For the past month through the end of October, Binary is hosting the fourth annual Minimalist TTRPG Jam. As part of my efforts to publish a beta for The Serket Hack by the end of the year, I’ve decided to participate. In a feat of monumental laziness, I’m writing this post to kill three birds … 270,336 spells
In a game where every character can participate in commerce, what is a merchant? Every character can pick up a sword or steal, but fighters and thieves are established archetypes. We could conclude, then, that a merchant is someone particularly skilled at business. This perspective is both reductive and conceptually boring: stories of business are … the merchant class
As with many of my ideas, this one sparked because I’ve been playing a videogame. Borderlands 4 came out on September 12th and I’ve been having a really good time with it, and in particular the boss fights have been a massive improvement over past installments. I am not the type of gamer to relish … boss relative: telegraphs & radial positioning
In the absence of position-based tactics, singleplayer turn-based RPGs have converged upon some similar mechanics. I want to look at how this works through a few case studies and talk about what it would look like for ttrpgs to adopt this design pattern. Rather than try to talk around this in the abstract, it’s easier … weakness break mechanics: a case study
I published a Lancer adventure called War In The Toybox based on the 2006 LEGO theme Exo-Force! This project has been in development for a few months as part of the 2025 Summer LEGO RPG Jam by diyanddragons. The jam ran from June 2nd to August 29th and the goal was to write a ttrpg … war in the toybox
I can hear it now. “Serket! You literally reviewed a game last week. Why do you have another review for an entirely different game this week?” Timelines are funny. The PaperCult crew wrapped up our game of Break!! on the 28th and it took me two weeks to find time to write about it. Directly … salvage union retrospective
Earlier this year I joined forces with some folks over at PaperCult to play new rpgs together, working through our backlogs to “Meet the RPG”. The first game we played together was Break!!, a lighthearted adventure fantasy game by Reynaldo Madriñan and Carlo Tartaglia. Though the full and correct title of this game is “Break!!”, … break!! post-mortem
I’ve been reading Fabula Ultima and playing Octopath Traveller 2. Somehow, these two ingredients have mixed in my head to develop a dungeon crawl procedure based on their chemistry. Neither of them are really about dungeon crawling, and I am, perhaps infamously, not an OSR nerd. This is why I find it so weird that … hacking the dungeon procedure
– The Water Magician if hunting monsters and delving into dungeons is so organized and regulated, you’re not playing a fortune-seeking hero, you’re playing a government employee with a weapon I was talking with some friends a few weeks ago about adventurer’s guilds and found myself confronting this popular understanding of organized adventuring. I get … adventurer’s guilds: the anime perspective
The annual convention for Warframe, TennoCon, happened this past weekend. For those unfamiliar with the video game, it’s a space ninja looter-shooter with uncharacteristically benign monetization. Unlike other free-to-play games, Warframe ensures that all players can earn premium currency and has even removed microtransactions when players were using them too much. Between the lore and … warframe & tabletop game design
