Sicko Implementations of Bespoke Tradeable Rulepacks

I should be writing about GenCon. I should be writing about the Appendix N Jam, or like, reading other peoples' entries and rating them. Instead, after talking with people about the ideas I was noodling on in the last post (which I will summarize in a sec, hold your horses), I have stumbled into some maybe real sicko mode things that we could be doing at every event or even FOR specific events.

Last time around, I had brought up the idea that there are a few disparate movements I would like to see function together at one time: people making business card dungeons, or bookmark tables, or just regular one page rulesets, or people still tooling away on their GLOG hacks. There's any number of ways these things could combine, but my big point is making sure that however they do, they would be 1. not mutually incompatible and 2. made to be traded around. In my mind, there's basically two flavors of implementation for this kind of thing: fully virtual or IRL collect-a-thon.

Fully Virtual

Basically, what we have right now is the fully virtual version of this even if we don't have it coordinated in such a way as to be a logical way to deploy it - people are already doing things like collecting 1-page RPGs or specific mechanics and the like via Itch or from blogposts or - dare I say it - YouTube and writing them down or printing them out for their own use (or, y'know, bookmarking them online). People create something and blast it out into the ether, someone else finds it and picks it up and puts it in their pocket. Game jams provide a way to sort of localize this kind of stuff, but it's basically an unlimited resource once it's out there - there's an infinite time scale, and people really just have to hunt around for what they want.

IRL Collect-a-thon

The other way to do this is something that I alluded to folks like Shing Yin Khor doing in my last post with their "a short rest" booster packs, and is what is the thing that fascinates me more - in this case, you have people designing and printing things ahead of time, then bringing them somewhere and trading them around (or, in Shing's case, selling them - I know this kind of movement is generally anti-capitalist, or at least anti-money, but bear with me on this one, it'll make sense in a sec) with other people. This can be done in a few ways: either you're giving out your business card that has a dual purpose of providing content; you're including it as a bonus as a part of a sale or some other interaction; or you're just trading stuff around for the love of the game. This also overlaps with things like stamp rallies at conventions - a group of creators could come together to create things that are related, so if you go to all of them, you can make some kind of greater project - whether that means it's a full dungeon, or a zine, or whatever. Likewise, you can swap stuff with your friends - if your one friend is really big into spaceships but you're into writing fanfiction about your original character Blonan the Blarbarian, maybe you make a business-card-sized space hulk and your friend makes a d66 table of Cursed Sword Generation and you swap them. Cool, right? 

Getting Perilously Close to LARPing

I don't really get LARPs - like, conceptually, sure, but from what I've heard from a few friends of mine, it seems a lot like there aren't any concrete rules written down anywhere to make these kinds of things a replicable experience - yeah, there's different schools of LARPs, but mostly it seems like someone assigns you a character ahead of time, you go make a costume and show up and improvise a whole character and most of the games end in you banging your friends for real but also definitely in character but also definitely not in character. Maybe I just know a bunch of the horniest LARPers, I don't know - regardless, that's not really my thing so I haven't looked into it. BUT, I bring this up because in the context of these bespoke rule and dungeon creation things, it occurs to me that there's a whole other tier of LARP that exists that DOES do what I'm talking about, it's just all oral tradition - immersive experiences like you get at Wasteland Weekend, Omega Mart, and that kind of thing. See, rather than writing down rules and trading them around, you DO have a staff of people who understand the rules and who act as questgivers and whatnot, and they convey those rules to people who choose to interact with them...but unless you're somewhere that gives you little trinkets for whatever you do, there's not, like, a tangible marker of the rules you've interacted with outside of the totemic representation of the questline in the form of said trinket. 

Do you see where I'm going with this? 

It's Not An Alternate Reality Game if it's Actually Reality

With a concerted effort, one could, were one so inclined, get people together under a shared premise (say, like a game jam), give people parameters to work inside, then all agree to meet up somewhere (say, PAX Unplugged) to share their inventions around. Essentially, everyone gets to build a bespoke set of rules that they have access to. Meanwhile, if there were another group of people, say, some sort of group of facilitators that provided dungeons or additional rules, then as people traded around their little bespoke rule cards they might encounter these facilitators who, if people had rule cards with mechanics for overcoming whatever dungeon they had on them, could win a copy of the dungeon and maybe a special mechanic card which could help them overcome other facilitators. It's not LARPing, necessarily - you're still you, it's just that you might need to have a rule on you for doing something like climbing walls in a dungeon, and if you find one of these roving facilitators and they tell you that the dungeon they're running has a wall you need to climb, then you can use that game mechanic (however it's written) and once you beat it then you can proceed. Or maybe you have something else - that wall is still there, but maybe you've traded your buddy for a mechanic card that has rules for creating explosives that can blow up the wall!

What I'm saying is, you could have groups of roving Game Masters with their own little mini dungeons, and you can have people who go and make mechanics about stuff they think is cool, and you could trade things with your friends and complete the little dungeons and get them as rewards and at the end of the day you've not only had a fun little live gaming experience, you also HAVE ALL OF THOSE MECHANICS AND DUNGEONS TO USE IN YOUR HOME GAMES. And maybe you stick all of those little cards in a binder or a Pokemon card binder or whatever and you bring it to the next meetup and you can show off all the stuff you can do and maybe you trade for something with your friend or maybe you replicate little booster packs of your favorite mechanics and hand them out to people but the point is that YOU are making all of these things, YOU are sharing all of these things, and each thing you make and share is unique to interacting with YOU even if it's something you copied from someone else because you thought it was useful enough to want to share with people!

Maybe I just have the post-con madness, but I really feel like this could be something. And then, you can invest in nice things to keep all your business card rules in - whether that's what I did with the A5 notebook with all the pockets or if you go the fancy route and get a padfolio that has room for all your fancy pens and notebooks and stuff and you can show THAT off to your friends too! Or go oldschool and slap all that mess in a Trapper Keeper! Whatever works!

OK. That's all for now. Get at me if this is also giving you The Madness.

Stay weird out there.

The Razor Thin Edge Between The Desire for Community vs. Commodification

    You're getting multiple posts in the same month, that's how you know I've got way too much to do and how badly I need to free up mental computing power. Sorry not sorry. Also, a quick heads up: I am sponsored by literally nobody in this post, and in fact am quite the opposite - I would argue everything I'm about to talk about is stuff I've paid for myself or received as an inclusion with something I've bought with the notable exception of The Chair, which Zach Hazard Vaupen literally hunted me down and handed me at PAX Unplugged like the world's most helpful Terminator. This will become relevant, but I'm also letting you know because hoo boy am I about to namedrop a bunch of people and supplies and I'm doing that because they're relevant, not because someone's paying me to do it.

