After Cohost died I needed a place for no-pressure blogging about RPGs, somewhere to keep stuff that isn't meaty enough for Loot The Room or Patreon. This is that place.
I also blog about the books I read and the music I listen to.
Latest Posts
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On Restless Tides
Itās funny how creativity never moves in a straight line. For me it seems to come in phases, shifting constantly not just between individual projects but across entire mediums. One month Iām deep into writing fiction, the next all I can think about is music, and then without warning Iām back into game design. Itās like my brain refuses to follow a single path, darting between different creative expressions depending on some internal tide that Iāve never quite managed to predict.
That restlessness is present even within a single medium. In games specifically, Iāve spent the last few years immersed in traditional fantasy adventures and dungeon design. But this year Iāve suddenly found myself returning to a form I stepped away from years ago and once again becoming interested in solo journaling games.
Thereās something uniquely intimate about creating a game meant for one person and their thoughts. When I wrote my first journalling games I was fascinated by the quiet conversation between player, page, and prompts. Itās like leaving notes for strangers to find, never knowing what stories they might tell in response. Working on āBlood In The Marginsā has been a process of both familiarity and discovery, like revisiting your childhood home to find that everything seems smaller, but the rooms somehow contain new corners youāve never noticed before. (Incidentally my partner and I did visit my childhood home a few weeks ago. That was a very surreal experience.)
Creative evolution isnāt always about moving forward into uncharted territory. Sometimes - often, in fact - itās about returning to old haunts with new eyes, about looking at what youāve done in the past and bringing the experience of the new, present you to bear on it. The Wretched, like many solo games, contains prompts that are relatively lose. Blood In The Margins is a creature of specificity and focus. You can still tell the story you want to tell, but the sandbox is smaller, the toys within it crafted with more care. This is what Iāve learned from writing dungeon games; that the specific and the concrete are the tools the imagination needs to create something truly surprising of its own. We never truly abandon our past creative selves. We just fold them into who weāre becoming.
Projects & Updates
- Blood In The Margins is in its final 24 hours, and closing in on Ā£8,000. I released a big preview of the game to backers a couple of days ago that will let you play through the opening Act. You should go and play it.
- The final PDF of Down In Yongardy is now available. All that remains now is for the physical book to be produced, which Space Penguin Ink are kindly handling for me.
- Weird Hope Engines was a rousing success. The team behind the show did an amazing job of bringing Directive 92A to life in the physical space, and it was an incredible experience getting to see people actually play it and to read what they were creating. The show runs until the 10th of May and I hope youāll get a chance to see it. Iām working on a website to archive all of the writing people are doing when itās over, and Iāll say more about that when itās ready.
- Speaking of Directive 92A, I wrote nearly 2 hours of weird ambient soundscapes and glitched-out beats to go with it. Itās on Bandcamp for a fiver.
- Iāve been enjoying writing fiction again, and I have two stories published on my itch page. The Knight of Rot is a short, sad grimdark tale set in the world of Mƶrk Borg. The Interview is a slice of dark academic murder fiction. Theyāre both free to read, and you can get a limited edition physical chapbook of The Interview as an add-on with Blood In The Margins.
Things Iāve Been Enjoying
Reading: Iām about halfway through I Want To Go Home But Iām Already There by RĆ³isĆn Lanigan and I adore it. Itās funny, itās well-written, it resonates on a very personal level, and thereās this slow creeping horror thatās starting to mount. I canāt wait to see where it goes.
Listening: Iāve been in an ambient and electronic mood of late, and in particular Iāve been really enoying Throwing Snowās 2016 album āAxiomsā. Hereās my March playlist.
Watching: Iāve been going through a Hitchcock phase and finally convinced Steph to watch Rope (1948). Itās still incredible.
As always, hereās a photo of Lucky. Heās enjoying the fact that the sun is out again, though my asthma isnāt enjoying my house being covered in his fur.
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Weird Attention Engines
Iāve been using social media in one form or another for about 25 years at this point, give or take, whether that was Faceparty or LiveJournal or Bebo orā¦ well, you donāt need me to list all the different social media sites that have come and gone over the years, do you? And Iāve had a presence on the internet for even longer. The first site I ever built was a space where I wrote short fiction that I based on the 16-bit animated GIFs of monsters a complete stranger was making. I often wish I could find that site again, just to see what sort of stories I was writing. And I often wonder if that complete stranger knew that the person she/he/they were talking to was 14 year old kid who just wanted people to read his writing.
