the other is the player ability to “veto” content. Hendrik ten Napel writes aabout Archipeligo:

“Not every conversation is the same, that's what makes comparing role-playing games to one so effective. The flow, the tone, the subject matter of a conversation—they all depend on the participants and the occasion. A round-table is not a sidebar, nor can a therapy session be confused with talking shop. You take turns! More or less strictly. And in a good conversation, the participants are all engaged with and interested in each other.”

Perhaps my aversion to adding something explicitly called “safety tools” in my own game is the concept of “safety,” which I find an incomplete concept. If the game is a conversation, safety must be a natural part of it — not necessarily set of special occasions that intervene from without, but a set of well-practiced priorities from within.

This is the part where I go “What do you think? Get in the comments!” But it’s also such a tough topic for a lot of people, and often strong ideas flare up. I hope I didn’t offend. Stay tuned!

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

7. The Scene Kit, distilled down to one page!

8. Activating the off-screen players in the ‘Support’ role

You’re running a TTRPG session, and you’ve got one player in the spotlight. For a while. In fact, they’re pretty much running this big, solo scene, while everyone… waits their turn.

This used to be my problem often enough. But one of my favorite things to do these days is to put those other, idle players to use. Specifically, I want those players to help me with the hardest part of duet play: Coming up with a series of interesting consequences for the player in the spotlight.

There are many games where players who are not in the scene are given cool stuff to do. Ben Robbins’ Follow, my main source of inspiration, has players outside of a scene offer “consequences,” which I believe should be called “complications.” In cozy horror game Brindlewood Bay, the investigators are often split up, but players around the table are still welcome to offer consequences and ideas. Microscope, another Ben Robbins game about making a history, has a rule like it for its Scene process called “Playing Time as a Character:”

Instead of playing a normal character, one player in a Scene can choose to play Time, a special type of character. Time represents forces or groups of people who are pushing the situation to some conclusion, for good or ill. The barbarians at the gates, the cavalry come to the rescue, the angry mob, the black plague, the tanking economy–these could all be Time.

A player decides to play the court nobility as Time. They are eager for the king to make a decision. If he doesn’t stop waffling, they may take matters into their own hands.

Time can be a required character, but the current player must define Time as something specific (angry senators, the barbarians, etc.) instead of just requiring “Time.” When Time reveals thoughts, it should always be about how or why it wants to hurry things along.

If you’ve been looking at scenes so far and thinking “It’s formulaic as it is,” this might be just your kind of solution. Now, when players are running their scenes, slowing down, getting stuck, or running on auto-pilot, we have others around the table giving prompts, adding complications, and helping you close down scenes when they run on for too long.

So, for the process of putting together Dramatic Scenes, which include just two players, we want to give a similar something-to-do to everyone else who’s not simply facilitating the process. And so, without a better name, I’m calling these roles “Support.” Here’s how I think it works…

The “Support” Role

Those around the table who are not in the scene take on the role of the SUPPORT, offering up a prompt or two during the scene to help increase the drama, focus the pacing, get clarity about what’s happening, or add new elements and complications. Once the scene is under way, players can chime in respectfully with any of the six moments below.

Players in the scene should feel encouraged to accept your offer and roll with the trouble, but are always free to reject an offer that leaves them uninspired, or goes against their own feelings and intuition about their character or the scene.

Here are the five things they can do.

• Complication – Something rears its ugly head, either from the environment, a focus object, the broader world, or even a memory from the past.

• Focus Object – Invite the players in the scene to come up with an object that is a focus of importance, that sits in the scene like its own character.

• Gut check – Pick one character who is encountering a difficulty, or a barrier, or new information. Ask them to add some emotion.

• Scene Breaker – Is the Scene lagging, or crescendoing, or just running too long? Call for a Scene Breaker! Has one of them already happened? Name it!

• Activate a Flaw – The tension is causing someone’s character flaw to show itself. Prompt a character to act out!

And so while we play, each person has a small sheet that looks like this:

So here’s the thing: That’s it. In the last post, we laid out the entire Scene Kit Process Thing in one page. Then everyone not in the scene, or helping move it

Here are the questions I’m still left with:

• Do you need a facilitator/director? It could still be good to have one player whose job it is to hold the Process Page and literally go through the prompts out loud, leading people from one moment to the next, just to keep the flow moving. Or maybe that undermines the “GMless” nature of this process.