Also, this is going to be yet another long one - if you'd like to cut the crap and get right to the actionable content without all the context, just CTRL+F "What Is Adam's Actual Vision" without the quotes and you'll hop to the end.

An Introductory Diversion: The Return of the Convention Go-Bag

    I know not many people read it, but one of my first posts here was about my convention go-bag and how I'd fine tuned it for anything I'd conceivably need at a convention, because after one year at GenCon lugging around my huge heavy duty backpack with room for my laptop, extra screen, big wooden GM screen, all my books and more I had had enough. It's been long enough since my days in marching band playing sousaphone, my body just ain't built for that anymore. The thing is though, when I'm not at cons but AM running other IRL games, I find myself longing for something with a bit more storage space - not as much as the heavy duty bag, but more than the go-bag. That leads me to opting for a messenger bag and the old classic: the Trapper Keeper. (Yes, that's the South Park Trapper Keeper Akira/Terminator/2001: A Space Odyssey homage. I usually hide some link gags in these posts but I figure I'll throw a content warning out for cartoon body horror on this one. Let's not think about how long ago Season 4 of South Park was, okay?) 

Enter The Trapper Keeper

Don't you give me lip about falling for nostalgia. Just let me have this okay?

    This is great. I've got basically all the space for everything I need, I could throw dice in the pencil bag if I wanted to, the interior pocket can comfortably fit a few zines inside it (if I'm taking it with me on a trip, I will often throw game design zines in there to get me thinking, or sometimes a worldbuilding game if I think I'll need to entertain friends). It's great, and it's specifically great when I know I've got plenty of prep time to bring everything I might need with me at once. But I don't really like taking a messenger bag with me everywhere I go these days, and if I want to write notes down to keep with me for upcoming game things, it's not the most convenient. I mean I GUESS I could type them into my Notes app on my phone or throw them in a private Discord chat to myself and then copy them down later, but that's a lot of steps AND reliance on technology/my faulty brainmeat to remember to sync things up before the game. Part of the reason I wanted to get that go-bag ready is to have everything in one spot at all times, and so that got me thinking about something a little more compact. 

    In the go-bag, I've got the little utility bag that has the e-reader, mechanical pencil, and two Field Notes journals in it, and that's honestly just about perfect - but with the e-reader in it, it's a little fragile to just throw in any old bag/cargo pants pocket and go. I like a lot of the options the little utility bag gives me though - just like the Trapper Keeper, it's got pockets to slide things into, space for a writing utensil, and is otherwise of the correct form factor to slide into my bag without taking up much space. But also, I've found out that I write like a caveman and cannot be trusted not to constantly break and/or jam the lead, so I want some kind of durable pen and I'm not quite ready to commit to the world of fountain pens yet - I was gifted one, but I use it so rarely I have to clean when it I pick it up to use it since the ink dries on the nib. While hunting around Richmond for advice on cleaning that fountain pen, I stumbled onto a happy compromise which would spiral out into the real reason I'm writing this post. But first: the compromise.

Yo Dawg, I Herd U Liek Journals

    In the not-too-distant past, I had also started trying to use some of the journals laying around the house to help create a physical backup of my Google Calendar. I like to joke that I'm the most extensive Google Calendar user that's not in a polycule because thanks to your friend and mine ADHD, I can't remember when anything is in the future. I also plan my life out many months in advance. You can see where this might begin to present a problem. So, I try to make physical backups of my schedule since it helps me visualize my upcoming time commitments and I can also do things like physically map out my days to combat time blindness. I had been getting better about this, but had also been trying to keep one journal as just my scheduler and one for all the random things I'd need to work out during the day and come back to, and this arrangement was just bulky enough that it was causing me to forget to take it with me places, which was again beginning to defeat the point. 

    While I was bouncing around various stationary stores in town trying to get advice about cleaning the pen (spoiler, I was basically just told to use soap and water and to just dry it thoroughly and quickly after cleaning so it didn't rust), I began to see certain accessories pop up in multiple stores and one in particular caught my eye and really started locking this into place for me - the stickable pocket. Leuchtturm 1917s have a pocket in the back already, but it never occurred to me that someone might make replacement pockets - or, for that matter, pockets for journals that didn't have them in the first place. The fact that it also came with a pen loop was all the better - I had gotten a nice Sharpie gel pen during a trip recently as well as some tiny Bullet Journals to use for keeping inventory for merch at a music festival, and THAT meant I could slap one of those in one of the pockets, stick a second pocket into the journal just in case, and as long as I could find something I could use to make a straight edge with when I needed it I'd be good to go. I ended up grabbing a brass stencil and another slide-on holster for it - overkill, sure, but until I find another one that can go in one of the pockets it'll do. I've managed to keep this with me every day when I've gone to work and it's always nearby at home, so I consider this a success. But we're not here to talk about my journaling habits - at least, not exactly. Put a pin in this because what we're actually here to talk about is...

Gameable Ephemera

An assortment of games of various formats, plus related bookmarks & business cards.
I have more, but lord knows where they are

    I loathe single-use objects. I rarely use bookmarks, but they're always included as special bonuses with books when you order from places because hey, it's free promo right? Usually, they end up in the garbage can. Likewise with business cards - after I've made contact with the people after the event I've received them from, unless they're really spectacular I very rarely have a need to keep them. This is something the TTRPG community has realized and has thankfully started to combat - whether you're Yochai squeezing whole keyed dungeons into specially formatted business cards, Reilly Qyote including instructions and some statblocks on a bookmark so you don't have to keep flipping What A Horrible Knight while you're using it, or the birdman himself giving you optional IRL drinking game rules + some cocktail recipes to go along with the in-game drinking game rules, these can serve as anything from additional marketing for yourself to standalone gameable content. They sure can be troublesome to keep up with, though, especially if they were to fall out of the book or zine you're keeping them in. Sure, you can just paperclip them in I guess, but unless you're stealing them from your office job who has paperclips these days? Plus you run the risk of damaging them or the book.

    All-around cool kid and well-known maker of keepsake games Shing Yin Khor has an answer to this in the form of their a short rest series of randomized game-enhancing booster packs. These have long-since sold out, of course, but the idea here is solid - you take your little bonus stuff, slap it in something labeled to keep it safe and then you just keep it with whatever game materials you want to use it with. This is the more minimalist approach to something rather than, like, one of those huge packs that Beadle & Grimm's sells, and significantly more system neutral. 