Social media has taught us to be loud, to always have something to say even if itās something completely empty. To be quiet on the internet is to cease to exist. Algorithms reward us for constantly making noise. If you take some time away, if your all-important Engagement drops off, then when you return with something to say the platforms say no, sorry, you were quiet for too long. You may have found your voice again, but we wonāt allow anyone to hear it.
Every month when I sit down to write this newsletter I wonder if I have anything to say. Am I writing this to communicate something thoughtgul with the people whoāve asked to hear from me, or am I writing this because I know that if I miss a month fewer people will read it when the next one rolls around? Itās impossible to be mentally On all the time, but this is the life Iāve chosen for myself.
On the 21st of March Iāll be attending the preview/opening of Weird Hope Engines, a show put together by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, and Jamie Sutcliffe. The first exhibition of its kind, the show aims to āexplore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibilityā. Iāve been writing a game for it that Iāve titled āDirective 92Aā, a dystopian group journalling game that Iām pitching as Papers Please meets Fahrenheit 451. Hereās the pitch:
In the near future the government has outlawed artistic expression and that collective memory is failing because we remember history through stories. You are a government agent who's been tasked with correcting the historical record in the form of stories people tell about the world and what happened to get to this point. You can choose to do your job, or you can choose to add new stories to the record to preserve the past that's being taken from you.
The game explores the power in the things that we say and the way we choose to say them, and asks you to imagine a world were the freedom to speak the truth has been stripped from you. The show will run from March 22nd to May 10th at Bonningon Gallery in Nottingham and also features new games by Laurie OāConnel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko, as well as original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang. Iām very excited to be a part of it.
The week prior to that, on March 13th, Blood In The Margins launches on Backerkit. To mark the occasion of the 5th anniversary of Wretched & Alone Iām blogging my way through a lot of W&A games on Loot The Room. The second post will go live today, with regular play-throughs appearing throughout the month. I think Blood In The Margins is going to be really good, and I hope youāll pick it up.
Oh yeah, Rebellion Unplugged finally announced that Iāve been working on the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls for the past 18 months. Which is exciting.
Here are some things Iāve been enjoying recently:
- The new Banks album is just really, really good.
- As is the new Stray From The Path single.
- Hereās my February playlist.
- Sam Richardās The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God has a cover that makes me want to play DCC and is packed full of great, weird, heartfelt horror.
- I donāt know if itās accurate to say that I enjoyed Quinn B. Rodriguezās malaise. but I felt very seen by it.
Thereās probably more I should say and include, but Iām still recovering from surgery and my brain is a fog of codeine and discomfort. As always, here is a picture of my cat.
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Tunnels & Trolls 2025
So the cat is finally out of the bag and Rebellion have properly announced the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls. For the past almost-two-years I've been working with Rebellion and Scott Malthouse to develop the new edition and I haven't been able to say a word about it, which has been killing me.
I still can't talk about what we've actually been working on (or I don't know what I can talk about, anyway) and I tend to think the "I can acknowledge that I worked on this but can say nothing else" stage of working under NDAs is the most frustrating one, but I can say that I've really enjoyed seeing this come together and I think people are going to really like it. There will also be people who really fucking hate it, of course, but the old editions aren't going anywhere if that's the case. I'm still playing 5th edition just like I still play OD&D or AD&D 2e. (Yeah, I know. 2e isn't the cool one. It's still my favourite.)
I'm looking forward to actually being able to talk about this more. And I'm still hoping I can convince Rebellion to let me write an updated Dungeon Of The Bear.
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A Dungeon Game Session 2 - Play Report
Use the tags to find play reports from previous sessions.
This was another small group, the same players as last time. Having not mapped the dungeon in the previous session they entered through the main entrance and began sketching the layout of the place.
Here I got a positive encounter result very early in the session.
Soon after entering they emerged into one of the first corridors after the initial rooms and were set to continue south, as they had done last time, when they heard the sound of heavy, clawed feet on stone and laboured breathing echoing up the southern passage. They quickly ducked back into the first chamber and closed the door, waiting for whatever it was to pass or leave.
