Here’s some play advice: the instinct to hold on to your best ideas so you can “properly set them up” or do “big reveals” is a trap. Get to the goods.
The goods will beget more goods. If we spend three years leading up to meeting a player’s evil twin, that’s gonna be exciting. But you know what’s way more exciting? The fourth time that evil twin shows up. You can’t get to that fourth time and all the baggage, betrayals, double-crosses, and oaths of vengeance that come with it without going through the first three. So just get started.
This week I've got designer and illustrator Strega Wolf van den Berg on to talk about money and the Mork Borg third party license. What, if anything, is the difference between making RPGs for fun, to pay rent, and to be paid fairly? And what is the cost (aha) of bringing money into making art?
On the flip side, this is also an episode about community, and how the shape of Mork Borg’s license fostered a community around it that allowed Strega Wolf to find a space in this hobby. Community can give us so many things that money can’t.
This week I've got Nova, aka Idle Cartulary, of the excellent Playful Void blog among other places linked below. Nova's one of my favorite writers in the, as she puts it, DIY elf game scene, and I knew that was a world I wanted to cover more this season.
Nova brought on the rumor table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent elf game adventure. We got to talk about what makes a good random table at large, our taste in how adventures are written, and how point of view is the thing that often turns serviceable fiction into real primo shit.
On the season 3 premiere, I’m joined by John Harper, designer of many games featured on past episodes of Dice Exploder including Blades in the Dark, Lasers & Feelings, and Agon 2e.
John brought in the Psi*Run risk sheet, a fairly complex dice resolution mechanic, known generically as Otherkind Dice. The risk sheet is such an elegant piece of design, packing essentially a whole game onto a single sheet of paper, and being so clear in both how it works and how you might tear it apart for your own ends. If you’re a new designer, or even just looking to get back in touch with the basics, John and I agree that hacking this thing is a great place to look.
