All posts by Aaron Marks

Gaming for nearly twenty-five years and writing about it for over fifteen, I've always had a strong desire to find different and interesting things in the hobby. In addition to my writing at Cannibal Halfling Gaming, you can follow me on Bluesky at @levelonewonk.bsky.social and read my fiction and personal reflections at newwonkmedia.com.
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Overworld

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While the focus in RimWorld is on the stretch of land that you’ve claimed for your base, the entire planet is available to you to explore. You can see the spread of different biomes and factions when you select your landing site at the beginning of the game, but really exploring and interacting with the broader world is dependent on either sending out risky caravans or developing later-game technologies like drop pods and (now with Odyssey) gravships. For our System Hack, the base site is likely to feel a bit smaller, and venturing out onto the world map is something that happens sooner. Luckily, we have decades of wilderness exploration in TTRPGs to help us out. When looking at our overworld map, we want to make sure that exploration and venturing beyond the base site both provides interesting decisions and helps us populate a world with people and places that our players will want to explore.

The overworld is also where we start considering some of the setting assumptions of RimWorld, and deciding where we converge or diverge. RimWorld’s implied setting is fascinating, but the place where all of the setting ideas fail to emulsify is in the overworld. Beyond the dispersion of settlements being a clear game contrivance, the lack of any population buildup or agglomeration is just not how any planet would look after years of colonization. There is a line to be walked here; a ‘RimWorld’ would likely self-select for individualists who may want space and to be left alone, but there’s simply too many personal and economic benefits for larger settlement to assume there wouldn’t be any.

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Articles, Editorial

The Endie Awards 2025 – Aaron Edition

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This post is brought to you thanks to Lady Tabletop, who prompted folks to write about their own gaming experiences of the year and give out their own fun awards. Like Seamus I thought this was a neat idea, and was also glad (and relieved) that ‘The Endies’ weren’t trying to be yet another award given out because someone disagrees with the ENnies. Thinking back on the year and giving your own awards is more useful (and more fun!), anyway.

I had a much more constrained gaming year than Seamus in part because I had a very busy year; in the middle of this year my partner and I moved, which involved buying a condo, selling two condos, moving one person once and another person (and a cat) twice. In a way I’m surprised I got as much gaming in as I did, and also surprised I was able to write anything from May to August. Still, the difference in absolute number hides the point that Seamus made to me that, due to the number of campaigns I’m in and how often I run, I probably ran and played more sessions by absolute count than Seamus did.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Coring the Onion: OSR structuralism and non-OSR games

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The RPG theory ship sails on unbidden, even as RPG networks of practice seem to be drifting apart. In November, there was a great post over on The Dododecahedron which bucked the trend and pulled theory work from outside of the author’s primary discipline, the OSR. Starting from a description written by Vincent Baker about the PbtA ‘conversation’, Dododecahedron author Rowan describes OSR play as an onion with four concentric layers: Character on the outside, then working inward to Mechanics, Procedures, and finally Adventure. Adventure is in the middle as the diegetic ‘fiction’ that the players are engaging with is the source of truth for OSR play. From there are Procedures, which describe the rules for how to go about play; that is to say, what travel looks like, or when random encounters occur, or how to track consumables. The next layer out is Mechanics, which describe the “rules” as most RPGs understand them; this is where initiative, ability checks, and all those specific bits live. Finally on the outside is Character, where elements like attributes, experience points, and skill ratings, all the things that make characters unique, sit.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2025

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Con season is well and truly over, with PAX Unplugged wrapping before Thanksgiving. That, combined with the upcoming holidays, has caused Kickstarter to slow…turns out game designers need a vacation too! We don’t have ten campaigns to look at this month, but there are still a number of interesting games on the horizon which are worth examination.

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Articles, Editorial

My first corporate convention

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When it comes to nerd hobbies, the convention scene is bifurcated. There are local, volunteer-driven cons that put a lot of effort into building content from enthusiasts around the area. There are also the massive, national affairs that bring attention and revenue to their parents. Gaming cons moved quickly into the latter category, even if the initial efforts were modest; both GenCon and Origins came to prominence after their alignment with TSR and GAMA, respectively. And now there’s a massive leader in the corporate con sphere: Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Base Building

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If any one topic is ‘the core’ of this System Hack, this would be it. Base building is the underlying gameplay loop of RimWorld and it is also a topic du jour in RPG circles, with the (admittedly poorly detailed) stronghold building from the D&D days of yore coming back into focus as more gamers want broader storyline opportunities. For our purposes, of course, if we’re making a colony sim we need to make a colony. But what exactly is the best way to do that?

Base building from my perspective is sandwiched between two examples which effectively bracket the space we have to work in. On the heavy end is RimWorld itself, a computer-assisted colony manager where everything is measured out in five foot squares and the player has complete power to place elements as they want them, as long as everything fits. On the light end is the new generation of stronghold building rules, most effectively typified by Free League’s games, notably Forbidden Lands and Twilight:2000. These games add a strong layer atop their roleplay frameworks, but the actual mechanical existence of a Forbidden Lands stronghold is merely a list of buildings with requirements and effects. We know the first item is too much, but we know the second is not enough. So what will base building in our System Hack actually look like?

