June 18, 2026
This post is written for Prismatic Wasteland’s
Random Blogwagon. I rolled an 18 on the first table (post on June 18th), a 4 on the second (one plain paragraph with no bolding, bullets, or similar nonsense), and pulled a Jack of Diamonds for the third (must reference Luke Gearing’s blog). So let’s get going.
Clocks have been a staple of indie TTRPGs for the past what, maybe 10 years or so? I’ve gotten kind of bored with them as-is for a number of reasons, but that’s only partially their fault. One thing that got me more interested in them again is the prospect rolling under them: for example, if it’s a 6-segment clock, for instance, roll a d6 every time it increments; if it rolls under (equal/under if ya nasty) then the promised outcome happens. This way there’s always a little immediacy to it. What really gets me going nowadays, though, is making each “face” of that clock its own distinct thing. Luke Gearing’s
Reputation Tables is a great example of this. I’ve used this in both Corpslayers and NULL_SPACE for bad things: whenever something bad has a chance of happening but isn’t quite there yet, add it to a segment of (or multiple segments of) the “clock”. Periodically you roll against it: if it rolls the number associated with that bad thing’s segment, that particular bad thing is the one that rears up. It gives you both a target number for anything happening and a specific outcome when it does happen, and
I love compressing multiple data points in one roll to death so this is like catnip for me. Give it a go! (PS: I’m sure someone’s written about this before and I’m fine with that, there’s nothing new under the sun and so on.)
...May 15, 2026
Hi there! Did you know that not only is NULL_SPACE
out, not only is it
out in physical form, and not only does it have
a printed job packet…it has its first official supplement, called
Supplement #1: Violence?
What’s that, you maybe didn’t know that because I suck at promoting it? Well let’s fix that and talk about it then.
...March 9, 2026
The Binary Star Promise is that I will get a great idea for a prototype, start something, and put it on the backburner for a bit if it’s something I don’t owe people and would need a lot of legwork. Valiant Horizon Tactics is, indeed, no exception to this. But thanks to having a genuinely atrocious week and needing a little pick-me-up, I decided I’d start thinking about it again because I do like the concept a lot.
...February 21, 2026
What is the intended vibe of NULL_SPACE?
“Cyberpunk-esque”
#
Shannon at
The Novel Gamemaster described NULL_SPACE on bluesky as having “a low-powered mothership feel but leaning towards more cyberpunk-esque rather than space horror”, and then I spent like twenty posts in a thread meandering on what I was trying to do with it. This is a paraphrase and extension of that thread.
...January 2, 2026
Hi there! It’s once again that time of the year. Every year I take stock of what I accomplished, go through my numbers, chart what I did and how well it did, and try to draw some conclusions.
Here’s last year’s, for reference.
I have too much stuff for one post going on nowadays, and also I’m very tired, so I’m splitting this up into three posts: this one has a general overview, the next will get into numbers (aiming for next week/weekend, but don’t quote me on that) and the last one will have my called shots for 2026.
...December 4, 2025
Or: Everyone always says what combat is doing, but nobody ever asks how combat is doing.
The TTRPG community (well, the blogging part of it) sure does love to define combat as one specific pithy thing.
Sport, War,
My Balls, there are others. Save for the last of those, I don’t really care for any of these definitions! For one, I think they very quickly lend themselves to being derisive - Sport vs War in particular feels like it was designed for posts rolling their eyes at people who like interfacing with capital-C capital-S Combat Systems. I would also say that it can also feel a bit thought-terminating in the ways that many labels can. As much as that can hit the broad strokes of why we might do something, I think we can go a bit deeper than that.
...October 20, 2025
Content warning: This is a game about a plague. There’s basically no way I can’t talk about the current, ongoing one.
Every year I try to do a little something indulgent for
Minimalist Jam, or at least try to stub something out that’s been on my mind. So last week, out of nowhere, I dropped
Death Has Come to This Town. This was an idea I’ve had for awhile that I held ransom behind hitting milestones on
other work, and when the time came to put it to paper it kind of forced itself out of my head and onto the page. I slapped that thing on itch and prepared to not think about it for like a month, and even then as more of an art piece than an actual playable thing.
...September 8, 2025
Created as part of Prismatic Wasteland’s Appendicitis Blog Bandwagon.
Influence is a very hard thing for me to specifically quantify a lot of the time. I don’t usually think of an Appendix N - an explicit list of influences - going into a game. Sometimes I go into a game thinking I’m going to be influenced by one thing and then come out influenced by another thing by accident and have to piece it together after the fact. So a lot of my influences have to be kind of backed out after the fact by thinking about what I was thinking of to get to a certain point. Also most of them are other games because I’m an uncultured cretin, but also I’m trying to pull more directly game-influential stuff rather than stuff that generally gave me good vibes because otherwise we’d be here all day.
...July 16, 2025
Created as part of Prismatic Wasteland’s Holes Blog Bandwagon, in which we all write about holes. Some holes are more literal than others, I suppose. And maybe one of these days I’ll get out of the hole that is “devlogs/retrospectives about my own games”, but not today.
“When you get right down to it, (mech game, show, etc etc etc) is about the people.” If you’ve done anything remotely adjacent to mecha stuff, you’ve read some variation on this. I roll it out as a halfway-joke every time someone brings mecha up because it’s such a combination of “cliche” and “John Madden statement-obvious”. Like, yes, it’s not literally about the walking war machine itself, it’s about the interactions of various people, much like every other story ever that involves people clashing against each other. And yet…APOCALYPSE FRAME is not “about the people”, at least not by focus. I barely touch upon the Aces at all, to the chagrin of a lot of people. What an oversight!
...May 27, 2025
NULL_SPACE
#
Liminal Void is has been consigned to the void. Well, the name has, anyway. Going forward, it will be called NULL_SPACE!
When I
spoke about it last, I said both of the following:
(in the context of priorities for the game:) De-emphasize combat. Over each edition, the degree to which anyone can easily do combat has been relegated more fully to explicitly chosen weaponry and combat-ready outfits - which was the goal from the start, but at the time I’d been coming off of LUMEN so I was still kind of thinking in the combat-game sense.
...