    Actually, hang on a second. The cool thing about all of these bookmarks and business cards and booster packs is how interchangeable they are. In fact, I know I've seen people put whole games on business cards and bookmarks before, to say nothing of just the abundance of one page RPGs. And what are all these microRPG elements if not basically the same as the joesky tax? People love writing little things to stick into games. Hell, people love writing little games to twist other games. Once you become enough of a gaming sicko, you practically have to start making little bits of homebrew or you start to lose your grip. It's like some kind of law of g-

Ask Not For Whom The GLoG Calls To...

    I'm not explaining the Goblin Laws of Gaming. You can listen to the Dead Letters folks talk about it if you really don't know, or you can read Arnold Kemp's original post linked above, or you can visit the subreddit, or go watch Hexed Press or any number of other YouTube people talk about it. There's probably a thousand other online communities for the GLoG I don't know about, and it's because

People

Like

Making

Weird Little Stuff

And

Sharing

It

Particularly those of us with terminal cases of can'tshutthefuckupitis.

A Tangent About Convergent Evolution: Artist Trading Cards

    Whilst chewing on everything that has/will go(ne) into this post, I discovered a whole other community out there - artist trading cards. I knew nothing about them before today, but this video goes into the whole ethos behind them as well as some basic techniques for making them - and since so many TTRPGs I know involve altering playing cards, I thought this might be a welcome inclusion for those of you who also might not be aware since there's a lot of overlap in goals. But this, too, appears to be a scene who loves making things for making things' sake and trading them around with other creators. Also, critically, according to this video the scene is staunchly anti-compensation - that is to say, the goal of these is to make a thing and spread joy, not money. Again, if this video is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it, of course, other than it's the first thing I've seen about this scene so I haven't gone and done further research because holy shit this post is long enough already), buying or selling ATCs is a pretty big taboo, and I want you to put a pin in that as well.

Capitalism Is Always The Bad Guy

    So, let's thread all this together. While trying to find a way to minimize the number of notebooks I'm carrying around while also making sure I've got enough supplies with me at all times that I can jot notes or run a game at a moment's notice, I simultaneously realize that I've got a bunch of random gaming ephemera that I don't really have a place for but does seem to be made to be stored in something like what I'm slapping together. I also realize that people love making these kinds of things, they can either be pure game mechanics or gameable content plus marketing, and that if someone were so inclined they could create little packets instead of just single objects but ultimately you could still keep everything together to mix and match however you liked, and if these things were made cheaply but abundantly enough they could be traded around, collected, and allow people to have whole bespoke systems unique to each person depending on what you did and didn't want to keep in your notebook folder. All at once, I saw three possible futures: a world in which I started Yet Another Game Jam and maybe got people trading things around at events or maybe even encouraged creators to start making event-specific content to pass out as promotional material; a world in which I worked with people to make some seed content packs (i.e. a pack of fantasy rules, a pack of sci-fi rules, a pack of system neutral monsters, etc) and sold them as little collectible doodads; and the world where I walked up to John Leuchttrum or Mr. Simon Schuster and went "Hello, I have an extremely marketable idea that already has a community around it, please give me your big time printing money to coordinate a product about this." With visions of gaming communities and dollar signs dancing in my eyes, I did what any reasonable person should - drove 8 hours to talk to Shing about it.

    Disco Business

    OK actually I drove to NYC to see Nicky Siano DJ, BUT Shing was happy to get lunch and chat with me. They had a lot of really good community-centric ideas - things like having LARPs codify event-specific rules in little cards along with your character-specific rules, or creators at cons collaborating ahead of time to create a multi-part adventure that you'd only see the full version of if you visited each of them not unlike a stamp rally. They were also super into the idea of, if the form factor was more in the playing card size, having binders of rule cards to show off and trade with people like Magic cards. I brought up the idea of the game jam and providing people templates so people could print at home, and they mentioned if a bunch of people ended up wanting to go in on it, getting bulk printing made of each of the projects and then distributed to the creators either by mail or at events would be a really fun way to encourage people to trade things around and keep costs generally low while keeping the quality consistent.

(Also, I sadly did not get to see Nicky DJ, the venue lost power. I did take the time to finally visit the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, however, and ran into quite a few people I knew as I was buying games, so that was an unexpected delight. Also Shing gave me some of their games?!)

 

He Is A Real Blogger, Not A Real Worm

    As luck would have it, Mr. His Majesty The Worm Josh McCrowell visited Richmond very recently and I also had a chance to talk about this whole concept with him. As someone who's much more tapped into the Blogosphere (and the GLOGosphere, for that matter), I figured he'd have some thoughts about this. We had as many intelligible ideas as soju and fast-casual Korean food would allow us that evening - mostly in the context of His Majesty The Worm. I feel like the way the GM builds Wormgame's behind-the-scenes functionality could work very well with something like this - whether that be detailing whole floors of The Underworld or just single encounters. And as I type this out, I realize that as long as your entire stack was the same form factor, this would be a really fun and tactile way to stock your Meatgrinder table for each level of the Underworld - with players getting to keep certain cards once they defeat them/find the item on them/otherwise remove it from active use. But regardless - I think that if you're the kind of sicko that loves making dungeons and fiddling around with little bespoke mechanics, as I know you have to be if you're running HMTW, this kind of thing would be right up your alley. The quasi-official HMTW fan Discord already has all kinds of projects on it including bestiaries and converting various megadungeons to be usable with it, there's no way an IRL meetup of Adherents of the Worm wouldn't be made better with swapping around tiny pieces of homebrew.

What Is Adam's Actual Vision 

(And More Importantly, Do We Need To Beat The Capitalism Out Of You)

    OK look, as cool as it would be to have like...bespoke A5 notebooks with art that I've commissioned from people with enough pockets and accessories that you could carry one notebook stuffed to the brim with gameable content from everyone I meet at conventions and get to quit my job because everyone paid me to be the middleman to get all of this done for them, that's not actually the thing I want. That's just the dream of being able to bring joy to people without having to worry about finances. And in the unlikely event that one of the like three people I know who could somehow begin the process of making something like that happen both read this blog post this far AND wanted to get a project like that going, it's something that would still largely have to be free and open source regardless, so no need for the pitchforks yet.

    No, what I'd actually like to see and maybe can try to facilitate would be something like a series of interconnected, themed jams to start - giving people specific prompts as well as templates to allow folks to start building up a body of work and then organize meetups IRL to trade them around, maybe coordinate with some friends who have their own companies to get them to give out little booster packs of event-specific content to encourage people to come to those booths, and if I was feeling like a real sicko, maybe get some buttons made to denote people who have stuff to trade at cons. I uh. I have a reputation with giving out buttons.

