I have spent the last several months re-immersing myself in the OSR and familiarizing myself with its NSR branch. I read blogs, modules, and games. I listened to many podcasts and watched a fair few videos. Understanding more deeply the way people engaged with these games, I aimed to

Beginning again requires working outside a ready framework or canon. Beginning again requires sinking back into more inchoate feelings and sentiments, looser and less organized concepts, and galvanizing hopes and values. Beginning again, I experimented with some new and playful ways of divining, sometimes using spark tables and sometimes turning

I spent a good bit of time running in the wrong direction here. I kept trying to make a role playing game that looked like the games I had when I was young but which were transplanted and nourished by different roots—osr by way of a new appendix n.

Evil: a study of lost techniques (Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh) I stumbled across this title while trying to look up another book's citation (Artaud and the Gnostic Drama by [not-that-Jane-Goodall] Jane Goodall) for a friend. I almost didn't pick it up, but I could

Perhaps an odd thing to do at the monthly level? This month has been useful for digging down into the sort of work I want to undergird my game. This game is meant to develop within an alternate autobiography and history, one in which my sense of what role playing

Warning, abstract game design discussion ahead. As I have been thinking about the sort of dice rolls that I want my game to use, I have been thinking about the core loops of play that will define it. By "loop," I mean the sort of actions that the

The last few months have been a slow churn of design thinking on my part, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to identify the folks whose ideas have been feeding that in one way or the other. It serves as a touchstone for me that I can revisit

The game for my queer little girl can't ignore the act of fantasy. Fantasy defined so much of her unfulfilled relationship to Dungeons & Dragons. But for all the common sense discussions of role playing games having their roots in "let's pretend" play, there

Pages and pages of old D&D material available, paths crisscrossing the landscape of my childhood memories lined with images and flashes of text that reveal vibrant and squirming emotions and fantasies still lingering beneath them. Those little dreamy ecosystems often hide behind creatures, objects, and places that infest,