Good Monday, Gamer!

The very first Monday Musing — June 26, 2023, released from the Substack paywall today — has 🤔 standing in for the 🤬 that would eventually take over. It was about Cortex Prime wrangling, Wizard Time, returning to Jorune, and budgets.

Three years and 155 more Mondays later, here we are.

🤬 Lifted: Primed by CORTEX. FINALLY.

In Musings #1, I was wrangling Cortex Prime mods for Lifted. Trying to figure out which ones to turn, which ones to leave alone, which ones would make the game feel like a superhero game I wanted to run. Took about three years of running it at tables, tearing it apart, rebuilding it, running it again. Mostly in the wrong direction.

My mods: Relationships (asymmetrical, evolving, a full Hx), Entanglements (personal complications as the cost of advancement), and Antagonists (the whole back half of the book, frankly). Plus the contest and test spine that Cortex gives you when you strip out what you don’t need.

🤬 GRIMOIRES, AND THE LONG WAY ROUND

The wizard energy never left. It just took a left turn into a CRPG prototype I’ve been calling Grimoires — a Vance-inspired mage game where magic is scarce, weird, and requires study. I started prototyping in DragonRuby. I’ve since moved to SDL3 and C++. The prototype is rougher but more real. Turn-based battler with TTRPG mechanics in the engine.

Alongside it, a smaller demo-thing called Zero Day Heroes. Different register — closer to a quick-play proof of concept. Two things building at the same time, which is its own kind of madness and also exactly how I’ve always worked.

The zero-budgeting angle has evolved too. In Musings #1 I was running a Google Sheet. Now I’m running a Docker Rails app I built and am currently dogfooding. The GM who codes continues to be his own worst client.

🤬 JORUNE.

Still want it. Still out of reach. That’s the whole update.

🤬 JUDD, AND SORCERER.

Judd Karlman is still one of my very good friends and Sorcerer is still one of the GOATs.

🤬 A BAD DREAM.

I had a dream recently where I was playing Cyclops in a Champions game. Not a very good version of Cyclops. The GM in the dream was yelling at me that I was playing Cyclops wrong and didn’t know how to play Champions. 🤷🏾

🤬 CURRENT MUSINGS

Project Hail Mary. Finished watching it — what a good story, what solid reveals. Going into the novel next, hoping the movie left out depth and tangents. They often do.

Dragonbane. Got my Free League box of hernias over the weekend. Been scanning through it and it’s doing things I wasn’t expecting. Might be what we play at my IRL table after we wrap Occulted KC: Monster of the Week.

Rich Rogers and I are teaming up for Wild Talents: The eXorcists — an X-Men-style game set post-Krakoa. We’ve got a team: Old Man Creed, Polaris, Pixie, and Mimic. All misfits. One-Roll Engine supers. Should be X-citing!!

🤬 DAD STUFF.

I’ve got what feels like a side gig trying to help my newly high school-graduated kid find his footing. It’s a thing. Half the time I think I should just get him on the path to being self-employed. Like dad. The job hunt is REALZ.

Three years of Mondays. Thanks for being here.

Catch ya in the next post.

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Good Monday, Gamer!

For 154 Mondays, I’ve written about other people’s games. Twilight: 2000. Burning Wheel. The Black Sword Hack. Mythic Bastionland. Apocalypse World. Coriolis. Monster of the Week. I wrote about them because I love them, because I’ve run them, because the table taught me stuff. Stuff that helped me make my own things that I hope people play.

“I ain’t got no body by Jake” - LL Cool Jay.

🤬 LIFTED: INDOMITABLE

My big, solo (sorta) TTRPG project.

I launched the Kickstarter for Lifted: Vault 01 almost three years ago, thinking I had the setting framed and the system locked in. Cortex Prime plus Marvel Heroic toolset, drop the Lifted world on top, ship it, profit. Then I started running it. And I figured out pretty quick — we already got this game. Back to the drawing board.

Lifted: Indomitable is what the table built. Ordinary folks with extraordinary powers living in a tech-aggressive world. The heroes aren’t organized because the heroes aren’t organized is the point. No Avengers. No JLA. The good guys are misfits, and getting them organized is the players’ job, session zero forward.

Here’s what’s lifted from those tables:

• Relationships, but asymmetrical and evolving. The way real comic-book teams actually feel — somebody owes somebody, somebody hurt somebody, somebody isn’t speaking to somebody. The Fastball Special needs a relationship. Without it, two players coordinating a move is just two players coordinating. With it, it’s a moment.

• Death, mechanized. You can go out in a blaze of glory. You can come back later. Comics taught us how this works; the rules just had to listen.

• Entanglements. Personal complications. Enemies, debts, histories that won’t stay buried. The cost of advancement is more story.

• Antagonists, antagonists, antagonists. Three more times for emphasis. Threat dice that grow every session an antagonist is in the field. Agenda pools for the ones with grand schemes. Mjollnir. RUBICON. Dr. Faust. Abzu and New Atlantis. The Dead Presidents Society. The Arbiter. Most of my page count goes to the people the heroes have to stop — antagonists.

Hand a GM the antagonist toolbox. Trust the players to make the heroes. And you’ve got games.

Right now, I’ve got 230 pages of Indomitableness. Nathan and I did the final walkthrough of the manuscript last week. He’s on the last layout pass. After three years of outline, write, run, revise, run, revise — the book has its shape. Layout is the last gate.
Then it’s done.

🤬 MAD-DICE

RollWithMe.xyz flatlined and I fumbled three games in a row. That’s the origin story of mad-dice.com.

I’m a console gamer these days. My PC-tinkering years are behind me — I spent the day job slinging code and SSHing into VAX/VMS systems, and by the time I got home the last thing I wanted was another tech headache. So I’m picky about TTRPG software because I know how it should feel. I love Foundry when the modules are great (Free League’s Twilight: 2000 module is the gold standard — 50+ sessions logged). Owlbear Rodeo saves me when a system isn’t supported. But for a Zoom-and-dice night with friends, RollWithMe was the move, until it wasn’t. So I built Mad-Dice.

“To do it, you do it.” mashed up with my programmer credo: as simple as possible, but not simpler. I set out to build a thing that does what I actually want — roll dice, chat, drop in images, no fuss, no logins required to start a room. As effortless as posting to a social feed.

What’s live on mad-dice.com today:

• Real-time dice rolling with any notation you’d want — 2d6+1d4, 4d6k2, 5d6s5 — IYKYK.

• Chat alongside the rolls. Game feel, not just numbers.

• Image uploads and inline art straight into the feed.

• Dogfooded in public. I ran a CBR+PNK actual play on Mad-Dice last spring — a Gone in 60 Seconds-flavored Forged in the Dark heist series in Gibson’s BAMA sprawl, three nights, fifteen high-value vehicles to boost. Diegetic player pitch, encrypted mission briefs, the works. Wrote it up as Ghost in Virtual Seconds and Pt2. Every session was a bug report I gave myself.

Cortex Prime-readiness is the goal. Not there yet.

🤬 TINYCON.EVENTS

Warhorn announced it was sunsetting (or changing hands — the details got murky) and a bunch of event-organizing friends panicked in my inbox at the same time. Where do we run our events now? Different versions of the same question from people who’d built whole conventions on the platform. I had an answer in the back of my head, because I ran Games On Demand Online in 2020/21. TinyCon.Events is my answer. Community-funded. Ad-free, forever. Never sells your data. Works for a one-time game night, a house con, a full convention. The platform serves the gamers, not the platform. But it can’t be free. So I ran a Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter came up short. The question I kept getting was “why annual funding? Just do subscriptions.” Even con organizers asked me that. Warhorn used PWYW subscriptions — and not many folks used it that way, not many cons that could did...until it was going away. I learned some stuff. The TinyCon manifesto still stands. I’m working out the next moves. I’ve got some ideas.

🤬 THE MAD JAY CATALOG

Setting up shop on the brand-new rpg-trader.com — creator-direct, no middleman, no algorithm...yet.

• Lifted: Vault 01 — the original Kickstarter zine. The setting primer. The first time Lifted showed up in print for Champions Now.

• By Aecer’s Light — a smaller zine, my first. Burning Wheel, Dunegon World and mices.

• Lifted: Vol 1 — the Indomitable PDF. When it’s done. Soon.

• PF Greatest Crits — a best-of-Play-Fearless zine. The newsletter as artifact. With a couple of guest contributors.

• T2K: Heavy is the Crown — my one-shot-plus scenario for Twilight: 2000.

• The Dictionary of Fearless Gaming — it’s got a few entries missing...but maybe those are guest authors?

Watch the rpg-trader profile. I’ll announce drops in the new home as they ship.

🤬 THE MOVES

A few things landing in the new spaces over the next few weeks:

Diceology — the podcast — is getting a reboot and a new website. I’ve been running SecretKC (my Kansas City cocktail and nightlife newsletter) on Beehiiv, and it’s been AWESOME, so Diceology is moving over there too.

Dice Unknown — a new Diceology AP series — kicks off with a Rich Rogers collab: Wild Talents: The eXorcists. Rich and I have been talking about doing something together for a while. Wild Talents is Greg Stolze’s One-Roll Engine supers game, and The eXorcists from the Lifted antagonist roster is the game. A different system’s take on a corner of my setting.

Muses of Play Season I has wrapped — final episodes are in edit. We’re talking about Season II guests now.

Play Fearless moves to Beehiiv. You won’t need to do anything — you’re already on the train. There are plenty of solid reasons to leave Substack these days; the extreme lack of support for the Games category is mine. The move opens up a lot I can’t do here. (Beehiiv, like Free League, doesn’t pay me to say that, but it’s still true!)

MadJayZero on Patreon remains the workhorse. I’m working out tiers to include TinyCon and Mad-Dice and fund their maintenance and development. Current Play Fearless subscribers will be folded in.

Grimoires and Zero Day Bandits are still WIP. ZDB more demo-ish than Grimoires. These are my moves into making indie video games. I’ve gotten to meet other indie devs and some pro indie folks and talk about bit-slinging. I’m on track for a demo debut for Steam’s Octoberfest. And yes...Beehiiv will let me segment posts for folks who care about this stuff too!

One more Monday Musing left.

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Catch ya next week!

Posted as part of W.F. Smith’s Random Blogwagon at Prismatic Wasteland. Roll your own day, write your own post. I got: ‘post on June 7th.’

Pull a card out of a 52-card deck and the deck changes. The probability shifts. The cards remaining are the cards remaining. Pull twenty more without reshuffling and you’ll watch the deck get colder — fewer suits, lower variance, the deck telling you what it has left to give.

A deck of cards is a randomizer with memory.

It’s the property Free League’s Twilight: 2000 (4th Ed.) builds its encounter deck around: a randomizer that runs out of one suit while another climbs, a randomizer that knows what it’s already given you. Their deck is post-apoc-shaped — but the mechanism is portable, and I’m gonna lay it out for you.

Three procedures below. One poker deck. You got this.

🤬 THE GRAMMAR

Before the procedures, the grammar. Two axes do the work for all three.

Suit is category. Every procedure uses the same four suits in the same conceptual slots.

♠ Spades — Threat. Force. Power. The things that hunt.

♣ Clubs — Faction. Order. Alliance. The things that belong.

♥ Hearts — Social. Bonds. Needs. The things that ache.

♦ Diamonds — Change. Strangeness. Knowledge. The things that transform.

Value is intensity.

• 2–5 — Less. Quiet, subtle, easy to miss.

• 6–9 — Plain. What it is, no exaggeration.

• 10–J — Strong. A defining trait.

• Q–K — Dominant. This trait runs the show. Everything else moves around it.

• A — Singular. The subject IS this trait. Nothing else explains it.

That’s the whole language. Learn it once, every procedure below uses it.

🤬 PROCEDURE 1 — ENCOUNTERS

The pull: Draw 1 card when an encounter check is needed.

Suit tells you what walks onto the road:

♠ Spades — A threat. Predator, hostile patrol, ambush waiting. The thing that hunts.

♣ Clubs — A faction. Patrol, scouts, rival party, NPCs with their own agenda.

♥ Hearts — A find. Travelers, locals, ruins, a place of welcome.

♦ Diamonds — A condition. Weather, terrain shift, omen, supernatural bleed.

