Getting Into Cons For Free As A Creator

 INTRO

    I've been going to cons since the weekend of my 18th birthday, and because I've almost never had money to go to cons on my own, I soon started working for the cons I wanted to attend because most cons will give you a badge and a room if you're willing to give them some of your time. That's the easy hack to get into cons for free, but that's not why we're here today. 

    I don't often like calling attention to the work I've done behind the scenes to make conventions work over the last almost two decades - mostly due to the fact that I like working behind the scenes. In the time I've worked for cons up and down the East Coast and the Midwest of the United States, spanning small sci-fi cons at colleges with ~100 attendees up to my current position as one of the two heads of the Indie Tabletop Showcase at MAGFest  (an event that has in recent years consistently hit its badge cap of 20k attendees), much of my time has been spent working as a Professional Vibes Checker - or, to put it another way, whether it be via Guest Relations, Panels, Photography, Press/Media, or for the aforementioned Showcase, my primary job has been reviewing peoples' applications to get free passes based on whatever thing it is they're known for. Some of those were proactive (as in, having pre-vetted people and reaching out to them on behalf of the con), but many more over the years have been reviewing applications submitted by people I've never met and having to judge their vibes based solely on what research I can find about them from what they've submitted and what I can find out about them from the Internet and anyone else at the con. While these are by no means foolproof tips, I'd like to share what I've learned over the years and what I personally do when I'm forced to gatekeep free passes so that you folks out there have the best chance you can (and, hey, if I can solve a few of my pet peeves by putting this information out there and get some things to become standard, what a blessing that would be).

    Also, and this should go without saying but because I have directly mentioned an event I am currently staffing, I would like to clarify that all the ideas, opinions, and anecdotes presented within this post are mine and do not represent the official stance of any event or organization I currently or formerly have volunteered with.

KNOW WHAT YOU'RE ASKING FOR
MARKET YOURSELF APPROPRIATELY

    One of the easiest ways to disqualify yourself and to make people immediately stop paying attention to you is trying to squeeze a badge out of an event that your work does not qualify you for. As an example, when I was the head of Press & Media for Colossalcon, we would regularly get requests from cosplayers for free badges - either with absolutely no reasoning behind them, or with folks trying to position themselves as influencers and trying to pass that off as event coverage. These people generally got a polite "no thank you" if we didn't have free time, or a "you may have misunderstood what we are looking for - if we've misunderstood your platform, please provide additional content or reach out to XYZ departments which may be more suited to your request" if we did have time. What we were looking for, and what we spelled out on the website, was people who had some kind of online presence with a clear history of covering conventions either with video or audio coverage in which they actually talked about the event - not just getting quick videos or pictures of themselves in costume in one spot that everyone got photos of.

    Every event will have a list of guidelines for applying for free passes of various kinds often in the very same place as the application itself. If you have questions regarding a particular event's requirements, the best thing you can do is to reach out for clarity - preferably prior to submitting an application, but at least if you do it after you apply the person responding to you can at least reference what you've submitted. Either way, you should always ask if you're not sure, lest you be Confident But Wrong and lose out on an opportunity. The likelihood of getting a second chance to apply for the same event is entirely dependent on the goodwill and free time of the person processing these things - I personally try to respond back to everyone who gets it wrong because I Cannot Shut Up, but I believe I may be an exception.

WHO THE HELL IS MARK MERCER?

    Here's the deal: you cannot assume that the person processing your application for a free badge is familiar with your work. Even if you're popular. Even if you were at the event last year. Even if you're at the event EVERY year. Staff changeovers happen behind the scenes all the time - most events are run by groups of passionate volunteers which means that at any point, someone vital to an event may not be able to come that year, or they retire, and with them goes the years of knowledge of who you are and what you do. Sometimes, new limits on the number of badges the event allow to go out in a given year change, and suddenly there is a new competitive level to the applications.

    Assume that you're going to have to audition every year. Always provide the most recent and accurate information about yourself, and don't let impostor syndrome get the best of you here - if you're applying for a free pass based on a thing that you do, be confident that your expertise doing that thing should qualify you for a pass! Present the best version of yourself possible - and again, if you do a lot of different kinds of things, be sure that you're very clear about what it is you do that is relevant to the kind of free pass you're applying for (see: the first section again).

CON STAFF ALWAYS TALK AND THEY NEVER FORGET

    If there's one thing I would want to remind people about, it's that no matter what staffer you interact with, how you conduct yourself will always make it to the people in charge of making the decision on whether or not you get in for free. If you're a huge jerk for no reason, if you act entitled, if you try to take advantage of the event or the space - we will know, and it will not be good for your chances of coming back in future years. But also - if you're a sweetheart, we will ALSO know! People love to talk about how nice guests are just as much as they're motivated to tattle on jerks. Having a good working relationship with the event staff outside of any personal relationships you might have with any staffers (or at least just being chill, which believe me, we definitely notice) goes a long way.

    I do also want to be clear here - this does not mean you should feel like you have to bend and scrape and grovel for the privilege of being at the event. This does not mean that you shouldn't feel empowered to bring concerns to event staff - and that includes before, during, and after the event. You should always feel safe and able to discuss concerns - and buddy, if you're at an event and the event staff does NOT make you feel that way, you need to name and shame those folks to whoever is above them in the organization - because again, con staff talk and they never forget, and if a staffer fucks up, you'd better believe the folks who run the event are going to do something about it.

THE INTERNET IS FOREVER
ITS HUNGER LIMITLESS
FEED IT YOUR DATA

    If you are representing yourself as a brand, you need to have some kind of web presence when you apply. And to be clear - if you are requesting a free badge or any other kind of free services from an event on the implicit understanding that you have a platform which you will subsequently be using to promote the event in some way, you are representing yourself as a brand. The good news is, there's plenty of free ways to do this and they're just as good as the paid ways to do it in this particular case. There are pros and cons though. Let's review them now:

Disconnected Social Media Links

    Probably the absolute barest minimum you should have is 1-2 social media profiles, and these should contain information about who you are and what you do. If you are actively representing yourself as a brand, you should be updating these periodically so that you show signs of life. One of my biggest red flags is checking a social media account and not seeing a post for a year or more - if you're telling an event you'd like a badge in exchange for promoting them in some way and it doesn't look like you're even on the Internet anymore, the message that sends me is you're just trying to get a free badge. The good news is, you're probably already on these sites, and updating them is trivial.

