- Never cut a knot. You must always untangle it, lest the thread spirits grow angry. They lurk in every knot you tie, from your apron strings to the woven talisman above your door to the rug at your hearth. See that the threads hold fast, and they will bring you good fortune.
- They say a young man lives in the woods, with a face as sweet as an angel’s and a voice to match. They call him The Deathless. If you wander too far from the path, he’ll come to greet you. You must never follow him or else you’ll be lost in the woods until you starve.
- Once there was tricky, clever girl. She saw fit to challenge the way of things, and for that the gods frowned. She challenged them to a contest: three tasks, and whoever completed them first and best would be free to do as they wished. It is a long story, but in their folly, the gods allowed her to choose the tasks, and in so doing, she trapped them in paintings, leaving her free to live as she desired without the overbearing press of the will of the gods.
- There is a creature that lives at the bottom of the well. You must whisper your sorrows to it, and in turn it will cry great puddles of tears. Its is a sad life, but our well never runs dry.
- If you must cross the river when the water runs high and threatens to sweep you away, tuck a gift of bread and wine into your pocket. Toss them in when you reach the center, in hope of sating the river spirits.
- Fear not the dead of night, for the sky is merely a blanket and the stars are pinpricks of light through which the lady of midnight watches and shines her light. The moon is hers, a carefully crafted button that slowly, s l o w l y is done and undone as the days pass.
- When you look at the fire in your oven, take care not to stare too long. The vulpine creature that lives in flame can steal your heart through one smoldering gaze.
- A pinch of rosemary in your porridge in the morning and a bitter brew of sourgrass and bleeding heart leaf in the evening will ensure your loved one will take notice of you at the next snowfall.
- There was a great hero who lived here once. Did you know? They drove off the monsters that had stripped this land bare. A great lord came to them and invited them to his manor, offering riches and acclaim. But the hero refused. Then a mighty king came to the hero, promising honor and and half his kingdom. The hero again refused. Finally, a golden god came to the hero and promised immortality and glory. Still, the hero refused. Here they stayed for the rest of their days, laying down their sword, which became the river you see now, and burying their armor to create fertile farmland for their descendants to tend for years to come.
- During the first falling leaves of autumn, you might glimpse the shadowy shapes of children among the branches of the trees. These are the children of trees, gone to plant themselves anew somewhere else.
Solo TTRPG Catalog
StandardA brief post today to share a tool I’ve been working on lately.
I play a lot of solo games. I get asked for recommendations about solo games a lot. I own a lot of solo games, largely thanks to bundles on itch. So I put all those games into a spreadsheet with several means of classification (system type, tools needed, gameplay length, etc).
This isn’t a comprehensive list, I want to be clear. This isn’t even all the solo games I OWN, just the ones I have read or played, and it certainly isn’t every solo game floating around on the internet!
Anyway, I hope this can be useful for folks. You can find the spreadsheet here.
Cheers, LT
The Playtest’s the Thing
StandardPlaytesting has always been intimidating to me.
Not for other people’s games – I’ll playtest those until the end of time, no matter how rough or finished they might be. It’s only my own games that seem like insurmountably difficult beasts to wrestle.
I think this is in large part because of how vulnerable showing my work to others can feel. The easy part is over by the time I’ve gotten to playtesting! I’ve talked about the game, I’ve thought about the game, I’ve written the easy bits down, but now? Now I have to play the thing? What if it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny? What if all this talk I’ve been doing is for nothing?
The thing is, all that talk IS for nothing, in many ways. The game in my head only exists there, in my head. No matter how much I talk with friends and colleagues about it, no matter how much I declare my intentions for further writing, the game is still only in my head until we try to play it.
My primary experience with playtesting, being on the side of the designer, has been with 5e content, which was largely focused around numerical/mechanical balance. That felt so easy comparatively! The content wasn’t really going to change, and the structure of the rules wasn’t going to change, because my collaborator and I had built the game off of an existing game.
That’s what I thought I was doing with this most recent game, using an existing framework and building something genre-new on top. But in reality, I’ve changed, or contemplated changing so much of the structure of the game that it only barely shares a skeleton with the game that inspired it.
Maybe it’s that I’m being wishy-washy about my design. In prior games I’ve written, I had very clear and certain mechanics that were simple enough to hold up without playtesting (theoretically). With this game, there’s a lot more moving parts and a lot of questions that are key to the core gameplay experience, to say nothing of the specific details that I’ll need to refine later. So playtesting is both incredibly necessary and incredibly daunting; I am throwing myself and my playtesters onto shaky ground at best, with so many central questions unanswered.
