Winning the game by being well-rested

I have long believed that the perfect RPG would reward the PCs for getting a good night's sleep – and penalise them for a bad enough one.

There are many upsides to doing this.

1. It's realistic. In my experience, getting particularly good or bad sleep could have a +/- 50% effect on your baseline competence.
2. It encourages roleplaying. People want to get a good night's sleep. Now characters want to get a good night's sleep.
3. It incentivises investing in comforts and nice-to-haves. Without the carrot and the stick, most players tend to default to only getting functional equipment.
4. It adds more choice to campsite selection. More choice is better. (I think it was Peter D who suggested: concealed, secure, or comfortable; pick one)
5. You can tie it to character injury. In HP-based systems, characters tend to either be fine or dead, resulting in confusion about what HP and damage really "are". Well-restedness is pretty much a score of overall condition, so being wounded can reduce the same score. Now it's actually more difficult to jump around on a stabbed leg.
6. You can tie it to character morale. Generally, telling players how their characters feel is a bad idea. Telling them they must act some way as a result is disastrous. But a hard rule like "a character who sees a friend die loses 1 point of overall condition" is non-intrusive, assuming you don't allow sociopathic PCs.
7. It incentivises problem-solving. To get the best outcomes, you need to acquire and carry around more creature comforts, even through hard terrain. So now you have a to-do list and some logistics to work out.
8. It encourages having a bunch of attendants (lackeys, entertainers, back-scrubbers, cooks, night watchmen, etc). This is in keeping with commonly emulated genres like "low-technology fantasy", and opens up new kinds of gameplay.
9. It makes the weather feel real. Most of us are well insulated from the effects of weather in 2025. Travelling, sleeping, or making a meal in bad weather is really rough going. 

and

10. It's also a soft progression system!

Characters with more resources can spend them to improve their day-to-day efficacy.

Characters who end the first game flush with cash might be able to get good provisions and nice camping gear, and secure a future +1 when there's fine weather and uninterrupted nights. Later, they might hire some camp drudges so they can get more rest per day, porters to carry their extra stuff, and maybe a proper cook. They're looking to get that +2. By the end of the campaign, expect everyone to travel with fine silks and furs, feather mattresses, bevies of personal chefs and butlers, vintage wines, and magical solutions meant to ensure good dreams, chasing that +5.

(Of course, if you want your normal "levelly" game, you can turn it into a treadmill: characters get used to the finer things, and their baseline expectations slowly creep up, so the bonus never gets too big)

I've had worse naps. (Artwork via www.lustigesrollenspiel.de)

How to get a good night's sleep

I think this metric is dependent on six things:

• Being sated (not hungry, thirsty, etc)
• Being comfortable (resting in a quiet, comfortable place, in shelter, at a nice temperature, etc)
• Getting enough sleep and enough down time
• Having creature comforts (indulging in vices, enjoying entertainment, being with friends, etc)
• Being safe
• Being healthy (not injured, cursed, ill, in shock, etc)

Some games have relevant mechanics (like systems for dehydration or sleep deprivation), which this approach could either subsume or integrate with.

Mechanically, how does it work? Is there an individual character roll depending on the factors? GM fiat? Player-facing prescribed requirements for each tier? The implementation will of course differ with the system.

So will the outcome. Games with a single central dice mechanic obviously get a dice bonus or malus. Then it's just a matter of magnitude and deciding which rolls it applies to (I think you could make a very good case for "all of them").

Final thought

You might have noticed I didn't call this "the INSERT_NAME rule". My thesaurus failed me.

Fettle and Invigoration are awkward. Condition or Vigour would be good but tend to be reserved game terms, so might be confusing. Words like Well-Rested and Energised don't cover the negative cases. Restedness is apt, but clunky.

Freshness is pretty good (except for sounding like you're in a supermarket).

'Consume alien': Reviewing Encounter Critical

...You ever hear of Encounter Critical by Riley and Ireland? A long-forgotten piece of amateur RPG design from the 70s, originally published "on a school mimeograph" and sold through hobby stores, and now available only as a scan.

It's one of those early masterpieces in which fantasy and science fiction tropes collide. And yes, that does mean the currency is "gold credits".

Quest into the slaver kingdoms or hurl yourself into the galaxies of space to find wealth and destiny. Your tactics and your character are yours to control as you undertake ENCOUNTER CRITICAL.

...Of course, it's a joke. This "forgotten gem from 1978" was created by S. John Ross in 2004, with flourishes such as advertisements for an official Gazette (a newsletter in four supposed issues), as well as a reference to "a forthcoming line of Encounter Critical miniatures" and a search for a book deal.