    The thing is, this kind of thing could absolutely be co-opted and monetized and turned into a whole corporate...thing. Like, Field Notes has a goddamn partnership with Dungeons & Dragons now. The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book (I linked it earlier) inexplicably has perforated tearaway pages, and though they're WAY too huge to paste into an A5 notebook, there's no reason they couldn't release a smaller edition in the form factor of the Ultimate RPG Campfire Questions or the Worldbuilding Guide - which, again, no shade to James D'Amato, he's out here proving this kind of thing has a market which is exactly my point. On the one hand, I'd love a premade kit of supplies to get out and mass produce this kind of stuff on the fly - like, could you imagine going to the store to pick up a kit that had one of those thermal printer sticker machines that has the app that links to your phone, a bunch of paper perforated to the right size, and just being able to snap a picture of something you sketched, print stickers of that sketch and stick them onto that paper and then just write your contact info on the back, and then that person takes it and shoves it into their Bullet Journal branded with their favorite AP series? The convenience would almost make up for the fact that you've got to use a proprietary app, and proprietary paper, and of course there would have to be a monthly subscription and you know there would be a way to sneak AI tools nobody but corporate wants into it and suddenly what started as a community project ends up tasting of ash to anyone involved from the beginning.

    I'm exaggerating and invoking a lot of negative buzzwords for effect here, but the point remains that I guess somewhere in the heart of this idea, there's grappling with the fact that the closer something like this gets to mainstream viability, the less it feels like there's a community behind it, and frankly I don't know how to grapple with that. It's something that seems to be in all the other parts of the hobby, and it's so easy for a new idea to succumb to being morphed and changed in ways that seem good at the beginning only to have them secretly be cursed the whole time. I'm gonna chew on this for a while - I'm certainly not in the place to start a whole jam movement right now, but maybe someday soon with some thoughtful help from other folks who know what they're doing. Is that you maybe? Reach out.

Outro & Citations

    I've talked about a lot of people here today. I try to be meticulous about in-context hyperlinked citations on these things, but from my old college chiptune blogging days I still have the urge to provide a bibliography for these things, particularly since a lot of folks whose material showed up in pictures didn't get talked about. If you're interested in anyone whose stuff you've seen me reference but you don't want to try to flip back up for it, never you worry.

In the meantime, stay weird out there, and if you're not already working on an Appendix N Jam entry, maybe you should go look at some of these other jams.

Stay weird out there.

Mentioned Above:

• Zach Hazard Vaupen/Emo Sludge: Bsky | Website
• Josh McCrowell: Bsky | Itch | Blog | editor for KNOCK! mag
• Reilly Qyote: Bsky | Itch 
• WF Smith/Prismatic Wasteland: Bsky | Itch | Website
• Bo Ryan Crum/Gravy Press: Bsky | Beneath The Muckfort on Itch & Cairn Press
• Adam & Jamie/72 STATIONS: Adam's Bsky | Jamie's Bsky | Infinity of Ships on Itch | Website
• Yochai Gal: Blog | Ludography | Between Two Cairns | Cairn Press
• Shing Yin Khor: Bsky | Website 
• Arnold Kemp/Goblinpunch: Bsky | Blog 
• Dead Letters Podcast is Sam, Misha, and Walid
• Feral Indie Studio: Charlie's Bsky | Alex's Bsky | Into the Wyrd & Wild Itch | Website
• Johnson² is available through Peregrine Coast Press, which has all the links
• Thrill of Dracula is by Kenneth Hite via Pelgrane Press

Why You Should Write Your Games To Be Played At Conventions

 

    As I begin my prep for running games at GenCon this year, I've been chewing on the idea of how games are presented for running at conventions. My take on how to prep may be slightly different than yours given that basically since I started running games at cons, I've been doing so on behalf of various companies - at this point, I've run games for Hunters Entertainment, Kobold Press, Plus One EXP and Mythworks over several GenCons and PAX Unpluggeds. And here's a little secret - with one and a half-exceptions (I ran CBR+PNK once for some friends, and I was running 5e for KP but with one of their own adventures), each of those events was my first time running and often even playing the game I was showing off. "Why would you do that?" a smart person might say, "Wouldn't you be really stressed and afraid of doing a bad job?" YES! Yes I would. Thankfully I've been running games for close to 20 years so I've developed a lot of the soft skills that can help smooth awkwardness over at the table, but while reading through each of the games I'd be running I found myself trying to hone in on the things in each game that really made them pop, the things that made me excited enough to risk running a game for the first time in front of a bunch of strangers on behalf of a different bunch of strangers that if I did a bad job presenting their game might never want to work with me again. 

    Running games at cons has been a part of the hobby almost as long as both games and cons have coexisted. There are many early D&D modules intended for convention play: the "C Series" modules were functionally what predates modern videogame speedrunning culture, and of course many games will include "quickplay" rules which can help you get up and running for when you want to test out a game before really fully committing to buying the product. In the indie scene, with loads of games being somewhere in the 16-40 page zine format and including both the rules of the game and often a starter scenario, it can be pretty painless to pick up a game and run it with little to no experience after a quick readthrough - and hell, the Mothership scene has gotten so proficient at whittling down information necessary to make a game work that the fancypants boxed set comes with like six trifold pamphlet adventures along with a few zines to show you the difference between what a shorter and a longer adventure can look like in a game designed to put characters through both a literal and metaphorical woodchipper. The thing is, "short games" are not the same as con games despite the limited amount of time you have at cons. Neither, necessarily, are "one shots" necessarily synonymous with con games despite the fact that con games are by necessity one shots (this is a squares and rectangles situation). When you're running a game at a con, the people who choose to invest their time (and, in GenCon's case, money) to sit down at a game are either 1. people who have never had a chance to play this game and want to see what it's like, or 2. are people who really like that game and are willing to play with strangers/have a whole group of friends they're going around and playing with. In either case, it's your job as a GM to be able to pull out a vertical slice of that game to show off all the best parts of it while also competing with those peoples' limited time and limited attention. As designers, I think this is a play format that should be considered when writing rules much in the same way that many games will include a solo mode or how many people will hyperlink their PDFs - both a kind of accessibility solution, in their own ways, and I think writing with convention play in mind is another kind of accessibility concern to keep in mind.

    Before continuing, I should say that this is something I've previously talked about in the third Wassailing of Claus Manor zine, The Pine Tar of Claus Manor. Consider this a much expanded version of that essay. I should also say that curating a game experience to a particular limited time frame is something I have a lot of experience with - One Night Strahd, although intended to be a 12 hour one shot, still required a lot of what I'm about to go into. And finally, I should point out that a great blogger would turn this into a miniseries of blog posts that are in an easily consumable length in order to create proper engagement with their blog. Unfortunately for you and I, I am simply a mediocre blogger and can only be succinct when people pay me to be, so strap in.