A Landing Page/Link Aggregator

    If you have a few social media pages, there's functionally no reason to not have a landing page - whether that be a landing page on a bigger website, or whether it's something like Linktree or Carrd. They're free. For an example, here's my Linktree, which I've organized with links to all the things I've done that I think people might want to know about. I might move them around if I were applying for a certain kind of creator badge at an event, but you can go from zero to functional in about five minutes. For an example of Carrd, here's one I made for the monthly chiptune blog I manage with my pal Ethan. Both of these are the free plans, both of them have as much information on them as is necessary to convey why they're there and to let people know how to find out more about me/my projects. These also have one secret benefit to them - they don't say when they were last updated, which again, per the last section (and upcoming for the next one), if I can't see timestamps that indicate that something hasn't been updated in a while, I'm not going to have immediate concerns - and if it's something where you've got a Facebook page you never update but an extremely active YouTube channel, having all those links together saves time hunting around and verifying you.

A Proper Website

    You don't actually have to have a proper website anymore - and by proper website, I mean a homepage or a blog. I personally prefer them - I think they're professional, but I've never discounted someone's application because they didn't have one as long as they had at least one of the other options listed. Not everyone has the money to waste on Squarespace, nor does everyone have the HTML acumen to make their own website (like, I haven't touched an HTML tutorial since I was in 6th grade trying to customize my Xanga page, don't worry about it). Again, be sure you're updating the copyright date at the bottom of your webpage especially if you're a business that sells a product - if I see someone's webpage with a copyright date several years out of date, that's a red flag that someone might be impersonating the brand. If you do have a proper website though, be sure that it's got updates on what you're doing so that the person reviewing your application doesn't have to go anywhere else to get what they need to evaluate your application.

An EPK

An Electronic Press Kit is a great alternative to most of these options - on the one hand, it somewhat duplicates the efforts of a Landing Page/Link Aggregator, but on the other hand it has the added benefit of having space for promotional images which can be super handy. Rami Ismail made a presskit creator for free which you can find on his Github but I will confess as someone who is good at building computers but not the programs that make them work, I've yet to noodle around with this personally - but I CAN tell you it became kind of a gold standard over on the videogame side of things. There's all kinds of free ones on the Internet though - find what works, go look at some games' EPKs for inspiration.

    AND NO MATTER WHAT, make sure that any of these options have redundant links to the other parts of your web presence and have some kind of contact information for you. In the old days of the Internet, having a webpage with no outbound links was referred to as a "dead end" for obvious reasons. Do not have a dead end - be sure that people can always find more of what you're doing, and even if you ONLY have the one page, be sure that it has a working email for you at the absolute bare minimum.

FOLLOWTHROUGH

    Let's say you've applied, gotten your badge, and now you're at the event to do the thing you do. Depending on the event and what it is you do, there are any myriad number of ways that you should be following through on your end of the bargain. Many events will explicitly state what they want - if you do any kind of press or media coverage, that event may ask you to email them links (or just tag them on socials) so that their press team knows where to reshare that coverage - and, bonus plus, it shows you did the thing you said you would! I'm aware of the fact that PAX Unplugged has a Content Creator Lounge available explicitly to people who received one of those promotional badges - if you did, be sure you pop in and check it out! (See previous point of "the staff always talk and never forget" - if it looks like you're not taking full advantage of something, you may not be offered it again!) If you're there to promote your game or an organization you represent, be sure you're there at your booth for the designated hours to do so! If you said you'd write a blog post after the event or do a podcast about it or anything else - do those things, and make sure the event knows you did them and has access to them to share them around. 

tl;dr
DO'S & DON'TS OF FREE BADGES

DO:

• assume you're auditioning for your spot every year
• keep your information on the Internet up to date and easily accessible
• read the fine print - the event will tell you what they expect from you
• ask questions when you're not sure of something
• be nice to the people staffing the event
• voice concerns if you feel unsafe or abused at any point
• believe in yourself when you apply and portray that with your application
• follow through on what the event asks of you in exchange for a free badges

DON'T

• think that people know who you are, even/especially if you're Internet famous
• think that how you act goes unnoticed by event staff
• do things that harm the event or take advantage of their goodwill
• ignore all the things that ARE provided for you to take advantage of
• forget to demonstrate to the event why you're qualified to work with them

OUTRO

    So there's all of my tips about what to do if you're applying to an event to get a free badge or promotional space based on your project or expertise. I will keep this updated if things happen over the years that would prompt an update. Again, despite namedropping my time with certain events, none of the above should be construed to represent the opinions of any events or organizations I currently or formerly have worked with - this is all just personal advice I've built up over almost two decades of being on the side of this equation that rubber stamps these kinds of approvals. I'm happy to answer any questions anyone ever has about this kind of thing - if it's something I'm directly involved in there may be more correct channels to reach out through than just commenting here or on BlueSky, but one way or the other I'm always happy to help.

Stay weird out there. 

One Year of a Very Secret Bookclub

 INTRO

I have, as I believe I have alluded to in the past, personally curated a group of local(ish) friends to read games with over the last year. They are, by and large, people who have suffered the same curse that I did - people who only ever knew Dungeons & Dragons or perhaps one of its offshoots because that's just what everyone played, and who never really knew anyone who had any other books. A rare few came to this already as game designers, having some projects under their belts (honestly, more than I have frankly). Some, like myself, are avid podcast aficionados and have learned of some games this way - many, unfortunately, have the particular mélange of neurospices that make listening to actual plays literal actual Hell for them and so just haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to other games. All of these folks, however, have two things in common: they know me, and they know I've got an unstoppably huge backlog of games to get through. What is pictured above is most of the games I own IRL - I've left out most of the D&D specific books, and of course most of those zines haven't been properly filed. 

With the season of unchecked capitalism upon us (read: Black Friday & the push for buying games for folks for the holidays), I felt like I should run down the games we've read this year and give you some mini reviews in hopes of inspiring you to purchase them for yourself or for others. I don't have any affiliate links or anything, nothing you click in this will give me any money - I'm just doing it for the love of the game(s) and shilling for stuff I like. In no particular order, we have:

Triangle Agency

Triangle Agency rules. Full disclosure, I've been hooked on this sauce from the very beginning: as a gift to myself back when the Kickstarter was running, I backed this at one of the highest levels so I'd get a chance to play with Caleb, I got to bring some podcast friends along, it was great. I've since run this on-air for The QueerXP, and I've run it off-air a few times including an as-yet unfinished mission I wrote prior to the game coming out. But why do I like it? For the reason I think a lot of people get it wrong - this is a game about your fundamental understanding of how you interact with the world, both in and out of game. It is a game that, if you break the rules and start reading beyond the playwall and you go read all the GM tips on how to run the game, forces you to reconcile with exactly how games work in a way that I personally have not been challenged before. This is a game that does require some GM prep, yes, but it is also an onboarding manual for helping players think more creatively and fill in the world with you via its "Ask The Agency" move, a move in which a player presents a causal chain for a thing they want to exist in the world to be true, and then there's some input from the table about it and then they roll to see the impact. I have now started playing almost every other game like Triangle Agency - not that I get to Ask The Agency and reshape reality in every game, but rather the same kinds of questions I would engage with when thinking about using that move are ones I'll ask the GM. If the GM hasn't established something, it's in a quantum state until they do - if a game doesn't let you mechanically assert your own narrative about it, the next best thing you can do is ask the GM! This is a thing that I think that people have done for ages in a sloppy way - the "rule of cool" argument can be somewhat of a large club swung around rather than a precise and delicate masonry hammer - and I think that by filtering this tendency through the prism of Triangle Agency, you learn to be better at other games.