Originally it was cast back in time 26 years from the true 2004 publication. Now 21 years have passed in turn.

How does the hoax hold up?

🛸 The aesthetic is perfectly on point: typewritten; amateur; hand-crafted and hand-drawn; retro; photocopied

🛸 The prose is breathlessly earnest, and preoccupied with its own relationship to conventions of war gaming

🛸 The game is full of sci-fi plagiarism and the kind of dated sexism obsessed with 'seduction' and 'doxies'

🛸 It's the classic nine-stat system we all know and love: Adaptation, Dexterity, ESP, Intellect, Leadership, Luck, Magic Power, Robot Nature, and Strength.

Um

The insane retro creativity of Encounter Critical

You roll for character race. Possibilities include, on the fantasy side, 'Amazons', 'Frankensteins', and Hobbits I mean 'Hoblings'. The purloined sci fi IP includes 'Klengons', 'Planetary Apes', and 'Vulkins'.

You can also play as a 'Wooky' and be penalised for wearing armour, although of course 'a Wooky will seek out magical rings or energy armor when it is available'.

You also have a chance to end up as...

You also may be a mutant, and therefore suffer from character traits such as Cannibal Urges, Allergy to laser, Unusual Sexual Gifts, or Self-Consuming Brain.

The writing mostly serves the "lost 70s indie game" in-joke, but also has its genuine funny moments:

 

Amateur indie design 

The mechanics, while harking back to OD&D, very much like they're just being felt out.

🛸 Warriors get followers and/or animal companions, and an underdetermined number of multiattacks.

🛸 Hit points, damage, and number of monsters appearing, are given as ranges instead of the underlying dice codes.

🛸 The nine stats barely interact at all with the (percentage-based) class abilities, only underpinning the general character abilities.

🛸 Instead, a class's key stats give xp bonuses or penalties. So does Intellect, which means it'll stack for the classes with Intellect as a qualifying stat (pioneer or warlock). If they roll maximum Int they will get +20% experience as well as "a 10% chance at experience bonus", i.e., 10% chance of doubling.

🛸 The terminology is slightly inconsistent.

🛸 The game is stuffed with percentage tables.

In these ways and others, it's all deeply connected to OD&D (while taking sniping pot shots at that game).

The book is laid out as if you pull out the middle pages to use at the table. Pages 23 and 27 are ("mistakenly"?) transposed, breaking the table of monsters.

Which includes extremely compelling types such as: Asteroid Worm, Bee Girl, Dragon of Wisdom, Rogue Robodroid, Sky Piranha, and:

(The entry for the Phasic Wolf helpfully notes that it is "phasic in nature".)

The intended 70s style rings true, IMO

An incautiously designed disease table gives you a chance of getting a brain disorder from sex work. Or you could get the "Pestilence of Dark Withering" or "Curse of Seven Hundred Minds" from a rusty nail.

There is a combat system which somehow combines simplicity, percentage rolls, underspecification, and assuming an understanding of how OD&D did things.

Does the ranged weapon table have "sling", "musket", "tommy gun", and "phasic sniper rifle" on it? Yes. Is it possible to do more damage with the sling than said rifle? Yes.

The text is very persnickety and period-appropriate, with pot shots at house rules and gaming styles, etc. It describes its spells as "correctly balanced", snubs spell levels, and says the authors prefer "a more science fiction approach where a spell is a spell".

(Speaking of spells, I love that a science fiction game has a spell that lets you travel... 500 miles.)

The inscrutably-named abilities are pretty great. Consume alien, Ensorcel, Illicit, Machine friend, and See the future all on one character sheet!

...And Seduce, of course. I've draw a veil over all the gendered stuff, but it's there – doxies, amazons, succubuses, etc. While it's clearly intended as a send-up of the 70s trappings, and works as such, the benefit of another 20 years makes it feels awkward and unnecessary. Rather than making a lot of content actually hinge on it, it could have been presented as a one-note joke.

 

The world of Encounter Critical

In the accompanying adventure, goblins are stealing the brainwaves of abducted girls to fuel up a spaceship in a warlock's lair.

This takes place in the game's setting: "Vanth, a fantasy world of adventure". (Is Vanth just Xanth, but different?)

It comes, of course, with a map:

 

It feels delightfully like the kind of thing I would have been making as an early teen.

My copy of Encounter Critical is from almost twenty years ago. These days you can find it for free on DriveThruRPG. Apparently there's an updated version.

