Musings from Fanterland

Today we are cooking something quite delicious; a scrumptious indie tabletop RPG to delight your friends. Put on your best apron and join me as we sizzle some stats!  Ingredients A pantry stuffed with inspiring games to raid.  When you do, always give credit where credit is due and respect copyrights. A pinch of a unique idea.  Get inspired by playing games and engage with their wonderful communities. A group of eager tasters.  Friends, or friendly folk from your favourite game community work best. A trusty set of gaming utensils. Index cards, pencils, dice, playing cards and poker chips let you test almost any idea.  Got your ingredients lined up? If not, get out there and come back when you do...  Ok. Let's cook! Instructions Pitch your unique idea. Get your eager tasters excited for your magnificent meal. Write a Quick Reference with gaps. Raid your pantry for rules that fit your idea. Nothing in your pantry that fits? Play more games! Leave any ga...

A short one this week. I've had many failed attempts at developing a game until I finally did. So I recently jotted down some habits that got me over the finish line. If they can get my cluttered brain there, they can definitely help you.  Play games. Whatever else you do, never grow detached from the pure joy of playing a game. Be a fan of the community. If you ever felt like you could be getting more out of a game, there's probably an entire community of other players like you, with all sorts of community projects ready and waiting for you. Fill the gap yourself. Once you've hung around a community, you'll get a feel of what's out there, like community hacks, modules, creator tools etc. But better yet, you'll get a feel of the things you'd like to have that don't exist. Why wait for someone else to fill that gap? Just give it a go yourself. You don't have to be the best person to do it. You just have to do it. Ideas must first survive contact with ...

  It is easy to want to be things. I want to be good at sports. I want to be a tidy person. It’s a lot harder to actually be something. Because we are what we do. No matter how unfair and outside of our own control, we can’t be the loving father if we don’t spend time with the child. This blogpost is about choosing what not to be so that we can dedicate our time to what you do want to be. It's not the usual RPG stuff, but it is about making time for other things which are more important, which is why I haven't done much in the RPG sphere lately. And hey, I'm still figuring out what this blog is about as I go! There is an infinity of things to be The difference between what you want to be and what you are can grow bigger and bigger, and you can start feeling the strain as the distance between the two stretches further and further. You can feel disjoint, you can feel like an impostor. Why do we want to be so much, even when we don’t act to realize any of it? Identities ...

Some players are in it for the game choices, some are in it for the world immersion, and some are in it for the character story. If the last one applies to you. and you've played anything like D&D, you'll be used to being frustrated with sessions that felt like the story went nowhere. Story is not a given if your game's goal is to simulate a battle step-by-step. What if we set up our session in a way that you can't help but have a complete story? Let's do it. From dungeon lingo to story lingo First up, we need some story vocabulary. We'll use that throughout this blog. Fortunately, if you know D&D lingo, we can easily think of a mapping from one to the other using the three-act plot structure (check the image below). MAIN QUESTS, SUB QUESTS and SIDE QUESTS ➡ Main Plots, Sub Plots and Side Plots. A full story contains at least one full plot. ACCEPTING A QUEST and ENTERING THE DUNGEON  ➡ Act I: ‘the Setup’. DUNGEONCRAWLING  ➡ Act II: ‘the Confrontatio...

Collaborative storytelling isn't a core part of every RPG, but every RPG benefits from players who practice it. Here are some principles to simply tell a story together before a single game mechanic is even uttered. These were stolen from various other games and corners of my mind, rewritten and thrown together for the first player kit of The Dreamcatchers. Set up opportunities Play to find out what happens.  The fun of a roleplaying game lies in all the things that you wouldn’t have thought of if it was just you writing a story alone. It’s in the obvious thing another player does that would not have occurred to you. It’s in the twist a game mechanic adds. So do not plan. Instead, set up a situation rife with opportunity and play to find out what happens next. Yes, and. Your adventure is an open conversation in which you accept what another player states, and expand on that. “ YES your fire suddenly rages like a blazing phoenix, AND the flash is so intense, it's blinding to...