Also there's a bunch of cool weird shit you get to do that lets you be an absolute horrifying freak. I don't know what else to tell you here, if you haven't already bought it I'm going to roll to Ask The Agency to have made your [benefactor/trusted adult of choice] get it for you.

Moonlight on Roseville Beach

Look, you had me at "queer disco cosmic horror." This is a game I ran at PAXU in 2024 (a thing which the game's creator mentioned might be the first time it's been run at a con not by him? And if that's the case, I need y'all to step up here okay), have loved GnomeAnne's 4-part AP of it, and generally wish I had more chances to run for folks. In terms of what you do in this game, you and your fellow players are queer weirdoes living in a beach bungalow in a seaside resort town in the 70s. It's a homonormative, lightly magical, and very mysterious alternate 1970s setting that lets you investigate supernatural mysteries - some of which might be your fellow players! My favorite prewritten adventure I can only describe to you as "Warlock Berghain." I love the dice pool system - one you don't really see in other games, where you're building a pool, rolling, and assigning dice to various tables to see what results you get which really lets you dial in your varying level of success in a narratively interesting way. Roseville Beach lets you go as silly or serious with the horror as you like - it's a really excellent and versatile game.

Ryuutama

Ryuutama is the game that actually made me start this whole bookclub thing, because I knew I needed to read it and yell about it with someone. Finding out it had already been out in America for almost a decade and yet I had NEVER heard about it blew my mind. There was a very recent video promoting it, and it does seem like periodically someone like myself will pick it up, yell about how nobody seems to have heard of it and then it falls back to obscurity, and I think that's a real shame. Especially with stuff like Fabula Ultima catching on recently, a game like this can really shine. It is, at its core, a game of not playing heroes, but rather people who are off on their One Great Journey in their life. There's all kinds of collaborative worldbuilding things in it and some very special things for GMs to do including building their own GMPC which may or may not directly affect a session - a lot of choices make sense when you realize that the author is/was a teacher, and used this as a game to teach people the fundamentals of roleplaying games. I do find it strange where it decides to get into the crunch, mainly on the overland travel rules, but I suspect this is a holdover from D&D's export to Japan and certain aspects of it simply sticking around in the Japanese game design space whereas we in the US had chosen other aspects, but I'm not educated enough on this to make definitive statements - regardless, it is a very easy game to pick up and play, and while certain elements may see part and parcel for a lot of modern fantasy adventure games, the fact that this did this a decade ago is something to be noted. There are nuggets of wisdom to be gained here.

Also, and again, cannot stress enough I do not make money from this, but I cared about this game enough to take part in a community zine and created a sort of Shaman King-y, DanDaDan-y class you can play along with including some advice for running games with death and the undead as a more prominent element. I think everyone did a really good job with it, I encourage you to check it out if you end up liking Ryuutama.

Salvage Union

Salvage Union is a game I am so Normal and Neurotypical about that I have literally reactivated my locked Twitter account to go pull up a thread I posted to put into this post because I forgot to delete Twitter before it got scraped for AI - a thread in which I went to bat for Salvage Union because I was so tired of people saying "Oh it's just another mech game that's all about combat." Salvage Union is a game that DOES let you do mech combat, yeah. It's also about building a community to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland dotted with corporate arcologies, a sea of zombifying nanites, kaiju, raiders, and simple folk who are just trying to stay alive. It's about being a part of a union fighting against those who would tear you down and either wipe you out or use you as just another cog in their machine. The three pre-written adventures have you either dealing with corpo espionage, horrible kaiju meat-mechs, or a cold war where people fight to control the bountiful and extremely dangerous resource that is the aforementioned nanites. Or you can just go off and do your own thing, man! Do a Borderlands With Mechs if you want to. Or a Fallout With Mechs. Or a Zoids But With Non-Animal Mechs. Or anything else your heart desires honestly! It's a cool game.

Now, you can skip this part if you don't want to hear my arguments about why this game isn't just about combat and actually it mechanically supports lots of RP options: Please pardon the extreme amount of spreadsheets I'm about to share here, but what I did was I went through every possible character option available to choose either as your pilot character or for your mech, and tagged everything as either being RP focused, combat focus, utility focus, or a hybrid, and tallied up all the totals for each section. They're all color coded for how they are in the book for easy reference. (Click each to embiggen!)

Pilot Abilities

Pilot Equipment

Mech Abilities

Mech Systems

Mech Modules

Mech Chassis

Also, none of these even touch on the Carrier Mech options, which are where all your NPCs live and which are almost EXCLUSIVELY about RP options with a small hint of combat or utility - because that's your home base where your guys live, and it's also a soft worldbuilding/tone setting choice because the kind of carrier you build denotes what kind of game you're going to play! AGH. OK I'm done yelling for now.

His Majesty The Worm

Ah yes, blessed be the Wormgame. I am very grateful to have played this game once with its creator and I have to say that it is very much a game that makes more sense once you get it to the table, at least in terms of how the game actually functions. Josh is an extremely prolific blogger and is the current editor for the OSR magazine Knock!, itself a collection of prominent blog posts from over the years. As such, much of this book is poised to teach you a lot of basic principles and how they apply to this game specifically - designing a megadungeon, building a believable town for the players to exist in, codifying interpersonal roleplaying with a set of mechanics to encourage you to get into character, all kinds of cool stuff. It uses tarot cards as its RNG and which tie to your stats, specialties, and also some really interesting combat tricks. It is somewhat of an arcane contraption and may not be for all tables - but if it's right for your table, I think it's a game that really sings. It's done well enough that it pretty regularly sells out, and right now the expansion/megadungeon that Josh has been working on is preordering/slowfunding over on Exalted Funeral.

Also, this is another game I was so moved after reading that I joined a game jam for it just to build a fishing minigame, because every game needs a fishing minigame. It's free online and probably will be forever unless I take time to actually make it a product worth paying for, but I had a lot of fun with it. Speaking of fishing minigames...