To me, this game reads like a how-it-could have been of the original D&D, like an alternate history Dalluhn Manuscript. The game that resulted from Arneson watching some slightly different films.

Well done.

Out now: Monsters! Horrors & Abominations

 
My new book, Monsters! Horrors & Abominations, is now published!

It's a 215 page bestiary crammed full of weird and flavourful monsters for D&D 5e/2025, like the...
👹 Endlessphant (wrinkled grey elephant's leg with a million knees)
👹 Big scaly one (gormless rubbery hound-god of trolls)
👹 Void oyster (beautiful nacre-petrifying abomination from beyond the stars)
👹 Stillness mage (undead weather-worker and master of doldrums)

Streamlined for combat encounters and delivered with tactics information, modern design innovations, great illustrations, and a touch of humour! Between the base creatures and tons of variants, there are 240 monsters from Challenge Rating 0 to 20.

All focused on the unsettling, underground, unspeakable, unholy, and undead!

Now available here as a PDF or a neat hardcover book!

And as a blog reader, feel free to use this code for 10% off the PDF, or if you would like the hardcover, this code for 10% off the physical book!

Review: Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy

It's Reviewn June! Revebrewary! Octobereview! Janreviewary!

It's August, and here is a quick review.

The adventure 

Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy (hereafter SPHotHGP) is a location-based adventure for Swords & Wizardry, BX, OD&D, etc, released by Jason Sholtis in 2013.

You may know Sholtis from adventures like Operation Unfathomable, as well as blog The Dungeon Dozen. From the latter, years of incomparably high-density weird ideas got fleshed out into a book and then into a sequel. I consider those two of the best books in the entire TTRPG space when it comes to inspiration.

SPHotHGP is 20 pages, released for free. To an extent, it's a pastiche of the classic 1978 module, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Some of the set-up is the same, and there are several little nods. For example, in the 1978 module, the hill giant's name is Nosnra (that is, almost Arneson backwards), whereas in SPHotHGP it's Sadrox... who crudely disguises his identity by calling himself Lord Xordas.

Sadrox/Xordas is the Hill Giant Playboy of the title, and his party pad is a den of iniquity and a hoard of much treasure.

As well as giving adventure hooks, Sholtis writes a great background story about how the evil Xordas acquired his huge wealth and party house, although it's not clear how this would become known to the players.

The content 

SPHotHGP is absolutely full of tables. Find the type, nature, extent, and progress of the party. Determine how the PCs are received. Roll to see what kinds of brawl break out, and what giant-sized and gruesome banquet foods are being served: Megatherium done 5 ways. Sweagledactyl, a swan stuffed in a giant eagle inside a pterodactyl.

There's a fascinating array of evil VIP guests and regulars:

• Raver Ylyach the Swamp Hag and her putrescent servitors
• Zogorion, the surprisingly scheming Lord of the Hippogriffs
• Zhemorna, caterpillar-headed high priestess of the Worm Sultan
• Glurt “Beef” Wellington, possibly the world's handsomest hill giant
• The Piper from Beyond Comprehension
• etc 

And Xordas has a very weird treasure hoard indeed.

The presentation 

SPHotHGP is semi-professionally put together. There's a keyed map, and this being for an oldschool game, inline stat blocks for each key being.

I noticed one unfinished page reference, some stray punctuation, and Glok the ogre captain seems to be incorrectly statted. Content-wise, I liked everything except that the characters and complex are largely reactive, with only a few VIPs having guidance for active agendas. I certainly can't complain about getting a good adventure for the low low price of free.

Sholtis's description is terse but evocative. You can practically hear and smell the place.

A few illustrations by Sholtis also help to really tie it together.

 

Normally I'd leave a link for you to take a look yourself. I found SPHotHGP a while ago on Sholtis's blog, but the download has sadly succumbed to bit-rot. I hope the author will repost it some time, because this is great stuff!

Playing Scrabble for keeps

So I've been hooked on Word Play, the Scrabble-based roguelite.

I play some video games here and there, and when I find one I really enjoy, I try to squeeze out all of its challenge juice (technical term). That usually means at least getting all the achievements.

As a result, when it comes to Word Play I have been putting far too many hours into beating Ultramarathon mode specifically: 20 rounds at the most difficult scoring.

Here's how I finally beat it.

(Roguelite players will be completely unsurprised to hear that this did not involve me being particularly good at Scrabble.)

 

Cracking open this game like an egg

It's all about synergies, of course, which means you need luck plus strategy. This run had the 'more rare and legendary modifiers' modifier, and I just doubled down on the first synergy I saw, which revolved around Upgrades.