Minimum Viable Products, Vertical Slices, & GM Soft Skills

    While I'm not a videogame developer nor programmer, the person I wrote One Night Strahd with is, and so over the many months we wrote it together I had a bunch of videogame design principles thrown at me. Likewise, some of my earliest convention work was representing MAGFest at PAX East and talking to a lot of different developers showing off either demos of their games or lots of proof of concept builds of their games. Through those times, I was introduced to the difference between "minimum viable products" and "vertical slices": a minimum viable product being the absolute bare minimum things a product needs to have to both correctly resemble the end product you're trying to build towards; a vertical slice shows off the project as it is intended to be consumed but only through a very small, curated window. While those things are part of the design process that ultimately leads to a full and complete game shipping, when we GM games we are consciously or unconsciously tearing down the complete product into these two categories and trying to recombine them on the fly based on the ambient factors while running it - how to budget your time for each part of an encounter, how to keep people engaged, how to make sure everyone gets to contribute, what things can be cut for time when an unforeseen event happens or even if players just locked in too hard on some random part of the adventure and now suddenly the easiest part of the adventure has taken half of the play session. Likewise, you're also juggling your (and, if this is a game the players have played before, their) interpretation of what things are exciting about the game you're playing and trying to highlight those things while downplaying the things that are active detriments (things that are unfun, processes that take too long, etc.). Some of you might go "But those things are a part of what makes the game the game!" and to that I would say, congratulations, you agree that some things are required to be the minimum viable version of that game in your mind and some things are not, and knowing how to differentiate is important. For example, check out this post about this person's Minimum Viable D&D - which is great for breaking down what the base constituents of what feels like D&D are both on a tone and rules level, but don't address what it's like to actually play the game. That part is one of the most ephemeral skillsets we have to interact with: GM Soft Skills.

    If you're not the person who wrote whatever game you're playing (and whatever scenario you're playing), you do not have the intimate knowledge of what the person who wrote those things wanted this experience to feel like. And to a certain extent, fuck 'em, right? Its your table and your group, so you're in charge of the experience. But I bring up this authorial intent because if you do not have that intimate knowledge, it falls to you as mentioned before to deconstruct and recombine everything to give to the people playing your game, and that means you need to be able to understand what things are fun to interact with, what things need to be interacted with to make the game happen, and what things can be hindrances to both. This is all the more important to keep in mind as a convention GM because it is extremely unlikely that whatever you're running was designed with the constraints a convention places on your time and the attention spans of folks at the table. When you're running a home game, you can reschedule, you can extend it out into multiple sessions, you can take 20 minutes arguing about a rule, you can apologize for triggering your friend because you forgot about their arachnophobia, and ultimately everyone there is still going to get to Do The Thing. At con games, you're battling the ticking clock, the preamble (introductions, safety tools, explaining the initial rules, letting people get their characters set up), the actual playing of the game, and then any number of outside distractions that pull people away, and all the while you are responsible for delivering the best possible experience because you are expected to Be An Authority to these people - after all, if you don't know what you're doing, why are you even there? Now consider all of that, plus the fact that you need to have read what it is you're running before, find all the things that YOU think are cool and mentally bookmark things you think should be highlighted, and then be able to adapt when the players have different opinions about what parts of the game they want to interact with or think are cool which are actively preventing you from concluding the experience in the correct amount of time. That is not a small cognitive load for a GM by any stretch, and being experienced at spinning all those plates doesn't make there be fewer plates to spin.  

    Going Through The Gauntlet 

        In older D&D modules, a lot of the ways the people writing the modules would deal with minimizing the cognitive load on GMs and players would take the form of providing premade characters (skipping the arduous process of character creation) and by either having explicit "win" conditions or by providing a scoring table. One of my favorite adventures to demonstrate this is C-1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (there's a reason it shows up as an Easter Egg in One Night Strahd, after all). 

By giving Referees a list of things that can contribute or deduct from the party's score as well as a concrete "win" condition of making it to a certain room within the time allotted, it inadvertently also provides a list of things that can speed up or slow down play - and this being from the published version rather than the initial version run at Origins '79, this scoring table (and indeed the whole module) also had the benefit of receiving feedback on how the game played across multiple tables. You can look at this and go "OK, these things are what the writers thought would challenge players, this is the kind of behavior they're trying to reward or punish," and so on. It also included pictures to be handouts - when you're on a time crunch, the thousand word value of a picture is much more present when you have to weigh it versus the time it would take you to describe something to your players.

    But people play other games than just the D&D-oids, right? If we remove ourselves one step from this style of play, we get to The Gauntlet gaming community and its publications - namely, Trophy Dark and the various Carved from Brindlewood games. Trophy Dark in and of itself is an interesting game in this context - its direct parent, Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark, was an act of reducing Call of Cthulhu and similar games down to its most minimal, rules-light form. Trophy Dark acts somewhat similarly to dungeon crawling games - I won't go over the whole history of that here, you can go listen to Jason and Alex talk about it - but with an intentionally horror-focused lens as the intent is you should be "playing to lose." In quite literally the opposite approach to Tamoachan, Trophy Dark doesn't want characters making cool, calculated decisions while trying to beat the clock - your characters are all deeply selfish and can, will, and should actively throw their fellow treasure hunters under the bus to try to be the last person standing. On the subject of one shots, the Trophy Dark rulebook has this to say:

Moving down the design lineage, we get to Brindlewood Bay and The Between. Both of them contain more or less the same advice as each other so to save time, here's the version of it from Brindlewood Bay:

Both of these pieces of advice are concise, directly reference mechanics in the text, and provide reasoning behind why this advice is being given. Brindlewood Bay and The Between also both provide an outline with approximate timing on how long each section should take. If you follow those estimates exactly, you'll have wrapped up both games in around 160 minutes - which means you'll be right on track if you have a 3 hour slot or you'll have had to figure something out if you had less time as many conventions stick you in 2 hour blocks (although, understanding how long it takes to run a game is in and of itself a Soft GM Skill to master, so if you're at such an event you might want to choose another game). As an alternative to this, Mike Martens has been working on an another mode of play for his upcoming CfB game Planet Raygun which he posted a video about recently - a duet mode (i.e. one player, one GM) which contains the same structure of play as a traditional CfB game but wraps character creation and the plot of the story you're exploring into one tight package. Mike described it as being somewhere between a Trophy incursion and a normal CfB scenario, which makes sense - when you cut out most of the meta-trappings present in a CfB game, what you're left with basically is the same narrative structure you see in the Trophy games. And critically, what this means is that this duet mode of Planet Raygun is still being designed to hit all the beats of things that make it feel like you're playing the base game, but at the same time it strips away many of the parts that can cause speedbumps and take away valuable gaming time. The fact that some of the things it strips away are...well...other players...is a thing that should be noted, but that's still a choice to design towards - after all, how in the world are we going to keep paying Elliot Davis' rent if people stop wanting solo modes for their games?

