I'm Lyme. I write TTRPGs, run TTRPGs, play TTRPGs, and listen to too many podcasts about TTRPGs. My favorite game is the one I haven't tried yet. This is ...
I recently had a good time at a sea music festival. I’ve listened to a variety of nautical music on YouTube and Tidal, and even seen the Longest Johns play at a bar, but I’d never been to a festival like this before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I ended up feeling like someone who had only read about RPGs before, going to my first con and getting to play. It’s much more of an interactive,…
Backerkit is trying a little experiment . To celebrate the Ennies this year, they invited Ennies nominees from last year to sell their games via special, 10-day crowdfunding campaigns as part of a bigger "Ennies Emporium". I decided there was no harm in giving it a try. My game Dawn of the Orcs , which was nominated for a "Best Rules" Ennie in 2025, is now up on a campaign. You can get it here .…
This is a blog about RPGs, but I want to talk about something else and I have no other platform for long-form content. If you’re looking for an RPG article, skip this post. Check out the root ring , it has a vast bounty of great RPG blog posts. This is going to be a blog post about a piece of visual media. It might be more entertaining in the form of a long-form video essay, but to my surprise…
This blog post is inspired by a panel I was on at Sabrecon in 2025. Unlike most panels, we ended up with two and a half hours to talk about making RPGs with a small group of people. After filling the time, I felt like there was still so much more basic advice that we never got a chance to discuss. This blog post is my attempt to actually put it all on paper for someone who wants to read it. A more…
Here’s a neat little dice idea I’m thinking about. If you roll 2d6, the odds of rolling exactly 7 are around 16%. The odds of rolling an odd number other than 7 are around 30%. The odds of rolling any even number are around 50%. Throw in a free reroll and the dice can have a 75% chance of rolling odds. Those are basically the only odds a player needs to face in an RPG. In a d100 system, a player…
I was involved in organizing Designed in the DMV , a local group of mostly-but-not-exclusively-RPG designers in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. I’ve had to leave the area for family reasons, and my current work schedule doesn’t give me a lot of good time to build a local scene where I live, but now that I've heard people from other countries name-drop DitDMV I wanted to put together a quick guide…
The rules of Estoc are as such: Each character has four Qualities. A Quality can be anything – a title, a piece of equipment, a skill, a career, a conviction, a supernatural power. Characters succeed at anything possible and fail at anything impossible, except when they encounter a Peril. A character must call on a Quality to solve a Peril. Once a Quality is called on, it cannot be called on again…
For much of the early 2000s and 2010s, whenever a TV show wanted to signify that a character was supposed to be a geeky type, they would have them express a strong opinion on the question, “Did Han shoot first?” (a reference to an Alec Guinness film that had a strong cult following at the time). In this time of apotheosis, the question had become so familiar that to speak it aloud was a comical…
I’ve been asked a couple times by people looking to make RPGs about what kind of math goes into designing an RPG, and if they need to study any particular mathematics in order to design a game. The short answers are – not that much, and no! I’m going to do a quick guide to the math you use when making RPGs in this blog post. This is intended for very fresh beginners, so if you’re an experienced…
I had this idea during the TTRPG manifesto jam, but never got around to writing it down before the jam ended. The OSR famously has its Principia Apocrypha , and Irving Benitez put together this neat lyric game manifesto . If there’s a kind of RPG I really enjoy and understand, it’s the d100 kind. I’ve written three of them . It’s a terrible name, because it’s mostly not about the type of dice…