Pass it did, the heavy sounds scraping past the door and along the corridor to the west before fading from hearing. After a few moments of waiting they re-emerged into the corridor, where they found the walls scraped and scuffed as though by blades. Someone jokingly suggested that this might be an armoured porcupine. Whatever it was, the group were keen to avoid it, and so headed south, ignoring the chamber where they had met the Rusted Hammer members excavating the statue previously.
Previously they had run due south, so today they decided to explore in a new direction. First, though, the group chose to once again examine the room with the metal hoop in it, embedded in a wall beside one of the two doors. As they examined it they heard the snuffling creature on the other side of that door, and were careful to keep the noise down should it hear them.
After inspecting the hoop, which was mounted onto a metal pole that disappeared into the masonry, Plorg decided to simply pull it out of the wall. The pole extended for a few feet before the group heard the distinct sound of the doors of this room locking, and a heavy thud from beyond the western door. That thud was met with a growl from whatever the large creature was, which began to move in the corridor beyond the door. Its noises quickly faded from earshot again.
The group realised that this might serve as a good safe room in future but, seeing no other use for it and not wishing to investigate beyond the western door where the beast was known to be, they pushed the hoop back into the wall, opened the doors, and continued to the east into new territory.
After exploring a few empty rooms and finding little but crumbling masonry and damp, the group came to a large chamber filled with old dog cages that held the bones of long-dead hounds. Through a hole in the wall they heard a deep, rhythmic rumbling from the next room - something like snoring, but too bassy and loud to come from any human. They also found a door to the south that they were unable to open.
As they were investigating it they heard the sounds of doors slamming from somewhere in the dungeon to the north. This was the result of a positive encounter roll. Many of the encounters on the table for this floor of the dungeon are not creatures but simply noises to add some atmosphere. Itās not fully known to the players yet but this level has been explored by the Rusted Hammer and is largely uninhabited aside from one or two wandering creatures.
In response to the noises from the north, Gladys spiked the door shut. This left the group with no easy way to escape in an emergency, but also would hopefully keep them separated from whatever or whoever was moving around out there. Iāve been running this dungeon from a spreadsheet. The map is marked out in coloured cells and room keys are added as notes. That makes it really easy to make notes about things players do to alter the environment and trust that I wonāt miss them when they come back to previously-explored rooms. I highly recommend running games this way.
The door to the south of the dog room was stuck shut and couldnāt be opened. The group debated crowbarring it open, but the snoring from the west put them off. Poking their heads through the hole in the wall into that room they saw a passage immediately to the south. The room itself was too big for them to be able to see the thing making the noise, which lay somewhere to the north, but it also meant that they felt safe slipping through and taking the passage.
A Dungeon Game doesnāt have anything like Perception checks. I debated having the players roll under their Agility to be quiet, but rather than calling for rolls I simply made an encounter check myself and decided that there was a 2-in-6 chance of the creature being disturbed. It remained sleeping.
To the south they found a network of rooms and passages that quickly led back to the door to the dog room, which they now saw was nailed shut from this side. They pried the nails out, giving them a way back without going through the snoring room.
In a side chamber they found some empty coffins, a small wooden chest, and a severed arm with a gold ring on its hand. Trying to take the ring caused the crawling hand to animate and attack, trying to climb Gladysā pick to get to her throat. With all characters successfully rolling under their Agility and acting before the creature, Manev immediately set the thing on fire with his torch, and it burned to cinders while Plorg held out his holy symbol and attempted to perform a turning.
Monev asked if he was able to set the crawling hand on fire, and we agreed that if his attack hit and was either a critical or dealt full damage, it would ignite. His attack initially missed, but he Exerted himself to convert it into a success. His initial damage roll was 5, and he used his daily Scar to make that into a 6. The crawling hand had 7 hit points, so I ruled that it took more damage at the start of its go due to being on fire and immediately perished. This was a really nice use of the few crunchy bits of A Dungeon Game, and it was nice to see a player engaging with them in a way that felt fun and meaningful.
With the crawling hand dead the group were able to take the ring and the chest, which was filled with gemstones. Sensing that time might be running out they decided to explore one more room, finding a large chamber to the south with a huge iron plate in the ground and pulleys hanging over its corners. They deduced that this may have been used in the past to open an entrance to a lower floor, but all the mechanisms were either rusted shut or missing. They might return in future, but for now it was time to return home.