• Do we need the longer version? Last week I boiled the process down big time, but there’s still all of the extra little pieces I put in. Sure, the boiled-down version is the one I’ll end up using, but maybe some people would still like the additional pages? Maybe I should release the whole thing for free, and then maybe people can pay for the additional material?

• Do I need specialty scenes? I toyed with the idea of writing some custom workflows for doing like a Reject-the-Quest scene or a Lovers-Quarrel, since they are dramatic scenes that have unique factors. I wonder if that might be a fun exercise, I might learn a lot just by building and running them.

• Do I need better design? Is the kit just… ugly as it is? Hell, I made the thing in Canva. I’ll have to figure that out later.

Now I’ve gotta put it all together and throw it in a zine and write the damn thing. Let me know what you think of what we’ve got so far! And if you want to run it, message me and I’ll send you the PDFS!

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

7. The Scene Kit, distilled down to one page!

8. Activating the off-screen players in the ‘Support’ role

If you’ve been following along, I’ve been trying to find a comprehensive, idiot-proof way of teaching ordinary gamers how to inject cinematic, charater-driven, dramatic scenes into any TTRPG. And if you’ve been following closely, you might have noticed my problem already. You see, in trying to be “comprehensive” and “idiot-proof,” I made something way way way way too big.

When I put it in front of my players, either to review or actually run, it works. There’s the good news: my playtest works!

However, everyone found it just way too much process, by sheer amount. It wasn’t complicated, per se, just brutally involved. Wherever it should have asked one question, it asked three. Even taking it slow, our narration of the scene rapidly outpaced our progress on the flowchart.

I mean, Christ almighty, there’s so much to it! Remember, to Set the Scene, we start with a Frame character who is in a place, doing a thing. Good. Then the other character, the Catalyst, picks a motive, and I’d written a flowchart for each motive! Here’s what that looks like:

God, will you look at all that? And you saw the cards I printed out in the first image! It’s so much paper! Yikes!!

Same thing goes for the six Scene Breakers:

It’s just too much. So let’s try to boil down a bit where we can.

Boiling down MOTIVES

Remember, we have six MOTIVES total. But making a custom flow-chart for each of the six motives really just made me realize how similar they are in structure. They all essentially boil down like this:

1. Flesh out your motive a bit, including the question “Why is this person the only one who can fulfill my motive?”

2. Choose your approach: subtle or overt.

3. Describe why the Frame is resistant.

4. Find a way to escalate the drama.

5. Will the Frame give you what you want?

6. Give up, find a new tactic, or resolve the scene.

So forget it, we should still list the six motives, but each one can follow that same basic process.

Boiling down Scene Breakers

The thing about a Scene Breaker is… by the time it’s on the table, it’s already fleshed out. The moment we trigger an “Emotional Outburst,” we’re already describing it. By the time we’re introducing a “Sudden Danger,” it’s been introduced. If someone says “How about my character makes a Dramatic Exit,” we don’t need to go to the flow-chart, it’s already done.

And so boiling down, in this case, means: Skip straight to resolution. That’s it, you choose a Scene Breaker, describe it, and then go to resolution.

Ready? Here’s the entire Process on one page:

There it is in all its glory, the one-page Scene Kit. I’ll probably still keep those other cards around, maybe as the “expanded version?” I just can’t imagine very many people finding it as valuable.

Lastly, what might be the final piece of this series, is the little actions we’re going to offer the off-screen players, and what I’ve made for them is going to go a long way in making scenes feel lively and dynamic. So the entire core of the Scene Kit is the One-Page Process (above), some SUPPORT cards for off-screen players (up next), and then a small zine with more information and guidance.

• You might have noticed, I’ve renamed my two central roles to the FOCUS “Frame” and PARTNER “Catalyst,” names that clarify both of those roles. Thanks to Mike JB and Otaara from Discord for helping me see that this was important to do.

• My Lovecraftian horror investigation game The Roaring Age is out. You should download it for FREE!

How does the one-page version look? Better boiled down? Hit me with any comments.

Today is the release day for my first game, The Roaring Age. I’ve been playing D&D since the age of… 9? That’s 25 years. Today is the release day for the first game I’ve written.

As I said when I debuted the project in May, this is a game I had stuck in my head, bouncing around for about a year, a hack of Liminal Horror that would let you play classic Call of Cthulhu modules but with NSR rules and principles, using the chassis of some of my favorite modern games games.

