In This World, It’s Time to Game

In This World is out! For playtesters anyway.

If you signed up to playtest you should have gotten an email with a download link Friday night. If you don’t see it, and it’s not in your spam, drop me a comment below to make sure you get hooked up. If you signed up after Friday, I’ll send out another round in a day or two, so don’t worry that you’re missing the boat.

We got *a lot* of volunteers for the playtest, which is very exciting. You are many, but … [ read more ]

Playtest In This World

My new game, In This World, is ready for outside playtesting. I’ve played it a bunch, made some tweaks and refinements, and now it’s ready for you:

Playtest Sign-up for In This World

It’s a very accessible game, probably more than any other game I’ve made. I think it would work great even for people with zero role-playing game experience. And as always I’m looking for playtesters who will get people together and play, not just read the game.

After we get some people signed up I’ll send out … [ read more ]

Uncanny Valley Androids & Secret Sacred Laws

Just played two fantastic games of In This World, back-to-back, with Story Games Seattle veterans Ace and Joe.

Yes, we played one game, and then got so excited we jumped right back in and played another.

Why? Because after the first game, which got us chatting a mile a minute, Ace made a comment which led Joe to ask, hmmm, what about using this In This World in this way instead..? So we turned on a dime and tried it and damn if it didn’t work great. Surprisingly great. … [ read more ]

In This World

Police carry badges…
Dragons breathe fire…
Nations have borders…

In our world, things are a certain way. Sometimes ways we don’t even question.

But In This World — the world we make together — things can be different. We can see how the world would turn out if we examined our assumptions… and maybe turned some of them on their head.

And instead of just making one world, we’ll make several, freeing everyone at the table to explore a variety of possibilities without worrying that the world we’re making isn’t … [ read more ]

“That sparrow has seen some shit”

I had this idea for a game.

Been kicking it around for ages, but couldn’t figure out how to make it into something you could actually *play*… until I had a breakthrough a few weeks ago. With that new wrinkle the rules wrote themselves, so I recruited some brave souls to try it out:

First playtest. Very good. See some rough spots, make some adjustments.

Second playtest, a few days later. Different group so they’re seeing it fresh. The rough spots now run smooth and feed back into the creative … [ read more ]

Classic Cartography: Star Frontiers

Time for some map nostalgia!

When Star Frontiers came out in 1982, we were so excited about lasers and gryojet pistols that we briefly dropped our long-running D&D campaign like a hot potato and went all-in. I remember wistfully wondering whether we’d ever return to our gelatinous cubes and +3 longswords. In the end the break was probably less than four months, but to a kid, that’s a life time.

These are some of the maps I drew for that first Star Frontiers game, an interconnected web of adventures on … [ read more ]

Mind of Sandra Birch

“It’s Inside Out, the game”

I have a short list of go-to GMless pickup games, “games to play at a moment’s notice.” What I’m always looking for are games you can jump into easily but still have endless replay, usually because they handle a lot of different flavors of fiction.

Mind of Margaret is one of the few games on that list.

You tell the story of one main character, but each of us role-plays different emotions inside that person and debates what they should do at key points of … [ read more ]

Finger Dice

You and your friends are trapped on a desert island. What better way to pass the time than to play games? But you have no dice! What do you do?

You could whittle some out of coconut, but instead here’s an easy way for a group of people to simulate rolling a six-sided die. I originally laid out this method in Microscope Explorer, but it seems like a useful thing for everyone to have in their toolkit so I’m sharing it here.

• Each person secretly picks a random number

Metal of the Gods

Humanity steals metal from the Gods… HEAVY METAL…

In a classic case of someone suggesting an idea, then someone else taking that idea a little further, than someone else going even farther, we decided to do a quick Microscope game that was pure cosmic metal, and discovered in the process that my friends are stone cold liars: like when Jem says he “doesn’t really ‘get’ metal”, and then every single thing he lays down is a fullblown album cover that leaps off the page.

In our history METAL is the … [ read more ]

“The rules are there to help you get the most out of your time”

A quick interview with the nice folks of Pizza Games in Milan:

I would definitely double down on the idea that the purpose of game rules is to help us get the most out of our time. All the other stuff — having fun, getting on the same page, being clearly written — comes back to that: respecting and maximizing the return on our time. Because time is our ultimate finite and irreplaceable resource.

If you want to think about it in stages, step 1 of good rules is to … [ read more ]

Festival of Rain

Story gamers make shit up constantly. It’s a big part of the process. We invent whole cities, cultures, and worlds at the drop of a hat and then maybe burn them down two hours later. We build and explore fast fast fast… and also slow slow slow.

And we share our toys. We create specifically so that everyone else at the table can use what we’re building. If I introduce a religion, it’s not just for me, it’s part of everyone’s story. Nothing is a greater compliment then when someones … [ read more ]

Pick a Hat, Any Hat…

Oooooh, look what I got in the mail! Yep, it’s Fedora Noir, where you can be a Detective… or you can be the detective’s Hat.

I’ve been using the online tool to play but it’s great having the actual cards. Soooo pretty…

All the Stuff You Never See

“Show us all the stuff you haven’t posted and the games you abandoned!!!”

I write a lot of stuff that no one else is ever intended to read. Thoughts, theory, reflections, problem solving. Lots and lots of stuff. But it’s just for me, to help me figure things out. If you did read it, it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense, because I haven’t put the effort in to turn reflection into communication — I haven’t taken the time to explain to the reader my mental starting point or … [ read more ]

It Never Ends

The most unrealistic thing about Microscope is that the history has an end. There’s a starting bookend and an ending bookend.

Real history never ends. It just keeps going and going. Every victory sets the stage for the next battle, but so does every defeat. The next election will fix things! Or destroy things! Yes, an election will make a difference, but there will be another election after that. And another, and another, and another.

Things just keep happening. It’s never over.

When I talk to friends and family about … [ read more ]

He Needed His Anger

I forget how juicy family stories are in Union. Then I play it again and… wowzers.

The Crimson Knight was a vigilante who put on a mask because he was an angry, violent man, and fighting crime was the most positive outlet he could find to vent that anger.

But anger is not a bullet proof vest. And for all his fury and skills, Stephen Jones was just an ordinary man. And so one night, battered and bloody, he found himself in the hospital. Which is where he met … [ read more ]