Value tells you the weight:

• 2–5 — Minor. Background flavor. Skirt-able.

• 6–9 — Standard. Engage or evade. Costs resources either way.

• 10–J — Significant. Real stakes. Could derail the day.

• Q–K — Major. Named monster, faction leader, sea-change.

• A — Iconic. The thing this region is known for.

Example pull: Queen of Spades. A major threat. The named predator that haunts this stretch of road — and you already prepped it. Or you didn’t, and you make it up now. Either way, the deck just told you what the next encounter at the table is about.

The deck is not reshuffled until it’s empty. That means the more Spades you’ve pulled this season, the fewer threats are left in the deck right now. The wilderness has memory.

🤬 PROCEDURE 2 — THE NPC DISPOSITION

The pull: Draw 1 card as the encounter begins, before the PCs speak. This sets the NPC’s disposition.

Suit tells you what they want:

♠ Spades — Wants you gone. Out of their territory, off their road, away from their kin.

♣ Clubs — Wants something from you. Information, goods, a job done, a tax paid.

♥ Hearts — Wants something with you. Companionship, trade, alliance, news from the road.

♦ Diamonds — Wants something despite you. You’re incidental. They’re after something else.

Value tells you the intensity:

• 2–5 — Mild. Negotiable. Talkable.

• 6–9 — Firm. Will hold the line. Won’t escalate first.

• 10–J — Committed. Will escalate to get what they want.

• Q–K — Driven. Violence is on the table.

• A — All-in. This is their last day or their first day. Nothing held back.

Example pull: 4 of Hearts. Mild, companionable. The bandit chief lowers his bow as the PCs come around the bend. “You traveling north? We’ve not had honest news from the Pass in a season.” Probably still bandits. But you can talk.

Suit-plus-value gives you what they want and how badly they want it. Two axes of information from one pull — and a real replacement for reaction tables that keep coming up neutral.

🤬 PROCEDURE 3 — THE DIVINATION

This one is slower. Three cards. For the kitchen at midnight with a coffee and your prep notes open. Or, just as well, at a full table of players with a light prep sheet.

The pull: When you need to know something — about an NPC the PCs are about to meet, a place they’re about to enter, a faction whose name just appeared on a tapestry, an item whose nature you haven’t decided — release your question and pull three cards in order.

• Card 1: The Face. What it appears to be. The public knowledge. The first impression.

• Card 2: The Hunger. What it wants. It’s drive. The thing it would risk everything for.

• Card 3: The Wound. What it hides. The lie, the scar, the secret that explains the gap between the Face and the Hunger.

Suit and value mean the same things they mean in Procedures 1 and 2. The slot tells you how to read the card.

A worked example: the swamp ruins up north

PCs gonna PC. They decided to go north to the swamp ruins instead of west, like I’d prepped. What’s up north in the ruins? I pulled three. Here’s what the deck gave me, and how I read it:

Face — 6 of Hearts. Plain. Bond / Care / Need.
Hunger — 8 of Spades. Plain. Threat / Force / Power.
Wound — 9 of Spades. Plain–Strong. Threat / Force / Power.

The Face is a Heart. Plainly. The ruins look like a place defined by bond, care, or need. Locals talk about them with grief, not fear. Travelers who’ve gone in say “someone’s still in there. They wanted help.” The ruins were somebody’s home — a healer’s holdfast, a small order, a hermit-temple. Whatever the ruins do now, the face they show the world is mournful and welcoming.

The Hunger is a Spade. Plainly. What the ruins want is to feed. Not metaphorically. The presiding thing in the ruins — spirit, parasite, slow curse, whatever — wants bodies inside it. An 8 means it’s well-fed enough to be patient. It eats when food walks in, then it sleeps.

The face is welcoming because the welcome is a trap.

The Wound is another Spade. Higher. A 9. This is the twist. You’d expect the Wound to be soft — a sad frailty hiding under the bigger story. Instead the deck drew another threat, stronger than the hunger.

The hidden thing is even more dangerous than the hunger.

The face is a sad bond. The drive is hunger. The secret is that the hunger isn’t the worst thing here.

The ruins are a containment site. The healer’s order that lived here was sworn to keep something buried, and they failed — or didn’t fail, depending on how you read it. The slow hunger that ate them is now the lock on the deeper thing. Every soul the ruins eat is one more soul keeping the seal. The PCs will come because someone needs help. They’ll find the hunger and think it’s the boss fight. They’ll be wrong.

That’s the game. Twelve minutes of interpretation, full architecture: hook, encounter, twist.

The pull also tells me what the dungeon isn’t. No Aces, no court cards. This isn’t an iconic legendary site. It’s a workhorse — a real place that operates at the plain-to-strong end. I can drop it in any swamp on any hexmap and it holds.

The suit repetition is the move. Two Spades on Hunger and Wound is the deck saying this place is fundamentally about violence, even when it doesn’t look it. If the Wound had come up a Heart, I’d have a tragic place. A Diamond, I’d have a strange place. Another Spade meant layered violence — which is the most dungeon-shaped result the deck can give.

🤬 THE GANGSTER OF LOVE (OPTIONAL)

Leave the two Jokers in the deck if you want a wild card in the literal sense — the moment when the game responds to the players specifically.

When a Joker comes up, something the players did has consequences. GM’s prerogative. The Joker is the “the world is responding to you specifically” card — not a random encounter, not a passing weather front, but a consequence with a name on it. A burned contact comes calling. A favor gets cashed in. A trail the PCs thought went cold lights back up. The seal they cracked last session leaks something new.

After a Joker comes up, set it aside for the rest of the session. Shuffle it back in next session. The Jokers track the living state of the campaign — they’re the cards that remember the players’ fingerprints.

Two Jokers is a soft setting. Want more? Add a deck of Tarot’s Major Arcana. Want less? Pull one Joker out. The deck is yours.

🤬 WHAT CARDS DO

Three things, briefly:

Combinatorics. A single card pull is 1-in-52. A three-card ordered pull is 1-in-132,600. You will never roll the same Divination twice. Your campaign’s NPCs and places won’t start to feel sampled-with-replacement — they’ll feel found.

Memory. Procedures 1 and 2 don’t reshuffle until the deck empties. The wilderness empties out. The dispositions empty out. The world is a finite pool of possibilities, and it changes as the campaign moves through it. Reshuffle when the deck runs dry, and mark the moment in fiction — the season turns, the war ends, the comet passes. Or vice-versa. The game breathes in cycles instead of running on a static random table.

Interpretation. A card says Queen of Hearts. That’s an image before it’s a number. The GM does more imaginative work with cards because the cards suggest before the table tells them what the suggestion means. You’re a step away from Tarot now — which has been doing this exact job for six hundred years.

🤬 THE TRICK

The deck on your shelf — the ones you get for all sorts of promo stuff and haven’t shuffled ever — has been a TTRPG tool the whole time. You didn’t need Mörk Borg’s deck, the Deck of Many Things, or a $50 indie oracle. You needed three procedures and a poker deck.

T2K showed me what cards can do at the table. The procedures above are what cards can do at my table — and yours, if you want them. Cut the deck. Pull a card. Read the suit. Your world will tell you what it is.

Spades hunger. Hearts ache. Clubs muster. Diamonds change.

That’s the whole trick.

Abracadabra.

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Play. Run. X-Card. Forever.

You know the parlor game Kiss, Marry, Kill (AKA F/M/K). Three names. Pick one to do for the rest of your life. Pick one for fun. Pick one to send to the void. Every party in America for thirty years.

This Monday, it’s TTRPGs.

The rules: one game I’d play forever — receiver-side only, never picking up the screen. One game I’d run forever — the home address of my GM life. One game I’d X-Card forever — the one I’m tapping out of and not looking back.

Forever is the operative word. Not “favorite right now.” Not “currently in rotation.” Forever. The pick has to survive my future self, the next ten years of releases, the next ten years of my own taste shifting. Three games. Three verbs. No takebacks.

Here are mine.

▌ RUN FOREVER — TWILIGHT: 2000 (Free League)

Of course, it’s Twilight: 2000.

Fifty-plus sessions with the Kalisz crew told me this answer years ago. Free League’s reboot of the 1984 grimdark Polish countryside is the game I’ve already chosen forever, by hours logged. Every other game on my shelf is in a polyamorous situationship with my GMing time. T2K is my main squeeze; my shawty; my Ace.

Every campaign I’ve run is better since my run on T2K — Black Sword Hack, Monster of the Week, Hallas through Moria, all of it — got better because T2K taught me what scarcity does to a sandbox. Fuel matters. Ammo matters. People matter. The encounter mechanics do the heavy lifting. The sandbox is alive. The whole machinery is built to let you sit back and let the players push and we all FAFO.

I will run T2K at the FLGS. I will run T2K online. I will run T2K at a con. I will run T2K when I’m 100 and the players are someone’s grandkids who don’t know what the Cold War was. I’ll run it in 2030, 2040, 2050. I will run it after the world ends.

You are on your own. You always were. That’s the game.

▌ PLAY FOREVER — CARTEL

Cartel is the one where I want to be in the player’s seat, running, desperate and giggling.

Mark Diaz Truman’s PBTA take on narco-fiction, I’ve always respected from the GM side and always enjoyed from the player side. Some games you want to run because you can’t wait to see what you’d do with the prep. Other games you want to play because the fiction is the gift, like pumpkin cheesecake— and you want somebody else to hand it to you.

Cartel is that for me. The premise is tight: Durango, Mexico, the drug trade, the costs that come with the work, the cultures and sub-cultures. The playbooks are sharp. The system is asking moral questions that the GM should be steering, not me. I’m not quite the right voice to run this game, but I’ve met plenty of GMs who are. Mark Truman and the Magpie crew, to start with, do a great job of teaching the game and its culture, and letting situations get out of hand. Carmella, Miguel, and Vaughn are others who were ABSOLUTELY cooking one-shots at the con tables I sat at. Each bringing something new and fantastic culturally, sub-culturally, that blew my mind, I love them for that.

Forever doesn’t mean easy. It means I’d come back to this even when it’s hard, even when the table got somewhere uncomfortable, even when the genre is asking me what I think I’m doing here. Cartel, Sagas of the Icelanders, The Velvet Glove, Jiangshi, these games keep me honest about why I show up to a TTRPG at all. If I’m at a table that’s playing this game, I’m there to pick up what the game is putting down. Let’s ride.

I keep talking about wanting to see what the Black American culture TTRPG looks like — and one of the reasons I think about it is because Cartel exists and demonstrated that this register is possible. Specific. Rooted. Hard. Worth playing. Even if some folks hide from it.

I’ll play at this table forever.

▌ X-CARD FOREVER — FREEMARKET

Sweet Cthulhu... For realz. I tried. I’m tapping out.

The X-Card protocol doesn’t require an explanation. I’m at this table. I’m not going to play this thing. No further conversation. And then the game moves on. Which means I could stop right here.

But forever deserves a sentence or three. So:

Freemarket — Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen’s 2010 post-scarcity TTRPG, the one with the cards and the reputation tracks and the whole Donaldsonist memetics of it — has long since been sold from my stash. I have played a handful of sessions and campaigns. I have read the rules cover to cover. I have read other people’s actual plays. I have tried to figure out what I was missing. I have tried to give it the benefit of the doubt I give every Luke Crane joint, because Burning Wheel rewired me, and I wanna be transformed.

And every time, the game failed me.

The reputation economy didn’t engage me. The card mechanic felt like a procedure I was performing on top of the fiction instead of through it. The post-scarcity setting kept asking me to care about social currency in a way the table never made matter. WHAT DO I DO???

Other people love this game. They’re not wrong. There’s a real audience for it. I’m just not it. I don’t dig okra either.

That’s why I’m X-Carding instead of burning. Burning (Kill) a game says this is bad for the hobby. X-Carding a game says this is fine for the hobby, but it isn’t for me, and I’m done explaining why. Forever doesn’t have room for the ones I’m still hoping will click.

The X-card is on the table. I’m out. ✌🏽

but forever is a mighty long time...

The point of forever isn’t about the choices. It’s about what the choices make you admit.

Picking T2K to run forever means I admit the kind of GM I am. I’m a sandbox-and-crunch guy. The other things I run are vacations. My home address is the WW III that never was.