Hellwhalers

Hellwhalers, another game I ran at PAXU 2024, is actually a game I felt maybe too Jewish to do justice? Like, to be clear, it didn't actually impact my ability to run the game, nor did it really impact my ability to play the game with PlusOneEXP this year (a Twitch stream which has sadly been lost to the depths), but this is a game of a very particular kind of Christian religious horror that I feel like people raised Catholic will really, really get a kick out of. Or if you're just a hardcore Moby-Dick fan, that's also an option. You are, predictably, in Literal Actual Hell, on board a whaling ship on the hunt for the Hellwhale - a foul demon that your mysterious captain has told you is the only ticket out of Hell. This one's got a lot of juice - as a GM, you can play with or leave behind as many pieces of lore included in the book as you like. The story is primarily driven by the nightly gambling - in a very slick piece of tech, the results of your roll on the sic-bo board will provide you the prompts for the following day's activities, and aside from that it really leans on the characters' playbooks to encourage different kinds of roleplay scenarios. It's a lot of fun if you're a sicko like me who enjoys really, really bleak games, gallows humor, and roleplaying just an absolutely awful person. It also got a zine of extra content this year!

The Wildsea

What if the apocalypse didn't come from war or bombs, but instead an eruption of vegetal life - an uprising of the trees, drinking the oceans dry, burying people beneath new waves of brown and green, and at the tops of these ever growing trees a new world arises - a world in which people ride around giant, chainsaw powered boats trying to make ends meet, tell each other stories, and make sense of this world. That's The Wildsea. It also gets a distinction for being one of the only truly post-human games on this list: like, yes, there are technically human-like people you can play in this game, but they're...not humans like you or I know them. Some were trapped in amber for centuries and have been changed by it. Others, the true descendants of the humans of the old world, have been mutated by the toxic sap that oozes from these giant trees and permanently rerouting the course of their evolution. But much more common are other lifeforms that have been elevated - cactus-folk, fungus-folk, discarded-machinery-folk, thousands-of-spiders-forming-a-single-consciousness-like-that-one-alternate-universe-version-of-Peter-Parker-folk. Rather than classes and hitpoints, your character instead gets built of a number of traits which have their own boxes which when you take damage get marked off, helping more accurately represent how one loses access to the things that make them good at what they do as their failures mount higher and higher in desperate situations. It's a game that is all about the wonders of the world, of hearing reality-warping Whispers on the wind. It is a game of adventuring in a new world, only as concerned with the old world as you want to be. I mean this both in the modern sense and in the antiquated meaning of the word - it is an awesome game.

Mausritter

I probably do not need to sell you on Mausritter. It has an extremely healthy community, maybe even too healthy by some standards - it, like Mothership, has caught on such that the community is regularly holding game jams, doing collective Backerkit funding months, and is all over the place. My friends knew none of that when I showed it to them, of course, nor did they know Into The Odd or any of the other games that ultimately derived from it. (Hold that thought, though.) This being many of my group's first foray into anything from that lineage, I think folks found the character creation mechanics extremely novel and interesting, as well as exactly what kinds of things the rules of the game concern themselves with versus what things are left to the table. You get rules for making your mouse, for the things they carry, for interacting with other animals and for waging very tiny wars. That is, mostly, it. There are of course GM instructions, but while there are rules for making hex maps to set up exploring the world, and there's a mechanical impetus for the mice to make it home to be able to level up (if they survive that long), there's not a whole lot else in there - which has let people play around and make some really cool campaigns for it. There is of course the official boxed set The Estate that has a bunch of adventures in it, and there's Tomb of a Thousand Doors - originally a community-created megadungeon that then got polished, crowdfunded and published by PlusOneEXP. But you don't need any of that to play! There's so much free content out there, and honestly creating a Mausritter adventure is easy enough just by looking around your own house and imagining the mice that are (hopefully not) in your walls and what they might find. And if you're like "Adam if it's so easy why haven't you made anything for Mausritter yet," first of all 1. how dare you, and also 2. I'm in the very early planning process of Krabberitter, so just hold your horses.

The Electrum Archive

Getting this one out of the way right off the bat - I am not linking the adventure I made for this, partly because it's not done/usable and partly because I don't want to have to explain the name of it to polite company. If you know, you know.

Now, more to the point: The Electrum Archive is a game of exploration in a science fantasy world. It is equal parts Moebius and Morrowind. As I have told many people, the fact that the way magic works is that you have to huff ancient alien gasoline that allows you to pierce beyond the veil of death to learn the true names of spirits to evoke them into the world isn't the coolest thing about the lore of this game should be enough to have you running towards that Itch page right now. This game truly has the sauce, as they say. I think it makes exploration-based gameplay much more accessible than some other games (Ryuutama coming to mind immediately, but that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison here). You can get FromSoftesque with it in terms of loredropping and worldbuilding if you like. There are many NPCs and locales with just enough information about them that you feel like you have plenty of usable tools at your disposal without feeling like you and your players need to go study a textbook. The few times I've run this game have all been wild - it supports dungeon delving just as much as it supports sandbox exploration. There's two zines out for it now, and I'm hoping once the creator's most recent Kickstarter for an expanded version of one of their other games finishes fulfillment, we might see a Volume 3. 

The Smörkasborg Experiment

One month, I pitched a truly preposterous thing to my bookclub. Because Mörk Borg was so short, and because I had so many variants and so so many more existed, my challenge was for everyone to read the base book and then as many others as they could. Here are some one-sentence reviews of the ones me and my crew physically own:

Mörk Borg: Start here - see where everything else compares, have fun dying, idiot.

Dark Fort: The actual one-page solo game start of the lineage, good to play around with to get the hang of it. (Available along with the MB expansion Feretory.)

Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper: Technically a solo or GM With Player tile placement boardgame that uses MB rules, this one's pretty fun.

Pirate Borg: Is potentially overhyped but honestly still good - I would reflavor all the alternate history stuff unless you and your playgroup are real history sickos about that particular time period like I am.

Blood Borg: Real punk shit that lets you do Vampire: The Masquerade without all those pesky extra rules. 

CY_BORG: It is exactly what you think it is, and is the only other MB derivative made by the original crew which means it's the only one with the same level of care.

Kill Your Necromancer: An almost completely standalone adventure book where you're all undead who have to kill the person who has cursed you with life once again - have fun killing, idiot.

Honestly, knowing Mörk Borg is very handy for deciphering so many other games these days, if you don't have at least the baseline one I'd recommend it. There's all kinds of people doing really inventive stuff with it because of how simple and straightforward the rules are, and the people who really put in the time and care rather than just jocking Johan Nohr's style have some really cool spins on the concept - I personally recommend anything Adam Vass (of Blood Borg, above) or Paweł Kicman (of Kill Your Necromancer, above) do if you want a good place to start once you've tried the OG.

(Yes I was born in 1990, what about the slang that is stuck in my vocabulary tipped you off?)

A Tour of Bastionland

Another month, I convinced the crew to read Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, and Mythic Bastionland - not just because ITO is foundational to many other games as mentioned previously and both Bastionland games build on that, but also because of the evolution both of the narrative of the world and of Chris McDowall as a writer. Like I personally was interested in mapping the plot arc of the universe that Bastion lives within, but without overselling it I really think of these games as paradigm setting for each era they dropped in. These games are the gravity wells that distort the space-time of this particular side of the gaming world, and I think that taking the time to understand them as well as things Chris puts on his blog, or the interviews he does for his podcast online, really end up unlocking a lot of ways to think about games. 