My engine is made of modifiers:

➡️ I get a random common Upgrade when I play a word with 8+ tiles.

➡️ Each Upgrade gets +1 use.

➡️ +1 bonus point each time an Upgrade is used.

➡️ I gain a refresh when an Upgrade is used up completely. (This was switched out near the end of the run)

So if I play exclusively long words, I get a bunch of Upgrades, and I get more bonus points on every subsequent word. I also get refreshes (to help me get long words), but I don't use them, because so many of the common Upgrades let you refresh selectively. I quickly build up 40 refreshes and a hundred bonus points per play.

Not crucial to the engine, but I also get a modifier for x2 score with 3+ unplayed special tiles. All the Upgrades are turning my entire bag into a mess of special tiles, so this doubles all my scores without effort.

Finally, I get my first potion tile, an 'M' worth 3 points. Potion tiles give you plays equal to their score, but break, when played. I hoarded this until I lucked out and got my final modifier: if you play a four tile word, add a copy of the first tile to the letter bag.

So now, with my huge numbers of refreshes, I can in principle just refresh until I get my potion M, play it at the start of a four letter word, and have it break but add a copy to the tile bag, for a net +2 plays. This is huge when you start the run with 20 plays and only get a few more per round. So: rinse and repeat, interspersing with long words (to get more Upgrades (to get more refreshes)).

In practise, though, that's slow and unreliable. I didn't end up spending many refreshes getting the potion M out there. Instead, I was careful to have an Upgrade slot open at the end of each round, and at about round 12 I got exactly what I was hoping for: the uncommon Upgrade which adds your refresh count to a tile's score.

You can see where this is going. I used it on my potion M three times, discovering in the process that a tile's score maxes out at 99. Now I gain 99 plays each time I put the potion M at the start of a four-letter word. Over the course of a round I gain more plays than I will ever need.

That's why the little number in the bottom right of the screenshot says "1538", not the "15" or so that you would normally expect.

 

Descent into absurdism

At this point the run is essentially won, so I rejoice, but it will clearly be a slog. Even with most of my tiles turned emerald or golden with the bounty of Upgrades, I only get something like 800 points per play with a long word, so I'm going to need to play 100 good words in the final couple of rounds.

Aware of this, I have been burning my essentially-limitless plays rerolling modifiers, and it pays off at the end of round 17. I get the 'multiply final score by number of special tiles' modifier, one of a couple that would reliably boost my scores even further.

So I wave goodbye to 'gain a refresh when an Upgrade is used up', you made all this possible. Now if I spell a word like LAVENDERS, it scores 5936 points. I can and do cruise to the finish in a handful of plays per round.

And that is how I got the hardest achievement in this damn spelling game.

 

Your mileage may vary

None of this strategy is reliably reproducible, of course, due to randomness. But I think it's interesting that it worked, because it was the first Upgrades-based build which I had tried. Part of that is luck in the early rounds, naturally.

Builds that I tried and failed with, for the record:

➡️ All gold tiles

➡️ Fast-growing diamond tiles

➡️ All the emerald synergies

➡️ Double length points, board expanders, and lots of plus tiles

➡️ Dozens of attempts that never got the smallest synergy.

 

So that's most of the challenge juice squeezed out of Word Play! I recommend this game if you're a Scrabblehead. It's on Steam.

—

Update a few days later: I translated my run into "whoops, all wildcards". 300+ tiles of golden and dotted 99-point wildcards took me to round 50.

 

I spent scores, maybe hundreds of rerolls trying to get the "dotted tiles multiplier increases with each play" modifier which would have given me desperately-needed multiplier scaling, and which could have taken me even further. I never got it, though, so I called it at round 50, where winning just meant typing "******************" over and over again and waiting for the scoring to finish.

 

Trying not to be a Gell-Mann Amnesiac

I sometimes wonder how much Gell-Mann Amnesia people experience. Paraphrasing Crichton, when you're a domain expert, you'll sometimes read an article that gets every aspect of your field completely and absurdly wrong, have a little laugh about it... then keep on reading and trusting articles that are about other fields, even from the same publication or writer.

As if they're some pure spring of wisdom which only coughed out a lump of mud when it came to the thing you happen to know about.

It's just an idea from a novelist, not the kind of cognitive bias that's supported by real-world studies that I know of, but you have to admit that it has a kind of... truthiness to it.

Stack this up with Dunning-Kruger and it's easy to become cynical. You might decide that actually, all the loudest voices are talking complete nonsense, all of the time. That might be too far. But I do think it pays to put deliberate hard effort into distinguishing domain experts from overconfident bullshitting pundits.

