Posts tagged “lessons_learned”

May 31, 2022 What I’m Working On - A lots going on in the Motherverse. We went from producing a zine a year roughly to now having something like six plus books due this year and a...

May 8, 2021 Violent Encounters - One the easiest traps to fall into as a new referee in tabletop rpgs is to treat violence the same as video games do. Video games are particularly...

December 16, 2019 Mawbreakers, Resource Management, and Combat Centric Gaming - Shortly before Langston was born I was reading a lot of Hellboy and I found myself wanting to play a paranormal WW2 game with some Wolfenstein or...

October 31, 2019 A Crash Course on Marketing Your Indie RPG - A lot of indie tabletop designers feel real discomfort when talking about marketing and advertising, and I understand why. It conjures up an images...

January 21, 2019 Stop Worrying About Layout Software - The majority of my on-the-job training is as a graphic designer. I started by pirating a copy of Photoshop in high school so that I could color my...

January 14, 2019 Why Setting High Stakes Matters - I’ve had a lot more success recently describing Old School RPGs as “high stakes” instead of “high lethality” and here’s why. A lot of my new players...

December 13, 2018 A Small Rant about Investigation in RPGs - I posted the below thread to twitter the other day and it went off pretty well. So here it is in full so that it’s easier for me to find later:...

August 22, 2017 The First Time We Played Mothership - At Gen Con this year, I finally got to run a one-shot session1 of my sci-fi horror RPG, Mothership. We had a good spread of players: two were really...

August 21, 2017 Mistakes We Made at Gen Con 50 - This was our fourth Gen Con as a company, I think my seventh overall. While we’ve done a lot of things right over the years, we’ve also made a lot...

June 6, 2017 Survive, Solve, or Save: Pick Two - Last night, I was reviewing Mothership with some close friends while complaining about Alien:Covenant and my friend Nick said something that’s stuck...

May 19, 2017 Removing Agency in Horror Games - Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Saving Throws in RPGs. Essentially, they are the opposite mechanic from a lot of things we’re used to as...

March 10, 2017 Why Buc-ee’s Made Their Bathrooms Their Core Business Offering - I’d never stopped at Buc-ee’s before, which my girlfriend thought was insane. We were heading to east Texas to see her family around Thanksgiving...

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