Clik here to view.
So, I said, You are a gnome on a goat
First, some heads-ups:The Lamentations of the Flame Princess bundle is live (including Death Frost Doom 2e rewritten by me and the recent LotFP Ennie winners)*Fever Swamp is gonna be weird and full of...
View ArticleNotes Taken While Starting to Write My Next RPG Book
Room When she is there, Room when she is not there.Johannes Vermeer100 OctopusesNimue“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” OceanidsSexual cannibalism is rare in the animal kingdom. Although cannibalism...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Attention Midwesterners, Contessa Needs You
Contessa, the con-within-a-con dedicated to promoting diversity n games is looking for folks to run games at U-Con in Ann Arbor NOVEMBER 17- NOVEMBER 19, 2017 and Acadecon in Dayton, November 10th –...
View ArticleIt's Demon Week
All day open Demon City playtests.Monday: 6pm-4am Pacific TimeTuesday: TBAWednesday: TBAThursday: TBAFriday: TBAIf you are interested, email: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with your available days and times...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Demon Week, Day 1 Notes
First:*If you missed it, here I am being interviewed about a new unannounced project for LotFP as well as Demon City.If you go "What's the new LotFP thing?" and you didn't watch it I'll just shake my...
View ArticleSarah Schulman On Communities And Conflict
Some excerpts on community, intervention, conflict, etc that gamer communities might benefit from Sarah Schulman's book about internet-era fight escalation Conflict Is Not Abuse.....One problem here is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Anti-Design of the OSR
Quotes from avante-garde architect and architectural theorist Rem Koohaas with one or two words replaced rewritten to be about elfgames:1. If there is a method in the OSR, it is a method of systematic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It's Alive
End of the Demon City playtest I just did. Two 2 PCs left"I'm getting in the elevator!""Uncontested, you can go ahead""I'm gonna try to...get out from under it?""Ok, so still one die. It's blinded so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revenants and Drones
New Demon City art, with the lazy first-draft of the write-up.Click to enlargeRevenants (Living Dead) and DronesRevenants are any form of living creature brought back to mindless life by witchcraft or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Demon City Art Notes
Light: Light is more important here. Not just direction of shadows (always important) but colorlight and the modelling of things, all the gradations.Horror creatures are often very simple in design but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Panic Modes
Panic Modes occur when a Demon City character is at exactly 0 Calm. (Not negative calm--at that point total ineffectiveness kicks in, but since you lose 1 Calm point at a time, you will always pass...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Roland Barthes: Dungeon Master
From Roland Barthes' lectures, Collège de France, 1977 (from How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, Tr: Kate Briggs):Of GamesNovels RPGs are simulations that is to say...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Do These Games Have In Common?
ParanoiaNumeneraThe Strangethe Apocalypse Engine gamesDelta Green13th AgeShadow of the Demon LordThe One RingCyberpunk 2020Trail of Cthulhu?Answer:All of them produced charity pdf bundles for Bundle of...
View ArticlePossible Blade Runner Spoilers
Blade Runner 2049 is like someone saw Blade Runner, wrote a fucking massive amazing sandbox setting around it, then the players kept going into hexes that only had like one line of description "Rusting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A moron, but likable. A small and pale puppy. A sheer drop.
The Host of Demon City can roll dice like a player, but, just as D&D can be a little more fun with miniatures, Demon City is a little more fun if the Host uses Tarot cards.The exact method will be...
View ArticleYe Three Lynkes of Sundaye
Jeff Rients (of Broodmother Sky Fortress, King of Old School Bloggers and the First Edition) wrote a thing about how he puts together his weekly dungeoncrawl--which is always fun beyond fun.TenFootPole...
View ArticleHorror: A Potential Introduction
I wrote this for Demon City but I'm on the fence about whether to include it. I believe it all, but I think it might be a little heavy and not-to-the-point for somebody who just picked up a new game.If...
View ArticleWhat Really Happens At The Library
Part of writing Demon City is digging in to the tropes of investigation-based games and getting at the juicy gameable meat within--often with the help of people who know the worlds involved better than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Horror's Deck
This is the second post about how tarot cards work in Demon City, (here's the first one.)Rather than dice, the Host of Demon City typically uses a specially prepared deck of tarot cards. In most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My First Conspiracy Kit
Happy Halloween!Here is a “fill in the blanks” style exercise you can use to start a Demon City campaign. Long-time readers may recognize it from before it's mutation into its current form......
View Article