i wanna take a moment to talk about one of my favorite game design innovations in HARVEST by @wildwoodsgames , something so genius that i plan to steal it for some future projects down the road — the dark force tempting them every playbook has an OCCULT POWER, a choice between three dark masters who are applying pressure to the character and grant them a special set of moves they can use to dramatically (and sometimes magically) influence the narrative

there's been a lot of conversation around "Théâtre D’opéra Spatial", the AI-generated image that won a prize in Colorado recently, but what i'm interested in doing is looking at this piece and saying "if this is art, what is it doing"

so lets try! (cw racism in art) the painting depicts a figure in white robes staring at an orb in front of her. the orb, buffeted by the architecture of the room, contains a city within it. a figure in red robes stands off to her side. around her are more figures, shrouded in darkness and digital noise

i got absolutely sick of writing about British People so ive changed the setting of 7 part pact and i am extremely enjoying the decision fuck the english, its time to write about earthsea

hey everyone , its been a while since ive actually told the story of how i got here. i figure, in this strange limbo time im in while i wait for the next chapter of my life to start, i should tell a lil story — some come gather round and i'll explain how i became a game designer i grew up in the Catskill Mountains of upstate new york, the foothills of the Appalachians, the place where Rip Van Winkle slept. my parents were artists, and i was a tomboy daydreamer of a kid — hanging out in the library and exploring the creek by my house

ive thought a lot about this and i strongly believe that labeling works "wholesome" or "tenderqueer" is a process of reduction, either:

• dismissing works which trouble the status quo by calling them cutesy & niche
• bad actors seeking a veneer of harmlessness

https://twitter.com/bignoseagenda/status/1505253777955336194

i dont really feel comfortable or trusting when someone calls their art "wholesome" or implies moral purity

i am equally troubled when pop culture talks about a work using a lens designed to strip away nuance and reduce a work to its most surface-level elements

one of our writers (the outstanding @bignoseagenda) has made a set of playlists for the residents of yazeba's bed & breakfast!! i'll link to each one in the thread below, and feel free to listen to them for some pre-crowdfunding Vibes Gertrude's playlist is GO THE DISTANCE, about her running from her parents and finding a new home here
youtube.com/playlist?list=…

Fuck Kickstarter

or; why we’re making the scariest choice possum creek has ever had to make.
(PLEASE READ THE WHOLE ANNOUNCEMENT!) about a month ago, Kickstarter betrayed indie creators. They announced blockchain integration, and in doing so burned multiple decades of goodwill and fucked over a lot of people
(i talk more about the pressures facing indie creators in this podcast)

https://twitter.com/TheRpgAcademy/status/1480540635820179462?s=20

when we talk about lyric games, more than unplayability or expression or whatever, the important part to me was the exploration of the importance of the authorial ability / prosaic quality of game design like the heart of the entire lyrical experiment was, to me, about going "once we have removed the mechanics from the game — left with the indentation of rules — what are we left with? what can we create in this indentation?"

a discord server thats an apartment building and everyone pays rents on their channels but sometimes the channels are leaky and get cockroaches in them a discord server thats a boat that doesnt have a designated server space and instead its a category of channels/permissions that moves from server to server

theres a concept ive been using with my friends when talking about games that i call "games having teeth" and i want to try and explain it a little bit down below

1/? so to me, a game has teeth when it uses specificity in a very ... pointed way. when the text of the game grabs you and pulls you close and makes you engage with it, when it effectively justifies itself.

2/?

one of my favorite weird old games (Normality) just got reuploaded onto itchio! i'm super excited it's available, both from a "this is a cool project" perspective and "this is important for the history of lyric games" perspective here's the link for downloading it, its an awesome weird project and i really hope you check it out because i think it's an awesome perspective on what games can be!
objectivereality.itch.io/normality

fascinated by the alt right freaks claiming im scared of norse mythology like i didnt publish a norse myth game 3 days ago "snowflake sjw is TRIGGERED by a self-proclaimed nazi who genuinely actually killed someone, will the woke police never stop their cancelling?!?!?!"

if youre going to write a game about norse mythology, you must be very careful to make your politics clear. there are incredibly dangerous and monstrous people who use norse mythology as an ideological framework to justify their racism and nazism (THREAD) right now in ttrpgs one such motherfucker is rearing his ugly head in our space. a literal nazi murderer @WargarW (with a wikipedia page that reads like a parody of an asshole) is gaining ground
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vike…

so i want to talk a little bit about perspective, accessibility, and the tools i used in In The Time Of Monsters to make sure the game would feel accessible even to someone who cannot stand lots of math first off, if you want to buy In The Time Of Monsters (or "monstytime" as ill call it for the rest of the thread), you can do so here!
possumcreekgames.itch.io/monster-time

today im thinking a little bit about designing rules that are meant to be broken. ive talked about this before but ppl didnt really understand what i meant lol so i wrote a few examples like, if we understand that a game text's rules don't have to be followed, we can use that as a tool to develop the game, yknow? all rules can be broken, but emphasizing that changes the tenor of the game to our advantage

someone's giving me a tv tomorrow which means i will own a tv for the first time in 12 years, and the part im reeling at most is that it didnt occur to me until this moment that i was missing a tv in my house i didnt realize people used their TVs for things ????? i had gotten so used to laptop screens ..... what do u even use a TV for

i talked a couple days ago on a panel about the fact that all rpg texts have a viewpoint, a narrator, a perspective. just like a novel, theres someone explaining the rules to u — who are they? as @kazumiochin has pointed out, d&d wields an anthropological narrator. the writer (befitting d&d's origins as from euro-nationalist historical war games) writes like a mid-20th century anthropologist studying a people theyre not a part of

what if the pandemic happened in 2009 instead sdfghfdsdg wow im on a roll lately with the viral posts, anyway check out wanderhome for a cool tabletop rpg thats nothing like this post (i contain multitudes)
possumcreekgames.com/wanderhome

how does your ttrpg make space (mechanically, structurally, safety-tools-wise, etc.) for someone who just wants to draw pictures of the characters / hang out with their friends / disengage from the rules structure? do your games have space for those players? i love 4th edition d&d's approach, by describing the Watcher in a list of different sorts of players

hey folks! this is a cute lil thread for my patr3on, where i post a lot of my works in progress and game thoughts and stuff! i'm gonna talk about some of the stuff on here and why u should give it yr support if u can 💕
possumcreekgames.com/patreon we've got some first looks at yazeba's bed & breakfast, a cutesy slice-of-life episodic storytelling game about a heartless witch and her bed & breakfast full of fun weirdos. the first look is available there, so be sure to get more info there

Hey just a pro-tip to my (wonderful, lovely, I'm sure) cishet followers - don't do this. Just, don't fucking do this. Not on Twitter, not in email, and certainly not in Kickstarter DMs. This shit is why queer designers & designers of color get fucking trapped on Itch instead of breaking into larger markets. This is why only the most sanitized, generic, subtextual versions of our stories make it big. It's coward shit and I'm sick of being the nice queer about it.