Now, anyone with their ear to the ground and a weather eye out for Gell-Mann Amnesia should have arrived at the obvious conclusion about generative AI. To wit, that the current state of the technology is that it is an overconfident bullshitter.

On being a piece of software and being confidently wrong

The case studies are easy to find, and the ones from domain experts sound pretty different from the ones from the tech industry and the reporters too busy and/or demoralised to do more than repackage their press releases as articles.

➡️ I am not a historian. The historians I've read say genAI gets softball history questions mostly right and deep ones mostly wrong. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. It just makes things up when the evidence is scarce. It makes errors of commission and omission as well as having misplaced focus and drawing weird conclusions from premises.

➡️ I am not an artist. The artists I listen to say genAI art looks bland and awful and organic because it doesn't understand composition or anatomy or separate objects (because it doesn't 'understand' anything). It can't make an image that isn't well-represented in the training data, like a camel and a steampunk automaton jousting from the backs of sumo wrestlers. Same in other kinds of media: filmmakers say genAI can't do film because it can't take direction or keep track of characters or have a consistent shot.

➡️ I am not a Wikipedia editor (except incidentally). Earlier this year there was a wretched moment when the Wikipedia editors were going to have genAI article summaries foisted on them, although I think that's turned around now. The skilled editors pointed out that the LLM summaries generally ranged from 'bad' to 'worthless' by Wiki standards: they didn't meet the tone requirements, left out key details or included incidental ones, injected "information" that wasn't in the article, and so on.

➡️ I am not a manager. The managers say genAI can't even collate timesheets reliably.

➡️ I am not a novelist. The novelists say a genAI book reads like a statistical summary of all creative writing anyone has ever done, including all the embarrassing teenage fanfiction. It sucks at originality. And because it doesn't have an internal model or understanding of its outputs, it can't keep track of things and make a coherent satisfying story. Things are vague, tropey, or contradictory.

➡️ I am not a lawyer. The lawyers are, um, well, by the sound of it a lot of them are being sanctioned for using generative AI to cite completely nonexistent caselaw. (☉__☉”)

➡️ I am not a public policy wonk. The bureaucratic wonks note that genAI can't summarise text. It shortens it and fills in the gaps with median seems-plausible-to-me pablum. The kind you get when you average out everything anyone has ever written on the internet. If you try to have an LLM summarise or draw conclusions from a study, it will usually do a bad job, fabricating statements more along the lines of what an average person would guess if they'd only read the study's title.

➡️ I am not a software engineer. The software engineers seem to have mixed opinions. They say that genAI works as code autocomplete (something that has existed for fifty years, but this new kind has pretty sophisticated lookahead, neat). At least some are saying it can't do principled software engineering, it introduces security flaws, its performance drops off for obscure languages, it overconfidently generates bad code, it plagiarises from code repositories that it doesn't have the rights to...

I could go on.

I'm no longer a domain expert in anything, this many years after my stint in academia. I think I'm halfway to being an expert in a few different areas, though. I deliberately concocted some thoughtful questions at the intersection of those areas, just to see.

For example, I asked about the (obvious) mapping of choose-your-path text adventure books onto mathematical graph structures, which the LLM chatbot identified. I followed up with technical questions about the features of those graphs in context: what would the game be like if they weren't digraphs, would you expect cyclic vs acyclic, would a finite state machine be more appropriate and if so why, etc.

And lo, the generative AI output was absurdly, hopelessly, and confidently wrong when given questions that needed expertise.

A lot of people with a lot of money would like you to think that genAI chatbots are going to fundamentally change the world by being brilliant at everything. From the sidelines, it doesn't feel like that's going to work out.

Sometimes I read posts from experts along the lines of

"I've noticed it's almost worthless at [my field], but it sounds like it's pretty useful for [other thing]."

But less so lately, maybe?

So I'm left wondering: are people experiencing massive Gell-Mann Amnesia about these chatbots? Or does everybody know that the emperor has no clothes?

(But oh no, we've invested so, so, so very much money into the emperor's finery, and all the wealthiest people at the imperial court agree: pleeeease could you keep squinting to see this amazing new clothing?)

 

Reviewn June 2025 part 3: Game books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

Part three: TTRPGs and game content

 

What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).

It's Reviewn June!

 

Tiny Spaceship

An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth 

By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)

A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).

I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0. 

Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.

 

RPG Design Zine 

A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design

By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)

Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.

Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.

The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.

I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.