Of course, it doesn't hurt that they're all pretty fun to play. 

Slugblaster

I got to run Slugblaster this year at PAXU and I'm very glad I did, but I really want to get a full game in. I am not usually a person who goes for a game that has mechanized emotional damage as an option, but I'll be damned if getting to play around in a world where you're cool teens (or at least, teens who think they're cool) using hoverboards to traverse the multiverse and cut sick promo videos while also trying to deal with interpersonal drama and keep your parents happy isn't the sickest shit. Most of my experience with the game prior to reading it was via the Quantum Kickflip and the My First Dungeon podcasts which are both excellent. The thing that really draws me to the game, though, is that while yes you can do it as a one-shot and do all your cool stunts and have fun goofing off - this game's downtime activities really do encourage you to build out your character's life in a way that many other games do not. In addition, there's a finite number of sessions you're going to play with these characters - much as life is being a teen, you will be forced to come to the end of this period of these characters' lives and you will be forced to see what the future holds for them based on your actions over the game in a truly Breakfast-Clubian way. Again, I'm in my mid-30s, so the 80s teen coming-of-age movies mixed with 90s highschool-centric TV with its afterschool specials are just as much a part of my DNA as was seeing people be really shitty at skateboarding but doing it for the love of the sport and recording them and their friends trying to pull of sick stunts. You don't have to have lived that era to have fun with this game, but I think any folks my age or older by about 10 years are going to have a certain kind of nostalgia for it.

One other thing about Slugblaster - much like Triangle Agency rewrote my brain about how I interact with any game world, Slugblaster rewrote my brain with the intent behind its action roll - you may have heard to "only roll when failure is interesting," but Slugblaster takes it a step further to say "only roll for WHAT is interesting." If you're being jumped by a biker gang, if each and every punch against each and every biker isn't the interesting part, don't roll for that. Roll to see how well you resolve the situation - a 6 on your d6 might mean you beat the shit out of an entire gang, or it might mean you successfully escaped with your teeth intact. Likewise, and I think I'm roughly quoting this directly from the Episode Zero of the My First Dungeon AP, if you're tied to a chair and need to grab a laserknife to cut yourself out, maybe it's interesting to see each and every inch that you skooch your hand across the floor towards that laser knife. Roll for what is interesting.

OUTRO

So that's it! That's every game I forced my friends to read with me over the last 12 months.

Except that's not every game I read over the last 12 months, is it? Take, for example, my haul from PAXU:

I ran CBR+PNK at PAXU as well on behalf of Mythworks in their big 50+ person megagame, which was absolutely wild. I'm reading Stillfleet now in preparation for playing it on Sunday in the Stillfleet Discord. I read the original preview edition of The Between and played in a medium-length game of it while the hypetrain was rolling for the crowdfunding campaign. While my job ultimately ended up screwing me out of the time off to go work for Possum Creek this summer at GenCon, I'd read and prepared to run Wanderhome. I've been writing an adventure for PlusOneEXP for Down We Go for...frankly too long now actually (sorry Tony) but I've been deep in those mines. I ran The Wassailing of Claus Manor at PAXU 2024 as well, and ended up writing something for the upcoming second expansion for it called The Pine Tar of Claus Manor which is...coming out sometime soon? I used the original edition of A Land Once Magic (updated version pictured above in the hand-stamped bag) to help worldbuild for a game of Armour Astir (which I talked about in a previous blogpost). I played Mappa Mundi, Trophy Dark and Inevitable for charity streams this year. I've played an absolute shit load of Mothership and Cloud Empress this year, both of which have had a ton of adventures to flip through and use (CE's books are still pre-shipping from the crowdfunder, but watt sent us the PDFs ages ago and lemme tell you, they're worth it). I finally read the Old School Essentials rules so I could play in a stream over on PlusOneEXP to promote Duginthroat Divided. While I haven't actually sat down to read the Cairn 2e rules I got recently, I did get to play one of Joseph R Lewis' adventures with him at a con in Baltimore with a veritable who's who of the Cairn extended family. And that's before getting into all the zines I got either from PlusOneEXP's Zine Club or from the various zine month crowdfunders! It's been a huge year for games, both personally and broadly! I encourage you to get out there and go buy some of these games - every single thing I've talked about in this post is a game I feel has value either as reference material or as an actual game to be played, and I'm very glad that both my friends that I pressganged into a bookclub and the people out there in the world who've welcomed me into their gaming groups and streaming games have all been willing to play with me this year. Excited to see what 2026 holds.

Stay weird out there.

On Meeting Games Where They Are

 

    So this doesn't usually come up, but I'm a huge robot & mecha fan. I was of the generation that grew up with Toonami bringing such delights to USA teens as Gundam Wing and G Gundam right after school, Evangelion in the dead of night on Saturdays on Adult Swim, followed by eventually getting IGPX & Eureka Seven, and even Gurren Lagann managed to make it onto The SciFi Channel's Ani-Mondays in that era (before it became The SyFy Channel, but my hatred for that rebrand can be a rant for another day). When I played WH40K, my army was The Iron Warriors who I ran with as mechanized of a list as I could, with as little flesh showing on the models as possible - same with Warmachine as well, where I ran as many Warjacks as I could in my Cygnar list that honestly probably wanted some support from dudes with guns. While learning to play D&D back in 3.5, once I stumbled on the Warforged in Eberron I never looked back. Once I got to college and could afford an XBOX 360, I invested in the Gundam Dynasty Warrior games and absolutely went to town on some Zakus. What I'm trying to say is, you give me a game about robots or about piloting giant robots, 99% of the time unless the actual way that you interface with the game causes me physical pain, I'm going to play it until either the robots or my brain have rusted away.

POWERED BY THE ASTIRPOCALYPSE

    As I mention from time to time, I have a bookclub with some local pals to help me clear out my backlog. Usually we read stuff from my personal backlog - between bad impulse control at cons/on crowdfunding sites/for Itch bundles, I've got a pretty sizable pile of games to go through and maybe hopefully play. I'd already read Salvage Union with this crew, and we'd talked about Lancer (a game which I have read but have never gotten to table, and which most of that crew have only heard of). At one point, one of my crew mentions they had backed a game and had joined an online campaign of it only to have it crash and burn harder than Zeon's attempt to drop Side 2 onto Jaburo - not only did it fail, but also everything still blew up and made sure nobody was happy. They asked me if I'd be willing to run a game for them and some other friends - they knew I liked mecha, they'd seen my Escaflowne Blu Rays and knew I'd run some other PbtA games recently. I agreed, sight unseen, because hey - it's not like a game like this would cause me to have to do an immense amount of bookkeeping as the GM, right?

