The next part of the Grimoire is complete! Covering the magic of divination (see far away things), apotrophaism (protect against bad things), invocation (summon and bind bad things), and thaumaturgy (ask nature to do weird things).
(here was Part 1)
For those unfamiliar with Seven-Part Pact, these are entirely fictional spells which the players then implement mechanically once they're ...
2024-07-15 15:23:48 +0000 UTC View PostThe first part of the newest draft of the Wizard's Grimoire is complete! It contains seventeen spells, and has a refresher on how magic works in Seven-Part Pact, along with a couple of updated rules.
If you need a reminder on how Seven-Part Pact works, you should peruse this tag right here. Inside are links to previous drafts made available for patrons, along ...
2024-07-02 14:59:50 +0000 UTC View PostWere you wondering why the Guardian's ward is a small black cat? Are you curious about why each little flower was chosen? Do you want to see Grubby and myself make fun of all our little typos in our three-year-old PDF? Well now you can!
The Wanderhome Director's Commentary is now available for all Patrons, right here, as a big thank you to all of your support. I think it's a really interesting document, compiling our reflections, our frustrations, and our joys at making this we...
2024-06-03 22:54:13 +0000 UTC View PostC. Thi Nguyen says that the medium of games is composed of agency. I don't know if that's true broadly, but I also think that it's definitely not true for TTRPGs. If we wanna imagine TTRPGs as being in relation to agency though maybe one thing we could do is think about anti-agency, or playful restrictions.
In a video game, agency is granted to the player through the providing of allowan...
2024-05-27 19:23:03 +0000 UTC View PostBehold the Hierophant, known as the Keeper of the Flames, Grail-Bearer, and the Weary Sixth Magus. He is the caretaker of the four immortal flames burning within the temples of Isha, and through this authority, cares for the common folk of the archipelago and their faith in the Gods. He is oft of a jovial and determined temperament, and his fate is governed by the planet <...
2024-05-23 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostBeen having a rough week, so I drafted up a little thing you can put in your game of Pathfinder, Worlds Without Number, Into The Odd, or any other game that features dungeons and dragons.
Been thinking a lot about how, among my many issues with a lot of more traditional games, theu never really have support for modeling the kinds of dynamics in parties that often really grab me. I want to run fantasy games where the party feels like a set of...
2024-04-26 15:44:27 +0000 UTC View PostBehold the Necromancer, known as Keeper of the Gates, Skull-Bearer, and the Grim Seventh Magus. He is the guardian of life and death, the gray and ashen line of gates which keep Isha safe from the ceaseless waves of the dead. He is of a melancholy and cold temperament, and his fate is governed by the planet Saturn and the metal Lead. ...
2024-04-18 15:50:02 +0000 UTC View PostWhen I look at any tabletop RPG, the first question I ask myself is: What does this game offer me that I couldn't achieve by playing make-believe with my friends? See, I could gather a few friends, sit down at a table, and pretend to be dungeoneering adventurers or superheroes or whatever. We could describe what we do entirely fictionally, and we wouldn't need any rulebook to help us do that. So then why do we want to play a game?
Sometimes (often) people tell me to play ...
2024-03-31 23:05:58 +0000 UTC View PostHere's a game I whipped up, a rules-lite experiment based on conversations I've had over the past few months about the nature of games. I'll post it on Itch.io soon enough, I just wanted to share it now with all of you.
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These are the essential social norms I use when I play make-believe with my friends.
This is a game about establishing and exploring Truths. Decide at the beginning who will be the arbitrator of what is True?...
2024-03-11 16:19:11 +0000 UTC View Post
You are a thief in a dungeon, or at least you're pretending to be, and there's a warrior blocking your entrance to the next room. Are you able to successfully fight your way past?
Well, you could talk through the process in which you combat him. Discussing what is likely for you to do, how well he can respond, navigate through the whole conversational process. Perhaps at certain mom...
2024-02-23 16:50:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I hope we get to play a game together. Playing together is the foundation of every close relationship I have — everyone I love in my life, I can find some way to play with them. There are so many people I know and value solely because we took a few hours to play together, and I have friendships built upon a game played years earlier that will last for decades to come. Even people I...
2024-01-23 20:25:22 +0000 UTC View PostAnother year comes and goes, and it's time once again for me to write about Possum Creek's year in review. This is the third article of this sort that I've written (2022 and 2021 can be found at those links) and, just like previous years, I'm going to focus on recap...
2024-01-09 15:10:28 +0000 UTC View Post
For those of you who don't know, every year Possum Creek likes to make a special t-shirt commemorating the upcoming year. Think of it a bit like how summer camps have a different shirt every summer! This year we have an amazing design by the incredible Lynnette Munoz, with a gorgeous metal-inspired font, dandelions, birds, and shooting stars. Dandelions are resilient ...
2023-11-09 18:51:17 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a guest article by the fantastic Kyra Helfrich, a longtime friend of the Possum Creek and who was the screenreader consultant and ended up pouring 3 months of their time into making the PDF of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast as screenreader-accessible as possible. Please laugh and cry with us while she talks through the process and what few glitches remain.
The screenreader-accessible version of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast will be releasing next week on the 15th, alon...
2023-09-06 14:25:47 +0000 UTC View PostMy friends and I have gathered to play Telephone. It's our favorite game, and we've spent months practicing to make sure we can hear each other as clearly as possible. We sit in a circle and confidently enunciate our chosen sentence into each others' ears, and at the end of the game it's revealed the starting sentence was exactly the same as the final phrase. There's a hollow pit in our stomachs, although none of us know why. We played Telephone as efficiently and effectivel...