Picking Cartel to play forever means there are tables I belong at as a player. The good GMs in my life have been a gift. I want to be on the receiving end of someone else’s take for the rest of my playing life, in a cultural/diverse register that I respect too much to drive. A high-octane, frenetic, desperate session is just 👨🏽‍🍳🤌💋 — I want this shyt forever, mane.

X-Carding Freemarket forever means I admit which games I’ll never get and I’m done being polite about it. There are too many games. The shelf is too deep. Forever doesn’t have room for the maybes. I only got so many Saturdays left.

What are yours? Drop them in the comments. Play forever, run forever, X-Card forever. No takebacks.

2 Mondays Left.

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Catch ya next week!

I drafted this post with the word impact in the title, and it kept sounding wrong. Impact is what a car does to a wall. These games didn’t hit me — they got inside and moved the furniture around. So: rewired. The games that rewired me. The ones I can point at and say I was one kind of GM/Player before this, and a different one after.

Burning Wheel 1e → Gold. This game broke up my D&D group. I live in the same town as these dudes, I see them in our FLGS, and we don’t interact. BW showed me what TTRPGs could actually be about — Beliefs, Instincts, Traits, the whole machinery of a character who wants something and the mechanics to go get it. It also opened the door to the entire indie TTRPG space for me.

Apocalypse World. If Burning Wheel made the session about a player’s goals through mechanics, Apocalypse World articulated the part that we never say out loud: these sessions are conversations. Moves, principles, MC agendas — Vincent and Meguey Baker wrote down the things good GMs were already doing intuitively, and once you’ve seen it written down, you can’t unsee it.

Twilight: 2000 — the Survival Sandbox. I’m putting these together. Both from Free League, which says something, and I ran them both sandbox style. IMHO, the encounter mechanics and the encounter deck are the heart of this sandbox game.

• Twilight: 2000 (Free League). 50+ sessions of long-running play with the Kalisz crew, plus open-table con sessions. I went deep on this one. The grimdark Polish countryside is the obvious read, but the actual lesson was about scarcity as a campaign engine — when fuel matters and ammo matters and people matter, the sandbox runs itself.

• The One Ring 2E / Moria. Moria, the OG mega-dungeon. Open table, sandbox during Balin’s run to take back the Halls. The sandbox game IS the campaign. The many, many players are little anthologies with a themed through-line.

Running both taught me that “the TTRPG sandbox” needs to be normalized!

Ars Magica / Nobilis. It’s good to have big goals, big dreams. Covenants that span generations, Powers that command concepts. These are my twin whale games — one day I’ll get a proper table and campaign going.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Big-ass generational game. It doesn’t matter if you run it with ALL the expanded playbooks available or just two — I know. This game remains BIG in play. Walk away from anyone peddling a one-shot. 4–6 sessions minimum. 8–12 if you really wanna see something.

In a Wicked Age made me a believer. A djinn, a thief, and a talking pig go on an adventure...and I ain’t never been the same. Oracle-driven play, characters built from situational fragments, sessions that resolve into something you couldn’t have planned and wouldn’t have wanted to. And the ‘Owe List‘. IYKYK. Find this game, play it. Thank the Bakers. You’re welcome.

Under Hollow Hills. Love this game so much. It surprised me. I came in thinking “faerie circus PBTA, sure, fine, cozy blah blah” and left thinking about troupe play and circus-as-found-family and the whole design for weeks afterward. And it isn’t cozy...

The Velvet Glove. Gang girls knife-fighting in bathrooms since 1970. Few games are this confident about exactly what they are. The Velvet Glove has a tight premise — that history-through-game-lore that I love — and it’s a feature, not a constraint. Nahual, Saga of the Icelanders, and Cartel all fit in this space for me. It makes me think deeply about Black American culture: what does that TTRPG look like? I think I have a response.

Champions Now. The Jolt campaign is where I figured out I had opinions about supers TTRPGs at all. Champions Now folds a 40-year-old superheroes engine into something that feels like a modern indie game without losing what made the original work. It’s still the reigning champion of supers games for me, especially since Champions Now puts the soap opera of comics upfront and mechanized. The fight mechanics are gamey. Smallville and Marvel Heroic RPG are strong challengers...if Cam could mash those two together ❤️

The Black Sword Hack. Two concurrent campaigns in early 2025 and nine posts in two months. BSH proved to me that player buy-in at session zero isn’t a vibe — it’s a winning procedure. When players design the state of the world from the start, they show up to PLAY. Every session zero I’ve run since has more BSH in it than it does any other game. Remember it’s a conversation — even if the game doesn’t have a session zero procedure, we can talk through that.

Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. Weaves its culture into its lore, mechanics, and play... (yep, another one!) I’m always here for games that do that — where the setting and the system are saying the same thing, where you can’t pull them apart without breaking both. Musing on Birthdays and Jiangshi has more.

Coriolis, 1E Because space doesn’t have to be Federation White. Third Horizon’s whole texture — the syncretism, the Icons, the Arabian/Persian/North African influences carried through as setting bones rather than dressing. You can build a science fiction game out of cultures the genre has spent years ignoring, and the result isn’t novelty.

These are the ones that did the rewiring. The newsletter you’re reading is what came out the other side. You’ll notice some commonality in my picks. I should say I’m not on commission, kickbacks, or affiliation programs. Free League, the Bakers (and some PBTA games) are first class at what they do, IMEO. Games with tight premises and something to say are 🔥 These are all in my head as I consider: in the TTRPG space, what do I have to say?

What about you? What’s the game that broke your group up in the best possible way, or the one that surprised you, or the one you ran two campaigns of back-to-back because you couldn’t stop thinking about it? Drop it in the comments.

3 Mondays Left.

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Catch ya next week!

I write this newsletter every Monday, and a lot of weeks it feels like a solo act. Me, my notes, my opinions, and a deadline I made up. But none of it would exist without the rotating tables of friends, strangers, podcast guests, and one-shot drop-ins who have spent their evenings playing pretend with me since 2020.

The tables made the GM. The GM made the posts. The posts made the newsletter. And the newsletter is just me trying, every Monday, to be worth the time those people gave me at a table.

Straight outta Kalisz

If you’ve been here a while, you know about Kalisz. Twilight: 2000 — the Free League reboot — was the first campaign I really put on the page. Back in 2021 I was running sessions with the alpha rules, and I wrote So, you are on your own before session one even fired. Then GM’s Cut: Three from Kalisz. Then Return to Kalisz. Then SitRep 02 after three sessions of getting it on in the WW III that never was. What I didn’t write is how much I enjoyed those early Saturday mornings with Matt, Geoff, Neil, and Richard. 50+ sessions. I didn’t write about T2K for its mechanics or its grimdark Polish countryside — I wrote about it because of the sessions these guys made by showing up and bringing their A-game every week. Those online sessions are still my yardstick: for running sandboxes, for facilitating play online, for managing a long campaign without it collapsing under its own weight.

I just wanna shoot shit up in Twilight: 2000. — MadJay, never.

The Oracle of Scalu

I dug up from the depths of my cellars and ran Rolemaster II. The actual ICE crit-chart, percentile-system, fumble-table, “your-arm-falls-off-on-a-bad-roll” Rolemaster II.

The Scalu crew showed up week after week and what we got was nostalgia, sure — but also some understanding. That table — that specific group of people willing to sit and parse rules and read crit results out loud with me — that was the experience. Not a point of friction. Not a bug. Thank you Mark, Cam, Victor, and Dave. I would run RM again, for veteran and committed players only, and certainly for these folks.
My takeaway: the old games still work.

The Black Sword Hack(s)

Inspired by an Indie Game Reading Club thread about The Black Sword Hack, I ran two concurrent BSH campaigns. 100% Play to Find Out. Two tables of old and new gaming friends. Player buy-in FTW; BSH has this in spades baked in from session zero, players make picks that design the state of the world, and everyone is in on the ground floor of the setting’s lore.
FTW: Get your players’ buy-in.

The Bastionlands

The Pearl Knight Saga with Judd and Thomas was a ridunkulous amount of fun and drama. One GM, two players — it’s a great format. I’ve always enjoyed Judd’s flavor of the strange, and I loved the freedom to riff off Thomas across seven sessions of play. These sessions were full of trust, GM included. Judd runs a table where I can just dial in on being an unhinged player, and it feels good to just play.
Get yourself a GM you trust.

Maxwell and me

I’ve been running TTRPGs with Maxwell since he was 7 or 8 years old. One-on-one games across grades, family changes, and assorted hurdles of life. It’s our sacred space these days. Traveler and BX D&D were the early games — picked by me. Broken Worlds and CY_BORG are where we are today — picked by him. Games I would have skipped over, but I was happy to run them for him.
My pop’s love language is cooking for people. Mine is probably running games.

The Education of the One Shot.

I almost cut this part, then realized cons and one-shot tables are where I learned things fast — in real time, with folks I might not even know. A con table teaches you in four-hour sprints.
Does what you prepped deliver?
Is your tableside manner on point?
Can you play well with others?
How’s your ending?
GMs, IMHO, can’t hide behind worldbuilding or a running gag. You sit down with strangers, you put a thing on the table, and either it dances or it doesn’t. Every campaign I’ve run is better because of the one-shots that taught me what to cut — and what not to hold back.

One weird trick?!

The through line isn’t a system or a setting or a clever GM trick. It’s the people who keep showing up to roll dice with me. Saturday mornings in a ruined Poland. Wednesday nights parsing crit charts. Session zeros for games I’d never heard of two weeks earlier. Strangers at a con table giving me four hours of their weekend on faith.
You taught me everything I’ve put on these pages. The newsletter is our fingerprints, not just mine. The campaigns are our stories.

So — Geoff, Neil, Matt, Richard, the Scalu crew, both BSH crews, Judd, Aaron, Thomas, the Moria tables (especially that all Hobbit band), the CBR+PNK runners, Maxwell, every PAX walk-up, every Fearless Moot, the Occulted KC crew, every play-by-post weirdo, every podcast guest, every one-shot drop-in — thank you.

4 Mondays Left.

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CW: This one’s about AI (and politics, religion, and sex). I’m not telling you what to think about it.

There’s a conversation happening across spaces right now, and if you’ve spent any time in RPG spaces — forums, Discords, social feeds — you’ve seen it.

“Unfriend me if you use AI.” “AI is killing creativity.” “If you’re not using it, you’re falling behind.”

Strong positions. Hard lines. Little room in between.

I want to be clear up front about who I’m writing to. I’m not talking to the investors, the people training models, or the executives making policy calls. I have nothing useful to say to them, and they’re not reading this anyway. I’m talking to us — the GMs, the players, the indie designers, the folks running Discords and tables and small press operations, the con facilitators. The ones @-ing each other on a Tuesday afternoon over a tool none of us built.

That’s what I want to talk about. How we’re talking to each other about AI.

Here’s where I am, for the record.
I use AI*. I don’t shop at Target. I’ve never had Chick-fil-A. I’m into Shibari. I don’t like okra.
Those are all about me — my values, my beliefs, my interests. I’m prepared to talk about any of them, but I’m not interested in changing your mind on any of them either.

I’ve been running my software business since 2006. I’d be dumb AF not to engage with AI tools. I need to know how they impact my operations, my employees, and my clients. I need to understand why so much of the grant and loan money my clients use is suddenly heavy on AI tooling. That’s the job, and I like keeping food in my fridge.

“But Jay, ethics.” Yeah, I hear you. I wish the people building these models had wrestled with ethics before they shipped. We’d be in a very different place. But the fact that I use a tool built under questionable conditions doesn’t automatically make me unethical, and the fact that you don’t doesn’t automatically make you righteous. The situation is messier than that, and pretending otherwise is a big part of why these conversations go sideways. For sure, there are plenty of bad actors in these spaces using AI to make snake oil.
I’m not both-siding this topic. I’m the guy who believed mashing up a camera, an MP3 player, and your phone was DUMB. I LOATHE having to (maybe) opt out of BS upgrades I didn’t ask for. For some of us, engaging with AI isn’t optional. It’s already in the tools — sometimes quietly, sometimes aggressively, sometimes as a feature nobody asked for, sometimes because “work” said so. For others, it genuinely is a choice. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither is a moral verdict on the person on the other side of the screen. Especially us — the people, the consumers.

