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 Design Goals

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It’s been a while since we’ve seen an extended System Hack at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Genesys Mecha concluded in September of 2019 and Cyberpunk Chimera concluded in May of 2020. And yes, neither of them were ever expanded into standalone products; while writing did continue behind the scene the scope of the ambition of both of the projects was simply too high to be completed in the spare time of one or even two nerds who also had jobs (and in one case, kids).

With all those caveats out of the way, I’m trying it again anyway. Both Genesys Mecha and Cyberpunk Chimera provided great deep dives and game design ideas, and with that in mind I wanted to set my sights on something that’s both been a personal quest of mine for a little while as well as something that will add to the game design conversation in a positive way (whether or not the article series leads to anything more). Cortex Prime is, in my opinion, one of the most flexible and powerful rules toolkits on the market. It’s also a toolkit that takes some effort and consideration to set up, which has prevented it from taking off in the same way as the similar but much simpler Fate. Cortex Prime also has many fewer worked examples than Fate, which has the exemplary Fate Worlds series as well as a number of Fate System Toolkits; instead, Cortex only has Tales of Xadia as a fully implemented Cortex game outside of its three in-book examples which are too short and a bit too unconventional to be accessible demos (their genres are police procedural, rescue team, and neo-classical fantasy). A good system hack will walk through the various mechanics, mods, and character options and discuss why each choice is made and how they’re going to work in the final product.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2025

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! While the majors are away, the indies will play, and now is a solid rush of projects from some smaller names even as the big guys get ready for the next big con. There were a pretty big number of campaigns to pare down from, but I think the ones I chose are pretty solid. And, despite a lack of new games from those big names, there is one new license to check out and a couple follow-on campaigns. Let’s begin.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

A (snarky) review of every RPG mechanic

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When I reviewed QuestWorlds last week, I came away from the game concluding that everything was centered around one basic mechanic: A character must roll under their ability rating while the GM tries to roll under the ‘Resistance’ rating of the challenge at hand. It is the character versus the challenge, and everything is defined in that way. And sitting with that, it kind of made me realize that a lot of TTRPGs define everything or almost everything in terms of making a check, only broadening the mechanical palette in specific circumstances.

Does this matter? Well, it depends. If you’re the sort of person who sees RPGs in terms of what exists and what people are already playing, then it’s natural to see the baseline mechanics of the TTRPG as something that’s been refined since the original release of D&D and is therefore fit for purpose. If you’re thinking about role-playing game design broadly, though, you may note that this sort of quasi-simulation of using probabilities to determine when a character overcomes certain challenges is a very limited sphere of the design space, barely larger than the sphere created by making quasi-simulations of using probabilities to determine when characters kill each other. You know, wargames.

For now, though, I’m going to stay in this design space taken up by the traditional roleplaying game (coming up with something starkly different will likely be the topic of a future editorial). There are many things which RPGs try to do, some they’ve arguably been trying to do for decades. For all of these tasks, do the mechanics help or hinder? And, because this is certainly the primary discourse around this topic, do mechanics make the task better?

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Articles, Level One Wonk

QuestWorlds: Who wants a generic game?

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Generic RPGs are designed to accomplish a goal that many say they want. The ability to write anything, make any genre fit together, and theoretically never have to learn another system again all sound great. The reality usually ends up being something different, though. The entire reasoning behind generic RPGs even being possible has forever been couched in very narrow assumptions about what an RPG actually is. Once you expand those assumptions a little bit, a generic game starts to look impossible.

QuestWorlds, originally called Hero Wars (and HeroQuest in between those two), is a game that came out of a post-TSR, pre-Forge era of the early 2000s much like the first edition of Fate. Both of these games have the same essential objective: build out a set of mechanics that can take any character on one side, any challenge on the other, and adjudicate that character standing up to that challenge regardless of the specifics. Add in some balancing rules for character creation and advancement, and you’ve got a game that’s ready for anything. Kind of. Both QuestWorlds and Fate make very similar disclaimers about only working with genres with capable and proactive heroes prevailing over larger-than-life challenges. The disempowerment of horror doesn’t really work, nor do the continuous drags of hunger, thirst, or wound management found in survival games. These generic games, and many generic games, quickly reveal themselves to be “roughly the way we think people play RPGs” games.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2025

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for May! It’s spring, and the buds on the trees have burst open into green leaves. Similarly, the post-ZineQuest hangover is over and RPG campaigns are bursting forth all over Kickstarter and BackerKit. Want a game about fishing, or making jam? How about a three-book space opera extravaganza? There’s lot’s to check out this month, so let’s get to it.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse Into the Vault: You, by Austin Grossman