2023-08-18 16:45:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Even games have a voice. When you sit down and read a tabletop RPG, the game itself speaks to you. The choice you make around narration heavily informs how people learn and play the game. Dungeons & Dragons has an anthropological voice, picking at pieces of the world the way a colonizer might dissect a foreign country. Apocalypse World is famously vulgar and harsh, p...
2023-06-01 14:59:01 +0000 UTC View PostI wrote a new article! It's a bit rambly but I hope it's still helpful for people. I just finished moving into a new apartment and outside of my fiction work I'm going to try and get more writing done for folks, so if there's ever any essay topics you'd be interested, please let me know and I'll see if I can't take a stab at them.
There's a moment in nearly every tabletop g...
2023-05-03 18:03:23 +0000 UTC View PostHi all, it's Jay here. As you can imagine Possum Creek has been pretty busy creating Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast (we're sending everything to the printers May 10th! The digital came out last month!) and also Inscrutable Cities and also I've been moving. I decided I wanted to do a little thing for the Patreon though, so I figured I'd upload another Slush dump. These are all the little projects I have as sketches in my Google Drive — some of them going somewhere someday, others abandoned for...
2023-04-26 03:30:04 +0000 UTC View PostHi babes I wrote a short story over the past couple of days and decided to post it on here. Content warnings for queerphobia and suicide (obviously), along with body horror associated with cybernetics, unreality, and extremely gross weird sex (I mean it!). It's about a trans girl who tries (and fails) to kill herself by algorithmic apotheosis. If you like it, please let me know! I'm trying to write more fiction. This is still the very first draft, which means no one besides my boyfriend has e...
2023-01-21 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe year is over, and what a year it has been. This marks the second year I write a "year in review" article (2021 can be found here), and this time I'm working on this article at my dad's cottage in Colombia. It has never felt less like winter for me, and with the warm days and cool nights, the mountains of Fusagasuga have more in common with September 15th than they do with ...
2022-12-26 15:04:10 +0000 UTC View PostIn my dreams I found the Quarry dark and starless. I leapt the locked white gate and walked the ramp past the stones until I reached the perfect lake, and then kept walking across the water until I reached the far banks where the swampgrass grew. Among the swampgrass fireflies danced, and I realized these green lights were the stars themselves, who during dreams left their patient perches within the sky and formed new experimental constellations in grottos and berry bushes. 2022-12-22 13:48:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks, Jay here. It's November (already!) and I wanted to update y'all on what's going on at Possum Creek and give you all some exclusive tidbits of what the future holds.
We're working on a new crowdfunding project with Backerkit towards the end of the month. We're super excited to be publishing Inscrutable Cities by Julian Jarboe as a full-color zine. We'll talk more about it as things get closer, and post previews up on the Patreon, but as a treat for a...
2022-11-05 21:15:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I was talking with a couple friends about tabletop games, and I found myself using the metaphor of "The Shallow End" a lot, and I figured I should write a little blog post explaining what I mean. I think this metaphor is a useful way to think about player engagement and how to build games that make room for a wide range of player needs.
So imagine a public swimming pool. Swimming pools are architectural objects that have a unique set of design constraints: they have to be useable by bas...
2022-09-23 16:18:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello my dear patrons, and happy Firetop! Summer has come to a close, and the first winds of autumn are starting to pick up. I wanted to update everyone on what Possum Creek is going to be up to for the next six or so months, special coupons just for patrons, and what we're planning to do for all of you in the future.
We're going to be launching a...
2022-09-18 20:38:05 +0000 UTC View PostThis article is a bit more academic and a bit more weird than what I normally write! I hope this essay can be a productive starting point for new modes of engagement with tabletop RPGs in a poetic context. I'm a bit rusty with the academia side of things, but I hope you enjoy regardless!
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"The house with cosmic roots will appear to us as a stone plant growing out of the rock up to the blue sky of a tower,"¹ Gaston Bachelard describes for us in his foundational 1958 bo...
2022-08-10 22:36:44 +0000 UTC View Post
I realized I forgot to upload this, so here's the newest episode of the podcast! Kazumi and I talk about game balance, why basically everyone misunderstands it, and how we can implement it in our games.
Hey folks, welcome to the next episode of Creekside Convos, where Kazumi and I talk about how mechanics feel, GNS theory (!), and why we think playtesting is really important.
References:
Edit: Changed audio source in hopes that this will go into the RSS feed. My apologies for many emails today.
Hi, welcome to the first episode of Creekside Convos, a new podcast with Kazumi and myself about tabletop games, identity, complications, and meandering tangents. We've been wanting to do something like this for a while now (and we've had a couple false starts) but we decided to put it together for folks and we're hopefully going to do more as well!
This first epis...
2022-06-02 16:01:03 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks, I just finished reading Bernard De Koven's 1978 book The Well-Played Game, and in a fever dream of a mindset I wrote two thousand words on Among Us! I hope you like it — I think it can be useful and maybe even a little funny? Anyway, enjoy!
My favorite game is Among Us. This often raises a few eyebrows — it's a popular punchline to jokes online, and on...
2022-05-30 19:32:27 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons, it's nice to say hi! As you can imagine, I've been really busy lately with Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast (don't forget to back on Indiegogo here) which as you're all aware has been in development for years. You can actually go through the old archives of this Patreon and find me posting snippets of it even before the pandemic. The heartache of working on a big crowdfunding thing is that I don't really get time to cre...
2022-04-12 19:17:48 +0000 UTC View Post