    If you've never played the original Apocalypse World, there are a great deal of things which future iterations have largely dropped - namely about setting up narrative pillars of the world. Some things have persisted on and have also changed further on down the evolutionary line into your Blades in the Dark-likes and such, but Armour Astir: Advent pretty fiercely holds onto some of the OG framework for Apocalypse World - because it is, after all, a game about fighting a fascist empire, and even if our modern day fascists appear scattered and incompetent there is always an underlying structure to their actions which dictates what they want and what they hold dear, and that's a thing that needs gamifying for this kind of situation. After a few days of deep reading the book and panicking that I wouldn't have enough things ready to start play, I came to two conclusions - we would use a worldbuilding game to help set a baseline for the world, and I would take some time and watch/listen to some APs to see how other people had played the game to see if I could smooth out some of the things that were giving me trouble.

    Armour Astir is not a game that necessarily concerns itself with how you got to where the present day tensions are. This is very much by design - the author's note on Page 7 tells us that we can do whatever we want - there is an implied setting by way of the art choices and names for game pieces, but ultimately it's up to you and your players to define the world. This is, I think, fine for reasons I'll get to - but lightly problematic for kicking off a campaign. Much of the worldbuilding mechanics in the game are very reactive - intended to decide things in the moment, which is fine for literally everything except all of the parts where you lay the groundwork for your world. The good news is, Armour Astir is a game that implies a magical setting that also has mecha, and that meant I could try out Viditya Voleti's A Land Once Magic, which rules. While we found a lot of good meat to chew on through our session generating the backstory of the world this way, it did mean that before we had even started playing the game we had already deviated from the intended gameplay. Which like...that's fine, right? Right?

FURTHER DIVERGENCE

    When trying to do my research on other folks who had actually run Armour Astir online, results were...pretty scarce. There were a few places that had covered the book as a review, but otherwise? Well...Friends at the Table used it in two episodes of their show, but they already had an established universe they were slotting into and had pretty good ideas of how to map what Armour Astir was offering onto their world. A few other folks had put very small APs, and that's about it.  Heck, even my beloved One Shot hadn't covered the game, and James & Dillin have practically covered everything over the years. What this meant was that I needed to make some choices on exactly how closely I wanted to cleave towards the rules text as written versus importing mechanics from other, similar games whose mechanics I understood better/felt fit what the system was "going for." After all, I'd already decided to use ALOM to build the baseline of the world, right, so what's the harm in grabbing a few of my favorite innovations in the PbtA and post-PbtA sphere? The game itself is structured in multiple phases which jump around from the actual boots-on-the-ground Robot Action (called Sorties, which pair with B-Plots if you have folks NOT in a mech at the time), then Downtime once the Robot Fun Is Done, and then you've got the Conflict Turn which checks in on what the bad guys are doing and how the world changes - why, that sounds an awful lot like what Carved from Brindlewood games do, right? And this game is riddled with clocks to track progress of good and bad guy schemes - sure, Blades does that, but haven't The Wildsea and Slugblaster both made cool innovations on the use of clocks in dynamic narrative scenes? Wouldn't it be cool if I just-

RULES AS READ VERSUS RULES AS WRITTEN

    Ultimately, I decided not to add anything in mechanically. I was starting to make choices about a game I hadn't even played yet, and that's unfair to the game AND its creator. Much like adding salt and pepper to your meal before your first bite keeps you from tasting the delicate blend of flavors the chef intended for you, I think it's important to try to meet the game where it is so you can actually see what the game is trying to get you to do. Aside from the ALOM session to help set up our collective baseline for our universe, we took either two or three sessions actually creating characters, the bad guys, and the rebellion that our players found themselves allied with. We basically get through one phase of play per evening, which means it takes us almost a month to get through a full "cycle" of play - which is fine, that's partly due to not having more than like 2-3 hours a night to play and also our collective newness with the system. It has meant that actual revelations about the system's inner workings have come slowly, but as we have played over the last few months they have in fact kept coming. 

    I would say that across the board, the players are certainly good at creating narrative though may not be as practiced with narrative-focused games which has meant there has been a learning curve teaching them exactly how much power they have over the world (both in terms of the magic their characters wield as well as in other phases where they are inhabiting other NPCs). Getting used to combat has been interesting - I think all of us are tactics-pilled when it comes to big robot fightan and so trying to decouple those expectations with the more cinematic combat this game expects has been our biggest pain point: but of course, so many of these stories aren't really about the combat since one well-placed laser kills any number of mooks - outside of fighting mindless beasts (which are not explicitly detailed in the rules but are hinted at), the point is to remember you're fighting people which means doing things like demoralizing them to stop fighting, intimidating them to run away or even convince them to defect are all valid options. 

    The thing that truly stopped us in our tracks, though, is the bookkeeping - both in terms of how much to pre-establish (i.e. the main pillars of the bad guys' organization which it is ostensibly your job to take down) vs. things that come up incidentally (clocks for progress on both the good and bad side of things, tapping and untapping rebellion segments for resources plus keeping up on them to make sure they don't get destroyed unless you want them to, that kind of thing). A lot of this didn't really click until one of our players was absolutely obliterated - hilariously, the same player who wanted us to start playing this game in the first place. Now, they got better, but a character facing death (especially so suddenly and almost casually as a stray laser from a mecha-kaiju intended to destroy their carrier instead got the PC dead center) triggers a lot of rules to come into play and suddenly a lot of the character advancement mechanics that at first just appeared to be roleplaying prompts revealed their true purpose as we handled the cleanup. This then prompted a major party-wide audit of character sheets to make sure that all the various bits and bobs aligned with what we realized their actual functional purpose was.

    There have been chafe points, but they've been rewarding to get through as I do my best to present the game that my friend bought and has wanted to play. As we get a better handle on the structure of gameplay, maybe I'll end up bringing in a few outside ideas to smooth things out, but honestly we're having a good time and I'm content to leave my speculation there.

Or at least I was, until... 

RULES AS INTENDED & UNDEATH OF THE AUTHOR

    I was very surprised to find out that Briar was actively and immediately working on a second edition of the game practically from the moment it was published and in peoples' hands. In reading over their devlog I was surprised and delighted to see a number of choices they were making were right in line with things I myself had been chewing on - how to make Pillars more tangible, adopting the Carved from Brindlewood mystery resolution mechanics over into dealing with the metaplot, building in a lifepath & worldbuilding system, potentially changing combat to be more tactical. That all rules, and not just because those are all things I specifically pointed out as chafe-points - it's because I love when creators look at other convergent evolutionary paths (both Armour Astir and The Between appear to have started development around the same time, with The Between eventually spilling out into Brindlewood Bay and eventually the rest of the Carved from Brindlewood games in the interim) and borrow ideas to grow stronger. 