I still donāt have an āescapeā procedure that I like, so I just made an encounter check on a 2-in-6 as they left the dungeon. The increased odds were due to them moving faster through already-mapped territoriy - less cautious, louder, more likely to attract attention. There was no encounter, though, and the group successfully escaped and banked their XP. Since we do a week between delves in both real time and game time, Monev had a chance to recover his Exerted Brawn, which now sits at 17 - one away from the maximum of 18.
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A Dungeon Game Session 1 - Play Report
A small group this session, just three players, two of whom had played in the first session of this dungeon over a year ago and one who was new.
Although it's been over a year since we last visited this dungeon the veterans quickly got their bearings in the first couple of rooms, remembering the spot where they had fought the bear and heading to the small side chamber to see if Josh and his friend were still excavating the statue in the wall. They found the chamber abandoned, and saw evidence of a small cave-in that had slowed progress on the excavation. (This was the result of a setback roll on my part in the goal tracking for the Rusted Hammer faction.)
Alone in the room, the party turned their attention to the large metal door in the southern wall. Old, hinges rusted shut, and covered in ancient runes, it immediately screamed "open me". Gladys set about hacking at the hinges with a pickaxe and had soon done enough damage that the rest of the group was able to lift the (very heavy) door away from the opening and prop it against the wall, giving access to the room beyond. Inside they found a low well capped with a thick lead disc, and noticed black ooze emerging from the mortar between the bricks. They decided to leave well enough alone and, replacing the door, headed back into the dungeon to explore.
Faced with a labyrinth of corridors, and with nobody volunteering to map the route, the group took the decision to always choose the southern passage at junctions. This led them down a long corridor with a few doors to the sides, which they ignored.
Soon they came to a small chamber with carvings of leering, demonic faces at the tops of the walls. They were faced with two exits, a short flight of stairs descending to the south or a door to the east that had been nailed shut. Being the foolhardy adventurers that they are, they decided to open the door. Gladys pried out the iron nails with her crowbar, and they opened it onto a small chamber. In the southeast corner stood a sculpture of a tree with a leering face emerging from the trunk, one of its eyes a gleaming red ruby. Skeletal bodies were scattered on the floor around it, and the group immediately sensed danger. Gladys threw one of the iron spikes from the door into the room and the group watched as the skeletons immediately animated. The adventurers reacted quickly, closing the door and holding it shut against the skeletons while Gladys replaced the nails to seal it again.
During this I was rolling for encounters due to the noise, but all rolls came up empty.
Pusning further to the south they approached the stairs, and there was some debate about whether these were stairs leading down to a deeper level or not. Seeing that they only descended for around ten feet the group followed them, led by Monev and their ten foot pole. At the bottom they found a short corridor and then another flight of stairs rising back up, as though the passage had simply passed under something.
After probing the floor, roof, and steps with the pole to check for traps the group climbed the stairs and found themselves in a room filled with broken crates holding rotten fruit and vegetables and crawling with fruit flies. Ignoring a heavy portcullis to the west Monev headed for a passage to the south, only to become cut off from the group when a huge jelly-like substance rose up from the rot. Monev offered the creature (the group dubbed it the "fruit jelly") his helmet as a peace offering but it didn't seem interested.
Taking the initiative Gladys stepped forward, reaching around the jelly with a pickaxe to allow Monev to take hold of it and be pulled free. As Monev was dragged out of danger the creature struck, bringing Monev almost to unconsciousness and also dissolving his shield.
Seeing that a fight may well be a bad idea, Monev coated the ground in lamp oil and ignited it, giving the group time to run. Here I rolled 3d6 - the duration of a lantern - to determine how long the oil on the floor would burn for, and ruled that although the "fruit jelly" is not weak against fire it would obviously not seek to immerse itself in the stuff if it can avoid it, so it would not give chase.
Wounded and shaken the group retreated back up the corridor, taking some time to explore the side rooms on the way back. They found a small set of stacking bear dolls that they will be able to sell in town, and located what appears to be a puzzle in one of the early rooms - a metal hoop extruding from the wall, with no obvious use yet.
Our hour up, they retreated back to town to rest and recuperate until next week.