How I actually use this stuff

Here’s the honest inventory. Not the should I version. The what’s already happening version.
AI tooling is baked into most of the software I pay for. Adobe products. My coding IDEs. My cloud provisioning services. A lot of my vendors have it sitting in their support portals before I even open a ticket. My new phone shipped with Gemini, Moto AI, and Perplexity preinstalled. Some I’ve managed to shut off. Others I can’t even uninstall to get the storage back. It’s in my email client. It’s in my browsers. It’s in my search engines. These days I’m reading whatever Gemini surfaced at the top of a search before I scroll to the actual results — and I notice I’m doing it.

So that’s the floor. The “opting out” conversation, for me, starts at managing what’s already in the room.

On top of that, I use ChatGPT and Claude for actual work tasks. Remember, I’m a software guy by trade. Show me a software or hardware tech worker who refuses to use AI tools, and I’ll show you an unemployed person. It’s not even about that person; the paymasters are calling this dance, I’ve witnessed it.

For gaming stuff, early on, I generated art for locations and maps for games I was running, and made some banner images for past Play Fearless posts. The novelty was real. It was fun. And then it wore off, and I drifted back to Unsplash, personal photos, and Creative Commons material — not because I worked out a clean ethical position, but because I liked the feel of those better for art. I use Canva for player-facing handouts and other materials. Canva also has AI tooling now; it’s all too happy to organize, clean up, or lay out your stuff... and I often let it.

I still use Pinterest the most for inspiration, even though AI content is exploding there too. I’ve had Gemini in Gmail clean up technical language for non-technical clients and cool down hot language in emails I prolly shouldn’t send. None of this is a recommendation. It’s a description. I’m sharing it because I think the discourse goes better when people stop arguing from imagined positions and start telling the truth about what’s actually on their machines. What I’m experiencing is siloed conversations — anti-AI folks gathering to talk about how garbage it all is, and other spaces where folks are scared to talk about AI tooling they use (by choice or work demands) whisper. That sucks.

And then there’s this.
Last year, my kid told his Algebra II teacher he was planning to use ChatGPT to pull up his failing grade. She told me. I told him: absolutely not. That’s a fast way to lose every piece of electricity-using gear in your room. For sure.

Fail Algebra II if you have to — but fail it through struggle. Fail it working with the teacher. Let Algebra II beat that ass if it must. Go down fighting. Then at least you’ll know something about you and Algebra II. You’ll live.
Mark Hx.

I think a lot of the heat in the AI conversation comes from people trying to draw one line that covers all of those cases at once. I don’t think there is one. I think there are a lot of small lines, drawn case by case, and most of us are still figuring out where ours go. And they don’t have to be the same.
In tabletop spaces, I’m watching a different version of this play out. People drawing clear personal boundaries — and then extending those boundaries outward as expectations for everyone else.

“Don’t bring AI to my table.”
“Don’t publish with AI tools.”
“Don’t be part of this community if you use it.”

As I sign up to run games at conventions, there’s the question: “Is this AI-generated?” “Did you use AI?” I ask, how are you measuring? It’s prolly in the tools.

Boundaries are valid. Expectations are human. The hostility that sometimes rides shotgun with them is the part worth dialing back.
Here’s a thing I think is true and not said often enough: very few of us actually control the development of AI.
What we do control is much smaller and much closer to home:

• How we use the tools available to us

• How transparent we are about that use

• How we treat each other when our choices differ

That last one is the piece I see slipping the most, and it’s the one that bums me out the most. We’re spending an enormous amount of energy fighting about a thing we don’t control, and not enough on the thing we do — which is each other.

TTRPG players already know how to do this. We have decades of practice negotiating incompatible preferences without setting each other on fire. Safety tools. Lines and veils. The X-card. System debates. Playstyle mismatches. Tone calibration. Session zero. We have built, imperfectly but really, a culture around the idea that two people can want different things from a game and still sit at the same table — or decide, kindly, that they shouldn’t, and move on.

We have the muscles for this conversation. We just gotta flex them.
What that looks like, in practice, is unglamorous:

Ask questions instead of assuming intent. Explain your boundaries without turning them into ultimatums. Recognize that someone’s use of a tool — or refusal to use one — might be shaped by their job, their time, their access, their disability, or just where they are in their creative life right now. Leave room for people to change their minds, including yourself.

I don’t have answers for you or your table. I’m not going to tell you to use AI or not use it. That’s not the post.
The post is: we can’t slow the technology down on our own, but we can decide whether the way we talk about it makes the community stronger or more fractured. At the table, we already know how to do this. We listen. We negotiate. We build something together.

It might be worth bringing that same energy to this conversation, too.
I’m asking y’all to have kinder ones.

5 Mondays Left.

*I’m measuring by the tools, implicit and overt.

Catch ya next week.

ICYMI

TIL about Piecepak

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The Piecepack: My Favorite Tool You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

I’ve been saying it for years, and I’ll keep saying it: the best gaming tools are the ones that don’t lock you into a single ecosystem. No proprietary ruleset. No subscription. No “buy the expansion to unlock the full experience.” I believe deeply in open-source, affordable, and reusable resources for tabletop play, not as a philo…

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• Sarah Doom: A Year on Patreon

• 10 Years later with AWBO & Judd

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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

This is Monday Musings #150. There will be six more after this one. Then I’m wrapping the series. Three years of Mondays. Six more, and out. A complete campaign arc with a proper ending.

When I started Monday Musings back in June 2023, I didn’t have a plan. I had Cortex Prime in front of me, Lifted: Indomitable in pieces on my desktop, and the suspicion that if I didn’t write something every Monday I’d never write anything at all. 149 issues later, the discipline did its job. The work got made. The space got found — you showed up. I built habits I didn’t have. I learned to articulate what I actually think about prep, about player agency, about the difference between running a game and steering one. I didn’t learn those things by sitting and thinking. I learned them by writing to you on Mondays, deconstructing the tables and social gatherings of the previous week.

That’s the thing about a weekly newsletter — it’s not really for the reader. Or it isn’t only for the reader. It’s a forcing function. A weekly Monday is a writer holding their own feet to the fire and saying: something has to ship today, even if it’s a scatter of notes after a tornado week. And some weeks it was a scatter of notes.

But, But Why?!

Because the thing that made Monday Musings useful is also what’s holding me back from making the next thing. When you commit to Mondays, you start optimizing for Mondays. You write what fits a Monday. You think in 800-word-ish increments because that’s what a Monday holds. You start three deeper essays and finish none of them, because Monday can hold them.

I’ve got pieces I want to write that don’t fit a Monday. Played: It reviews that need a month of actual play under their belt. Tools and resources that take real cooking time. The Back Room posts I want to send to paying readers about things actually in process, not packaged after the fact. A zine. A move off Substack. An actual publishing rhythm built around depth instead of frequency.
So I’m choosing the other work.

What’s coming over the next six issues

I’m not going to drag this out. The runway is short and intentional:

• #151 — AI in TTRPG spaces. The hot one. I’ve been holding this piece for a while, and it’s time.

• #152 — What I got wrong. Three years of receipts. Things I’d take back, soften, or argue with now.

• #153 — The tables that made me. The actual humans and games behind everything I’ve written here.

• #154 — Played It: a final review for the Musings era. The format that’s becoming the new heartbeat.

• #155 — A reader’s companion. If you’re new, here are the posts to start with. If you’ve been here all along, here’s what held up.

• #156 — The move. Where I’m publishing next, what the new rhythm looks like, and how to adventure with me.

That’s the plan. I’ll change it if something better shows up, but that’s the shape today.

What this isn’t

This isn’t burnout. I’m not running on empty. I’m running on the opposite — there’s more work I want to do than I have hours, and Monday Musings has become the thing I do instead of the thing I want to do next. I gotta switch that up.

This isn’t goodbye. I’m not going anywhere. The newsletter continues — the format changes. Play Fearless is the body of work, the thing. Monday Musings was a chapter inside it. A long, useful, formative chapter. But a chapter.

What’s coming instead: A monthly-ish Played It review with a real month of table time behind it. Tools and resources I’ve been wanting to make for a while now. The Back Room becoming a regular thing for paid readers, where the in-process work lives. And the occasional standalone musing when something needs to be said. Roughly thirty-eight posts a year instead of fifty-two — closer to one a week, with breathing room baked in. The whole rhythm built around depth instead of frequency. Issue #156 will lay out the full schedule, including where the newsletter is moving and how to come along.

What’s next?

Stick around for the next six. They’re going to be the best of the series, because I know they’re the last ones. The pressure of “must ship Mondays” gets replaced with “make these count.”

If you’ve got a Musing that hit you — early or recent, doesn’t matter — reply and tell me which one. I’m building the Greatest Crits zine right now, and reader picks carry weight that the open-rate data doesn’t capture.

Six more Mondays.

ICYMI

80 days Around the Blogosphere with Prismatic Wasteland H/T to The Indie RPG newsletter.

Monday Night Spell & Blade with Sean Nitter.

Mad-Dice.com is 1 year old and has rolled over 3000 dice!

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“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso

April has been a game breaker! From tornadoes and weather, to travel and other IRL events, busting up a regular game schedule. I did get to hang out with my brother and his family in Ohio this weekend. Talked about what we are playing at the table and in our bands. So here’s a scatter of notes, thoughts, and stuff!

Cortex Opens the Door (Again)

There’s a new development around Cortex Prime—a community licensing program announced by Dire Wolf Digital and administered by Cortex designer Cam Banks!! (Go Cam!!!) Contact Rusty Sellsword at cam@rustysellsword.com for inquiries!

Cortex Prime lives in that space between toolkit and philosophy. It’s less “here’s the game” and more “here’s how to build the game you actually want.” Licensing has always been the friction point. But this shift suggests a future where Cortex becomes more like Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark—a system people iterate on publicly, remix, and build communities around! I’m here for that!

OPP...yeah, you know me!

We missed a Monday session of Spell & Blade, but Sean Nittner dropped a write-up of Session One—complete with GM notes from Stras. I’m always interested in how other GMs mark up their prep. Not the polished blog version—the working document. The scratches, the underlines, the “if they zig, this might happen” scribbles. I think that’s where the real magic lives, where I compare it with how I do things, and techniques I might steal!!

I’m firmly in the camp of prep sessions. Not scripting outcomes, not plotting arcs—but building enough structure that when the table swerves (and it will), I’ve got something to jump from.
Prep is constraint. Constraint is fuel. Without it, I find improvisation drifts and gets bonkers.

It also keeps me honest. No quiet rewrites. No behind-the-screen 3-card monte. The situation is the situation, and we play to find out what happens.
There’s a discipline to that, and I think players feel it.

Stras’s notes are a good reminder—prep isn’t about scripting outcomes, it’s about building something you can push against at the table.

What stands out:

• Questions: The page opens with prompts (What’s the arena? Who’s the champion?), not exposition. It leaves room to discover things in play.

• Specific anchors. A few vivid details (Skyglass Arena, VADRA, the bard announcer) do most of the work. The rest stays loose.

• Rumors as direction. Not lore dumps—just hooks that point somewhere and invite action.

• Right page = pressure. Encounters, travel twists, set pieces. Not a plot, just a menu of things that can happen.

I dig it, structure enough to stay grounded without steering outcomes. These notes don’t tell you what happens, but they make sure something always can.

Netrunner, Nostalgia, and UI Loops

I’ve been playing a lot of Solo Netrunner Online lately.

Partly nostalgia. Mostly research.

I’m deep in the UI/UX layer of my own Netrunner-inspired deckbuilder, Zero Day Bandits, and there’s no substitute for just playing the damn game!!

Netrunner still works for me. All the mechanics, the layout, the tension between hidden and revealed information, the pacing of runs—it’s all working for me.
The website does a pretty solid job managing the game state, and it looks like it uses the new cards from Null Signal

Origins, Games on Demand, and the Lodging 🤷🏾‍♂️

I’m contemplating going to Origins Game Fair this year...
Specifically, running games at Games on Demand.
Everything about it is a strong yes.
Run games. Meet people. Catch up with old friends.

And then there’s cold water of lodging logistics, hurdles, and ...I’m prolly just getting old and cranky.