    What that means, though, is that now we're in kind of a liminal zone - because we have a fully functional book of rules to use, but we also know that the person who wrote those rules is hard at work trying to make those rules something newer and better because they no longer fit their vision of the game - so like...maybe being so precious about adhering to the rules to provide the game experience as intended by the developer isn't so important since the developer themselves is opting to update everything?

    For now, I'm content to let the real game designers do the real game designing and stick to what's in the book for running our game. The rules in the book are as balanced as they need to be, and they do work as intended even if I personally have a little trouble parsing out what that intention is sometimes. But it also means I'm going to take opportunities to pull in my favorite CfB tech like Painting The Scene & maybe doing some Unscene-esque B-Plot scenarios to help learn about NPCs in the rebellion that we otherwise don't get to check in on. Maybe I'll whip ALOM back out to whip up some prompts to help fill in some characters before the PCs run into them. Maybe I'll just do Tarot readings for some of the background characters to see what they've been up to while the party goes off to show the fascists their Burning Finger.

    No matter what I end up doing though, it'll be with the knowledge that rather than enforcing my will on the game system and my players before trying to see what kind of game the game itself wants you to play, I listened to it, I interpreted it, and I'm using the tools I have at my disposal to make sure that the gameplay experience that the game wants us to have and the gameplay experience all of us at the table want to have are harmonized as best as I can. 

Knights of the Triangular Table

 

As many of you have recently, I presume, I have been corrupted by Mythic Bastionland brainrot. There is, by my rough calculation, at least one day's worth of content from Chris McDowall himself explaining things about Mythic Bastionland on YouTube split between his own channel and the PlusOneEXP channel. Having been sucked into the Fantasy Life sequel recently and being unable to do less than two things at one time or my brain explodes, I've had a lot of time to absorb this content which has been riveting but unfortunately it has solidified the brainrot and that means I have to make a blog post so I can go back to my life.

Give Us This, Our Knightly Brainrot

Around the time I started watching all of McDowall's deep dives, I also saw Caleb Zane Huett posting on Blooski about wanting to play knight games and getting sucked into Pendragon and Mythic Bastionland. Now, seeing Caleb talk about what he wanted out of knight-focused games combined with the literal day's worth of hearing Chris McDowall talking about the inspirations and mechanics of Mythic Bastionland got me thinking about a few things I'd never really stopped to consider before since I'm not really any kind of Arthurian scholar:

1. The Knights of the Round Table are really weird. Like, really weird. Like, possessed of superpowers that make almost no sense for anyone to have.

2. The thing that solidifies myths as myths is in the power of the telling - that is to say, the specific iteration of a myth might be mutable or adapted from region to region, but the broad strokes of the story are going to remain the same no matter who tells it.

3. The thing about Knights (certainly in Mythic Bastionland, probably in the Arthurian tales) is that broadly speaking, they're just dudes who fight well. Sometimes they're dudes who are invincible or can grow to giant size or shoot lasers from their hands or get really strong, but they're just dudes who are concerned with Doing The Right Thing and Being Honorable.

Hang on a second. Regular Dudes who have some Very Specific Special Powers, can regularly defy death with the power of Plot, and are extremely concerned with a narrative metacurrency which is mainly used in the context of their job and occasionally checked by Deific Powers-That-Be? Why does that sound fam-

By God, Triangle Agency agents are knights. It's knights all the way down.

(Hang on to Point 2 though, we'll come back to that.)

HWÆT

"Now hang on," you say, "you can't just overgeneralize two games as well as an entire category of story you've just admitted you have no background with and point to them all and go 'It's the same thing!'" Well, first off, yes I can, you've just seen me do it. But second off, the reason I point to all of this is because I think that that not only does Mythic Bastionland have some procedures that can fill in some gaps in Triangle Agency's encounter/campaign design, I also think that these games are both playing around in the same metanarrative space despite being wildly different genres and it can be helpful to examine them both.

I'm going to try to talk about this as sensically and concisely as I can without just copypasting huge swathes of both rulebooks into this post, but unfortunately I do need to point to a few concepts so you know what I'm talking about. In Triangle Agency, the middle third of the book (that nowhere near enough of you have read, because you followed the instructions not to read it) deals not only with GM tips but also some fundamental background truths of the world of the game that you're supposed to enforce - in other words, while much of the game text is dedicated to encouraging the players to improv and design the world right along with the GM, this part describes a number of failstates for a campaign by way of explicit worldbuilding, thereby setting some guardrails around your game. (By failstate, I mean from The Agency's perspective. That's not to say that triggering these failstates is bad, but rather it functions as another way to let GMs expose the metaplot behind Triangle Agency and choose to either accept or reject the core conceit of the game if they haven't already made that choice.) A big portion of this section is dedicated to understanding how Anomalies work - the threats in this game. An Anomaly is a concept given agency to affect the world, and while Minor Anomalies can be dispatched by hurting them physically, the Major ones (which are the main targets in the game) usually don't just go down by punching them real good - usually you've gotta figure out a trick to them, and this portion talks a lot about this. 

As it turns out, all of these principles map directly onto the Myths in Mythic Bastionland. Just like Anomalies, Myths have their own spheres of influence, portents of their arrival, and while some of them are concrete monsters that can be overcome quite a lot of them are just oddities that create situations that need to be dealt with like "The Wall" or "The River." In fact, while the challenges the players need to overcome as well as the basic conceits of the characters themselves overlap quite a bit between both games, Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland fit together precisely because they are mostly concerned with giving you procedures to deal with opposite problems: Triangle Agency gives you a largely mutable world with hyper-customizable characters who are given concrete tasks which must be created by the GM using a toolkit to generate new threats; meanwhile, Mythic Bastionland gives you largely immutable characters in a world that must be defined by the GM prior to play and populated from a known list of threats, but then leaves the actual exploration and interpretation of the world up to the players. 

Don't Just Ask A Manifold For Help

Okay, so that's a lot of words to say that these two games are interested in going about vaguely similar premises but approach that concept from opposite vectors. The reason that needed to be so explicit is because having run Triangle Agency a few times at this point, I've found that one thing that the core rulebook and The Vault (a book of pre-written adventures that, with care, can be strung together into a campaign) don't spend a lot of time doing is helping GMs with defining the actual space that players will investigate during the course of their adventure. Triangle Agency is not a game that cares about travel-focused exploration, instead focusing on defining scenes in which action happens, and so that means it can take a little more work than expected when those interstitial parts suddenly need to exist for one reason or another. For some tables, this may be a non-issue - particularly for tables more familiar with more story-based investigation games like the Carved From Brindlewood family of games. Additionally, the fewer things that are defined ahead of time, the more opportunities the players have to shape the world themselves with their powers/the Ask The Agency move, which in turn allows for opportunities to roll dice and generate Chaos and move the plot along that way. 

