It’s Alive! And, what comes next.

Wow, this has been an adventure. Lots of firsts, lots of excitement. I get to write words and you get to read them! How cool is that! May the novelty never wear off 🤞🏻

This past week I posted Become A Lich!, the first game I’ve written on scratch-paper, typed onto e-paper, edited into PDF-paper, and then printed onto paper-paper. For years I have played around with game design for funsies, terrorizing my weekend gaming groups with wild concepts that break the rules of the games we already play. And now that experience is paying off, because these cool ideas don’t all just live in my head anymore. They live on the internet! Where other people can see them! And play them! People like you!

Alright, so, that’s exciting. I’ve published my first game — minigame? one-pager? I’m gonna go with gameling — and have plenty more to come. They won’t all be one-pagers, too. I’m gonna have gamelings of lots of pages. Like, at least 4. Maybe more. I kinda want to take this into zine territory. Games with dozens of pages. So that’s what you can look forward to in the future: frequent short games, occasional long games, lots of dice games, sometimes card games.

But wait, there’s more!

That’s right, if you’re getting this delivered to your email, or if you’re reading it from the future, or if you’re skimming through but still experiencing the pre-subscription wonder, amazement, and FOMO regarding whether you’re missing out, there’s more! Because this Steady will have more than just a single game every month. A newsletter is on the way, or maybe just a blog, I should write a few episodes and see what fits best. Words on a page. Words about gaming! About having fun. About understanding why and how and who and where the fun is.

Alright, maybe that’s too broad. Here’s what I have to talk about:

• TTRPGs are fun and cool. They’re fun to play with friends, and they’re fun to play with yourself, too.

• Wait, what? Yeah, that’s right. You heard me.

• Playing TTRPGs by yourself is a lot of fun. It takes a totally different mindset, but if you’ve ever been wanting to take that Nephilim Bard out for a spin, or see how the Catfolk Rogue handles tough times, you’re gonna find that out here, too.

When people hear TTRPGs, they think of that really well-known game that’s in its 5th edition and had a movie recently, and that really cool videogame, and a bunch of weird scandals you can read or watch about on YouTube. Then there’s a step further, where there’s games like Pathfinder, or Fate, or Blades in the Dark, or Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which are all made by some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet online (Paizo and Evil Hat Productions are two of my favorite companies ever). Then there’s even wilder and weirder stuff like Wreck This Deck by Black Armada, which has you LARPing as a modernpunk “deckrunner” who destroys customizes a physical deck of playing cards to bind and call forth demons to influence the world around you. It’s wicked and cool, and you’ll be happy to know, no demons are harmed in the making or play thereof.

So what is a TTRPG?

The umbrella that is “Tabletop Roleplaying Games” includes a lot of games. An argument could be made that Monopoly even counts, in which you play the role of a real estate mogul, making a game out of sucking the fun out of a Saturday-night in, on a board that’s right there on the dining-room tabletop. But when I say TTRPG, for my purpose, I mean a style of game that encourages and alights a spark of imagination, creativity, and mindful play within the gamer, which engages a different form of your brain than merely rolling your chances.

When you play an RPG, you engage your imagination. You’re escaping from the world around you, for a few hours or even just a few minutes, and in doing so, you allow yourself to play-pretend at having a different life with different life choices and problems.

Maybe it’s fantasy, with swords and magic and goblins and dragons. Maybe it’s the far future and you’re making interplanetary trade deals with a hauling ship just to pay off the mortgage you took out to fund your junker. Maybe you’re a vampire who likes people but struggles to find community, because their state of damnation keeps them at odds with the people around them. Maybe you’re a farmer, getting up there in age, and you’ve heard of the Dark Arts and maybe you could sidestep death entirely.

You’re not Sally S. Normalfolk when you play a TTRPG. You’re Salandra the Sorceress, keeping the Folk of Normtown safe from threats beyond the wall.

It’s the stuff of fiction, except you can skip all the writing and reading (if you want).

And what’s this about playing solo?

Historically, TTRPGs began with a group of guys telling stories around a table. And the format has, for the most part, stayed the same, up until recently. There have been forays into trying to play games on their own, but it’s always been on the outskirts, with lone players sans a GM to play with, who want an opportunity to roll dice.

Well, that’s only kind-of true.

There’s this adage in the Solo RPGing space, that “prep is play”. And the cool thing is, that works for traditional TTRPGs too! In a sense, most TTRPGs already have a ton of solo play, in that the time you spend creating and thinking and imagining your character, is a form of play. When you’re driving home from work, or walking in the park, or laying in bed at night, thinking about what your cleric or rebel or troubadour is going to do about the repercussions of flirting with the Big Bad Evil Gal at the end of last session, that all counts as play!

With that all said, however, when people talk about Solo RPGing, or Solo Gaming, or playing tabletop roleplaying games with yourself, they usually mean games designed to be entirely played by one person.

My game Become A Lich! is one example, albeit a small (and fun!) one. But there’s so much more, and I want to cover and share a lot of that.

So, as I go forth with this creative journey, hopefully bringing you along with me, this is what I plan to write about. Having fun, with others and with yourself, too.

TTRPGs help spark that flame of inner creativity. Have fun, Play Brilliant.