An Aside: Do Only Horror Games Care About Time Pressure?

    You may have noticed that all of the games I've mentioned so far are inherently horror-forward. To directly quote Josh Domanski, who explains why much more succinctly than I would have: 

    And that makes sense! But surely there has to be some game out there that both nails presenting the vibes and rules in a self-contained package while also being about something that isn't horror, right?

I mean, yeah, there is. I'd forgive you for not having played it at a con because of the many many issues surrounding its physical release but it's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast.

Zeeb and the CfB family of games fall into what some taxonomize as Capsule Games (see: a different Josh's blog post for more on that), and removing lots of player choices does in fact remove a lot things that can slow down play and eat up your precious minutes. Josh has another post about designing capsule games and I encourage you take a moment to read both of those, because a quick glance will reveal that each of the other games referenced are also games that are horror-forward (and yes, I count D&D as horror forward - it's a game primarily about solving problems through extreme violence dawg, I don't know what to tell you). Other intentional one shot games that hit all the marks I'm talking about, such as Ten Candles or Dread, are also horror games. Yazeba's does also include horror elements in some of its scenarios, so why is it different? I think it's because each chapter in the book is intended to be its own standalone miniature game intended to take place in around 90 minutes. The whole design process is with that in mind - you (both the person acting as Concierge/quasi-GM and everyone else) are only given as many rules as are necessary to run the scenario, and with each scenario focusing explicitly on certain characters and portraying a specific episode of their life, time crunch doesn't need to be used to add terror - it's used to simply denote a natural stopping point for the story. In some ways this seems like the same advice for the Brindlewood games, but the intentionality is different: rather than saying "just play the game as it's written and change these few things to account for time remaining to get through it," Yazeba's says "no matter what happens, what you are about to do is going to be a complete experience." It's subtle, but an important distinction.

What Wisdom Can Be Pulled Forward?

    For creators, I think it is important to really, deeply understand what it is that you think makes your game cool and then make sure whoever picks up your work knows that too. If you're creating something that bolts onto someone else's game (i.e. an adventure module), it's important to not only understand what makes your thing cool but also what elements of the base game you're writing for you think are the coolest that you want to show off with your own work. No matter what, it's important to understand what components of your game slow down gameplay and increase cognitive load for players and for GMs, and you need to decide if those things add to or detract from the experience - things that slow down gameplay might be The Point of what you're creating, but if that's the case you need to be able to account for that elsewhere. Be mindful of how you want people to use their time - whether that means flagging content that is easy to "cut for time" or just a preamble in the beginning of your writing explaining the intent and potential pitfalls associated with certain parts of the game. Give your players only as much as they need to play, and give your GMs only as much as they need to run the game, but whatever you give them needs to be able to show off all the best things about the game. And finally, remember that "one shot" only means that you intend the game to be played in one go - that doesn't help people understand how long it should take or how important certain things are in the plot, so you can and should consider including the intended play time for what you write to help people make choices about what to run!

    For game runners, it's important for you to understand what YOU like about the game you're running. Make sure everyone has rules reference sheets, even for games that are slim on actual rules. Watch an actual play of the game if and where you can to see what things come up during play that aren't present in the text. Read through the text a few times, highlight the things you feel are the most relevant to getting the point of the game across. Don't be afraid to turn longer parts that could derail the gameplay into cutscenes - con games are probably the only time it's OK to railroad players, and that's because the shared social contract of a convention game is that the players know you're trying to get them to the end in a limited amount of time. If you do cutscene your way through a portion of the game for time, consider letting the players respond to that or otherwise help shape that cutscene (see: Painting The Scene in CfB games). Also remember that for better AND worse, it's likely nobody you're running the game for at a con has any preconceived notion of what the scenario should feel like, which means you're going to be stressed about a bunch of stuff that those players will not even be able to perceive. Keep an eye on the table - if everyone's having fun, you're doing it right, and you can probably let go of the fact that you misread a rule on page 5 which completely recontextualizes the whole module and you've had to absolutely freestyle it for the last 30 minutes. Just be honest with folks after the game about it so they know they got a slightly different experience than intended!

    Overall, just remember: if you're running something at a con you've got about 2-3 hours - give or take for breaks and emergencies - to present a vertical slice of a game you love. Enjoy it, and do whatever you need to ahead of time to make your time at the table go as easily as possible. You're curating this experience - make it as fun for you as it should be for the players! 

Outro & Shoutouts

Shoutouts to Josh Domanski and Mike Martens for chiming in on my original Blooski thread about this. Also shoutouts to Josh McCrowell and Jason Cordova for having meticulously documented their thoughts and opinions on gaming over the years which have helped me build my own GM Soft Skills, certainly around their games but also for others. And finally, shoutouts to Yochai, Brad, & Sam at Between Two Cairns and Chris Airiau of Ansible Uplink for delving into some of the behind the scenes things which can be important to know when running adventures in the systems they frequent in.

Stay weird out there.

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. 

The Post-PAX PAX-Packed PAX Post (Unplugged 2024)

 

    Long ago in my previous life as a chiptune music blogger, I used to be the social media person for MAGFest's mini-stage at PAX East. In addition to my MAGFest duties, I would take some time to go chat with developers, play some videogames, and generally just absorb the culture of the event after which I'd write up an article about what I saw and played. With the return of my blogging life, I feel it only appropriate to revive this article series to fit my new form, though this time around there wasn't so much schmoozing and playing games as there was running games and...running games. So maybe this also kinda counts as a review thing? We'll figure it out by the end I'm sure.

INTRO

    Rather than just showing up, going to panels and networking like I did last year, this year I decided I'd run some games. I'd originally reached out to Tony Vasinda at Plus One EXP about running games for them - I have run games at GenCon for Hunters Entertainment and for Kobold Press over the last couple of years, and given both that I am writing something for Plus One EXP that I really ought to playtest but also because they publish a whole bunch of games I really like but never have a chance to run at home, I figured that was an easy shot to line up. Tony recommended I reach out to the Games on Demand folks - Plus One EXP was planning on having a small "takeover" on Saturday evening, but that if I really wanted to run their games, Games on Demand would be the place to do it. And so I did, and I ran games there, and it fucking rocked.