ICYMI

Judd’s post about a favorite page from World of Dungeons.
You’re prolly already reading the Indie RPG Newsletter
And you’ve already listened to the latest Muses of Play: Powered by The Bakers, pt 2. with Sarah Doom and I.

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A game is “done” when you stop thinking about it, right? The Bakers’ answer complicates that in the best way, and it instantly changes how I think about tabletop RPG design, publishing, and the long life of ideas.

In part II of our conversation with the Baker family about creativity, we zoom out to the craft problem every creator hits sooner or later: how do you keep your work from turning into an echo chamber? We talk about avoiding insular design, why it helps to play with people who are not game designers, and how “outside” inputs like movies, museums, walks, concerts, and conversations with other creatives can reshape mechanics and story procedures. We get into personal stories around inspiration and values. Place and history matter, including the messy histories under our feet and the responsibility to amplify underrepresented voices. We wrap with a candid segment on social media, kids’ privacy, and media literacy, grounded in ongoing critical thinking rather than one-size-fits-all rules.

Part 1 on Patreon.
Part 2 on Patreon.

You can catch up with The Bakers on Patreon and at Lumpley Games

Next: Thousand Year Old Creative.

Be sure to check out Sarah Doom also on Patreon!!

Sarah Doom, a tabletop role playing game designer, writer, layout artist, and visual artist. I create games and stories that explore ferality, beauty, gothic, witchcraft, femininity, horror, and folklore with a dark metal sensibility.

ICYMI

Sword & Blade Session one is in the books.

Roll for Origin: Nerds going on about Smallville and Marvel Heroic!

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“Sésame, ouvre-toi!!” —Ali Baba

The 40 Minutes Without Earth -The Occulted Artemis II Mission

They went dark for forty minutes.

That’s expected. Everyone knew that. When a ship passes behind the Moon, it drops out of radio, out of sight, out of contact. Forty minutes of silence. Procedures. Checklists. Calm professionals doing the work.

They witnessed an eclipse during that window. Earth swallowed by shadow. Sun occluded. Signal gone.

And then they came back.

The Parsons Layer

In a world shaped by Jack Parsons, that forty-minute window isn’t empty.
It’s unobserved.

Parsons didn’t just prove you could reach the heavens; he proved you could interact with them as a system. That reality responds to alignment, to geometry, to intent. He removed the safety rails. What used to require ritual space, time, and discipline can now happen repeatedly—through trajectory, timing, and exposure.
The far side of the Moon is a blind spot, an opportunity.
A place where observation fails, and rules loosen.

During those forty minutes:

• The astronauts were outside observation (no signal, no witnesses, no feedback loop)

• A rare alignment occurred (eclipse geometry, shadow crossing shadow)

• The system—call it reality, call it the occult infrastructure—accepted new inputs

What came back is not necessarily what left.
Here’s what falls out of the Artemis data:

40 — The Ritual Interval
The mission reports approximately 40 minutes of blackout. That’s a classic threshold number—long enough to be tested, changed, or exposed. In occult terms, it reads like a controlled exile: time outside protection. IYKYK.

37 — The True Exposure Window
From 6:44 p.m. to 7:21 p.m. EST, the actual gap is 37 minutes. That discrepancy matters. Public number vs. operational number. One for the media, one for the man.
3 + 7 = 10. Full circle of completion.

9 — The Completion Point
At a maximum distance of 252,756 miles, the digits resolve to 27 → 9. The end of one state, the beginning of another.

Double 9 — A Two-Way Gate
Break the distance into 252 and 756. Both resolve to 9. Balanced on both sides. Whatever opened… opened both ways.

5 → 1 — Convergence
The blackout begins at 6:44 (6+4+4 = 14 → 5) and ends at 7:21 (7+2+1 = 10 → 1). Multiplicity collapsing into unity. Four go in. Something singular comes back.

Use them like this:

The public story is 40 minutes of silence.
The classified story is a 37-minute exposure window (6:44–7:21). Mission Accomplished
The occult story is a 9-gate opening at 252,756 miles.
The horror story is not everyone came back the same.

Three Ways to Run It

1. The Fantastic Four Variant (Power as Contamination)

They return changed. Not clean, iconic “powers”—but unstable interfaces with whatever they touched.

• One can see systems: fault lines in reality, stress fractures, invisible flows

• One phases in and out of alignment, physically present but occasionally “elsewhere”

• One emits fields—gravity, heat, radiation—that behave inconsistently

• One hears something on the edge of perception… and sometimes answers it

These aren’t gifts. They’re side effects. You get the idea.

The public calls the astronauts heroes. The program calls them assets.
They are the first successful exposure cases. They won’t be the last.

2. The Replacement Theory (They Didn’t Come Back)

The astronauts are gone.
Something else is wearing them.
Not clumsy possession. Not obvious horror. These entities are learning—language, behavior, emotion. They’re convincing. Almost perfect.

Almost.

• Subtle delays in reaction, like buffering.

• Misunderstandings of emotional nuance.

• Obsession with patterns, systems, repetition.

• Occasional “bleed”—voices, shadows, reflections that don’t line up

The horror isn’t that they’re monsters. It’s that they’re non-human explorers.
And Earth is their new destination.

3. The Gate Theory (The Program Is the Ritual)

Nothing “went wrong.” This is exactly what the program is for now.
Someone—government, corporate, or something older—realized that:

• Deep space + alignment + isolation = access point

• Human bodies are viable carriers

• The process is repeatable

Artemis was a pipeline mission. Small-scale testing.
Each mission increases throughput. Each crew expands the dataset. Each return brings something back—data, influence, or presence.
The next mission is already scheduled…and one astronaut is going back.

What the Players Encounter

Start with the cracks, leaks, missing scientists, doctors, and reporters.

• A routine debrief transcript with sections blacked out… except for repeated geometric symbols

• Medical scans that show “extra structure” layered over human anatomy

• A mission log where one astronaut describes hearing instructions during radio blackout

• A NASA contractor quietly hiring deniable assets to investigate “anomalies”

• A whistleblower who insists: “They’re not the problem. The next launch is.”

Let the astronauts be distant, controlled, mythologized. Untouchable celebrities.
The players deal with the consequences.

Themes to Lean Into

Observation as Safety
When no one is watching, what changes? What rules depend on being seen?

Systems vs. Understanding
Everyone involved thinks they understand what’s happening. They don’t. They’re operating on Parsons-era assumptions: good enough to proceed, not good enough to be safe. Explain nothing.

Bureaucratic Horror
This isn’t chaos. It’s structured, funded, and scheduled. The horror is that it’s working as intended.

Inheritance
The players aren’t stopping an event. They’re inheriting a system already in motion. Buckle up.

The Question at the Table

The mission is never just “figure out what happened.”
But:
Do you expose it?
Shut it down?
Weaponize it?
Or accept that this is the next step—and help manage it?

Final Note for GMs

You don’t need to define what the astronauts encountered.
In a Parsons-shaped world, that’s the point. The system doesn’t require a full understanding to operate. It only requires enough success to justify continuing.

They went dark for forty minutes.
That’s all it took.
And now the next launch window is approaching.

Something happened during the blackout.
It worked.
And now it’s being repeated.

Modern Horror (Possession / Replacement)

Campaign Starter: “They Passed Quarantine”

The astronauts cleared medical. Cleared psych. Cleared everything.

But small things are wrong:

• Family members report “off” behavior

• Pets refuse to go near them

• Reflections lag a fraction of a second

Then someone disappears after a private meeting with one of the crew.

You’re:

• Investigators, hunters, or specialists called in unofficially

• People connected to one of the astronauts

• Or witnesses to something that didn’t quite make sense

Next: The entities aren’t hostile. They’re curious. And the next mission is meant to bring more of them through—cleaner, faster, better integrated.

Conspiracy / X-Files Style

Campaign Starter: “Blackout Protocol”

A classified memo leaks:

“All far-side blackout intervals are to be considered active exposure windows.”

You’re part of a deniable team tasked with:

• Investigating anomalies tied to the Artemis return

• Tracking unusual procurement contracts

• Interviewing personnel who were “present during silence.”

Every lead points to the same conclusion:
This was a test.

Nextt: The program isn’t run by a single agency. Multiple factions are competing—each with a different theory of what came through, and how to control it.

Cyberpunk (Techno-Occult Integration)

Campaign Starter: “Signal Loss = Signal Gain.”

During the blackout, the ship’s systems recorded impossible data—patterns that don’t map to physics, but do map to something.

Now:

• Corporations are embedding these patterns into AI systems

• Black market firmware promises “alignment optimization.”

• People exposed to certain datasets begin to change

You’re:

• Runners hired to steal, sabotage, or analyze Artemis-derived tech

• Corporate troubleshooters dealing with “emergent anomalies.”

• Or infected—your own neuralware is starting to behave… differently

Next: The blackout wasn’t a loss of signal. It was a connection. And now that network wants more bandwidth.

Sci-Fi / Space Opera

Campaign Starter: “The Far Side Is Not Empty”

The Artemis crew reports nothing unusual.
But telemetry shows:

• A second set of trajectories overlapping the ship’s path

• Mass readings that don’t match the vessel

• A shadow that wasn’t cast by any known object

Now, new missions are being rushed.

You’re:

• Crew on the next launch

• Engineers who know the numbers don’t add up

• Or agents sent to ensure the mission succeeds—no matter what

Next: The Moon’s far side isn’t just a blind spot. It’s a threshold. And something is waiting for the next crossing.

Urban Fantasy

Campaign Starter: “The Breaks in Silence”

Old practitioners recognize the signs immediately:

• Eclipse + isolation + intent = working

It wasn’t a ritual circle. It was a spacecraft.

Now:

• Prophecies change

• Wards fail in synchronized patterns

• Young mages manifest unstable abilities tied to “dark cycles.”

You’re:

• Practitioners trying to stabilize the damage

• Faction agents racing to control the new paradigm

• Or civilians caught in the bleed-through

Next: The old ways warned against this exact configuration. Parsons proved you could bypass the warnings.

Military / Tactical (Twilight 2000 Tone)

Campaign Starter: “Asset Recovery”

One of the astronauts goes off-grid. Your unit is deployed to recover them.

Rules of engagement are unclear:

• Do not engage unless necessary

• Do not allow media or civilian exposure

• Do not… let them reach a populated area

When you find them:
They don’t resist. They just ask:

“Are you here to bring me back, or to bring me more?”

Next: Your command knows more than they’re saying. And the next deployment isn’t recovery—it’s escort.

Alt-History

Campaign Starter: “The Second Crossing”

In your setting, something similar happened once before—an eclipse, a silence, a crossing. It was buried. Forgotten. Until now.

The Artemis event reactivates:

• Old symbols, old magicks

• Old sites

• Old mistakes

You’re:

• Descendants of those who survived the first event

• Or agents uncovering a pattern that repeats across time

Twist: Parsons didn’t discover anything new. He recreated something that already happened—and restarted the cycle.

GM Thoughts

No matter the genre, keep this constant: The astronauts are not the narrative. They are the proof of concept. The real story is what happens next when the system that caused them is allowed to continue.
And it will continue.

Because it worked.

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Catch ya next week!

“I am everyday people…” —Sly and the Family Stone

Welcome to Q2, 2026. IYKYK.

Sword & Blade kicked off with a session zero that felt properly mythic—big energy, sharp edges, and just enough mystery to lean into. I’m playing Kormel, an apprentice wizard sky raiders took his parents and he’s left with a secret map disguised as jewelry. I’m eager to see what Stras does with that! The table is young, hungry, and already tangled: two sisters (a smith and a thief), a bird-person of Hexed origin, all set against Iskanard, in the frozen north. It has that early-campaign electricity where anything could happen.

No Occulted KC (my weekly MOnster of the Week game) this weekend—the FLGS café was closed, and spring break logistics won out. Instead, I’m planning a series of smaller, focused Broken Worlds sessions across the week with Max.

I’m digging into a rough draft of Lifted from Nathan Paoletta, who is HARD AT WORK!! He does make me look like I know something!

