Tag Archives: Opinion

Articles, Editorial

The Last Caravan – Con-Apocalyptic Road Trip

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They came less than a year ago. The war was swift – and brutal.

Humans and aliens bombed each other to smithereens, and now both sides are licking their wounds. Mysterious new factions rise to join the struggle of the fallen titans. In this landscape of shifting allegiances, we may have to choose sides. Debris from the explosion of the aliens’ mothership has clouded the atmosphere, lowering the temperature and creating the coldest winter in a thousand years.
We find ourselves in a melancholy, wintry landscape — quiet, until it’s not. Egg-shaped alien structures thirty stories tall now squat, humming, over the cities they crushed. Xenofauna and lost invaders stalk the woods and highways. A war is brewing in the aching silence.

We are navigating the waking remnants of human and alien empires — and all we’ve got is a car, our fellow travelers, and the road.

It’s time to head west with The Last Caravan.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Cultures of Play, Quanta of Play

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The assumptions, intentions, and design of tabletop roleplaying games are infamously broad; seeing eye to eye on how to play is as primary a challenge as finding a time on the calendar for four to six people. Back in April of 2021, the blog The Retired Adventurer published a post called Six Cultures of Play which still sees reference as a succinct overview of distinct play traditions which have evolved over the last fifty-ish years of structured tabletop roleplaying. Between solid analysis and the author’s own admonitions not to see bright lines between the cultures where there aren’t any, I see the article as a useful model to start thinking about how people game and what they want.

Of course, the gaming world hasn’t stayed still, and from the publication of the original post to the renaming of Twitter to “X” in 2023, fragmentation was the word of the day. Since then, we’ve seen continuing fragmentation joined with an upswell in interest in fairly specific playstyle differentiation, driven by migration away from Wizards of the Coast products and strong take-up of “D&D alternative” products including not only Pathfinder but Daggerheart, Tales of the Valiant, and Draw Steel. The core ideas in the Cultures of Play post still hold true, but the consistent signpost in my mind is in the introduction, where the author describes a culture of play as equivalent to a ‘network of practice’. A community of practice is a group which forms around something they collectively do (or practice) which they have a passion for and want to do better; a network of practice is also that but doesn’t assume the same consistent strength of relationships, therefore being a more appropriate term for a larger, more nebulous group. As broad as a network of practice can be, I don’t really think it aligns with a ‘culture of play’ anymore.

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Articles, Editorial

My gaming group: A twentieth anniversary review

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September of 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of my current gaming group. Yes, you read that correctly. While I’m not sure of the exact day, twenty years ago either this week or last week I met with five other nerds in the study room of Carnegie Mellon’s newest freshman dorm, New House (which has since been renamed). The organizer, my friend Dan, had swiped the mailing list from an event run by the university’s chapter of White Wolf’s Camarilla Society; he decided that while he wanted nothing to do with a Vampire LARP, he met some cool people at their D&D one-shot event and would want to play D&D with them. We all decided that yes, we’d like to play D&D, and from there we were off. Three more people joined over the next couple of semesters, a lot of games were played, and we were a close-knit group until graduation in May of 2009.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Big groups, small games

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For the most part, the ideal size for a gaming group is five, four players and a GM. This is driven by group dynamics; researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review back in 2018 that the ideal group size for meetings is between five and eight, at least if the point of that meeting is to have a productive discussion and get things done. Roleplaying games skew to the lower end of this mostly just due to the fact that in addition to the actual ‘meeting’ of a game, there is also the need to manage that many characters, their contributions, and their stories.

Ideal doesn’t mean only, and an experienced GM can run games anywhere in that 5-8 range without too many problems, at least as long as they’re realistic about how long things will take. More and more, though, games are being written towards a specific group size, usually a smaller one. In some cases it’s obvious, like Fiasco: the number of turns in the game, and therefore the amount of time the game will take, is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and even playing with five people, the maximum number recommended by the rules, the game begins to sprawl and the story begins to sag. In other cases, the restriction comes from a clear place, but the question hangs in the air about how to subvert it. A good example of this is DIE: There are six roles, six dice. That’s how many there were in the comic, therefore that’s how many there are in the game.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2025

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! We’re seeing the post-GenCon movement begin, and several of the big publishers are starting their engines up again with new campaigns. At the same time, there are a number of good indies out there which are worthy of your attention. Let’s get to it.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

TTRPGs and fandom

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The genesis of fandom as we know it starts and ends with communication. Sports fandom began evolving from the 19th century to today as radio, TV, and then the internet all brought access to more and more people. Literary fandom wasn’t too far behind: Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both inspired fan movements with intensity rivaling the most fervent fandoms of today, famously doing things like publicly mourning the death of Sherlock Holmes.

There’s always a spectre behind fandom, though. Sports has seen a sea change from live attendance to broadcast as team owners can charge more and more for tickets and extract more and more money out of their audience. A massive subsection of the fandom factions collectively referred to as ‘nerd culture’ are owned by Disney, engineered to extract money from the existing audiences of Star Wars and Marvel. The strong feelings of identity and association associated with fandom can easily be weaponized, and the history of nerd culture brings along with it a whole other level of making spending choices feel very personal.

So what of role-playing games? The RPG hobby and RPG fandom are often seen as one and the same; traditional RPGs are high-commitment and there isn’t much of a casual following. Beyond that, RPGs, specifically licensed RPGs, are vehicles for other fandoms, taking advantage of the fandom overlaps implied by that phrase ‘nerd culture’. When we look at RPG fandom, though, we do see things falling out in a few different ways: Those who focus on the act of playing RPGs as a whole, those who are fans of their one chosen game, and those who are fans of the chosen game, Dungeons and Dragons. Just like fandoms of all sorts of other hobbies and media, the RPG fandom is driven not only from the enthusiasm and engagement of its members, but also by the companies who capitalize on those feelings of association and belonging in order to make money.

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Articles, Editorial

Coriolis: The Great Dark Review

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One small step for the Year Zero Engine, one giant leap for Coriolis…

Free League has been shepherding the Coriolis series for nearly a decade now. Originally published by Jarnringen, the original designers of Symbaroum, Coriolis was released in 2008 to much acclaim in Sweden. Free League first got on board creating additional material for the game, but ended up the stewards of the series, releasing their first version in 2016. Now, we get the newest edition, a ‘standalone sequel’ set 200 years after the events of Coriolis: The Third Horizon.

Coriolis won accolades for being a solidly original sci-fi setting, and The Great Dark carries on that legacy by managing to be different even from the version of the game that came before it. At the same time, Free League didn’t mess with the formula of the YZE mechanics too much; we’re staying closer to home with the version of the mechanics established in Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands than many other recent YZE games have. While I don’t think that The Great Dark is going to win over all existing Coriolis fans, I do think that its combination of strong premise and continued originality is going to help it make a case for itself, either on its own or sitting on the shelf next to all of your Third Horizon books.

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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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