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The design decision which won narrative gaming

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Last week, Apocalypse World came back to crowdfunding, with the Bakers seeking funding for a Third Edition of the game. Apocalypse World was first released back in 2010 and it took the indie RPG world by storm; by the time Dungeon World was released in 2012 it was already all but certain that ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ would be a phenomenon. It’s easy to forget that there was another indie darling riding high in the hobby in the early aughts. Fate was arguably the other big indie game, and it even made its way into the ICv2 bestseller list after the success of its 2013 Kickstarter, an honor typically reserved for D&D, Pathfinder, and a few other corporate games. The ICv2 data point is particularly interesting. Fate outsold Apocalypse World; not only did the game peek into commercial sales charts as late as 2020, Fate even holds the statistically dubious honor of being one of only three games to ever outsell D&D in the ICv2 rankings (the other two being Pathfinder and FFG Star Wars). Commercially, Fate was an indie juggernaut.

Fate has clearly not maintained the degree of impact and influence it once had. Hell, the last three Kickstarter campaigns run by Evil Hat Productions, publishers of Fate, were all Powered by the Apocalypse games. The literal keepers of Fate have, thanks in no small part to John Harper and Blades in the Dark, seemingly seen the writing on the wall in terms of salability and influence of PbtA over Fate. Why is that? To start, there’s an obvious disparity to the degree in which unaffiliated designers took the respective systems and ran with them. That said, it’s fairly clear to me that this is a symptom, not a cause. While it’s hard to beat the Bakers’ approach of ‘sure, just don’t literally plagiarize us’ for licensing, Fate was licensed under the OGL and later Creative Commons, which were both used by tons of creators in other contexts. No, the difference in third party support and expansion has to do with the design of the respective games, not their shepherding by their respective creators. And I think I know specifically which design elements made the difference.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: November, 2025

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for November! There are a ton of campaigns out there this month; my initial pass easily got to 20 even after I realized that there were a lot and started filtering more aggressively. We’ve definitely got more designers putting in the juice, but there are some other interesting developments going on.

First, Gamefound has come roaring onto the scene again. While the provider got some recognition during the Kickstarter blockchain kerfluffle, their network was pretty weak until recently. First, over the summer Gamefound acquired Indiegogo (not the other way around). Second, Gamefound is currently in the midst of RPG Party, an event that started in mid-October to help promote and drive engagement with RPG campaigns specifically. Chaosium and Magpie got on board with RPG Party, so between their involvement and the recent access to the Indiegogo mailing list, Gamefound has jumped from also-ran to contender seemingly overnight.

But let’s move onto the games. This month features campaigns from all three major crowdfunding providers, meaning the space is starting to heat up a bit. Competition is a good thing, and supporting competitors to Kickstarter is a great idea when Kickstarter United is still on strike.

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Adventure Log, Articles

Adventure Log: If you could DIE all over again

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Playing the same scenario over again is a tough proposition. As good as the first time went, finding something else to discover, some other way to engage with the scenario, or simply just another perspective is not easy. Admittedly, the core scenario of DIE, Reunited, isn’t any old module. This past month my group played it again, and doing things over again was a core component of the twist I introduced.

You’re likely familiar with the first time my group played Reunited, it’s the basis for Seamus’s review of DIE, and it was an incredible experience sinking our teeth into the game over one long day. There was interest in revisiting DIE this year, and my thought was there was going to be one of the scenarios for the game; last year I ran Distant Fans from the core rulebook and it went well, though not quite with the same gutpunch as Reunited. When the stars aligned and our gaming weekend was going to step down to six people on its final day, I decided to lean in to returning to the gutpunch. Arguably, I leaned too far.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tasks and Work

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When you boil it all the way down, RimWorld is a game where you assign tasks to your colonists and optimize how they get performed. Every time you place down blueprints, place a zone, or add a ‘bill’ to a production structure, you’re effectively communicating a specific task. When it comes to our tabletop colony sim, these sorts of tasks are going to be a cornerstone of the gameplay loop just like how they are in RimWorld. The actual implementation, though, is going to be quite different.

Structured time in RPGs is seen as something to be avoided, at least outside of combat. In most trad games, the passage of time is something either tracked closely in increments no more than a few seconds, or glossed over entirely. We have started to see games, especially games using Free League’s YZE system, paying more attention to the passage of time, while Edge’s new DPS mechanics used in Arkham Horror are assigning a mechanical bounding to the typically loose definition of a ‘scene’ by anchoring characters with a dice pool that exhausts over the span of one scene. It’s useful to consider rules like these for our game, but a Colony Sim is going to require something different. With productive tasks being primary, constant and consistent time tracking is going to be needed to fairly assess what’s going on in the colony.

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