In Ars Magica PbtA land, I’ve reached a happy point with the spell casting moves. Not “done,” but enough to see the shape of the system and, more importantly, get it to the table. Next up is combat, and I’m circling a few priorities: declare actions first, resolve with dice in a PbtA frame, and let the fiction carry the sequencing rather than strict initiative. I want that Sorcerer-style tension—commit, roll, then discover how it all collides.

Touching Grass

I spent most of the week socializing with non-gamers—mostly Gen X, a couple of boomers. Dinners, a happy hour, a second date (but fourth outing), some day drinking, and a strip club. I’m always fascinated by how obscure our hobby looks from the outside. Ticket to Ride is the only game mentioned outside mainstream games. A couple of people had “heard of D&D” —these folks are Gen X folk with a couple of Boomers!! I’m the odd one out for not knowing Pluribus, The Pit, or not having watched Game of Thrones or The Expanse. They blanked on The Creator, Tenet, and 3I/Atlas. The most interesting bits from the “for fun” lists were: singing at church, baking ( a side gig), and garage sailing.

The World Cup came up more than once—specifically, whether Kansas City is ready for it. There’s a low hum of anxiety there, which gets ramped up by the conversations around AI; I wish we were more patient and caring with each other around this topic (another post in progress). Politics were vomited out unsolicited, from a couple of dudes. I don’t let stupidity pass; my default move is simple: “Say more about that.” Not to debate, not to convert—just to see how far the thought goes. It’s a short game, and usually a revealing one. My veteran status came up, and the question “Did you ever kill anyone?” often follows…from a dude.

The standout moment of the week, though, was meeting Gunnery Sergeant Quiñones. Hardcore Advanced Squad Leader player, deeply committed, dismissive of D&D and Traveller as too soft for his tastes. We became fast friends, buying rounds, telling tales and tipping dancers until last call...aka carousing. And finally, my Uber driver—26—plays weekly Daggerheart, went to Planet Comicon KC, and lit up talking about Stranger Things.

ICYMI

Sarah Doom Design Diaries: Design Diaries: Deep Dive on the Witchborn
Daydreaming about Dragons: Spring Gaming!
Checkout Sean Nittner: Monday Nights in Iskanard AP write-up.

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“SHAZAM!!”

I'm potentially playing a sorcerer in a game I can't quite name yet, during a playtest. The themes of wizard quests and sky city ruins drew me in, plus I get to play with people I haven’t teamed up with in a while. We’re doing a session zero, which I really enjoy—whether I’m the host or a player. The narrative work created during this setup is fascinating, and I often feel that once it’s finished, it becomes the game's core premise. For example, three main pillars of my current Occulted KC game (Monster of the Week) come from the session zero. PBTA games usually provide many narrative elements immediately useful for session one. Cortex Prime’s Pathways excel at this; once a pathway’s session ends, you typically have a solid situation in place. The Black Sword Hack also emphasizes world and situation building through character creation. Champions/Now features player Situations (Disadvantages) that a group can easily rally around. I believe these tools are valuable for crafting campaigns that are uniquely ours from the very beginning - more games should normalize this!

Hacking: Ars Magica

There’s a version of Ars Magica that’s been bouncing around in my mind lately. What if we take the core concept of Hermetic magic and apply it through some PBTA alchemy? Ars Magica has always featured one of the most evocative magic systems in RPGs: verbs and nouns, Techniques and Forms. Your spells describe effects—that part feels classic. But the mechanics around it—the math, the magnitudes, the bookkeeping—can pull gameplay back toward simulation, even when I’m more interested in momentum, consequence, and myth.

So here’s my formula...

Magic is still built from Technique + Form. That grammar stays intact…mostly!

Each Technique is now its own move.

When you Creo, you bring something into being.

When you Intellego, you reveal what is hidden.

When you Muto, you change something’s nature.

When you Perdo, you unmake or diminish.

When you Rego, you command and control.

My first thought: forms are rated tags, from +0 to +3. You roll 2d6 + Form for the Technique move triggered. The Forms do what they’ve always done, but more cleanly: they grant permission. If you don’t have Ignem, you don’t shape fire.

It’s Ars Magicaesque. Still verbs and nouns. Magi are reshaping the world through will and knowledge. Just faster. Looser. A little more mythic. A little less academic.

It’s a rough pass right now. One could flip the process—my second thought: maybe the forms are all permission-only, and the Techniques have corresponding stats (or conditions, requirements, etc.).

I think some focused playtesting shakes this out better than reasoning about it.
I like different moves per technique, rather than one big Cast Magic move, then a move for Ritual magic.

If you’ve played Ars Magica, what would you want to see preserved? What would you gladly leave behind?

Playing: Occulted Kansas City

The Hunters are still hot off an interstitial session, I introduced the next mystery anyway!! In the Tome of Mysteries is The Curse Speech mystery, which has a cabal of contagious curse-talking occultists, which seemed absolutely perfect since we have a Curse Eater and an implied group of curse eaters🤷🏾‍♂️
It’s the T-Birds VS the Scorpions! And of course…our resident curse-eater has accidentally learnt/caught curse speech!

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“We are our choices.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End has been sitting in the back of my mind while I prep.
The premise is simple: the big heroic journey already happened. The demon king is dead. The party is gone or fading. And now you’re left with the long tail of what that all meant—because you’re an immortal elf.

I’m three episodes in and still intrigued—which, for me, is saying something. I’m terrible at sticking with most series. It’s fantasy, but reflective. Almost melancholic.
Revisiting places that used to matter.
Seeing how time changes everything—except the protagonist.
Quiet moments that recontextualize past choices.
It’s a cozy adventure, but with some emo weight—we’ll see how far I’m in.

Prepping: Broken Worlds TTRPG

My kid just discovered Broken Worlds and Kill Six Billion Demons… so you know—we’re gonna play it.
If you’re not familiar, Kill Six Billion Demons (KSBD) is a long-running webcomic by Abbadon. The premise: reality was fractured when the original god was divided, and what remains is a multiverse of 777,777 worlds ruled by demiurges

You’ve got:

• angels as rigid, law-bound enforcers of a broken order

• devils as masks wrapped around chaotic flame

• god-kings hoarding power and reshaping reality to their will

• and mortals caught in the middle, trying to survive or ascend

It’s mythic, violent, philosophical, and a little unhinged—in a good way.
Power is will. Authority is taken. Identity is something you carve out of the universe with effort and consequence. Broken Worlds takes that setting and builds a PbtA-adjacent game on top of it.

And I love the premise. The lore is strong. It’s evocative in all the right ways. First read through—I’m a bit cranky about the mechanics. Right now it feels very fight-forward. A lot of emphasis on combat stuff, exchanges, and structured violence. Which fits the setting, sure—but it doesn’t quite feel “PbtA savvy” yet.
I’m not looking for innovation for its own sake, but I do expect:

• strong fictional triggers

• moves that snowball

• systems that reinforce the tone beyond just combat

That said, this is a first read. I’ll run it RAW and in good faith and see what actually happens at the table. Some games read one way and play entirely differently. And to be fair, Tenra Bansho Zero is also fight-heavy—and it absolutely rocks once it is on the table.

Maxwell has chosen the Hunter playbook—a practitioner of the Shadow Arts. NInja shyyyyyyyyt.
We’ll see where it goes.

Played: Old School Car Wars

This one’s just nostalgia, Car Wars. (3E)
I lucked into an old school highway brawl this week, some kind stranger let me get behind the wheel of a couple of vehicles.
Turning keys.
Speed control.
Piles of counters and D6s
Watching everything fall apart because you pushed just a little too hard.
It’s crunchy in a way modern games don’t really do anymore.
But what I remember is how tangible it all felt.

You could see the mistake happen.
Track it.
Measure it.
Own it.
Try and manage it.
Love that stuff.

ICYMI

The Indie Game Reading Club has a piece in Rascal about my favorite publisher, Free League Publishing:

The Abbey can wait! A nice AP from Judd Karlman’s Weekly Cairn sessions.

Open Hearth Community — May the 4th Minicon weekend gaming is coming. Good time to rebel up and join the community!

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Catch ya next week!

“Omne trium perfectum.”

In the occult, the number three shows up everywhere.

Three stages of alchemy. Three faces of the goddess.
Three knocks at the door when something on the other side wants in.

Even outside the esoteric traditions, three has a certain gravity to it. Storytellers lean on it constantly. Three wishes. Three trials. Three clues that point the investigators in the right direction.

There’s something about the number that feels complete without being overwhelming. Enough pieces to create a pattern, but not so many that the pattern disappears.

Three things have been on my mind this week around the table.

First, the new Muses of Play episode with the Baker family is live on Patreon. Sarah and I sat down with the Baker Family to talk about creativity, collaboration, and what it looks like when making things is just part of everyday life.

Second, in Monster of the Week: Occulted KC, the hunters took a break from chasing the next Mystery and instead started pulling on the loose threads left behind after eight sessions of play. What the players latch on to enriches the campaign world and begins to develop a few interesting knots.

And third, I’ve been sketching out a magical design mashup: Ars Magica + Powered by the Apocalypse + Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Wizards chasing immortality across generations, magical covenants rising and falling, and a game that leans harder into mythic fantasy than historical simulation.

Three topics. Three threads. Let’s see where they lead.

Powered by The Bakers

The newest episode of Muses of Play is up on Patreon this week, and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to sharing for a while. Sarah and I sat down with the Baker family—for a long conversation about creativity, making games, and what it looks like when building things is part of everyday life.

If you’ve spent any time around modern tabletop RPGs, you’ve felt the Bakers’ influence whether you realized it or not. Apocalypse World and the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games changed how a lot of us think about play. Playbooks, moves that push the fiction forward, games that trust the table to discover the story instead of following a plotted script—that whole way of thinking about design owes a lot to their work.

The Bakers describe a house where materials are always within reach. Tools are visible. Projects are half-finished and waiting. Someone might be writing, someone else sewing, someone tinkering with game mechanics. Creativity isn’t treated as a rare lightning bolt. It’s treated like something you do regularly, like cooking dinner or taking a walk and that resonates with me.

A lot of people imagine creative work as a big moment—writing the book, launching the game, finishing the project. But the truth is it’s mostly smaller than that. It’s the daily habit of making things. Sketches that don’t go anywhere. Half-written ideas. Systems that almost work. Sessions at the table where something clicks and you realize you’ve stumbled onto a better way to run a game.

One of the parts of the conversation I appreciated most was how openly they talk about unfinished work. Quilts that stalled out. Drafts that never became books. Designs that lived on a shelf for years. Creative people accumulate unfinished things the way mechanics accumulate tools. They’re parts. They might get used later, or they might just teach you something along the way. Either way, they’re not failures.

Another thread that stayed with me is the importance of community. The Bakers talked about how creative communities used to gather in a few big online spaces. Those hubs have mostly scattered now. But the underlying idea still holds: you need people who show up. People who make things. People who check in regularly and share.

If that sounds like your kind of conversation, the full episode of Muses of Play with the Bakers is now live on Patreon. It runs about an hour and fifteen minutes, and it feels a lot like sitting at the table with them. Big thanks to the Baker family for doing this with us. It was a joy to catch up and just talk, and even more of a joy to share.

Following the Threads

We took a small detour at the table this week in Monster of the Week: Occulted KC. No new Mystery. Instead, after about eight sessions and a handful of cases, we paused and looked at the board. There are a lot of open threads (You can catch up!!)

Rather than pushing the next Mystery, I asked the players, “What do you want to follow up on? ” This is a GM skill. You won’t find (IIRC) this move in Monster of the Week. The structure of the game gives you strong episodic play—one Mystery at a time—but over multiple sessions, the world starts leaving many loose threads around. Blades in the Dark uses the term ‘Free Play’. Mouseguard has the Player’s Turn. So this week, we do that.

We learned a good deal about the characters. Blake, the Curse Eater, has a night job as a custodian. Eleanor, the Flake, is paid to stay away from family. Micahel Lewis, IT support.

They spent the session checking in on NPCs they’ve helped/saved, and tracking down Bennie, who’s become the Hunter’s chosen Big Problem. No prep required on my end, other than keeping my notes straight and updated. The session became a kind of investigation collage. The hunters bounced around Kansas City chasing leads, making calls, visiting places they had already burned once or twice, and asking questions that I honestly didn’t know the answers to until they asked them.