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Game design stories are often told in a way that portrays the designer as a visionary, seeing something that nobody else does as they quest for their ultimate game. This often loses the reality of the medium, that design takes a lot more work than ideas and that work can often get very messy. The novel You by Austin Grossman is technically about video game design, and one of its strengths is portraying the video game industry (specifically the PC gaming industry) at a time when it was about to transform and transform the world along with it. You takes place in 1997 or thereabouts right outside of Boston, in a part of Cambridge that’s really only known to locals (incidentally, I interviewed for a job in the building that I’m 95% sure is the office in the book). The story is about Black Arts Games, a fictional publishing company whose next game will either make or break them. What the story is really about, though, is a single-minded and overzealous designer and worldbuilder who created the holy grail of role-playing games, digital or otherwise.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Confessions of a “realistic” GM

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I feel there is a certain arc that you see among tabletop gamers, especially those who get their start with D&D. D&D is, like anyone’s first RPG, the gateway to a new world, a new mode of expression and imagination. While lots of people enjoy games, some end up enraptured, vibrating at the thought of what they can do and create. So they become a DM and start writing, start doing as much as they can with the game. And they start hitting walls. Some of the walls are from the game; the sort of ‘game logic’ of D&D only tells a limited palette of stories no matter how much the marketing says otherwise. So they try another game. And another game. In most cases, game logic still prevails. Some of the walls, though, are from the other players. Even if the DM wanted to try another game, the players wouldn’t necessarily go along with it. And from the perspective of the person who was most excited by the game, it certainly looks like the other players aren’t taking it seriously enough. The stakes that our aspiring writer sees in their worlds, the other players…don’t. So how do they fix this? How do they make everything feel serious to everyone at the table? How do they make the players feel the way they feel?

This story is a familiar one, and I know that because it’s my story. I was the one who was vibrating out of my chair with excitement at the idea of creating worlds in D&D, and my disenchantment with how D&D actualized those stories led me to Cyberpunk. And when it seemed like the intrigue of the stories wasn’t resonating with my players, I tried to make the game more serious, more internally consistent, more “realistic”. And years later, when I found a literal generation of heartbreakers and retroclones dedicated to making D&D more lethal, making wizards less powerful, and generally making the game more difficult, I finally realized two things. One, there is a nearly universal desire for grounding and meaning among those who tell stories, whether they do so with TTRPGs or something else. And two, for those of us working in the TTRPG medium, making the game ‘grittier’ is usually the answer to a different question than the one actually being asked.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The funnel and beyond: Pre-play character creation

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In RPGs, character creation methods abound. You can create characters mechanically with point and option spends, build them alongside a backstory with a lifepath, or just roll some dice and see what comes out the other end. When it comes to actually aligning the characters with the game you’re about to play, so much so that you need to bring the GM along for the ride, I think I’ve found one of the best options. Now, one reason you’ve likely never done this before is that it’s time-intensive and it can be a lot of extra work for the GM if not all of the players. Another reason, though, is that to really play through character creation, you need mechanics to do so. Precious few games have these mechanics, but after giving one such system a spin I’m pretty comfortable saying it should be more of a thing for campaign play.

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Articles, Editorial

Rules, retcons, and rightsholders: The tough road for superhero RPGs

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Back in November of last year while talking about network effects and how they make you play D&D, I dropped a little bomb. I stated that there has never been a good mass market RPG in the superhero genre. At the time, no one took the bait, but I can imagine some easy dissent there. What about Champions? What about Marvel Super Heroes? How can you possibly hate FASERIP? But yet, I do maintain my position. While there have arguably been good superhero games, none of them have reached mass market popularity and, by the way things are going, none of them ever will. It’s not the fault of any particular game or its design, at least not directly. Instead, the instinctive way that a game designer wants to approach comic book superheroes is one that’s fundamentally at odds with ever seeing broader popularity.

Of course, as one would naturally surmise, that means there’s a different way to write a superhero game that could see broader appeal and generally be more easily used to tell superhero stories. We were even close to having a game that fit in this template actually see some measure of success; what killed it was of course nothing to do with the game but rather the other reason that superhero games can never really succeed, licensing. So let’s look at the flavors of superhero games we get, the flavor of superhero game we want, and why the two aren’t likely to match.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2025

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! The world outside is crazy, so come on in and take a gander at some quality, handpicked RPG campaigns. We’re seeing some solid activity from major players this month, albeit maybe too much activity from some. And then there are of course a number of fantastic indie campaigns, covering the fae, werewolves, kids with weird powers, and more. Check it out!

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