Appendix 2025

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 and weigh my work against.

Between the Skies (huffa)

This is the sleeper hit of my year.

I have a deep and old love for planar travel games, and this is dense with spark tables for that. The guidelines for navigating them makes it easy to generate everything from a low-key setting grounded in unraveling mundanity to a gonzo game that strains the bounds of conceptual coherence.

But that isn't what made the game a hit for me. In detailing how all the material she provides can be used to run a game, she details a play group–centric sort of play I only dimly understood before. Beginning with the simplicity of the conversation loop between players and a referee, she expands into why you might or might not want to make use of mechanical procedures (tokens and die rolling) to provide resolution in your game.

With equal simplicity, she talks about the ways that the dynamics shift when players share more of the referee's adjudication role between themselves, as well as how to navigate a game solo. Her discussion leaves me with a sense of a continuum between solo, collaborative, and referee-driven play that a single group could navigate together.

I would say it is revolutionary, but huffa's relaxed tone and easy presentation style just makes it seem like common sense, something I should already just know. Like, wow, you are just playing a game with or without other people, and there is nothing wrong with changing the way that game works as you go if it works for everyone involved.

For bonus points, her account of nested point crawls made me think about the point crawl in an entirely new light, perhaps to model the occasional non-Euclidian environment.

How to Play the Revolution (Zedeck Siew)

Speaking of revolutions, after reading huffa's Between the Skies, I was primed to be excited about Siew's post. Part of a longer discussion about his lack of interest in games that attempt to foster ethical behavior or ethical actions on the parts of players, this turns toward political behavior. Should a game model revolutionary anticolonial behavior?

His answer is great. "Revolutionary" isn't a property of a certain set of rules. It is a relationship between a group of people who refuse to let their "game" be dictated by any specific set of rules and are willing to abandon any set to follow their game (i.e., their relationship to each other at the table as mediated by the fiction of their game) along a new trajectory. The revolution abandons rule-first play for table (community)-first play.

Cairn 2e, Warden's and Players Guides (Yochai Gal)

Cairn opened my eyes to the possibilities of ultralite rules for playing Dungeons & Dragons–style games. It shifted the weight of the game toward the exploration of the fictional world thereby, and I didn't realize just how much I had been missing precisely that.

Replacing level-driven advancement with diegetic advancement and change only tightened the linkage between fictional world and play in ways that excited me. No levels! No tick boxes to track advancement! Just in-game effort and consequences expressed in warden-mediated changes to the character!

The setting generation procedures were a total bonus. It's a lot of fun to drop dice onto blank paper and then draw it into a dynamic little map for your next game.

The Painted Wasteland (Tim Molloy & Chris Willett)

This is the first of my palette-driven purchases this year. I am bored silly of the dark and grim, even when it is lit up by a searing yellow background. The Painted Wasteland is weird, luminous, and magic. I was also astounded by how easy it was to read both on and off-screen. The layout of the book is simply perfect for my laptop, like no other book I have read. The type, my goodness, so easy on the eyes.

I could roll in Tim Molloy's art, squeeze myself through the frame, doze against his warm stones, parade alongside his cast of strange and alien character. The hex crawl mechanics are playful, most hexes self-contained with just enough linkages between them to create a sense of a living place. The module's challenges and dungeons veer a little too easily toward confrontation for my tastes, but I feel like it would be so easy to dial down the violence and let the colorful and whimsical cast play more with the characters. This is a delightful place to just hang out.

Ultraviolet Grasslands 2e (Luka Rejic)

So far, no regrets buying books because they are colorful. By coincidence, UVG gave me a colorful point crawl to The Painted Wasteland's hex crawl, and I am intrigued by the way UVG uses the point crawl to explore great distance in a way a hex crawl cannot. Each point along the journey is weird and alien in inviting way. I can see looking forward to coming back to a point.

The character creation and attendant mechanics seem fine, though I suspect I would use another system were I to run it. But the caravan and trade procedures seem pretty cool, and I think there is a lot of fun to be had following that loop of commerce around. And maybe this is just those formative teenage years playing Megatraveller, selling stuff is such a great reason to travel and explore, much better than being a semi-professional dungeon pillager.

The Dream and the Underworld (James Hillman)

I talked about this plenty in my previous post, so I won't say too much here, except: the idea of further unlinking OSR play from narrative and using its tools to explore objects and places as dense layers of affect and emotion in which the characters are entangled excites me.

Between Two Cairns (Brad Kerr and Yochai Gal): Silent Titans, feat. Quinns (March 14, 2024)

A rarity for me: I listened to this podcast episode twice. The points at which Quinns struggled with the module stuck with me!

