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,

Zoa Tan turns out to be more dreamlike and childlike fantasy than I first thought. The first vision I had for it gives way to another, and I suspect that over the course of this project it will turn (and return) to other visions. My first impulse was to hold

[Octavia] Butler asks us to consider . . . how might we parse what is harmful transmutation versus what is merely different or unrecognizable or strips one of a certain phantasy of mastery and control?—Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (132) Cairn's simple attribute

The phrase "Zoa Tan" came to me in a dream and its dreamy fullness just belongs to my queer little girl's game. With it, I have a working image for the game's cover and copy. This isn't meant to be true final

I have been in therapy long enough to recognize that my childhood fantasies around both the assassin fly and the caryatid in the Fiend Folio are closely related to the freeze stress response. Those fantasies test out alternative forms of attention from within a freeze state, forms of attention that

Opening a copy of the original Fiend Folio brings back a visceral rush of curiosity, excitement, and over stimulation. The line work for many of these monsters is dense and textured in a way I still find almost uncomfortably tactile; I believe many of these pieces are by either Alan