About a week ago, I jokingly announced to my friends that I had seen one too many posts about torches. My comrades in the OSR have received abundant mileage from blog posts talking about torches, torch alternatives, lighting, making light matter, and all manner of darkness mechanics. Truly: I love that for them. I am … alternative game fantasy: a manifesto
A little while back, I showed one of my friends the website I’m building and she asked me what faggot games meant. I directed her to click on the link, as I believe that Eclipse expresses an eloquent vision for the movement in her post. However, I wanted to give a shot at explaining in … Faggot Games: in my own words
On January 1st, Idle Cartulary over at Playful Void threw down the gauntlet by challenging everyone to make a dungeon zine. Everyone should make a dungeon, at least once. Everyone should get in touch with the hands-on craft of something physical like a zine. Everyone should get a little messy with it. I took this … dungeons (where do i start?)
Let’s take the fact that System Matters is given. How do we determine whether a specific system is a good or bad fit? What are games, actually? The good news is that people have been giving this a lot of thought for a long time. The bad news is that there are no clear definitions. … system anatomy: theory 103
In July 1999, Ron Edwards posted an essay called “System Does Matter”. A copy of this essay is available on the now-defunct forums of The Forge, which was a community of people interested in publishing their own RPGs. A large percentage of all ttrpg discussion and discourse can be traced back to this fundamental concept. … system matters: theory 102
Jargon is necessary to have deeper conversations from an academic perspective. In order to build upon ideas, we develop a shorthand to refer to foundational concepts. I don’t want to assume that any readers of this blog are already familiar with pre-existing jargon, so I’m going to explain foundational concepts as they come up. rules … rules elide: theory 101