I really have to hand it not only to Brian and Natalya's leadership and all their administrative duties but to all the other GMs who ran things over the weekend. The house was packed pretty much from open to close all weekend. Creators were showing off their games. People like me were running games they just really liked and wanted to share with people. It was a well oiled machine of nerds playing pretend with and around each other and it ruled. Prior to, as I often refer to this to my IRL friends, "pretending to be famous on the internet" and really engaging with the TTRPG scene at cons, I truly never played con games. Playing games with strangers? Not actively curating your playgroup? Disgusting. But actually no, it absolutely rules and I love it. I hope next time around I plan my time a little better so I can actually play in some games too (#foreverGMsquad), but all in all, no notes on management or vibes.

HELLWHALERS

    HELLWHALERS, by Moss Powers & friends as Brewist Tabletop Games, is a game about Christian religious trauma. It's also about doing your best Captain Ahab impression by hunting a whale on the seas of Hell with several other damned souls as a last-ditch effort to seek salvation. As a Jewish person, and honestly not one who has really spent that much time on the religious side of things, I was worried I didn't really have a lot of the in-built Christian trauma to work through that I imagine makes this game hit harder for a lot of folks. For example, all of my Catholic friends I've brought this game up to have all given me the reaction both of "oh yeah, that's that good shit" and "oh, playing that game is going to be pure suffering" and congratulations, after running it I can tell you both things are correct! And I mean that in a positive way! 

    I think HELLWHALERS is extremely mechanically sound, with the necessary nightly gambling portion becoming the Oracle for the events of the following day. The game does make mention of being adaptable for longer games, but in my opinion HELLWHALERS is best enjoyed either as a one-shot or as a very short campaign, for a few reasons:

• The game relies very heavily on player buy-in - if you have players who are REALLY, REALLY into the premise, you'll have rich scenes to play through and longer gameplay will be a natural consequence of the roleplaying - but none of that is in the book (aside from the rewards for roleplaying, that is). If your players aren't clicking, a long game may actually be hellish.
  
  
• Aside from a few inspiration sparks in a few places, there isn't a lot of guidance for GMs beyond the actual mechanics. I fully admit this might just be because I'm not a Christian so outside of recognizing Hell as A Really Bad Place To Be and therefore Everything Should Suck, I think maybe I lacked context to really make those inspiration sparks catch fire. In a long game, I feel like you've really got to have a good idea of what Your Hell looks like and what will happen, which takes this from an otherwise fairly straightforward pick-up-and-play series of roleplaying challenges and gambling into being pretty heavy on the prep.
  
  
• The endings. I cannot make this clear enough - I LOVE the endings, because they are exactly my kind of bullshit. I was the kid who, after reading Albert Camus' "The Stranger" in highschool thought "wow, I bet reading 'Anna Karenina' and 'The Metamorphosis' and 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Trial' and 'No Exit' will be a really cool thing to do that will have absolutely no adverse effects on who I become as an adult." Because I was a fool. I don't think I can do a better job of talking about the endings than Aaron Voigt did, but what I can say is that if I were playing a long campaign of HELLWHALERS and was not made clear what the tone of those endings were, I think someone who didn't make the literature choices I made in highschool would be very upset.

    Now, as I said - all of those things are, in my opinion, something that makes HELLWHALERS ill-suited for long games. But for a one-shot at a con? Perfect. Literally perfect. The players who got it, got it. The ones who didn't were still along for the ride and they still got to be awful people who gambled and hunted a whale. It was a great experience.

Buy the game on ITCH or over at Plus One EXP, and if you'd like some actual plays, why not try the one-shot on Moss' YOUTUBE or the short campaign from GAME MASTER MONDAY (also available on your podcatcher of choice).

THE WASSAILING OF CLAUS MANOR

    THE WASSAILING OF CLAUS MANOR, by Mike Martens and Michael van Vleet, was the other game I'd originally gone into the weekend to run. For about the first twelve seconds of explaining the game to people, it appears like it could be any number of wholesome Christmas stories - the players take the role of servants of the estate of Santa Claus and his family and it's your duty to make sure that everyone's needs are cared for to make sure Christmas goes off without a hitch. This would be totally fine and normal were it not for the fact that reading the history of the family members reveals some darker intentions and motivations - and not just petty backstabby things, like "made a deal with an elder god from beyond time and space to be able to deliver everyone's presents" and "sell the family's valuables without being caught so you can fund a service to kidnap naughty children and ship them to the North Pole for aggressive reeducation from a young girl who is Definitely Not Krampus." You know, normal stuff.

   
    Now, I've never played Trophy and know nothing about running it, but I'm aware that The Mikes are old hat at writing Trophy incursions and this was very evident to my players over the weekend who WERE big Trophy heads - they had nothing but praise for it. From a complete outsider standpoint, I will say that the card-based generation of whose problems showed up in what order was very slick (and made all the better by the use of the official card accessories, which Tony was very kind to provide me with to use), but the ability to push problems off onto other players if you wanted to be petty almost never came up in our two hour game! It turns out, people just really wanted to deal with the challenges they were dealt. Actually, to that point, I'd like to address some deviations I made from the rules so that should you find yourself in the same situation you'll be prepared too. I will say though...maybe don't try to run a game in under three hours unless you've all played before - not to say that you can't, but you end up rushing, which led to things like:

• preparing the deck of family to be sure to include any family that players had specialty with due to their tenure at the house, but basically keeping the number of family in the deck to 3 (which was one more than half the players)
  
  
• after allowing all family members to have their first Trouble, removing one of the family members from the deck
  
  
• after those family members had their second Trouble cleared, sticking with one family member to get to their level 4 Trouble
  
  
• liberal use of stacking skills, Twists, allowing other players to assist, and giving extra Dark dice to their pool as the story got weirder and weirder

    Like I say, there was very little use of the Duck mechanic because people genuinely just enjoyed the prompts they got such that they wanted to do whatever they could to resolve them, but of the two groups I ran over the weekend, the one full of Trophy players got super into Cooking Someone's Goose near the end of our session and that ruled. I'm becoming much more a fan these days of "let the player narrate a wild and wacky thing, then roll for it" kinds of games as opposed to the crunchier games I used to play, and Wassailing definitely lets you get as wacky, petty, or gruesomely inventive as your mind will allow. Definitely worth playing.

If you want to buy it, you can grab it on ITCH, over at PLUS ONE EXP, and if you want to watch some actual plays I recommend THIS ONE from Kat The Lore Mistress and THIS ONE on the Plus One EXP channel. 