While overall in agreement with Stuart's prefatory essay on dungeon design, he was at odds with Stuart's assessment that the potential energy that animates a dungeon and its rooms is necessarily connected with violence and the threat of death (combat as war). Similarly, addressing his frustration between the hostility of many of the dungeons' inhabitants and the wondrously bizarre spaces they occupied, he protested the way that the hostile occupants prevented the players from actually wondering at the spaces.

And yes! I don't find the looming threat of lethality to be all that meaningful to engaging in exploration or puzzle solving. Both of those have satisfactions all their own, and suggesting that imminent character death makes them more interesting leads to design choices that often undermine those inherent pleasures.

I discovered the Myst series of games in my early twenties—I loved them and I loved the sporadic long-distance phone calls my Mom, brother, and I shared unlocking each little wonder the puzzles activated. I didn't need imminent death to appreciate them, and in fact fell away from computer gaming as it became harder to find games that didn't incorporate death into the game play loop.

Also, what about all the shades of risk other than death?

Quinns followed up his frustration about the level of violence with another frustration: why would anyone subject themselves to these places? Why wouldn't they just say fuck it and go off and do something easier? In movies, Quinns observes, romance plots are so common because love is such a legible reason for people to get into crazy situations, but in this module there is no love.

Where is the love? I suspect the centrality of lethality gets in the way of letting love and other sorts of powerful emotion into these sorts of games. Love makes our mortality precious and glowing, and a game that had both love and lethality at its heart would be an exploration of warfare's monstrosity.

But a game of love and risk, well, that is something else entirely. I don't think love needs to be or have a story to shine; it isn't inimical to world-first play.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Zakiyyah Iman Jackson)

The whole book is amazing, but two pieces have made their way into my design thinking. The first is Jackson's close reading of Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild." Having just talked about my own childhood fantasies of serving as a host for the Fiend Folio's assassin bug, I would have been excited just to discover a novella contemporary with my childhood that explored similar themes. But Jackson opens the story into a "meditation on the possible conditions and terms of mutual adaptability, communicability, and reciprocal responsibility" (129; emphasis mine) that leads us toward a "praxis [that] might very well leave [the concept of] 'the human' behind" and "demands the reimagining of the human body" (158).

I want to immerse the OSR focus on risk in this kind of thinking and transform it into a consideration of vulnerability. Vulnerability lies on the other side of the adrenalized risk and the sudden, too quick mutual violence of combat. It emerges in treaty and compromise, in regret and mercy, as well as in defeat. As with love, where lethality takes pride of place, vulnerability can often be ignored.

The second piece comes by way of a tangent. While not one of the topics of Jackson's book, her readings of Butler and Wangechi Mutu's work reminded me of another of Mutu's works, Family Tree. There Mutu envisions a divine family of the future through collage, suggesting a new way of being with the world that sits squarely in Jackson's encouragement to leave the concept of the human behind. Diegesis as collage.

That is a tall ask for a role playing game, perhaps, but I think Evlyn Moreau's "Positive-Gross" is a good place to start. Many of the boundaries along which she describes exploring the gross as a positive dimension of experience are precisely points along which mutual adaptability, communicability, and reciprocal responsibility begin to open. Also Moreau's illustrations in "Positive-Gross" are so perfectly playful, which a role playing game can very well be.

Mana Meltdown (Lazy Litch)

This short module is something of a marvel. Beginning from the most baroque premise, players are launched into a convoluted, high concept, emotionally fueled fever dream of people, places, and monsters. At once utterly unrecognizable and somehow perfectly legible, I suspect I am going to be coming back to this one for a while to try and make sense of how that works.

Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

Setting aside all the ways this is a great novel (just wow), I couldn't stop myself from thinking how well this fits into the framework of an OSR point crawl; I can all but see the map! The centrality of exploration and inventory, random encounters, points of interest, dungeons, treasures and transformations. The world becomes clearer without ever becoming entirely explicable over the course of the exploration and many characters die into near anonymity. The characters don't even have names, just roles they serve within the expedition group!

But there is a potent subversion. The narrator turns against the extractive and instrumental end toward which she has been set and enters into a relationship with the alien world in which she finds herself. Discovery becomes primary, alongside the growing sense of their being some narrow way forward in which the human and alien achieve a sort of however-temporary harmony, embodied by both herself and the lighthouse keeper.

I want that possibility realized in a game, too.

Flux Space (Nick LS Whelan)

I just think this is really neat and I want to play with it.