jay Dragon Profile picture
27 🌱 writer #Wanderhome #YazebasBnB, awards (ENnies, SFFWA Nebula), RPG publisher, trans gay 🌱 spam: @TheOmelasKid 🌱 email: jay@possumcreekgames.com
Jun 26 6 tweets 1 min read
i unfortunately think "it's not my job to educate you" , as a phrase, has done tremendous harm to leftwing communities and communication and we all gotta put in doubletime to recover from the harm its caused sorry but there no such thing as "just google it" anymore and if you dont do the work of explaining what you mean, a thousand evil people and/or robotd will gleefully do that work for you
Oct 26, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
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 Harvest “Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” Zora Neale Hurston Harvest gives us laden orchards and barren fields; desperate fervour and doubts grown thick as weeds; calves born and pigs slaughtered; proud traditions, failing wealth, and hostile stares; juice-smeared lips and dirt under nails; and always the questions echoing down through the generations: “Whose blood must be spilled to feed the land?” and “Whose hand will hold the knife?”. In Harvest, you play the residents of a remote island community stranded somewhere off the British coast. On the mai... 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
CHOOSE THE POWER THAT SENT YOU HERE A mandate from His Royal Majesty to deal with the sedition taking root here, by any means necessary. Your master is The Crown. A research project to capture the Island’s unique culture, watched over by your colleagues with great interest. Your master is The University. A holy mission to bring these lost souls stumbling back to the Lord, or else send them to the bonfire. Your master is The Holy Church.
CHOOSE THE POWER THAT BLESSED YOUR FAMILY LONG AGO A vast, terrible serpent which slumbers in the bowels of the Island, undying and eternally dreaming. Your patron is The Deathless Wyrm. A grand old tree that stands in the middle of your family graveyard, hoarding bones and wisdom. Your patron is Grandmother Oak. A giant who once shaped the Island’s valleys and carved its rivers, and towers over its mythic history. Your patron is Crooked Hence.
Sep 4, 2022 14 tweets 5 min read
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) An AI-art generated image of a two figures standing in front 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 Detail 1Detail 2Detail 3Detail 4
Sep 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
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 Magic changes those who work with it. Choose 1 which has beeThe Graven Isle is the place you call home, the furthest and fuck the english, its time to write about earthsea
Mar 21, 2022 18 tweets 7 min read
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 A selfie of me, wearing a beanie and with fingerless gloves 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
Mar 19, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
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 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
Mar 19, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read
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 — Go The Distance ... Gertrude's playlist is GO THE DISTANCE, about her running from her parents and finding a new home here
youtube.com/playlist?list=…
Jan 20, 2022 26 tweets 5 min read
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)
Jan 20, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
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?"
Jan 19, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
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
Aug 27, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
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/?
Aug 25, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
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 a screencap from the game 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
Aug 1, 2021 6 tweets 1 min read
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?!?!?!"
Jul 31, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
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…
Jul 31, 2021 12 tweets 3 min read
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 In the dim torchlight, in t... 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
May 18, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
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 Some Ways To Design Law-Rules  Example rule: “PCs cannot u 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
May 18, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
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
May 17, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
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
May 4, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
what if the pandemic happened in 2009 instead The forever alone macro with "It's 2011, quarantine is Boromir saying "One does not sipmly go outside without The socially awkward penguin meme with "go to see jennia naruto character silouette with an ipod touch, mask, and & 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
Mar 30, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
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 Watcher A watcher is a casual player who comes to the game b
Mar 30, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read
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 A series of concept art sketches from Yazeba's Bed & Breakfa