About me Hi, I'm Rick and this is my little blog about games and things. I have a passion for stories in all their forms. I like to write things in my spa...
My friend Brandon has been talking about this idea of a distinction between “using” the mechanics of TTRPGs as a toolbox to help tell stories and “playing” these games by their rules, he introduces the concept in his latest blog post . It’s an elegant distinction which helps contextualise a way that it can be easy to talk across each other, especially because it’s so clear that neither of these…
Something exciting happened to me recently. I was talking to a friend about game design who expressed an interest in seeing the thing I was currently working on. A while later they let me know that they’d read through it and played a solo game, they showed me the cards they made and it was exciting to see something I’d thought about so hard being interpreted by someone else. Lexeme 1 sets out a…
If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly. In the last few years TTRPGs have exploded in popularity and visibility but one game remains dominant. At the same time in the indie space the number of systems and adventures continues to balloon. There is now a marked difference between the pace at which games are released and the rate that most people can realistically even read them let alone…
Recently the NSR Cauldron had one of periodic descents into the taxonomy of what the NSR even is and what an NSR game is. As usual the topic prompted a wave of imposter syndrome in me, as a moderator it's hard sometimes to reconcile my values and motivations to the community when I don't actually play the sorts of games many believe to be synonymous with the server name, and when do I don't…
I’ve become fascinated by poems that you can play. I wanted to write another one focussing on something encouraging or comforting people could do because these days things feel so dark. I was inspired by David Lynch’s Weather Reports 1 and also by the concept of The Glade from the RPG Eco Mofos 2 . The first draft of this arrived when Lynch passed as a tribute to his spirit and energy. An…
Reintroducing my heartbreaker as a card based game
When it comes to magic in TTRPGs I like it when spell casters have the freedom to choose how their magic is deployed. If a character can produce a fireball I’m never sure why they can’t use a similar technique to light a fire or illuminate a room. What follows is an attempt to demonstrate a method by which magic can be expressed narratively to perform actions rather than used as a collection of…
In TTRPGs we talk a lot about the fictional world and a lot of words have, quite rightly, gone into helping players and referees make the worlds they create feel consistent and grounded. There’s another angle that I want to consider in this discussion that contrasts in-character focussed and narrative focussed decision making. To start off with I want to explain a little about how I was to treat…
100 Word Stories is a project my friend Tom and I started during the first Covid lockdown. The idea was that every day for the month of May 2020 we would post a story exactly 100 words long. It's been some time but Tom is now continuing the project on his new blog, go check him out! 100 Word Stories by Tom Hurles→
This week I released the first of a planned series of 24XX games under the title The Midnight Editions. The idea for this first one came to me when I thought about the idea of using Lady Whistledown's Society Papers layout as the cover image for a 24XX game. I didn't know what the game would look like at that point but I had the basis for the idea and therefore the sorts of stories I wanted to be…