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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Foundation

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Let me tell you, I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld over the last month. The new Odyssey DLC adds a whole dimension to the game that was previously fairly difficult to access: Exploration. With a gravship, it’s possible to go to so many more places on the map, and thankfully they added more things to see on that map as well. Odyssey adds to and enhances the gameplay loop of RimWorld, but thanks to the gravship’s function as a mobile base, that gameplay loop is largely maintained even with the changes.

Thinking about how the gameplay changes and doesn’t change with the addition of the gravship proved to be a good way to start thinking about the gameplay loop of this System Hack. When I’m playing RimWorld, what are elements I want more of that the game isn’t really going to provide? What pieces of the game, on the other hand, are best left to a computer? The trouble with developing an approach to a colony sim RPG is that the genre and its best examples are fairly broad, and you need to make some narrowing decisions very early on.

As I said earlier when discussing my design goals, I’m not trying to emulate RimWorld. Rather, the goal of the game is to provide a similar conceit that leads to storytelling. We are going to be using a few setting concepts from RimWorld to ground the setting of the game, and we are going to be focusing at least notionally on the idea of a colony, a homestead of a handful of people who are trying to make their way on a new world. There are going to be things we want to lean into, like relationships, that can be given significantly more depth at a game table than on a computer. There will be others, like tile-by-tile building layout, that are probably best left on the PC. Ultimately the three elements we want to build from are going to be creating characters, building the settlement, and exploring the world.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2025

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! We’re still a little bit in the post-GenCon hangover, but there are definitely a lot of things to talk about and games to look into.

Before getting into the games, this seemed like the right place to reiterate the news that Gamefound has acquired Indiegogo, mixing Gamefound’s newer tech stack with Indiegogo’s massive subscriber base. Gamefound has been very successful in board games, though they haven’t broken into RPGs to the same degree. Still, these two companies joining forces means we will likely have a third viable crowdfunding platform after Kickstarter and Backerkit in terms of network effects and value for project developers. Will we see more RPG projects from Gamefound in this list? Possibly. The site still trails in terms of reach and backer-facing quality of life features, like requiring disclosures for projects that use AI art. Still, more competition is generally better in the space, and I look forward to seeing the newest iteration of Gamefound roll out.

And with that, on to the games! We’ve got horror, we’ve got dragons, and yes, we’ve got another attempt at writing a tabletop roguelike. Onward!

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Articles, The Independents

HOME Review – Mechs, Monsters, and Mapmaking

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“One year ago the Rift opened and the Kaiju attacked. It tore our cities apart, rampaging for days until we finally dropped the bomb. We killed the beast but lost so much in the process. We knew this was only the beginning so we built the Mechs: giant war machines, the pinnacle of human engineering, and our only hope for survival. The Rift is reponing. More Kaiju are coming, but this time will be different. Your Home depends on you. Are you ready, Pilot?”

This is HOME, the Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking RPG for 1-4 players from Deep Dark Games!

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Hit points: A cyberpunk case study

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Are hit points meat? Does the answer to that question even matter? Hit points are an old mechanic, ported into RPGs at the beginning from wargames, where they made the assessment of unit health more granular than ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. D&D took the concept and applied it to player-characters and monsters alike, and from there it became profoundly common. Measuring damage taken and time until expiration is one of those things where the simplest approach is often the most fun, even if it’s hardly the most realistic.

Hit points as a mechanic are not a monolith. Not even D&D still uses the original mechanic where you have a number and when it’s reduced to zero, you’re dead. Death saves, critical wounds, damage thresholds and any other number of modifiers to the hit point schema make the act of bleeding out after being stabbed a lot more complex than it necessarily has to be, but sometimes more fun, too. Of course, a lot of the relationship that a game has to how its characters get shot and die has to do with genre.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

On Specificity

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Why is Mothership, well, Mothership? Put another way, why isn’t it Basic Roleplaying, or Call of Cthulhu? The core mechanics are all very similar; basically everything in Mothership that isn’t specifically about starships is adapted from Call of Cthulhu in one way or another. And that little starship aside does point to the answer: The reason Mothership is Mothership, Call of Cthulhu is Call of Cthulhu, and neither of them are BRP has to do with the specificity of their missions. Both Call of Cthulhu and Mothership frame their ideal game experience as horror, which lends itself to specific mechanics in the designers’ eyes. Mothership more specifically is science fiction horror, so the designer adds rules about spaceships and space travel. Specificity isn’t limited to genre, though. Mothership is also intended to be light on mechanics; famously the game has no mechanics for things like stealth which means that the adjudication of things like hiding and following are circumstantial and entirely in the lap of the GM. Whether you agree with this mechanical decision or not, it is deliberate and it is specific.

While specificity of game outcomes is produced by having more and more concrete rules (Mothership’s take on stealth is completely non-specific, while a game with one or more stealth skills and a laundry list of modifiers would be much more specific), specificity of game design is much more interesting, especially as there’s an entire class of games that deliberately avoids it. When I looked at QuestWorlds, I saw a game designed to try and do everything, at the expense of doing anything in a particularly interesting or engaging way. It’s hardly the only generic game, and one could make the same complaint and direct it at Fate, or GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

But hold on. If we go back and look at Mothership again we have, broadly, a fairly non-specific game. Yes, it’s about space horror, and the character options are tuned to space horror. The GMing advice is very good. The layout is very good. The game, though? It’s, outside of the space horror part, stripped down Call of Cthulhu. So where does that Mothership ‘vibe’ come through besides the design ethos? A good part of it is the modules (hardly a controversial opinion), but I think a specific and interesting point is that the modules bring with them hyper-specific mechanics. While GURPS has mechanics meant to be at the level of physics and D&D has mechanics which reinforce genre, Mothership has a good chunk of its mechanics corpus supporting specific stories, designed for and included in the pages of modules like Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. And this is kind of important: While Mothership clearly takes inspiration from the DIY and hack-and-borrow ethos of the OSR, it’s presented a bit differently. The modules, in addition to providing the setting and conflict and everything else for a solid few sessions of adventure, also provide the hacked/modified rules to make that adventure feel different or play different than the base game. It does make me think, though: If you’re hacking the rules (or using the designer’s hacks) for every module, how truly different is that from using a generic game? Put another way, what really makes Mothership different from BRP, really? It’s not rules, after all.

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