When I saw the Twisted Classics Jam, I knew that was my opportunity, even though my entry is barely what they were asking for, for this jam or in general. It was a big task, and it was going to challenge me to finally learn professional design tools and get creative after a long time away from creative productivity. I quickly noticed two things at once:

• I am, incidentally, getting married in the next year, and possibly even having children.

• I am not sufficiently organized in my life in order to be both a creative and a parent.

I had about 3 months to write a game and learn all of the tools to lay it out, and so I had to tidy up my organizational habits. It began by:

• Finally giving myself permission to set aside responsiblities I’d grown tired of to laser-focus on a product.

• Further permission to invest in a new desktop computer that could run the necessary software.

• A deadline-sensitive motive to finally learn a little bit of basic project-management skills.

Here’s the really dreaded trap. If you start to do this thing, little by little, you will begin to feel astounding about what you’re suddenly capable of. And you will want to apply these reforms in your time, attention, and self-management to more parts of your life. Suddenly, I wasn’t just writing pieces of a game, I was finishing large chunks of it. I wasn’t just toying with new software, I was using it fluently. I wasn’t just making time in each day to get it done, I was entering creative flow states. I’ve been in one now, for about 4 hours.

I decided to take it further:

• I made a habit of digital note-taking — mostly using the PARA method — to track projects and clear my mind so that I was jotting down and clarifying ideas more often. Once you get shit out of your head, you’re just making room for a more constant flow of ideas. I’m actually already play-testing my next game.

• I decided to shed a lot of other baggage — all of my old reading lists got sorted into an excel spreadsheet and I got rid of over 100 books. I turned all of my payments and Metrocard contact-less and don’t carry a wallet anymore. I turned my physical habit tracker into a little mini app I made from Google Sheets. Had to teach myself to do that, too.

• I decided that if I can get this stuff in line, why not try my stagnant job? I started applying my more-developed project management skills and calendar time-blocking to my work. For the first time in 4 years, I felt equipped to walk into my boss’ office and ask for a 50% raise. They immediately agreed it was overdue, and are working out terms.

• I invigorated new life into my community organizing, and have no only been mentoring more often but have even been GMing more games while writing The Roaring Age as well as other creative projects that are continuing to pour out of me.

In short, I decided to pick up a weight so heavy that I had to get stronger in order to lift it over my head. I won’t belabor the point.

‘The Roaring Age’ is here!

I’ve got a lot to say about making this game, not just design stuff, but things like:

• Lots of what I’m adding into Liminal Horror with The Roaring Age comes from my experience not just with games like Mausritter and other NSR games, but from my first PbtA campaigns, like Monster of the Week or Brindlewood Bay, and how natural it felt to work in fiction-first mechanics into NSR-style games.

• For a 1920s game, I did meticulous research into capturing what it means to emulate another period in history. (My two main non-fiction sources are Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, and New Work Coming, by Nathan Miller.

I’ll get to that eventually. For now, I’m just all gratitude.

Thank you to Goblin Archives Josh Domanski for making Liminal Horror, and then making a community around it. You make great things possible by planting seeds that carry on the wind and grow in unexpected places. Thank you to anyone who’s made a game, based on a game, based on a game, or made any game at all.

Thank you to my friends and players who cheered me on, particularly , a profoundly encouraging and collaborative copy editor. Who cares if he edited Cairn 2e and Beyond the Pale and Block, Dodge, Parry and a hundred other amazing things? The thing most people don’t know is he actually does bring the best snacks to every game, and even if that weren’t true, everyone he knows would still be impossibly fond of him.

Thanks to everyone who, at any point, said “Wow, this project looks so cool, I can’t wait for it!” Every single one of these comments was noticed and internalized, and made it all possible. And thank you to the Explorer’s Design Community, who gave me a boost every time I was struggling to find a decent font foundry or fighting with Affinity Publisher.

What comes next for The Roaring Age? Well, I’m thinking a few conversions for popular Call of Cthulhu modules, and then maybe an original adventure or two? I’m thinking The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh meets Boardwalk Empire. Eventually, it’ll come. More and more is coming every day, it seems.

The Lord is marvelous.

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

7. The Scene Kit, distilled down to one page!

8. Activating the off-screen players in the ‘Support’ role

So far, we’ve been working on a fool-proof procedure for building Dramatic Scenes into your favorite RPG of choice — I’m thinking of calling it something like “Scene Kit: The 0-Charisma Guide to Roleplaying Great Scenes.” And so far, we’ve just about got a full procedure.

