A Digital Post In Praise Of Physical RPG Magazines

 INTRO

    It will likely come as no surprise to someone who would be reading this blog that much of what we would consider modern TTRPG design discourse and thought lives and dies in the ephemerality of the Internet. Back when I was but a wee D&D 3.5 CharOp board denizen, The Forge and the G+ chatrooms fermented the thoughts and feelings and games and grudges that my generation of game designers would come to know - or not, as the case may be, as in some ways many of those designers became influential enough that their games are now grandparents or great-grandparents many times over and we may have never seen the originals that spawned them. Before them, there were tales of the fan-zines that kept the RPG hobby alive - people circulating handmade periodicals, or in some lucky cases a game would be tied to a big enough publisher that it could have its own tie-in magazine that fans could write in to. 

    While people say that what you put on the Internet is forever, we are finding that more and more that is not the case - websites will die, archival efforts like The Internet Archive are under constant attack, people may scrub their online presence after a scandal. Consider the fact that much of Magic The Gathering's official web releases - including literal YEARS worth of lore - only still exist because someone backed it all up: WOTC didn't see a point in maintaining it since it didn't turn a profit. (Shoutouts to all the original members of The Vorthos Cast, who all ended up getting jobs with WOTC because they proved they knew what the hell they were talking about and proved the value of a lot of that stuff.) Physical books and magazines though, those are much harder to purge. Sometimes they too exist as transformations of the original work - maybe a publication will bundle a bunch of blog posts together and reformat them with new art and layout, maybe someone takes the opportunity to do some Lucasing to their old work to make it more accurate or palatable to a modern audience. Sometimes, the people who contribute work to these publications become personæ non grata and while the work they did may have been good or even foundational, their presence in the work becomes a blight upon its name such that modern designers don't even know who they were. All of these things, even the changed ones, become markers of the time they are written in and sometimes can provide just as much context about the ecology of the gaming hobby as they do about the games they're being written about in the first place. To that end, I'd like to take the time to shout out some currently running publications - and as always, I'm not making any money off of this, I'm just shilling for a cause I think is good: keeping good records to help future generations.

   There are a few things I need to make clear here before we get too deep in here: mainly, that the more I started poking around and asking for help on this, the more people kept coming up with additional entries which has made this a much more in depth post than I first expected. I've tried to keep this as short and punchy as I could, but I'm going to have to split this into three separate posts. This post is going to focus on print zines for more that one game/category. The next post I'll be putting out (later this week, so I don't spam you all) will be focused on magazines that are dedicated to a specific game. The final post will be about digital-only zines that if the world was right and just would have print versions to go along with them. 

    Shoutout to everyone who told me about their favorites, and especially to all the Bretonnians folks in the UK for shouting out some publications that hadn't made their way across my desk yet. There are games I'd never even heard of that still have robust, thriving communities out there, and I think that rules.

TUMULUS

    Tumulus is the paid counterpart to the extremely prolific and extremely free blog "Skeleton Code Machine" as well as the (presumably) free community game design presentations given at local libraries by Exeunt Press. If you're unfamiliar with "Skeleton Code Machine" I...I don't know how, honestly. Your friend and mine John Exeuntpress writes posts like he's haunted by that Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross - Always. Be. Posting. More importantly, not only is he extremely consistent in addition to maintaining a terrifying output schedule, he's also got this quarterly zine that lets him explore some weird and wacky stuff - some of it (in his own words) is greatest hits posts from "Skeleton Code Machine," but each volume contains a few exercises to build your own games, a few theory articles, and a few ready-to-go games - and not all of it is home grown Exeunt Press originals! Each volume has about eight chapters, excluding the introduction or any full spread art, and guest contributors so far include Strega Wolf, M. Allen Hall, Jesse Ross, Hinokodo, Nate Whittington, Junk Food Games, Binary Star and Charlotte Laskowski. If you get a lot out of "Skeleton Code Machine," this one's a no brainer. Also, if you do a subscription for four volumes over the year, it costs you right around $5 a month up front, give or take, which is a pretty appropriate amount of money for a subscription these days I think. 

MEAT CASTLE GAME WARE ANNUAL

    Christian Sorrell has their fingers in a lot of (meat) pies. In addition to being fairly prolific in the Mothership scene, they've also got pretty regular MÖRK BORG and Cairn content that pops up as well a fantasy tactics game going that they're slowly building on. They also show up pretty regularly contributing to other peoples' projects. What we're here for today, however, is the "Meat Castle Game Ware Annual" series, which collects all of the freebie newsletter games they put out over the course of a year - currently, there are two volumes out: #1 has content from the games mentioned above, plus some microgames and some setting-agnostic content. #2 has more standalone content - a few games, a little Mothership, but lots more musings on games. No word on if/when the next one of these drops, but you can keep up with Christian's newsletter here.