And yet, last night’s playtest started giving me answers almost immediately. Purely by having to explain the rules I’d already written to players, not designers, and purely by building a character in the game, I locked in some key elements of the game (it’s definitely doable as GM-less, it’s definitely workable with a default scenario, but that default scenario needs to still help players propel plot). Even with all the questions that arose and the work ahead of me, I feel confident that this game has good bones, and even more, I feel confident that I can be the one to make this game.
All the talk in the world about this game has not given me even a fraction of the certainty granted to me by playtesting.
I hope that if you, like me, get knots of anxiety at the thought of letting others play your game (not just read it), you go ahead and schedule a playtest. Don’t wait for the game to be “ready” for playtesting. Stop thinking about it and talking about it and make it happen.
Cheers, LT
1d10 Haunted Places
Standard- An ancient lord’s house with a roof long ago rotted away. The whole mansion is open to the elements. There are those who say that spectral figures dance to faint music in the afterimage of a grand gala from a hundred years ago.
- This particular bend of the river looks innocuous enough; it’s a common water route. But superstitious types will swear they’ve seen ghostly hands reaching up from the depths, whispering sweet words about swimming.
- It’s a gate. A single gate with no walls or fence or any structure to attach to. It opens on its own, beckoning you. You walk through, and suddenly the field before you is a bustling marketplace of the dead.
- An empty cathedral is filled with the echos of hymns and chanted prayers bouncing off the mosaic floors and stained glass windows.
- If you listen closely you might hear a child’s laughter by the fountain. There are no children here anymore, but their reflections are in the water.
- The curiosity shop is tucked away on a side street. It gets few visitors, but you like the atmosphere and the hidden treasures you sometimes find here. The only thing is that you’re fairly sure the shopkeep and every other customer who walks through the door is a ghost.
- The tavern was cheap, and suddenly you know why. Moans and screeches haunt you throughout the night, and you’d swear there’s a shadow person in the corner, but when you look directly at them, they’re gone.
- They say the tower is haunted by the young man who threw himself from its peak as a means of escaping his destiny. Now he looks for someone new to bear the burden.
- The ship that is sometimes spotted in the harbor among the fog is unmanned, you’re sure. Cannonfire sounds from it, but no shots land. The light signals beg for help. Whatever you will find there, it won’t be alive.
- It’s easy to dismiss the lilting singsong coming from the cave as the echoes of someone playing a prank. It’s even plausible that the glowing liquid oozing down its stalagtites could be a natural phenomenon. Less easy to explain is decaying form of a shabby king who passes right through you when you approach.
A New Year’s Wishlist
StandardHere we are at the end of the year!
2024 ended up being a really good year for me in gaming – a thread in the Dice Exploder discord asked everyone about the highlights of their year, and going through mine had me feeling really grateful.
- I published 3 ashcan editions of games, 3 games or game-adjacent projects (including an interview about a game that doesn’t exist), and 3 supplementary posts for The Wildsea.
- I got to attend GAMA for the first time, and it was hugely enlightening!
- I hosted 4 game jams this year (one of which is ongoing!)
- Exchanged zines via mail with a lot of friends
- Started a “daily read” practice for games and game-adjacent content, and made a habit of screenshotting things that stick out to me
- Played a lot of games on podcasts and streams
- And so so many other things (I played no less than 15 unique games this year, by my count)
I don’t expect as much from 2025, largely because I’m having another kiddo soon and I know by now how little time that will leave in my brain for games. So my very, very modest wishlist (thank you Christian for inspiring this post) for the year is as follows:
To Play/Run
- New version of Band-aids and Bullet Holes
- More Toxic Sword Lesbians
- a variety of solo games (especially No Tell Motel)
To Work On
- Playtest: Untitled Reality TV game
- Playtest: Gripemongers
- Playtest: Imitation Meat
- Write: Femininomenon Calendar Game
- Write: Wreck This Deck supplement
- Write: Mythical Birdfeeder
- Write: supplements for other games I’m a fan of, as possible
I’m keeping it sparse! There’s so many games I want to play in actuality, but the time just isn’t there. The list of work is easier because writing on my phone while nap trapped or in the wee hours of night was a godsend for my creativity during the last infant period of my life. I expect you’ll be treated to some sleep-deprived blogs as well. Playtesting is a much, much harder thing for me, even when you don’t factor young children’s schedules into the equation, but I’m determined. Two of the three listed are extremely close to publish-ready. If they have to sit until 2026 to actually be prettied up and published, that’s okay!