 

Sinister Hovering Orb

(Sinister Hovering Orb)

By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)

A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).

For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".

There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.

PUBLIC GUEST 5

Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5

By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five) 

A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).

The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)

PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.

Writing With Style

An editor's advice for RPG writers

By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)

A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.

There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.

Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.

Dwarf Mine

A mapping game of adventure 

By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)

Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.

There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
 

The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.

A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:

• I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
• The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways, and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
• Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
• The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room. 

There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.

The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly? 

The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".

The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.

 

GURPS "Discworld Also"

A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG

By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!

Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).

It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed

• A mangled seven-clause sentence
• "almost" should say "always"
• "could" should say "would"
• "fall off" should say "falling off"
• "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
• "They not" should say "They are not"

The alternative troll stats, and the extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').

Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.

The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger and Fourecks get more space here.

• Smarlhanger is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
• Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of armour.)

The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.

'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.

Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl

By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice) 

A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.

A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.

There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.

Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:

• Satellite shamans
• Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
• Robot prosthetics
• Hive drones 
• Sky bandits
• The Spinal War
• Sindovar
• The Maze 
• Josung (game)
• etc 

Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
 

In progress

By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.

I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!

Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.

So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.

Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory

I have an upcoming weird experimental narrative solo game. It's about a harlequin demon, the fantabulous floating factory he runs, and the power of allegory.

You play as 'the good child' on the factory tour, where the other children all have minor foibles which will surely come into play. But what kind of lesson do you learn when you win a rigged game?
 

 

Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory. 

I put together my first prototype as part of the game jam, WTFjam 2025. You can check out the free demo now! https://periapt-games.itch.io/wallace-wunkles-tragedy-factory-demo

Reviewn June 2025 part 2: Fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part two: Fiction 

 

It's Reviewn June! 

In the modern melange of media that blurs the line between traditional and web publishing, it's hard to say what's a 'book'. For the sake of a clean division, I'm looking here at the physical fiction books I read in the first six months of 2025.

...But now that I come to write them up, I find that means very few are left after I take out webfiction, manga, poetry collections on Project Gutenberg, books on archive.org, and ebooks. We're left with:

A bunch of John Allison's superb comic books

Maybe ten or twelve of them: volumes of Solver, Bad Machinery, Steeple, The Great British Bump-off, etc. Most of these I'd read in webcomic form; having them in print is a little luxury and a way to support a great artist. I wish that Conan and the Blood Egg hadn't been taken down since I'd have liked a physical copy of it. I also wish there was a nice, straightforward timeline of all of John Allison's creative outputs; he has a long history of different interlocking series and I have a completionist spirit.

Game-ready ideas: This stuff is just riddled with inspiration for modern settings. There's lots of semi-supernatural stuff going on. Especially check out the mystery-solving comics; you could lift one of the premises wholesale for a game of Kids on Bikes or maybe Fiasco.

Guards! Guards! (1989) and Men At Arms (1993). Terry Pratchett

Discworld re-reads after looking at GURPS Discworld last year, and reading GURPS Discworld Also this year. I've read every book in this series about a dozen times, apart from the last few. Pratchett in his best years remains unparalleled.

Guards! Guards! and Men at arms are comic fantasy detective books that I think anyone who likes even just one of those genres would enjoy.

Aside: I noticed there's a few lines in Guards! Guards! that appear almost verbatim in Shrek (the movie, not the book) in what one must charitably assume is convergent evolution.

Game-ready ideas: It's hard to make a comic fantasy TTRPG. Comedic elements develop in practise, at the table, unless everyone involved makes a dedicated effort to prevent that. Part of Pratchett's comic genius was taking ideas to their humorously logical ends (retrophrenology, the rate of million-to-one chances coming true in genre fiction, animal responses to their own reflections, etc).

I think 'taking ideas to their natural conclusion' always helps with verisimilitude, including in TTRPGs. Suppose X is a fantastic element true of your setting. Then you really ought to take what we know about how worlds / people / processes operate, puzzle out as many consequences that follow from X as possible, then add those to your setting or modify X to remove the ones you dislike. Otherwise some of these will inevitably be explored in play and come up short, revealing the world as shoddy papier-mâché.

Pick of Punch. William Davis (ed). (1975)

Punch had a surprisingly long history. I have a few of the really old compiled volumes, so old that they don't list dates (I'm guessing early 1900s), which I should dive into some time. This particular book is comparatively recent. It suffers from a boatload of unfortunate 'signs of the times' (racism, classism, misogyny...)

