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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Articles, The Independents

SPINE Review: Making A Game Of Getting Lost In A Book

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You and Granma were, frankly, on the worst terms. That’s what made it such a surprise when you got a package from your cousin, who had wound up being the executor of her estate. Maybe, your cousin writes, Granma was able to overlook your differences since you had become a fellow academic? Either way, the actual package is a copy from her rare books collection, willed to you. You can’t help yourself, so you start to read the book. It’s a weird one, an anthology of works all talking about books and stories and death and living forever and… rituals? Hold on. You really can’t help yourself. You consider just not turning the page, but you turn it all the same. The notes you’re writing in the margins stop being the words you intended to write. You can feel the book pulling you in…

The book is Siderius Plug’s SPINE – Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes.

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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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Articles, Editorial

It shouldn’t have been called Single Player Mode

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Cyberpunk Red has been going strong for around five years now. The game came out around the same time as the tie-in video game Cyberpunk 2077, and represented a return to form after 2005’s Cyberpunk v3 (and 2020 being over 30 years old). Now, R. Talsorian Games has kept the party going with continual Cyberpunk support both free (in the form of Monthly DLC) and for pay (in the form of the Interface Red collections as well as standalone supplements like Black Chrome). Single-Player Mode is the most recent standalone supplement, and your take on it will depend entirely on what you think a solo RPG is (or should be).

If you’re older than a certain age, when you think solo RPG you think something like Mythic GM Emulator, a set of rules that can act as a GM and let you play through modules or combats on your own. If you’re younger than a certain age (let’s say younger than me at least), your first thought of a solo RPG is probably more like a journaling game, or a hybrid narrative game like The Wretched. It’s important to state this because despite its 2025 release date Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is firmly the first of those two. There are no campaign framing tools, no narrative generation, and no character supplements. Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is built firmly on using an ‘oracle’ to answer questions which allow you to progress forward through your imagined narrative, and also provides tools to let you play out investigations, social interactions, combats, and neutrons all on your lonesome. What it’s truly best at, though, is having a library of random tables which enable you to set up all sorts of premises, missions, and random encounters to make your Cyberpunk solo game more interesting. You may realize as I say this that random tables aren’t just for solo gaming. Not only is that true, it means that while I think Single Player Mode makes for an excellent GM aid and has some good rules additions…it just doesn’t work as an effective solo game.

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