But some people have asked “What about little action scenes or vignettes that are just like, a character reflecting, or a simple montage, or some action sequence.” And you better believe we’re folding those into our process!

To recap: We’ve set the stage with a FOCUS character doing some plot-relevant ACTION in an interesting location. We brought in a PARTNER with a MOTIVE who will pursue some pressing need to bring them into conflict with the FOCUS. At some point, the scene ended, possibly with the conflict boiling over, or some new information or danger present, or maybe with a hug and a resolution. Someone said “Cut!” and these scene ended.

Now, it’s time for us to look at the consequences, and pull the camera out to look at the Aftermath of our scene.

Minor Scenes

Minor scenes are additional denouements that can be added after a scene. After a scene takes place, any player at the table, starting with the FOCUS player, may narrate or describe a single vignette using just a few sentences. Choose from:

• The results, immediate or wide-ranging, of the scene we just witnessed.

• The next obvious plot developments after the scene

• A complementary vignette from another location happening at this moment

• A contrasting vignette that subverts the mood of the scene we just saw

• A montage showing the passage of time after the scene.

• A character's outburst of emotion, private thoughts, or personal reaction to the state of the story

• The revelation that someone was eavesdropping on the scene.

Is there a better name than “Minor Scenes” for these? Perhaps! But it’s stuck with me for now. What’s really lovely is that a lot of things can happen to express a lot of development and action, sometimes more than even the scene itself managed to pull off! Let’s build on some examples from earlier scenes, and show the minor scenes after, using Elga, Reginald, and Clyde:

Elga the Barbaian is sharpening her axe in preparation to fight the yeti, and Reginald the Wizard comes in asking for help for his Dramatic Scene — he wants Elga to convince the locals to give him access to their secret herb grove. They have a fight, and Elga storms away. CUT! For the Minor Scenes…

• Elga narrates that she, in anger, cuts firewood, but realizes how sharp she made her axe in her frustration, and she grins.

• Clyde’s player reveals that Clyde the rogue saw her storm away from the wizard, and is seeing the tension develop in his party.

• Reginald’s player narrates a montage of them all packing up the dogsled, saying goodbye to villagers, with Clyde eyeing his two companions nervously. Reginald’s player feels bad about the fight, and so he adds a detail where the camera sees Reginald throw the best part of his lunch to Elga’s sled dogs as a gesture of apology after their tiff. Elga’s player goes, “Elga sees this, and nods.”

Later…

Clyde and Elga are sneaking through the Yeti’s lair, and suddenly want to do a Dramatic Scene! As Clyde leads the way, Elga is advocating a cause — she wants Clyde to turn against the haughty wizard with her, and Clyde carefully expresses that he thinks this is a bad idea. Before they can hash it out, the Yeti springs his trap and attacks! CUT! For the Minor Scenes…

• Clyde says he shouts for the wizard, and curses Elga under his breath for being so obstinate.

• Reginald the Wizard, meanwhile, says he’s been outside the cave making a hot tea while they poke around, hears a roar, and hops up comically to spring into action.

• Elga’s player says, “I don’t have a Minor Scene to narrate, I think it’s honestly just time to roll initiative!!”

You see how this goes? We might begin with a simple dramatic exchange of action and emotion, working out tension between PCs, but actually, our structure contains a whole multitude of scenes that use this first dramatic scene as their crux, that way we have continuity between Dramatic Scenes and the RPG we’re playing.

Do I need to make a set of Specialty Scenes?

At this point, you might be thinking, “But Jack, there are plenty of scenes types that still involve exchanges between characters, but aren’t… really covered by your structure. They’re unique, but they still serve and important dramatic functions.”

So perhaps I need a few small bespoke flowcharts for “Specialty Scenes” that you might recognize from the movies, but don’t follow the model I’ve set forth? For example…

• The Action Scene

• The Lovers’ Quarrel

• The Rejection of the Quest

• The Death Scene

• And more… (?)

Anyhow, in my next post, I’m either going to stitch it all together into one big procedure, or maybe it’s time for me to flesh out some roles or actions for off-screen players and give them an ability to interject or inspire.

What do you think? Does this cover all of the bases? Are there more Minor Scenes or Specialty Scenes I should look out for? Leave a comment! I eat ‘em up!

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene.

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

7. The Scene Kit, distilled down to one page!

8. Activating the off-screen players in the ‘Support’ role

Anybody who’s ever tried to roleplay a Dramatic Scene will tell you that perhaps the toughest part is knowing when to end them — picking that moment to say “It’s time to stop,” and knowing what to do when that moment comes.