Game-ready ideas: Reading this was being immersed in British culture of a specific period; it was not always easy to parse. It's interesting that even things close to you in time (less than a century ago) and culture (English-speaking Commonwealth country) can end up almost incomprehensible; you don't need huge gulfs for a text's meaning to become eroded and for a different culture to seem strange. Corollary: If you pick up a book like this and discard the parodic and inappropriate elements, you'll be left with a mass of very specific setting content and tone you can borrow.

More

There's a few novels on my table that I have no hope of finishing before the end of June. Fingers crossed for getting them over the finish line by Christmas!

I may have to change how I approach reviewing in the long term, if my slow shift towards reading more digitally continues.

That's been especially true of my TTRPG reading, so next time, as I wrap up with part 3 (game books reviews), I'll be looking at digital publications too.

Reviewn June 2025 part 1: Non-fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part one: Non-fiction 

 

I read a medley of materials.

The modern melange of media blurs the line between traditional and web publishing. Most books are available online; many bloggers edit their writing into self-published volumes; plenty of web texts are book-length or longer. News and commentary and user content and blog posts and tutorials and metafiction all start blurring together.

For the sake of a clean division, I'm only going to look at the physical books I read in the first six months of 2025. It's Review[i]n[g] June!

 

I externalise my memory by writing reviews every so often. 

 

Games and decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. R. Duncan Luce & Howard Raiffa (1985)

A game theory textbook.

Do you ever dive into something thinking you'll be able to hack the technical writing because you have semi-relevant education? One of my majors was in formal logic, but I still couldn't really parse large chunks of this book.

Game-ready ideas: Any sufficiently technical work can be a good source of esoteric jargon to cram into a wildly different domain, like wizardry or mythos occultism or sci-fi engineering. By the way, a dryad and their tree are a dyad: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyad

A brief history of mathematical thought. Luke Heaton (2015)

An introduction to maths through a history lens. 

Brilliant, but dense going in parts. The rare book where I wish it had been twice as long so that some of the inferences and arguments could be laid out in more depth.

Game-ready ideas: Everything is weirder than you thought. 'Non-Euclidean' has a specific meaning which is not just synonymous with 'unknowably eldritch'. Geometry was useful to ancient societies for e.g. recalculating field boundaries after seasonal flooding moves markers. Mathematics has historically intersected massively with religion and spirituality.

Paradoxes from A to Z: Second Edition. Michael Clark (2007)

An encyclopedia of paradoxes with a weird design.

The gimmick is that the paradoxes are arranged in alphabetical order; this makes it almost impossible to read. The introductory entry on 'paradox' is under P, more than halfway through. The implication is you should be using this as a reference work, but the audience for that has to be miniscule! Reading it cover to cover, I was told constantly to flip elsewhere to get necessary background information, because of course all the formal approaches to paradoxes are interlinked. There are no page references. 😡

Seriously, why not just present the paradox in a sensible, mostly-chronological order? Introduce concepts as needed and build from there? Luke Heaton's book may have spoiled me.

Aside: It's interesting that many famous paradoxes are either resolved by the things mathematicians do to make mathematics useful (define countable and enumerable infinities, specify axioms of set theory, etc), or become trivial once you understand that human language isn't and can't be some perfect mirror of reality.

Game-ready ideas: I'm not a 'riddles' guy when it comes to puzzles. Don't use paradoxes for that. You could reskin some paradoxes as challenges that academics in a fantasy world are working on. Preference intransitivity might be turned into an interesting game challenge, e.g. some group prefers A > B > C > A under certain circumstances.

Zeus grants stupid wishes. Cory O'Brien (2013)

Myths from various cultural traditions, retold.

Absolutely redolent with early 2000s internet era writing style, down to ending with an insufferable take on science and religion. There's a line break after almost every sentence clause, like a text conversation or a certain type of free verse.

The author admits to having two orthogonal premises, and vacillates between them. Paraphrasing:

1. "Modern retellings of myths are bowdlerised; I will tell you the weird nasty original bits [implied: and lean into the troubling stuff by making unpleasant jokes]"
2. "I will just make stuff up to make myths more exciting"

Can't recommend it. I counted seven jokes that actually got a grin, out of (~20 'funny' lines × 275 pages) maybe 5500 stabs at humour. (Lots of typos, too.)

Game-ready ideas: When a cultural tradition is admired, it can end up reflected through massive gulfs of history into art, scholarship, etc. I also like (a) a more adversarial relationship with one's pantheon; (b) living in a magical gourd; (c) a sun that's capable of making mistakes and suffering retaliation for them.

Battle castles: 500 years of knights and siege warfare. Dan Snow (2012)

The story of a set of specific castles.

