There's more to an rpg's format than cost and page count.

what a game am i right guys(so like i do actually have a paper due friday but uhhh -candycane)(also i have a morning class tomorrow (since im writing this on the 23rd) but after that im gonna be…

How many 2026 World Cup matches could a single person actually attend?

So it's a heatwave, and unfortunately, I didn't really get a chance to sit down and really write anything this week. The schools are closed because of the heat. We don't have snow days here; we have…

The party rescues Uncle Bob, recruits Brand and a merchant, kills a cultist, adopts two goblin kids, and reaches a pirate town.

“If you have already sold a videogame for money, congratulations! This manifesto is not for you. Please stop reading.”

Continuing from last week’s thoughts . In a recent conversation we had, Ed Jollyboat used the analogy of an airport runway as a linear introductory section to a game, which opens up into blue sky…

The common thread between Mario and Messi.

Revisited my Deltarune thoughts now that Chapter 5 is about the release. Added birthdays to the following characters: Tamaki, Cyan, Ozzy, Varsene, Mimi, Valcyne. Tweaked the outfit switcher style for…

I will continue providing updates here, but wanted to start an additional side project for some more personal thoughts/writings and to be more compatible for old devices - which is one of the reasons…

Players trust sense motive checks, can you blame them? The referee must present the world truthfully, but that obligation ends once they begin speaking through an NPC. An NPC may be mistaken, or…

I have known Agile Monk for a long time, and we have talked a lot over the years about my work and the OSR in general. Recently, he and his team at Fantasy Companion Workshops launched a crowdfunding…

I play fantasy sports quite a bit, most often baseball and football. I also tend to play in dynasty formats. That means players are rostered (or can be) for longer than the current season. Trades in…

The Tokyo Game Market has long been a hotbed of innovation, especially where trick-takers are concerned. Sometimes the games don’t work entirely as intended, but, hey, that’s what it…

I just finished The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for the third or fourth time. Every few years I'll go back and see how much of it I can figure out without a walkthrough. It's one of the few…

I made a game

While building Vulcard for the Game Programming Lab at ETH Zurich, we accumulated dozens of individual sprite PNGs for icons and UI elements. Loading each as a separate texture works fine early on.…

The old Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh was the game store of our childhood. It’s where we went to buy RPGs, modules, dice, and a whole pile of miniatures. We rummaged through the shelves in the…

Mapping and keying the key locations in a horrible terrible no good lunar colony.

Several years ago, before I cared about rpg blogs, I unsuccessfully tried to run a game of City of Mist . There are many reasons why it didn't work out and they all have little to do with the book or…

I picked up the physical Quickstart/Preview for “Fomoria” at UK Games Expo and quickly found a group eager to try it out! Fomoria is a game of epic horror and you’ll be playing as varying…

On Healing, Creation, and Connection in Skate Story.

I set out to design merchandise for 15 D&D classes and accidentally turned it into a three-month lesson in creativity, website building, repeating patterns.

I’ve been a rhythm game fiend since my introduction to Dance Dance Revolution in the early 2000s. I spent years obsessed with DDR, took a detour into Beatmania, then played Guitar Hero / Rock…

I've been told for years I should run TTRPGs professionally. I finally stopped arguing with everyone. I'm running Shadowdark on StartPlaying.games, and this link gets you $10 credit if you want to…

I have been playing the New York Times Crossplay game against the computer in hard mode and most of the times I win. Here’s what I’ve discovered: These have been my observations. Give…

For Rogue Trader on Steam. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is one of those games that has found its groove. If you check out the numbers on Steam you’ll see that it has a solid concurrent…

There’s something to be said about a game that I can boot up for the first time on a tight deadline in the middle of the night and instantly find myself entranced with. As much as I enjoy doing this,…

As cozy as it gets.

In Rul we met The Silence Bringer, Atok the Messenger, an old mushroom farmer friend, Ruldan the smith, grandma Ulna, a beleaguered dungeon keeper, and Xravik Shadowsong, Chosen of Akta, Then we set…

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year: Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it. -- me, November 2025 So I owe you…

With the price of the Steam Machine now known to the world (ouch!), I can’t help but feel sad about the inevitable price of the Steam Frame which I was really looking forward to. However, it does put…

Gadzooks! This screenshot could be from any film! Aside from the man looking like John Glenn, there are hardly any clues here to even help in identifying this scene - but if you have a crackerjack…

During the level design process, I try to put a lot of emphasis on “readability.” For me, readability comes down to: what information is the level conveying. Not all information is…

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Thursday, Monday, May 18, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Kyrill Azernyi, JP Tuttle, Zarf, Michael Stage, Josh Grams, Doug Orleans, Allyson, hugh, and…

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction met on Thursday, April 27, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Doug Orleans, Michael Stage, Josh Grams, hugh, Carl Muckenhoupt, Allyson, Zarf, Michael Hilborn,…

It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.

This past weekend I was listening to the Queens of the Stone Age 2013 album ...Like Clockwork while I was choring around the house. I love this album but I hadn't chewed on it in a year or two. The…

The Pokémon series began as an approachable JRPG with all the standard genre conventions intact, but as the series moved towards online and narrative, its level design has lost its bite.

Most of the Unbound crave human worship, attention, or service, but not all of them do. While the Howling Rustic decided to make its own version of a terrestrial hominid, the Sulphur Herald ...

Seventeen demos, scored out of 10, in the order I played them. TL;DR — Highest marks went to Blood Dungeon (9) , then PengPong , Kaz , Shroom and Gloom , and Furyball at 8. The demos go offline when…

Not really a response to a Narrascope talk so much as the talk is an alarm letting me know it's time to have this conversation again.

How game platforms turn safety rules, creator economics, and brand fit into growth across Roblox, Fortnite, EA, and Tebex. The post Game Platforms Grow Only When People Trust the Rules appeared first…

El precio es alto, pero está justificado. No deja de ser un PC, y un producto de lujo, a fin de cuentas.

Rail shooters are something I don’t normally care for, but with two exceptions so far. One is Rez, Sega’s music themed rail shooter, for its brilliant use of minimalist visuals and music integration.…

As expected v0.8.0 introduced a bug with the save game editor. Thanks to a player that reported the reproducible bug, I was able to fix it already. So this version brings two bug fixes and small…

A review of an illustrators first impressions of baldurs gate 3

Visualizing football tactics

If you look back at the "cardboard starship" tag, you'll see there have been a couple of previous builds... and #3 was never updated. That's because I never finished it. I was unhappy with the foam…

Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module…