That’s the moment I’m always looking for as a GM. Player-driven play isn’t just “the players choose a mission.” It’s when they start pulling on the world. When they decide what matters enough to investigate. When the questions come from them instead of the Mystery sheet. You’ll see what the players are interested in. Follow up on that.
They had theories...some better than mine.

Second, it helped reset the campaign’s sense of place. Instead of a series of disconnected cases, the hunters started to see Occulted KC as a network of overlapping problems.

And third, it gave me new fuel for the next Mystery. Because now I know what the players care about.

But this session—the one where the players followed their own leads—did more to shape the campaign than any prep document I could have written.

Ars Magica, Apocalypse World, and the Long Game

I’ve discovered Project: RedCap, a fan Ars Magica Open-content community, and have been circling an idea lately: what happens if you take Ars Magica, run it through the Powered by the Apocalypse engine, and then graft on the generational play from Legacy: Life Among the Ruins?

Ars Magica has always had one of the best premises in fantasy gaming. A circle of powerful wizards, each pursuing their own magical obsessions while sharing a covenant that serves as their home base and laboratory. The game already hints at a long arc of play—years passing, apprentices rising, magical projects unfolding slowly.

But the original game leans hard into historical Europe simulation. Tribunals, medieval politics, church relations. That’s all interesting, but it’s not the part of the premise that grabs me. The part that grabs me is wizards chasing immortality.

Not just longer lives, but stranger ones. The kind of magical ambition that reshapes the world around them. That’s where the mashup starts to get interesting.

Powered by the Apocalypse gives you moves that push the fiction forward. Techniques and Forms could easily become tags that feed into specific magical moves. Instead of calculating spell levels, the wizard declares intent and rolls the move. Magic becomes fast, expressive, and dangerous in the way fantasy magic should feel.

Then we stir in Legacy: Life Among the Ruins.
Legacy runs on generational play. A generation of time can pass between sessions. Families evolve. The world changes because of the choices made by earlier characters. Now imagine that structure applied to a wizard covenant. A generation of magi pushes the boundaries of magic. One of them vanishes chasing some impossible ritual. Another becomes something inhuman but powerful. Apprentices inherit the library, the tower, and the unfinished experiments.

Twenty years pass.

The covenant is different now. The world around it has shifted. Magical catastrophes have left scars. New magi rise, building on the discoveries—and mistakes—of the last generation.

The campaign stops being about a single wizard’s career and becomes about the long arc of magical ambition.

That feels closer to the fantasy I’m interested in. Not careful medieval scholars cataloging spells, but sorcerers pushing toward apotheosis while the world struggles to keep up.

Ars Magica always had the bones for that kind of play. PbtA could make the moment-to-moment play faster and more expressive. Legacy could give the whole thing a sense of deep strange time.

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Catch ya next week!

“The creative adult is the child who survived.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

As I come up on two months of running a weekly IRL table, Judd’s recent post about his Thursday game night landed at exactly the right moment. I dig having a regular thing on the calendar. A standing table changes how gaming feels.

Before the Age of the Pandemic, Wednesday nights were my regular night. Dice, snacks, friends, same table every week. When everything shut down, that rhythm broke. We never quite put it back together the same way. I ran plenty of online games afterwards—most notably my 50+ session Twilight: 2000 campaign—but aside from that, most online games ended up being short flings, four to eight sessions before everyone drifted back into real life. Fun, but not quite the same as a table that becomes part of your weekly routine. Right now, that’s Sunday brunch, a car ride and chat over to the FLGS Cafe, a cappuccino, catch up with the friends, and then session recap!

Tron: The RPG?

A funny conversation came up this week about Tron: The RPG. We were flipping through character sheets from various TTRPGs—Transformers, G.I. Joe, Power Rangers—and another gamer asked:

“Where’s Tron? Wouldn’t that be a great RPG?”

Light cycles. Identity discs. Arena battles. Yep. I nodded.
“Yep, for sure. Sounds great.”

Because I’m curious, I asked:

“What do you actually do in Tron?”

He thought about it. There was a pause.

“Well… there’s arena fights.”

Another pause.

“Maybe… It’s kind of a cozy game?”

He was serious. I HARD rolled my eyes.

“What if you played Users instead of Programs?”

He immediately shook his head.

“Nah. That’s not interesting.”

And he’s right. But the question still hangs there:

Tron: The RPG — what do you do?

The setting is incredibly evocative. Among the coolest visual worlds in science fiction. But when you start asking what the characters actually do session to session, the answer gets fuzzy. Arena fights? Sure.
Running missions inside the grid? Maybe.
Rebel programs fighting the MCP or some corporate OS overlord?
Feels like Cyberpunk

There’s probably a game there. But it’s a funny reminder that great fiction doesn’t always translate directly into great role-playing games without figuring out what play actually looks like.

Still… I’ve been down that grid.

Occulted Kansas City

My Monster of the Week Sunday group, Occulted Kansas City, closed their third case this weekend.

The situation started simple enough: a local gang dispute. The Disciples were infighting and—both sides brought barely understood occult artifacts to the parley.

Things escalated. magicks got used.
And suddenly there was a Djinn loose in the city.

This session was also the first one after the hunters selected the Hauntbusters Team Playbook, so we got to see some of those new team abilities come online. They used one of their location cleansing moves, which fit perfectly with the Djinn situation.

At one point, the hunters needed the True Name of the Djinn in order to deal with it properly. That led them to their team’s enemy: Celeste, the occult librarian and they made a deal with her. Love to see it!

Now there are a bunch of loose threads floating around the campaign, so next session might just be Free Play—no immediate mystery, no ticking clock. Just the hunters poking at the world and seeing what shakes loose.

• Bennie, Eleanor’s burned tech contact, has gone missing.

• The Disciples still have a frog monster they’re trying to weaponize.

• The Siren is probably still body-snatching with Michael Jones helping her.

• The MiBs?!

• And there’s that weird liminal space from the first case…

HAHAHAHA.

I love this shit.

A Word from Our Sponsors

Mad Dice continues to reliably roll along.

mad-dice.com now has over 2500 dice rolls logged. I still get a kick out of seeing people use it at their virtual tables.

Lifted: Indomitable is very close to PDF release now. We’re down to a cover, an afterword, and a final check before sending it out. You can check out the latest Kickstarter update!

Muses of Play — Episode #2 should (hopefully!) drop later this week. Sarah and I spent two hours talking with the Baker family—Meguey, Vincent, Elliot, and Tovay—about Apocalypse World, indie games, and their approach to creativity and design. I had to edit this into two parts!! This will be 1/2.

But, you can still catch the first episode here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/muses-of-play-149521286

I’ll also be moving the PDFs for some of my early zines over to DriveThruRPG or Itch soon.

• By Aecer’s Light

• Lifted: Vault One

I still have a few physical copies floating around here, too, so if you missed those the first time they came out, there will be another chance to grab them.

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Catch ya next week!

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett

As a dad, I’ve tried hard not to put my kids on my path. I don’t need them to love the same games, tech, or obsessions. I just try to expose them to a wide field and see what sticks.
This weekend, Maxwell asked if it would be cool to move his Windows 11 laptop over to Linux Mint. That felt like a small rite of passage. He grabbed a flash drive, built the installer, and by Saturday afternoon had Mint up and running. Clean desktop. Fast boot. Big dad grin.

However, not all of his favorite Steam games played nicely. Proton helps, but compatibility charts are not the same thing as lived experience. So he spent most of Sunday on the long adventure back to Mordor Windows 11.
And he made it back!

What I loved about the whole thing was the agency. He wanted to try something. He did the work. It broke expectations. He rolled it back, cranky, frustrated, and on his own terms, with small advice from Dad at our Waffle House brunch. That’s a better lesson than “Dad says Linux is cool.” It’s also how I’ve learned most of what matters: curiosity, friction, iteration.

Curiosity, friction, iteration.

This week, we watched John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. I continue to enjoy how the High Table mythos unfolds across the series. There’s rich, rich lore there. Across three sequels, no desperate callbacks, no recreating earlier beats. The world just keeps widening...over a dog and a car!

The part that fascinates me most is the gold coin economy. It’s not just currency. It’s a social signal. A ranking system. A measure of where you stand in the ecosystem. I’m hacking En Garde! right now, and those coins feel like the “score” for where an assassin sits on the ladder. Not XP. Not levels. Reputation crystallized into metal... until you’re excommunicado.

It makes me think a lot about alternative economies in games—what actually tracks status, leverage, power? Not just mechanically, but fictionally... Burning Wheel’s Resource stat comes to mind.

Occulted KC

On Sunday, my Occulted KC crew chose the Hauntbusters Team playbook from Monster of the Week. Think Ghostbusters, but I’m making it Midwest weird!

I’m genuinely excited about it because I’ve been weak in my use of location mechanics. Haunts as active spaces—with moods, rules, and escalating manifestations—force me to practice that muscle.

I also noticed we routinely miss the XP trigger for learning something new about a hunter. It gets skipped a bit too often in the end-of-session rhythm. I’m considering soft prompts at the table as we play:

• “How’d you learn to do that?”

• “Where did that gear come from?”

• “What’s your connection with X?”

Those details are worth more than the XP mark.

Missed Magicks

I’m also looking seriously at reviving my old Ars Magica campaign set in The Contested Isle: The Hibernian Tribunal as an open table. The covenant-as-home-base structure. Rotating magi. Seasonal projects. Tribunal politics simmering in the background. We got a good 3 sessions of play in IIRC online before schedules collided. I needs it back!

7-9…

On the publishing front: Play Fearless: Greatest Crits didn’t fund. It came up short on cash, but it performed decently on data. That matters. I’ve got two game designers onboard as contributing authors. The article list is culled to twenty pieces. I’ll still do a small print run, aiming for mid–late spring 2026.

That seems to be the theme right now. Try the distro. Watch the sequel. Run the haunt. Launch the book.

Learn. Adjust. Keep going.

ICYMI

• Sarah Doom One Shot Monthly: Trophy Dark!!

• Roll for Origin – Mutants & Masterminds coverage

• 10,000 Swords Against Heaven

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Catch ya next week!

This is how I think, prep and run a weekly Monster of the Week campaign set in Kansas City—what’s working at the table, what I’m stealing next, and why the players are doing most of the heavy lifting.

The cast in Occulted KC has expanded, adding a Curse-eater mentor and an occultist librarian to the roster, an exorcist who consults with the local PD, and his muscle.

The Disciples,a local gang, are squabbling, and they now have a pet frog monster.

And no one has seen Bennie in a minute.

What’s on the table

• The core Monster of the Week book

• Codex of Worlds

• Codex: Apocrypha (gold with a Curse Eater in play)

• CY_BORG location pad (surprisingly clutch)

• A face-card NPC deck, pencils, and a simple GM kit

• A couple of KC metro maps

Real places speed decisions. If one person knows the city, locations pick themselves, and descriptions stay grounded.
Tools that generate prompts (face cards, location pads) beat “big prep.” They give you just enough friction to spark play.

I start each session with a recap done by the players.
I scribble during the session and drop it into Obsidian afterward.
That’s my whole workflow.

Case #2: Curse of the Frog Monsters

Case #2 ran about four sessions and ended… unresolved. We hit Midnight on the countdown clock. The hard part for me, the MC/Keeper, is indicating the end of a mystery and the start of the next, because the moves depend on it. Here, we went a couple of sessions without any interaction with Bennie, an NPC bystander and a burned contact of Eleanor (PC). Bennie is a big lead. He gets his agenda fulfilled, as does The Monster. Because I expect these players to continue to meddle in Bennie’s business, there’s no denouement. He’s just gone, but as players, we know he’ll be back!

The Hunters:

• Restored one transformed victim.

• Discovered Bennie’s got access to at least a Frog Monster transformation spell, and Frog Monsters are contagious.

• Evidence of a river spirit

• Celeste, an occultist librarian, hired Bennie for a job, but they had a falling-out.

No failures here. All consequences.

Absence as Fiction: “What Were You Up To?”

We’ve now implemented the custom move for when a player misses a session: What Were You Up To? [link]

It’s working out pretty nicely.

Through that move, we:

• Introduced another Curse Eater — Blake’s mentor, who comes with some bad news.

• It was revealed that Michael Jones was spying on Michael Lewis, but Michael Lewis has the advantage.