MOONLIGHT ON ROSEVILLE BEACH

 Because I am what one might refer to as "calendarically challenged," when I saw Richard Ruane asking if anyone wanted to run Moonlight On Roseville Beach during Plus One EXP's Games on Demand Takeover, I went "Oh yeah! I can do that! I'm only running 10 hours of games over the weekend, I can do four more!" In addition to driving five hours up to Philly. And five hours back. In one weekend. It was fine, but lord was I tired.

    Anyway, so Roseville Beach. Like it says on the top of the book pictured above, it's a queer game of disco and cosmic horror. Frankly if that's not enough to sell you on it I don't know what else I can do for you. On the other hand, if you need a more pointed description, it's a game that focuses on very strongly thematic playbooks, building a dice pool to handle challenges as they happen, and otherwise having everyone at the table build a narrative together along with placing very strong emphasis on relationships. I'm aware that this is not a new trend in games, necessarily, but I feel like this game is in conversation with a few other games like Monster of the Week, Triangle Agency, and The Between with regards to the narrative and mechanical impetus to honor the character's reality while also tying narrative prompts to the mechanical implementation of the game. I feel like the longer I talk about this the more in the weeds I'm getting but perhaps more succinctly I can say: game good.

    Because I only had one game of Roseville Beach to run I was really anxious to make sure it was good, but I needn't have worried - three of the players had actually been in the same boat as me insofar as they had bought the game LAST PAXU and hadn't had a chance to play but were very excited, and the other two players were two younger...friends? ("Harold, they're lesbians!") who hadn't heard of the game before but were very interested in playing. Everyone had a wonderful time building out their characters from the premade characters we had to work with, and even though out story ultimately ended up on a cliffhanger due to time it absolutely felt like we squeezed every ounce of juice out of those four hours of gaming. It was a deeply fulfilling experience.

    If you are hot and sexy and have good taste, you should prove it by buying the game on ITCH or on PLUS ONE EXP. If you want some EXCELLENT actual plays, you should either go for GnomeAnne's miniseries or the one over on The QueerXP (on SPOTIFY or whatever podcatcher you use)!

THE HAUL

    As to what games I came home with - I was very grateful to Moss for gifting me the cloth HELLWHALERS sic-bo board (and some sea glass beads, not pictured) for running the game. Likewise, very thankful to Tony and the Plus One EXP crew for giving me physical copies of The Wassailing along with its expansion and its various accessories. I was not expecting to be able to get my copies of Brindlewood Bay & Nephews In Peril that I'd funded through the The Between hypetrain, but so I did. And straight from Jason Cordova, no less! Jason, Alex Rybitski and Bran Lavigne all twisted my arm, beat me up and took my wallet to get me to buy the copies of Trophy Gold/Loom + the Trophy Character Creation Cards. With my funds only barely left intact, I meandered my way over to the Stockholm Kartell, was only slightly an embarrassing fan (we'll get to that in a second) and finally bought a copy of MÖRK BORG along with the FERECTORY expansion because I definitely needed to get a copy of DARK FORT, which was included. It is probably a good thing that I'm poor right now, because had I not been I would have spent a lot more money on a lot more games and I would have ended up having to rent a trailer to drag behind my car to get them all home.

ADAM'S TIME AS AN EMBARRASING FAN

    PAX Unplugged 2023 was one of the most important conventions I've been to in the roughly 17 years I've been going to cons. I was scared, panicking, and frankly not expecting anyone to give me the time of day because aside from fumbling my way into an ENnie thanks to a very talented group of co-conspirators, I'd done basically nothing of note at that point. It turns out I needn't have worried, because the creators I met then were extremely welcoming and it really set the tone for my 2024. The bar for 2024's PAXU was, understandably, very high, and therefore I was still unfortunately anxious. It would probably be very gauche to namedrop everyone here, but suffice it to say I spent some time telling some folks how very excited their work makes me. In particular though, I am thankful to Johan and Pelle for suffering through me talking to them about how fascinated I am by MÖRK BORG despite only just buying the game from them, because it ties into the stated premise of this blog. With the preponderance of _ BORG games, I've been interested in exploring them because it looks like their baseline framework is drawing a lot of people to it to hack it into all different kinds of genres rather than making their own games with their own identities. The idea of "silver bullet" systems - ones that people try to hack to do something vastly off of the original premise because they know the system well rather than going for an established game that already does whatever they're looking for - is something that has fascinated me for a long time, so hopefully I'll get to exploring that here in 2025.

    Anyway. Beyond fanning and fawning over at the Stockholm Kartell, I was very thankful to finally meet Alex and Bran and Jason over at The Gauntlet's booth as well as running into B Narr a few times! For those of you who were not a part of The Between's BackerKit experience, the print run fundraiser for The Between included a number of expansions from the core setting, one of which being called "Blood And Coal" and is being written by Alex and B and Wes Franks and Lin Codega! I had a wonderful time chatting with them throughout the weekend on what to expect - as someone who's wrapping up an Old Gods of Appalachia RPG actual play and who had promised that I would run "Blood And Coal" at every con I was at for a year once it comes out, to say that I am gnawing on the bars of my enclosure while I wait for its release would be an understatement. The fact that Bran had the booth looking as great as it was is a testament to the fact that everyone needs a good event planner in their employ, and of course getting to chat with Jason IRL was an absolute joy.

    

    Unfortunately, this panel was the only panel I had time to go to what with all the game running over the weekend. Fortunately, this panel fucking ripped. You'd think that talking about why you tell sad stories would be, at the very least, not a pleasant topic to speak on but honestly I found myself nodding along to everything. I think folks' backgrounds were varied enough on the writer/actor/player spread that every person had really cool things to say about the topic, and while my sleepy mind may have lost most of the particulars of the conversation (god I hope it was recorded somewhere), I can tell you that it has been rotating around in my mind ever since the panel ended. Also, this was my impetus to start listening to The Heart Is A Dungeon, and of course by the end of the prologue Rahrah had me sobbing in my car on the way to work so I'm gonna say I think they know what they're talking about on this topic.

12/12/24 EDIT: Had I been but slightly more patient, I could have included this embed of the panel! I didn't realize it was being recorded! Go watch it and have feelings about it.

OUTRO

PAXU 2024 fucking ruled. I then immediately drove home and smashed up the bumper of my car. 

Truly, my life is a rollercoaster.

Anywho, below is a picture of what my TTRPG shelf looks like these days (minus the two D&D shelves) after adding my haul to it. If you've made it this far and think I might be fun to play games with, uh...if you see something you want to play, let me know? I don't mean As Content - like, yeah, sure, if you want me on your podcast to play a game that would rule and I would love that but I more mean, like, hey, are you passionate about games and want to play one with me? Hit me up on BlueSky at @iknowadamseats.bluesky.social. 

Stay weird out there.