February 27, 2024 The Insufficiency of Language - Last week my church hosted a reading by the poet Kaveh Akbar at TCU. Kaveh’s debut novel Martyr! is a NYT bestseller and his poetry appears in the...
December 16, 2019 Mawbreakers, Resource Management, and Combat Centric Gaming - Shortly before Langston was born I was reading a lot of Hellboy and I found myself wanting to play a paranormal WW2 game with some Wolfenstein or...
February 26, 2019 Mawbreakers: A Weird WW2 Para-shooter RPG - Recently, I’ve had this itch to play a game where I play a platoon of WW2-era soldiers who fight the paranormal, kill Nazis, look for Dracula, and...
January 20, 2019 Painless Character Creation for a Painful Game - I’ve been working on this Rap Sheet System for Heist for a little bit, and one of the big pieces of feedback I’ve gotten is that it requires too...
January 14, 2019 Why Setting High Stakes Matters - I’ve had a lot more success recently describing Old School RPGs as “high stakes” instead of “high lethality” and here’s why. A lot of my new players...
December 27, 2018 How to Create a Criminal - Awhile back, I wrote up a Rap Sheet system for character creation in Heist (and called it the lifepath system, which I think sounds lame and kinda...
December 13, 2018 A Small Rant about Investigation in RPGs - I posted the below thread to twitter the other day and it went off pretty well. So here it is in full so that it’s easier for me to find later:...
April 23, 2018 Can We Make This an Image? Designing Better Tables - I’ve been working more on Mothership in an attempt to get a limited run of the Player’s Handbook done in time for Gen Con this year. I talked to...
April 8, 2018 Mothership: Ship Creation Sheet - Continuing on my journey to re-work the graphic design in my RPGs, I’ve tried to fit all the rules for designing a ship in Mothership onto one...
March 27, 2018 Lessons I Learned Designing the Mothership Character Sheet - I’ve been revisiting a lot of my graphic design chops recently, as a result of cool things like Sam Mameli’s 5e character sheet that attempts to put...
March 1, 2018 Designing Heartbreaker, My Tactical Card Game - I’ve been working on a tactical card game called Heartbreaker, for a little over a year now. In it, players each control a dark champion who fight...
January 8, 2018 Heist: A Smash & Grab RPG - So here’s something that I’ve been working on for awhile now, Heist the roleplaying game. What is Heist? Here’s a quote from the introduction:...
August 22, 2017 The First Time We Played Mothership - At Gen Con this year, I finally got to run a one-shot session1 of my sci-fi horror RPG, Mothership. We had a good spread of players: two were really...
June 26, 2017 Top 20 Twitter Bots for D&D - About a year ago I decided to see how hard it would be to make a twitter bot. Apparently it’s not that hard depending on what you want to do. I...
June 6, 2017 Survive, Solve, or Save: Pick Two - Last night, I was reviewing Mothership with some close friends while complaining about Alien:Covenant and my friend Nick said something that’s stuck...
May 19, 2017 Removing Agency in Horror Games - Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Saving Throws in RPGs. Essentially, they are the opposite mechanic from a lot of things we’re used to as...
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