The unchosen options create friction. Trouble follows. Allies slip. Leverage is lost. It makes the city feel like it keeps moving even when a player can’t make it.

Case #3 — The Teapot Djinn

The Hook: There’s been a beef cooking amoung members of the Disciples. One night a meet happens. One side brings their new weaponized “make-a-frog-monster” juice, the other side brings a janky teapot. When it all goes south, a warehouse in South Grandview goes up in flames.
Tracey gets grabbed by the cops for the arson and the three charred corpses. He makes his one phone call...to Eleanor.

This came together too easy. My initial thought was if the occult is unlicensed, black market tech, what happens when a normie gets a hold of something they don’t fully get? The Disciples were already a strong part of fiction, and the hunters have met and saved Jr and Tracey. Making this hook a very smooth transition from the previous case going cold.

I’m a big fan of the original X-Files and Fringe. I love the parts that blur the episodes together. I’m enjoying weaving that ‘blur’ as we move between cases; this is part of my GM prep.

The Current Board

I still use Ron Edwards’ outline method from Champions Now. It works extremely well for me. When the situation changes enough, I start a new file copied from the current one. This lets me “go back” and see previous ‘game states’ and what’s fallen off. Perfect for how I run games.

Hunters

Eleanor — The Flake

• Attends a well-being support group with Blake.

• Cryptozoology nerd with Michael.

• Former contact burned: Bennie.

Michael Lewis — The Mundane

• Old BFF with Eleanor, drives her around.

• Blake brought him into the occult world.

• Being quietly observed by Michael Jones.

Blake — The Curse Eater

• Saved Michael from a Siren.

• Fated to consume a world-threatening curse.

• Now has a mentor in the picture.

Kansas City Notables

• Bennie — ambitious occultist. Missing.

• **The “MIB” / Black Firetruck?

• Celeste — librarian/occultist. Hired Bennie.

• The Disciples — a local gang caught up in the occult.

• KCPD — Vaughn, Common, Duchovny, Harris.

• The Siren — working as an ER/EMT. Still in the city.

Mysteries

Case01 — Liminal Spaces

• Black Firetruck's first appearance.

• Siren introduced.

• Cockatrice defeated in a liminal space.

• Liminal cracks discovered.

Case 02 — Curse of the Frog Monsters

• Bennie can transform folks into Frog monsters

• Disciples entangled.

• KCPD drawn in.

• Midnight hit on the countdown. Bennies in the wind.

Case 03 — The Teapot Djinn

• Disciples infighting.

• Hector escalates with a weaponized teapot

• Tracey in custody for arson and murder.

• Hunters confirmed they have a free Djinn on their hands.

What’s Working

• Weekly cadence builds momentum. If I have two players, we’ll play.

• Player-created NPCs become antagonists faster than prepped ones, and the engagement is stronger!

• Absence moves generate hooks instead of gaps.

What’s next

I still don’t know how this season ends. I’ve begun creation of an Arc as defined in Monster of the Week. Think long-form Mystery. I’m calling it ‘The Parson’s Project’.
We’ll create a Team next session. Teams are playbooks that players pick, and they add theme, mechanics, and moves, and rationalize the why of hunters. I feel like both Arcs and Teams are good to bring online after a few sessions; you’ll have game fiction to anchor to.

ICYMI

I’ve got a small zine project live called Play Fearless: Greatest Crits — my third Zine Month project. It’s a curated collection of essays and practical tools pulled from a few years of writing Play Fearless on Substack, focused on running better sessions and building stronger table culture.

Inside you’ll find things like:

• building fantastic one-shots that rock!

• running online games like a demon!

• planning and trusting emergent play.

It’s a small print run (PDF + print). I’m also running a few limited online game sessions as reward tiers — a fast CBR+PNK heist setup and a short The One Ring: Moria — because I like putting the ideas into practice.

37 hours and $600 to go.

I’ll see ya at the finish line.

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“COWABONGA” — TMNT

There’s another wave of nostalgia gaming building.

I picked up the new hardcover editions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness and Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Apparently, there was a Kickstarter for it that I missed! The old softcovers lived on my shelf in the late ’80s. I remember having a great time with them. I don’t remember if we played rules-as-written or drifted into whatever worked. So that’s the question now. If I run it again, is it fun RAW? Or was the magic mostly youth, pizza, and a tolerance for Palladium crunch?
Imma find out!

I’m also prepping a four-session run of Lifted: Wild Talents. By request—more or less—I’ll be running Wild Talents in the Lifted setting. The hard part for me is creating the pregens and the situation—and without player input, that’s some rough GM lonely sad. For con games though, that’s where we GMs often find ourselves. having t create both the scenario and pregens for a table of folks we don’t often know.

So I’m leaning on archetypes and shared touchstones. The X-Men, specifically X-Force (comic books), IMHE, most folks have a sense of mutants and being the underdogs. That leaves me with the premise/situation... It’s gotta hit hard, and immediate, snatching up a player’s interest. As I write this, I got nothing, 🤷🏾‍♂️ but I am procrastinating by updating mad-dice.com to use Wild Talent dice!!

On the Table

I brought a tablet to the table this week. Most of my prep lives in Obsidian—markdown, linked notes, layered references. I’m done printing it all out. I used an 8” Lenovo tablet. Small enough to manage, easy to pass across the table when someone needs to read a move or reference. It came in pretty handy for a new move I’m testing for missed player sessions:

What Were You Up To?

When you miss a session and tell us what your Hunter was doing off-screen, say what you were up to and roll +the most relevant stat.

On a 10+, choose 2.
On a 7–9, choose 1.
On a 6-, you come back changed, and the Keeper makes a hard move. Mark experience.

Choose:

• You come back with leverage.

• You secured an ally.

• Trouble doesn’t follow you.

It gives absence weight without turning it into punishment. And it generates hooks.

ICYMI

• Indie RPG Newsletter

• Sarah Doom released The Maiden and the Rake

• Roll for Origin returns soon—Mutants & Masterminds coverage on deck. Catch up with Ep 06: Wild Talents & Godlike

• 10K Swords vs Heaven update: https://makapatag.itch.io/10000-swords-against-heaven/devlog/1379825/142-update-more-clarifications

• Play Fearless: Greatest Crits — a curated RPG zine of table-tested GM insight shaped by actual play and lessons learned the hard way. Small print run. PDF available. 50% funded and five days left. Help this old underdog pull off an upset!!

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Catch ya next week!

“You’re not having a good night are you John?” —Cassian

I’m watching the John Wick series. I haven’t seen them all. I rewatched JW1 and then watched JW2 this weekend. I’m revisiting the idea of moving the old En Garde! format to a John Wick-inspired setting.

The draw of John Wick is the lore and ecosystem. It’s institution. A global aristocracy of killers. Neutral ground that actually means something. Markers that bind. A High Table that enforces consequences across borders.

If I’m a GM looking to run a Wick-inspired campaign centered on The Continental, the first decision isn’t stat blocks; I’m looking for emphasis. I need the game to be about obligation, prestige, and consequences.

If you want Wick at your table, focus on the machine, not the muzzle flash.

A Continental campaign is about:

• Obligation

• Reputation

• Escalation

• Institutional retaliation

Violence is sharp. The consequences are long.

If someone kills on neutral ground, the world responds. If someone honors a marker, doors open. If someone breaks the rules, privileges vanish.

The tension is “What does winning cost?”
That principle should guide every system choice and table structure.

Choose Your Systems

Different systems spotlight different aspects of Wick. Decide which axis you want to emphasize.

Aristocratic Competition: En Garde!

If you want assassins maneuvering for status, En Garde! provides a strong skeleton. Turn-based declarations — travel, contracts, duels, obligations — translate cleanly into Continental politics.

This supports rivalry. PvP is formalized. Advancement is visible. Death is expected.

For strategic, prestige-driven campaigns, this is my first pick — and something I’ve been hacking on for a while. This option is a heavy GM lift.

Escalation Drama: Dogs

And I mean, Dogs, for other unique settings. The escalation ladder — talk → brawl → kill — is nearly perfect for Wick.

Each escalation step adds mechanical weight and tension, but increases fallout. Drawing a gun becomes a conscious mechanical choice, not just color.

Most important — almost everything has dice values.

This system shines at multi-assassin tables where tension might boil over. Conflict resolution is the same for PvP or PvNPC.

Moral Erosion: Sorcerer

If you want Wick as tragedy, Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer is strong. Markers become bindings, or demons even. Power has internal cost. Humanity measures adherence to the rules.

Every favor called in costs something personal.

The dice pools here are the chef’s kiss. The dice say when and to what effect. Power always answers — but never cleanly.

DIY Options

Cortex Prime

With careful mod selection, Cortex can support:

• Distinctions like “Excommunicado”

• Stress tracks for Heat and Reputation

• Assets for safehouses and hotel protection

Cortex Contest rules seem perfect for escalations of combats.

It requires some GM work upfront. Cortex leans cinematic freedom. Wick demands consequences. If you don’t enforce fallout, the tone drifts.

Champions Now

Leaning into its Situation mechanics, I would consider Champions Now.

I might reduce starting character points. I might not.

Unlike broader superhero toolkits, Champions Now focuses on tight, purpose-built character construction and strong dramatic framing. In a Continental game, that means assassins defined by sharply tuned competencies — close-quarters gunwork, tactical awareness, social leverage, sheer durability — without drifting into four-color territory.

The result is Wick at a slightly mythic pitch: lethal specialists whose effectiveness is never in question, but whose choices — and obligations — from their character built Situations generate the real tension.

Competitive Sandbox: Remember Tomorrow

If you want intersecting agendas and rotating spotlight scenes, Gregor Hutton’s Remember Tomorrow is your huckleberry.

Assassins pursue personal goals inside the same ecosystem. Rivalry is expected but structured. There’s even the possibility of “getting out.”

It works largely out of the box. You simply roll back the futuristic setting assumptions.

The Multi-Assassin Question

Putting multiple professional killers at one table introduces a structural problem:
Why aren’t they killing each other? There are three workable campaign models.

The Crew Model

They share a patron, debt, or city-level crisis. PvP is off the table by agreement. External pressure unifies them.

Stable. Long-form. Discuss the boundaries in session zero.

The Rivals Model

They compete for status and contracts. PvP is allowed but consensual. Neutral ground rules matter.

Works well with En Garde! or Remember Tomorrow.

3. The Political Web Model

Sometimes allies. Sometimes competitors. Escalation mechanics manage internal conflict. The High Table enforces boundaries.
This requires trust at the table and clarity around consequences.
Adult players.

The institution must matter more than ego. But the players, the people, must matter more than the game.

And PvP isn’t for every table. Talk about it before session zero, during session zero, and revisit it as needed. It’s OK to leave it behind.

Overlaying The Continental on Other Games

You don’t need a dedicated Wick system. The premise overlays cleanly onto modern or near-modern settings. In cyberpunk worlds such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadowrun, the Continental becomes a neutral arcology or an extraterritorial guild. Markers are encrypted cred-bonds. The High Table is a shadow consortium.

In far-future sandboxes like Traveller, it becomes a starport sanctuary network. Excommunication means the revocation of docking rights across subsectors.

It works even in urban supernatural games like Monster of the Week.

All you really need to add:

• A protected space

• A binding favor economy

• A reputation track

• Institutional response

Keep your combat rules.
Change the stakes.

How to Run It Well

1. Make reputation visible.

2. Track markers publicly, no player secrets about this.

3. Announce High Table decrees formally.

4. Keep violence sharp and short.

5. Never let rule-breaking slide.

If a rule is broken and nothing happens, the premise collapses.
If the world responds consistently, tension builds automatically.

The GM Above the Table

You are not choreographing fight scenes.
You are maintaining the machine, the world.

The Continental works because it feels larger than any single assassin. The High Table feels patient. The rules feel binding. Sanctuary feels sacred — until it isn’t.

Run the institution with discipline, and your table will generate the rest.

That’s John Wick at your table.

“May you enjoy your party.”

Kickstarter update — Play Fearless Greatest Crits Zine

The Play Fearless Greatest Crits Kickstarter is live. This morning, it sits at $920 of a $2,000 goal, 12 days to go and an update!

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Catch ya next week!