As is becoming perhaps more common, I feel compelled to react to an interesting piece from elsewhere in the RPG blogosphere. High Level Play and Scaffolding takes a Bluesky thread from Sam Sorensen and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss why there are noted trends of hesitancy among players to move into “high-level play” in an OSR sense, that is to say gameplay which shifts from focusing on dungeon crawling and party-level combat and treasure hunting to play where the characters become leaders of mercenary companies, warbands, or even nations. Post author Zak H. frames this as a scaffolding problem, essentially stating that the mode of play that “high-level play” requires isn’t set up or framed by any of the levels or modes of play that come before it. I find that perfectly reasonable; it makes sense that dungeon crawling doesn’t prepare you for factional intrigue or morale management. What I’m more interested in is where this all fits into the broader hobby here in 2026.
Continue reading Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play”All posts by Aaron Marks
Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026
Come one, come all, to the Crowdfunding Carnival! It might be summertime sadness, but things are a bit quiet here at the carnival. That said, at least one barker has taken the opportunity to put a fresh coat of paint on the old tent. Kickstarter has rolled out a new search page, including significantly more filtering options. Also of note is the new ‘TTRPG’ category. While this first appeared last month, the line between it and the old Tabletop Games category was still blurry, so I opted not to bring attention to it. There’s still crossover between the two, but it looks like the more specific categories should help with searching. In addition to TTRPG there’s also STL being added as a category, which should help filter minis and other accessory-specific campaigns away from your search page if that’s not what you’re looking for.
While I don’t have proof I’d anticipate that Kickstarter is responding to the ever-increasing competitive pressure from other providers like Backerkit. While Kickstarter is still dominant in the broader crowdfunding space, Backerkit has brought the heat in TTRPGs as well as other toys and games categories. This month’s campaigns come from both services, and as is often true in the doldrums of July, it’s the indies that have come to play.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026
From ashcans to zeroth editions: The new face of TTRPG revision
Players from every generation have taken it as a given that RPGs get updated. There are always new ideas to be implemented and tweaks to make, and basically every high profile attempt to make a ‘final’ edition of a popular game ended in failure (or, at least, another edition). Even if you can’t change a manual’s text, there are errata. Even if the base game stays largely the same, new supplements mix up how everything works and plays together. This is, at least in terms of how we engage with games, inevitable.
What’s not inevitable is how games will change, what that actually looks like. I had an opportunity to play in a short Fabula Ultima game a ways back, and while I liked the game (quite a bit, actually!), one thing was seared in my mind from the experience. After almost every session, one of the players would trawl through the game designer’s Discord and bring us rules updates. These weren’t errata, they were notably redesigned spells and class abilities which the designer was rebalancing in response to feedback on the game. Even though the published version of the game hadn’t changed, we had rules modifications delivered fresh…so long as someone in the group was on the Discord and at least nominally engaging with the fannish side of the game’s community. It is a very different way of adjusting rules, and it is but one aspect of a sea change in how designers approach adjusting, fixing, and yes, finalizing their games.
Continue reading From ashcans to zeroth editions: The new face of TTRPG revision
Umdaar: Fate’s Best, Maybe Last, Worked Example
For over twenty years, Fate has been a pillar in indie gaming. From its newsgroup origins in 2003 through its Kickstarter breakout in 2013 and on to today, Fate’s clever design and extensive modularity have kept it relevant to mechanics nerds and rules hackers and inspired designers and players alike. That said, Fate is a design for hackers above all others, and the popularity of systems as granular and mechanical as Fate has waned in favor of frameworks with fewer moving parts. Even Evil Hat Productions, publisher of Fate, is spending more development resources on publishing games like Apocalypse Keys and Blades in the Dark than it is on the Fate ecosystem. And it’s this context into which Umdaar bursts onto the scene.
Masters of Umdaar was originally published back in 2015 as one of the settings in Fate Worlds: Worlds Rise Up. In that original format, the setting was intended to use Fate Accelerated rules and allow for semi-random generation of character species and monsters to fit into its ‘planetary romance’ setting which read like a beautiful car crash of Star Wars and He-Man. The new Umdaar is much, much more than that original entry. Clocking in at over 450 pages and now using the more traditional skills-based Fate Core framework, Umdaar has evolved from a small setting guide to a full-fledged game, complete with its own set of completely new frameworks employing Fate’s usual building blocks of Aspects, Stunts, and Extras. Both the volume of content and number of new structures not seen (or only vaguely alluded to) in Fate Condensed or Fate Core is what solidifies Umdaar’s role in the Fate line-up: Fate’s current and primary worked example.
Continue reading Umdaar: Fate’s Best, Maybe Last, Worked Example
System Hack: Making a Useful Character Questionnaire
Character questionnaires aren’t new tech by any means; even before they started to be ingrained into character creation and session zero procedures, lists of key questions have been used extensively in TTRPGs to give players a starting point from where they could figure out who they wanted their character to be outside of mechanical determinants. In recent years, though, the character questionnaire has developed into a procedure all its own, with some interesting tech for making the process more specific to both TTRPGs in general and the given TTRPG a questionnaire was packaged with. One character questionnaire I’ve used recently, the persona generation questionnaire from the DIE RPG, is both powerful enough and generalizable enough that I want to break down what it does in an attempt to make writing a character questionnaire for your own session zero easier.
Continue reading System Hack: Making a Useful Character QuestionnaireCrowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close enough to GenCon to suck the air out of the room, it is close enough that most of the major publishers will wait a couple months before any big announcements, giving the little guys a chance for some more spotlight. We’re seeing it now and, as you’ll see later in the article, we saw it five years ago as well. With that said, let’s get into it. No major publishers this month, but we do have the newest campaign from one of the most successful singular designers going.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026
Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons
As readers of the site know, I’m a cyclist in addition to a gamer. I spend at least as much if not more time riding and working on my bikes as I do playing, reading, and writing about RPGs, and riding my bike is an integral part of how I get around and interact with my community. I’ve even written about RPGs and bicycles before, though in that article I was speaking more to how the economics and business models of the hobbies compare. There are also comparisons to be made about how one actually rides a bike compared to how they play a game, and while this analogy is imperfect it can provide some insight to how we both play games and engage in games discourse.
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System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tech Tree
In RimWorld, the tech tree is the conceit which allows the game to work with its ‘societal drift’ conceit. Tribes of nearly cavemen, “modern” colonies, and ultra-tech feudal lords all coexist thanks to a set of technological ‘research projects’ which separate each colony by level of development. In our System Hack, we’re going to need the same tech tree conceit, but the underlying mechanics are going to be quite a bit different.
Before we go any further, I want to make sure you know that Cortex Prime is now available on DriveThruRPG. While digital versions of the game have been available before, you can now finally own a PDF version unfettered by a walled garden app which made the game significantly less accessible. With Cortex Prime finally available in the broader ecosystem, my hope is that there’s much more interest in this and a whole host of other projects using the system.
Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tech Tree
Extra! Five years of Weekend Update
In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.
Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.
Continue reading Extra! Five years of Weekend UpdateCrowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 