This was written in the wake of a TV series, and reads like television travelogue narration. The prose is sort of breathless and sometimes borders on legitimising tyranny (letting all the 'divine right of kings' slash 'conquering warlords should have a monopoly on violence so that they can govern' stuff go unexamined).

A useful primer on castles. The actual history content is decent, e.g., addressing the common misconception that a fight goes until you're dead or the enemy is wiped out. But I noticed a few absolute howlers too, old debunked canards like: "Beer was then a basic necessity of life because, unlike the water supply, it could be trusted not to cause disease."

Game-ready ideas: Castles are a specific response to a specific kind of socio-military-economic situation, and might not plausibly crop up in your fantasy world. If they do, there's enough info here you could just lift out a castle and its context entirely.

How to. Randall Munroe (2019)

Pop science with a twist: silly ideas taken seriously. 

'The xkcd guy' has written some books, and now I think I've read them all. Pretty light reading until the physics gets heavy. Covers how to play tag (against champion sprinters and marathon runners), how to power your house, how to decorate the world's tallest tree, how to land a plane on various surfaces, etc.

Fairly interesting stuff, but not the sort of thing that geared my mind up to go down some research rabbit hole. If I had any criticism, it's that it's a little America-centric.

Game-ready ideas: A lava moat is surprisingly near-feasible in real life, so in fantasy it should be even more of a staple.

 

AI Morality. Edited by David Edmonds (2024)

A modern collection of philosophical essays looking at AI and its implications.

The essays are about AI in the broad sense, not just 'generative AI' or 'LLMs', as people are increasingly misapplying the term (which is bewildering to me, like if some specific advancement in orthopedy for hockey injuries led to an explosion in popularity and people just started using the umbrella term 'medical care' to mean 'orthopedy for hockey injuries').

The book's anchors – philosophy, computer science, and writing – are at the intersection of my university study and brief academic career. I picked up a few places where a writer just obviously didn't know what they were talking about, but those were few and far between, so it didn't sap my respect for established academics too much. The book covers a lot of interesting topics, but I found myself skimming a lot due to the curse of existing familiarity with them.

Game ready-ideas: Nothing specific, but lots of inspiration for near-future science fiction. The ethics of insurance denial, cyberattacks, and Asimov's Laws. The chapters on faceless algorithms might be good for Cyberpunk / Shadowrun.

Tune in for Reviewn June parts 2 (fiction I've read) and 3 (game books I've read).

Monsters of the Month: Malevolent Revenants

The crumbling monuments of the living are haunted by spiteful remnants. Rotted bodies stir in their catacombs and merge in shambling hordes. Powerful mage-wights linger under peat mounds, poring over parchment secrets.

Portents stalk the ruins, faceless dry flesh barely containing their wrathful spirits. In ancient sepulchres deep beneath the earth, towering warriors guard glittering treasures. Above them, the night's silence stutters with the cackles of bestial ghuls. 

 

Monsters of the Month: Malevolent Revenants

A collection of undead horrors, this is the last of the mini-bestiaries I'm putting out for D&D 5e/2025!

New monsters. Special traits. Tactics advice. Lots of variant forms.

Live on Kickstarter! 

Check it out here! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/monsters-of-the-month-malevolent-revenants 

If you missed earlier collections, you can pick them up as add-ons!

Corpse prisons! Kitbashed bone golems! Toadstool-encrusted ghouls! Sear them with the light! 

Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

Wiki Articles Are Wizards!

Wizards are bizarre uniquities who carve their own paths through reality like rogue stars.

Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed] is my new zine for crafting these characters out of wiki articles, then pitting them against each other in a wizard-off!

To get a thematically consistent weird wizard with spooky powers and an appropriately unpleasant set of personality traits, you'll want to use procedural generation rather than strictly random generation. This small book gives you a comprehensive method for doing that, using wiki articles as the inspirational material, and has all sorts of bonus wizard-lore to boot.

🧙 Available today!

 

And I'm publishing a companion piece: a collection of troublesome characters, 30 Wicked Wizards!

From Miarthetrolut the Regulator (who meddles with fish kinematics) to Sthogar the Ambitious (and his reanimated giant spiders)!

The thirty wizards and archwizards in this zine-style book are all made using the Wiki Articles Are Wizards rules, all laid out in a splattery OSR style, and all very weird and wicked.

🧙 Also available today!

 

As well as print copies, you can get a digital edition of either zine!

Are you interested in both? Hey! You can grab the PDF bundle!

 

The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or
you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.