Once upon a time I would have had a list triple this size, and I’d have felt bad halfway through the year when I didn’t have any of the things done. But this is just a loose wishlist – if I don’t get a single thing on this list done (unlikely, since I already have sessions of Toxic Sword Lesbians scheduled), that’ll be okay.
I hope your 2025 is wonderful, and I’d love to hear your own wishlists for the year, as they relate to TTRPGs.
Cheers! LT
A quick thanks.
StandardI appreciate everyone who jumped on board for the 12 Days of Itchmas, last minute though it was.
Whether you blogged, rated and reviewed on Itch, or just talked to your friends, I’m glad to hear so many people talking about games they love!
I’ll have a “2025 Wishlist” post going up before the year’s end, but this blog will be a bit quieter for a bit! (How do yall consistent bloggers do it?)
Cheers, LT
The Twelfth Day of Itchmas
StandardAt long last, we come to the end!
(Recently I learned the 12 Days of Christmas are actually Christmas Day thru Jan 5 (Epiphany) – notes for next year).
I had some aspirations of writing original content for games I enjoy but the time crunch got me, per usual. Still! Today’s game is one I have a half-baked homebrew for that I WILL publish eventually.
Hunt by Spencer Campbell of GilaRPGs is a diceless, single-session gris-based combat game about an order of doomed knights. It’s his first (or one of) game using LUMEN 2.0, the diceless version of the system that runs NOVA.
I’ve been trying to get this one to table since I got it at GenCon last year! It’s a perfect “our regular game didn’t fire so here is our emergency backup for one night only”.
If you’ve listened to the recent RTFM, you may know that the Arthurian rennaissance is upon us (look, that was my takeaway, it might not have been Max and Aaron’s, but cmon. Pendragon is such a fun disaster basket). Did you like Dev Patel in the Green Knight? Are you a fan of inevitable doomed? If yes, this game is for you.
Pick your knight oath. My choice, for example.
Pick your weapon. Again, mine for example.
Work together to build your doomed order and the beast you hunt. From there, the quest proceeds apace! You may have to tackle some setbacks before you find the beast – manage your resources carefully or find yourself lacking when the time comes.
I am not, strictly speaking, a wargames person. I am, however, in video games, a real time strategy person. And this game scratches that itch while also telling a compelling, often tragic story.
Cheers, LT
The Eleventh Day of Itchmas
StandardBelated but no less beloved, today’s Itchmas recommendation is Outliers by Samantha Leigh, published by Far Horizons Co-Op.
If you, like me, are a solo game afficionado, you might know Leigh from the tarot-based game Anamnesis, or the recent Death of the Author.
I know Triangle Agency is all the rage this year (and with good reason!) – corporate supernatural weird horror is a genre a lot of us know and love. If you like the design of that game but don’t have a group to get it to the table with, I suggest giving this game a try. And it’s well worth it to get a physical copy if you are able – the design is simple but thematic, and personally I think more of us designers should use spiral or wire-o binding on our zines!
You play as a research assistant hoping to secure a new grant before your lab runs out of funds. The game is based on the Wretched and Alone SRD by Chris Bisette, but plays somewhat less bleakly than a lot of its fellows, in my opinion.
As with other W&A games, this one requires a Jenga tower, but it provides and easy alternative (counting down dollars) if you don’t have one. I much prefer that alternative over the commonly linked “here’s jenga tower math!” website that is often shared around.
Cheers! LT
The Tenth Day of Itchmas
StandardWe’re in the home stretch, folks! I hope to finish with some small content things for games I enjoy, but for today, have another recommendation.
Three Hunters by Ryan Khan is a short form, open-ended game about the titular hunters.
Each of you is chasing the Quarry for your own reasons. The setting bits provided are evocative and should spur the imagination.
The end of the game asks if you are willing to sacrifice yourself in pursuit, and each hunter answers privately.
Ryan is doing some really cool, lyrical game design, especially in the “short games” space.
Cheers! LT
The Ninth Day of Itchmas
Standardtwo posts in one day, but this one is actually on time!
Today’s recommendation is A Response to the Esteemed Dr. Crackpot by Emily Jankowski.
This is a game for two, wherein you each play an academic publishing increasingly disgruntled and convoluted academic papers as a rebuttal to one another. It’s a one page game with a clever premise and funny writing.
perhaps my favorite line in the game is the ending condition: “Play ends when responses become too personal and therefore completely unpublishable by the journal.”
Cheers! LT
Lady Tabletop 