I remind myself: we are at the end of an era. The means of survival and the question of preservation come to the fore. Hardly opposed, tensions abound between them. Daily survival often depends upon the failing and changing institutions that constitute the passing era, while preserving for what comes
"Thats... something. Weird, check. Dreamlike, check. Boozy, check. This can have its place in a game, but in the end if you want this to MEAN something (as opposed to a dremlike divertissement) you will need some hard work"—Dada Dan Akiko (comment on my Appendix N Jam
The last year has brought me face to face with how essential role play writing and role play are to my critical and creative being while simultaneously underscoring how poorly the discussions of game design, game theory, and game play have served me in realizing creative work in line with
It's been a good month for me creatively. Two one-page games, a short module, and two PbtA-inspired moves for various jams going on over at itch. Most of that happened because of the critical work I have been doing privately to leverage my imagination out of
I am writing game material now that I like. I have signed up for a few game jams and the work there all feels like it is going in the right direction. The work rests on concepts and images near and dear to me. The projects themselves have all led
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
the past carries a secret index by which it is referred to redemption
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,
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
At the center of it all. It usually takes me time to get to the root of a project. I jump too far ahead, beginning without proper foundations, or I drift off course, getting lost in squalls of maybe this or maybe that. The pattern has held here. I know