For other tables though, I think that the "Sites" rules on p. 15 of Mythic Bastionland provide GMs a handy way to conceptualize an investigation space for Triangle Agency - functionally, it provides you with a way to not only loosely physically map a space but also to narratively map story beats (such as features or threats inherent to the space) to provide a visual key to go along with the story. Likewise, I think that mechanizing the distribution of information via travel (i.e. the revealing of Omens) can be helpful when you need something to fall back on to allow the world to reveal information if interacting with NPCs isn't driving the investigation as strongly as you'd hope - this problem is somewhat hinted at in the GM tips section of the Triangle Agency book, but only in the context of if the players have accrued a lot of Loose Ends and the world begins to unravel causing NPCs to become somewhat meta-aware (or The Agency speaks directly through them). 

Some of you might be going "But Adam, travel literally doesn't matter in Triangle Agency when Manifold players can just teleport around/Timepiece players can just bend time so there's no penalty for travel times so why even bother trying to set any kind of map?" A fair question, but it's important to remember that even literal/functionally instantaneous travel is still travel. Both of those things are extremely valid ways to solve narrative problems - using them doesn't invalidate challenges as presented any more than a sword invalidates a monster. You're just using game mechanics to interact with the game world. And that brings me to one other point...

Knights of the Triangular Table

This is mostly revealed in that middle third of Triangle Agency with a little bit scattered around elsewhere, but from The Agency's perspective the biggest threat to reality is the Chaos generated from regular people observing and interacting with Anomalies. All players are playing Resonants, which are regular humans who have bonded with an Anomaly to give them extremely specific powers - and because The Agency has deputized them, they themselves have a very localized exemption on that Chaos issue but still have to be mindful about how much Chaos they cause by (mis)use of their powers around regular people and/or by rogue Anomalies. If you let too much Chaos accrue, your literal game world begins to unravel, and in the intervening time you might be assigned not only to cleaning up your messes but also those of other agents - unless you follow the plot presented by The Urgency, who advises you that Chaos is really just a resource that will lead to a new and better world. (Or you ignore them both and seek the path of Reality, which has Other Outcomes.) Compare this to the metaplot of Mythic Bastionland, a quest that pays off on the conceits of the world going back to Into The Odd - the players are Knights who have been appointed by all-knowing Seers, blessed with very specific superpowers, who must maintain their own realms lest they fall to schemes or revolutions but must ultimately seek enough Glory that they are worthy of embarking on The City Quest: the quest that will establish Bastion, the only city that matters. What I'm saying is, both Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland are telling stories of shaping the world and bringing on what at least the characters (and maybe the players) believe to be a bright new future. And if we accept that there's enough overlap between the metaplots and the narrative conceits and the player choices and on and on and on that these games are trying to do the same thing, then I think the only logical realization to come to is that when Caleb said he was hunting for the perfect game to play knights in, he didn't realize that he'd already written it.

So here's what I'd tweak to adjust Triangle Agency to become Knights of the Triangular Table:

• Allow for more lenience on Loose Ends - people have believed all kinds of weird stuff throughout history until science comes in to disprove it, which means that reality is at much less risk of unraveling just because a bunch of peasants saw a weird monster or heard a rumor about a tree that makes you sad if you eat its fruit or whatever. This in turn means a rebalancing of the Weather Events table.
  
  
• There are a lot of adjustments to be made to bring the tech level in line across the various ARC types, but I don't think any of them are wholly incompatible with a different time period. Also, a Newborn could come from the regular world/time of Triangle Agency as a fun little isekai treat.
  
  
• The biggest change would have to be with The Agency itself - both in terms of what it is and what it offers. I feel like corporate culture doesn't necessarily map well onto other historical time periods, but the idea of studying things and bringing realms to order have been around ever since people learned how to learn and to covet their neighbor's goods. To avoid explicit colonialism or imperialism, I would probably flavor The Agency as The Academy - an organization that maintains a Vault of oddities and dispatches its Tainted Knights out into the world to both help catalogue and contain all of these Anomalies and bring Order to the land. Obviously, these Knights have been Tainted by their contact with these Anomalies and venturing out into the land on behalf of The Academy is the only thing that keeps them from being imprisoned in The Vault. If you did want to keep it on a more monarchist route, obviously you'd have to end up calling it The Regency. 
  
  
• The Grand Quest the game could build towards might be capturing (or siding with) The Urgency, which would still be up to its tricks but again due to it being more difficult to generate Chaos since people are much more believing of weird stuff in the world wouldn't be as infinitely powerful of an entity. Perhaps the big moral dilemma for The Urgency could come from the fact that they need The Academy to bring more Order to the world because the more The Academy got people to stop believing in Anomalous things, the more Chaos it would generate by forcibly remind people of its existence. 
  
  
• The Anomaly generation advice still functions perfectly to figure out what Anomalies may be plaguing the towns, forests, and other desolate places the Knights traipse across - just pair it with the hex crawl and omen rules from Mythic Bastionland.

OUTRO

I mention from time to time that I run a bookclub - I had originally called it my Very Secret Bookclub, but I don't think I can anymore since I don't shut up about it. This bookclub is made up of friends of mine, most of whom just like playing games, some of whom interact with the game world more professionally, but all of whom have very specific gaming circles who tend towards very specific games and who never really have the chance to grow their circles. Thanks to my friends trusting me to be a tastemaker, I've now gotten to have a full year of sitting down to chat about games in my backlog I might never have gotten a chance to get to table at all, let alone actually sit down and read no matter how cool I think they are - which includes Triangle Agency, Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland and a bunch of others. 

What I've found really fun, though, is that by regularly reading and discussing games, my friends and I have been able to not only help develop our own ability to identify things in games we do and don't like but we've also been exposed to whole kinds of design concepts that were outside of our areas of expertise. People forget just how much of gaming culture is ephemeral and insular - things that might be painfully obvious to people who were in the Google+ blog circles 20 years ago are brand new concepts to the person who only just started playing games, or who might have had a group where everyone only played one particular game because that's what the person who liked running games owned, simply because those circles never overlapped. I really encourage you to build this kind of community yourself - if you're someone your friends trust as A Game Person, give them books to read for you all to talk about! If you want to learn more about games different games, seek communities outside of your own - lord knows every publisher has their own Discord these days and each of those Discords has people willing to run games that publisher puts out. We live in a time where the barrier to learning is so much lower than at any point in the past - not completely gone, but definitely lower, and I really encourage people to take advantage of that.

A special thanks to my friend (and member of the Very Secret Bookclub) Krysta for doing the mashup of the Triangle Agency promo art with the Mythic Bastionland cover on extremely short notice. She actually did two versions of my prompt and I couldn't tell which one I liked more, so I'll leave the other variant down here and leave it up to your internet browser to see which version gets pulled in for the thumbnail.

Thanks for reading, please go play knights with your friends.