KNOCK!

    I'm glad that publishing groups like The Merry Mushmen exist - for one thing, they're responsible for rounding up years and years and YEARS of blog posts, giving them some good ol' spitshine and fancy new art and layout and presenting them to the masses by way of the KNOCK! series (currently on Issue #5 with #6 theoretically in progress). But beyond that, they've really made a name for being a good indie publisher for OSR content. They don't do a lot of publishing, but they've got a pretty rock solid line of Old-School Essentials books, they've got The Black Sword Hack, and finally they have one other zine I hadn't noticed until just now as I was writing this which will get covered in the next entry in this series. 

    The one key note here, though, is that these are somewhat premium products. Obviously, all the blog posts still exist from their original creators (as long as their websites are still up, of course) and you can go read them, but getting these nice versions can be costly - particularly if you're in the United States, like myself. That said, if you grab a bundle deal (or get them through a crowdfunder) so you're getting everything all at once, you can avoid a lot of the pain of importing them from France. Or you could live in a country that knows how tariffs work and you could avoid all that!

WYRD SCIENCE

    Another excellent publication from across the pond, Wyrd Science is about twice the size of the first two zines mentioned and contains interviews with game designers, authors of novels for Warhammer 40k, comic book creators, and community organizers, plus game reviews and more. Unlike most of the other publications on this list, Wyrd Science leans much more heavily into representing the culture side of tabletop rather than just providing gameable content, and I think that's super valuable to have in print: for one, I can read two pages way faster than I can listen to a 30 minute interview; and for two, niche culture magazines like this are a truly dying breed. Perhaps I may be overly taken by the ritual of reading a magazine to learn about a thing you like, but as someone who has absolutely fallen into the passive media absorption brainrot of letting reviews and interviews in podcast form just constantly wash over me, I retain so very little - whereas when I read an interview, I'm actively engaging with it, I'm seeing what pictures the editor wanted to put with it, I'm consuming it as a whole experience.

    Yes I DO have ADHD, why do you ask?

    One final note: by the time this goes out, the Wyrd Science website version's days are numbered. That's not to say they're going away, but per this article (which, again, to prove my point, may not exist the next time you try to click it) outlines the financial untenability of maintaining their own separate website. This is a thing I empathize quite a lot with as someone who does next to none of what Wyrd Science does but have still paid an arm and a leg for a website over the past few years in website hosting nonsense. When I had last polled the internet for help on this, Hinokodo had helpfully provided a step-by-step guide to hosting your own site which I certainly need to do - if you're out there Mr. Wyrd Science, if you still want to have a site I hope that helps you out. One way or the other though, Wyrd Science has stated they'll still be around and that the most recent funding push for Volume #7 of Wyrd Science has re-energized him into making sure the zine survives. These are limited print runs and again, if you live in a country whose leadership has yet to look up the word tariff in the dictionary it can be a little dicey getting them over here - but it's worth it.

RASCAL NEWS

    Look. I support paying journalists a living wage. You support paying journalists a living wage. We both know that Rascal was founded to be able to provide unbiased reporting on the tabletop games industry and beyond. We've both got the subscription, right? But what if you have a friend who hates journalism and needs to be shown the light, or at the very least lightly concussed with a small book until they learn the error of their ways? What if you just wanted a tailored Rascal experience that was all gas, no breaks, just the bangers? Then you'd better be one of the like four people who sees this link to the IPR website because Rascal - Year One is sold out pretty much everywhere.

    More to the point - similar to but contrasted against Wyrd Science, Rascal - Year One is a zine covering tabletop culture broadly - not just RPGs, but also how each of the writers themselves engage with the portion of the fandom that best suits their interests. I'm not gonna belabor the point considering how difficult this has become to get in print - but if you can, do, and if you can't, clamor loudly and give Rascal your subscription money so they can pay for another print run.

THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS REVIEW

    Probably the newest of newcomers in this particular list, the International Players Review literally just funded their books naught but a few weeks before this blog was written. They generated a lot of buzz, but I'm gonna be honest, I don't know where to find much information about these folks - they're flying pretty far under the radar! Some digging does reveal the Bluesky account for Golden Achiever (credited as "Graphic Designer" on the Backerkit page but does also seem to be in charge of the Itch page and a Patreon) I do find it fun that these zines are straight up intended to be evoking the nostalgic zines of yesteryear rather than channeling them perhaps on a more stylistic, internal level like Tumulus has, but I'll be honest, my interest was piqued! Particularly excellent was noting that, in going through the descriptions of #1-3, #3 contains an interview with Lee Gold, whom is ultimately responsible for this kind of zine existing in the first place and only just retired this year after roughly five decades of this. Excited to see what comes of these folks.

SECRET PASSAGES

    SPEAKING of zines intending to invoke yesteryear, Secret Passages does this too but coming about it from the reverse side of things - it's not that the zines themselves are evoking the past, it's the writers who were there in the first place! Self described as "an Old School RPG and Oldhammer" publication, this thing has folks from all over the history of the industry (though, understandably, skewed on the English side of the hobby) sharing stories both about the hobby as it was and how certain things today have arcs that can be traced all the way back then, but also just all kinds of fun little gaming apocrypha that can get lost over time as the oral tradition of the hobby fades - hence, put it in a zine! Job done. 

    They've just launched a Kickstarter for Issue #3 of the zine, which is slightly curious to me - not in and of itself to use a crowdfunder to get a print run, of course, but rather that it appears that they're using it to offer multi-volume subscriptions, meaning if you back high enough during one Kickstarter, you don't need to back the next one. I would think that the Kickstarter fees alone might eat you up rather than just sourcing subscriptions as normal, but I suspect I also have no idea what I'm talking about. Legitimately very interested to hear about this kind of funding model, I don't think I've seen anyone do it like this before. 

    Either way, Kickstarter tells me that this project is based out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so unless there's a Geordie audiobook add on pledge level AM NOT BUYIN' AN AM GAN'N HYEM. (Shoutout to all two of my Tyneside pals, whomst I have just lost with that bit.) (Also that's a lie, I can't say no to something with Lukasz Kowalczuk art on the front.)

PRISMATIC WASTELAND

    Hello, Warren. You're reading this because I posted it in your Discord. You probably saw this title and said "Well, I didn't write a magazine, so I'm probably not in this. That's a shame, I really wish more people would say nice things about that book I wrote." Well JOKE'S ON YOU, Birdman. It's your blog's 5th birthday and you're getting a mention in here too.

    To any of you unfamiliar with the Prismatic Wasteland blog, what began five years ago as a way to chat about an Ultraviolet Grasslands game and review some games has expanded into a blog that's also includes all kinds of theory posts, event coverage, ready-to-run game content and more. After putting out a few games including the excellent Barkeep on the Borderlands, Warren joined the fight against Internet enshittification, collected all the hits from the blog from 2021-2024, spruced 'em up real nice and got the cool cats over at Games Omnivorous to publish it. Well worth the read.

GLAIVE

     Glaive is one I'm very excited to learn about, and it looks like I'm not the only one: The Weekly Scroll just interviewed the magazine's editor CJ Somavia. Glaive is a lifestyle magazine a la Thrasher - not just about TTRPGs, but about all kinds of related game culture. As someone who already lives in the middle of the Venn Diagram of lovers of dungeon synth, chiptunes, TTRPGs, wargames, and the late 90s era of gaming, this is unfortunately laser targeted at me and now I'm gonna have to figure out how to go beat someone up and get a copy of the first volume since it's 1.exclusively a physical magazine and 2. starting to pop off. Very excited to see where this one goes.

UNDER THE DICE

    In a similar vein as Glaive, Under The Dice is put out by Steve H of the Hive Scum podcast. This is, in my opinion, peak fanzine - almost no information about it online, only the amount of web presence that is necessary to get information out there, and otherwise it's getting around by word of mouth. I literally cannot tell you how much of the zine skews towards TTRPG content versus wargaming content, but I can tell you that the Glaive interview with these folks is up online to view, so I encourage you to check that out. And hey, UTD, if you see this? If you restock your zines, I'll buy 'em! 

OUTRO

    Sweet Jiminy Jesus. This project quickly spiraled out of control. Thankfully the other two posts that will follow this one are functionally almost done since I cut a lot of it out of this one, but still. Again, thanks to everyone who helped me expand the search beyond what I already knew. If you're someone like me who craves physical media, please show these folks some love. Stay tuned for the next post, which is all zines/zine-adjacent objects which are all dedicated to specific games.

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.