Oh hey hi hello, I'm Katt Kirsch. I write old school RPGs quasi-professionally, and I harbour an obsessive streak about a myriad of weird games, analog synth...
Part 1: Why You Haven’t Yet What’s your favourite movie? Your favourite musical album? Imagine them both in your mind. Now, how many times have you watched that movie? How many scenes can you remember, how many lines can you repeat? Same with the album: can you name all the songs, hum all the melodies? Now: what’s your favourite dungeon? To run or to play, doesn’t really matter. Let me ask you:…
Hey, everyone! I'm still exhausted from the holiday and new year's festivities, but I'm told I ought to mention the 2026 Bloggies Nominations where I mention things. I imagine this will be my only "For Your Consideration" post unless things get pleasantly weird. This is the blogpost I'm probably most proud of: Leonard Cohen's Advice for Novice OSR Referees While we're talking about it, I'd like to…
(For the Rainbow OSR Discord's Secret Santa this year, Rook had a simple request: A new character class, anything you like but not-silly . I drew inspiration from Robert Eggers' masterful The Witch and Lukas Feigelfeld's lesser-known but far more harrowing Hagazussa for a slightly different take on a witchy hybrid class. I'd probably allow for some kind of natural kinship with wild animals in my…
NOTE: This is the 17th part of the Thinking Adventures Mask Relay , the first entry of which can be found here . "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face." -John Updike In the faintest memories of the ancient men, there persists a lingering echo of a face, the shifting outline of an almost-memory in want of a name. All whose lineage bears the mark of the old wizards still remember a flickering…
I'm supposed to interview several people over the next few weeks: Luke Gearing, Sam Sorensen, Christian Kessler, hopefully several of the other bosses and players. That's always been my plan: to contrast my experience in OVER/UNDER to "traditional" Cataphracts (itself a relatively new work in progress), and Sean McCoy's Mothership itself. I figure it'd be a delight to debrief my very serious,…
Leonard Cohen's How To Speak Poetry (1978) speaks to a time when the public performance of poetry was transforming into what Marc Smith would call "slam poetry" some six years later. Poetry and fantasy roleplaying alike quickly evolved in the following decades, but I see parallels in Cohen's "old school" approach to poetry reading and the advice my friends and I dispense to rookie referees and…
Let's say you've been given a voucher for a free flight, any ticket on the plane. There's no question that you'll usually want first class , right? The high class seat is number one in quality; the highest rank is usually number one. With me so far? Okay, awesome. ThAC0, besides being fun to say, shouldn't be intimidating. It just means, what will I need to roll to hit Armour Class 0. That's a…
The current plan is to run through my first starter adventure, then fast forward to them arriving in a port town where another of the zines takes place. It's a whistle stop tour of my current Zungeons (Zines that are Dungeons, just go with it), with a few locations from various group projects (Bronze Lands, Eastlake, etc) airlifted into a new context. All of these can be found at my Itch page if…