The best scenes are short, and often end right at the height of tension, but that’s not our instinct as gamers. This is part of how the needs of drama cut against he needs of gamers and role-players. We want to play it out, to know if we succeeded or failed, or how our actions resolve. Instead, good drama often means leaving certain questions open.

We’re putting together a step-by-step process for putting Dramatic Scenes into our tabletop roleplaying sessions. So far, we’ve picked a FOCUS character, and gave them an ACTION to do in an interesting location. Then, we brought in a PARTNER who is coming in with a MOTIVE to challenge the FOCUS character, and we’ve played out their drama a bit.

Now, it’s time to put an end to the scene.

Introducing: Scene Breakers! Six quick ways to conclude a scene.

Scene Breakers are the highly dramatic moments that bring our scene to a decisive finish. Sometimes, the MOTIVE leads us to a Scene Breaker, but a Scene Breaker can also be declared or noticed by anyone inside or outside the scene spontaneously, so long as you’ve brought the PARTNER into the scene and worked through their motive a bit.

(ie: Jamie and Lauren’s characters are fighting pretty early in the scene. Josephine, who is not in the scene, goes, “How about a Scene Breaker here? ‘Sudden Attack?’ Maybe your fighting drew the attention of an ogre, who comes crashing through the tree toward the camp.)

Here is the list of scene breakers:

Dramatic Exit
Startling Discovery
Sudden Danger
Emotional Outburst
Tension Resolved
Time to Go

Scene Breakers can be rejected by those in the scene, so long as both FOCUS and PARTNER want to continue the scene. Some breakers are easier to reject than others – an Emotional Outburst might lead to more time in the scene, but an attack by an ogre probably means it's time to stop chatting.

If both the FOCUS and PARTNER reject the breaker, move on to the rejection questions. If they don’t lead to another breaker immediately, introduce and respond to more COMPLICATIONS, and get to a breaker that one of you accepts.

Or, Breakers can be accepted, you answer the final question, and you RESOLVE the scene.

You might get to a Breaker naturally, without having to pick from the list and declare one. If so, anyone at the table can identify it by saying something like “That looks like one of the scene breakers! Do either of the participants accept?”

Because anyone can call for a Scene Breaker, at least one player between the FOCUS or the PARTNER has to accept it.

• A choice about how the Scene Breaker plays out.

• A way or two back into the scene if neither player wants to end it.

• A firm cue to reflect on what just transpired, and to close the scene.

These are much shorter than the MOTIVE section. Here’s the one I’ve got for Emotional Outburst:

Looks great! If it looks long, consider that one of the players accepts the Emotional Outburst, it’s just two prompts that boil down to “What is the outburst, and how does it look?” and then “How do you both feel about what happened?” Simple stuff!!

Finally, let’s close out the scene. To Resolve, we ask two questions:

• What are the last words or actions of each scene participant?

• How did that central ACTION we started with turn out?

What’s cool here is that “last words” can be used however we want, not just as a form of action resolution. At any time, a scene can pivot. Players having a blow-out fight can decide that, using their last words, they’re going to reconcile, or make the attempt at least. Or maybe they’ll just throw out some badass one-liners! Or even sit in silence. It’s up to those players.

Here’s what it looks like:

“Annnnnnnd… CUT!”

At the end, there’s a simple, cool Aftermath section! I’ll detail this little bit in the next post, and then we’ll bring it all together and see how it looks in one full flowchart.

Notes:

• I’ve got two things, and I don’t know where they go. First: At some point, we need to figure out how the PARTNER arrives in the scene. At what point do we ask this question? When they start fleshing out their MOTIVE? As soon as they declare they want to be the PARTNER? Second: At some point, we gotta ask if there are background characters, when does this get done?

• I’m starting to wonder what format, tagline, title, and design I should use for the final product of this thing, since now I’m just writing the blog, filling in my MOTIVES and Breakers!, and getting ready to put it all together. I’m thinking like “Scene Kit, the Zero-Charisma Guide to Roleplaying” or something. It’s not just some marketing shit, I’m trying to figure out what my vision for this thing is, and how to get the notice of people who could benefit most from it.

How does all this look? Is the flow of the chart looking pretty clear, can you imagine going through the process yourself? Hit me up in the commons if you think of any reflections, or what I’m missing.