It’s difficult to make wise decisions without robust data, and our goal was to try to share some practical information about production costs for tabletop roleplaying games. This survey is intended to get a comprehensive picture of the production costs for analogue tabletop RPGs to help inform publishers on how to budget for their games. […]

Christo Meid 7 May 2017  Loss of language and assimilation? https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/playing-the-birth-and-death-of-language-in-dialectI know this didn’t come up in the game I played of Circles of Power at Dreamation, but this piece by Alex Roberts got me thinking about assimilation of cultures by another and how that might play out in Circles of Power. It could be […]

+Mark Diaz Truman raised an excellent point with regards to the role of the setting for Circles of Power. The apprentice edition was very intentionally designed with a relatively bland, fill-in fantasy setting in the form of the Steel Throne. I wanted people to provide feedback on the broader structure (mechanical moves, communities, etc), rather […]

Breakout Playtest Feedback I ran two excellent playtest sessions of Circles of Power over at Breakout 2017. While the hour is late, I wanted to capture the most salient points and share them with the community. Session 1 consisted of a group of the Wise who struggled against the ever-hungry Giants. The Burdened Community was […]

After the War is science-fiction horror roleplaying game, set on the frontier world of Polvo in the aftermath of a galactic conflict. This is a game about people who lost their homes and their families in the war and have come together to rebuild their lives on this rough, frontier world. It’s about diverse communities […]

Every failure has made me a better designer. Seeing the fail states if games, either in playtesting or after publication, has shown me a dozen different areas where I can hone my craft. Recently I decided to step back and look at the broader patterns which highlighted four different core design structures that need to […]