When I was a child, my best friend and I would play pretend on the playground. She would be a superhero and I would be a supervillain, and we would narrate a chapter from her incredible adventures. I would pose a challenge to her, but she would ultimately defeat me. There were no mechanics besides the kinetics of our bodies. We would follow this ritual daily for years and years, iterating on a framework and a story until we grew too old for playgrounds. With the benefit of hindsight, I can no...
2022-01-26 15:28:23 +0000 UTC
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So here we are, at the end of 2021 and the start of a new year. It’s a Long Grasping month in the Hudson Valley, the view from my office punctuated by thick mist and hungry branches. Rain is constant but snow is nothing but a memory. While it doesn’t really feel like winter, I thought it would still be a good idea to do a short review of what Possum Creek Games did in 2021, what I learned from it, and what I’m hoping to bring into 2022. I hope to make this a regular series, bec...
2022-01-03 20:39:45 +0000 UTC
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or The Tricky Art Of Welcoming New Players To Roleplaying
My dad reads all my games. It’s an incredibly touching and sweet thing he does, but I also feel bad when we discuss the games afterwards and it really sinks in for me how hard it is to read games. He’s tried to read other games by ...
2021-11-14 17:23:38 +0000 UTC
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Hello patrons both old and new! It's super exciting to have all of you here — you're all such important parts of the community and help support us in more ways than you know. Companies like Possum Creek Games that operate on big Kickstarter releases can struggle a lot with "feast and famine", and having a stable income source like all of you when times are lean makes our lives so so SO much easier.
Anyway, hi! Make sure your Discord is connected to your Patreon for access to our Disco...
2021-08-29 03:29:13 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks, here is a recording of last night's Patreon talk for all of you! It will go live to the public eventually, but all you get first watching privileges. In this talk, I discuss the 2009 RPG Normality, ergodic games (a game that is nonlinear and difficult to read intentionally), lyricism, playability, and game design. I take a bunch of great questions, and together we start to pick at what a game can be.
Some links:
2021-06-23 16:15:33 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks, tonight at 8pm EST I'm going to do a Salon Chat about ergodic games, unplayability, emergent texts, and the fascinating tale of an illegible RPG. Make sure your Patreon account is synced up to your Discord account, and come join us!
Afterwards I'll do a Q&A and help folks out with their projects! This is the first one of these I've ever done, so I hope you come by and help me test it out! I'll also record how it goes for this Patreon.
2021-06-22 22:22:07 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone, Jay here. So as we move forward supporting other creators and developing Possum Creek Games into its own publishing house, I wanted to talk a bit about what that's looking like over here and how we're moving forward. I also wanted to show off all the projects we have planned down the line, in one form or another.
A couple notes!
1. This isn't secret, but it's not quite ready to hit the whole internet yet. Tell your friends, but maybe don't s...
2021-05-14 01:17:56 +0000 UTC
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I find it really hard to write essays. Therefore, I didn’t. These are each a fragment of a concept, and together I hope they can point to some greater framework beyond the sum of their parts. I encourage you to extract meaning from them in whatever way feels natural.
Erin Hunter’s RPG
After a long and particularly challenging day crafting new mechanics for my upcoming design, I decided to leave my office and walk to the nearby park, where I found the Wise Teacher si...
2021-04-24 22:45:23 +0000 UTC
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(Uncanny: A Sleepaway Expansion releases on Itch.io and our website February 19th)
Hey gang! Grub here, Art Director/only other employee at Possum Creek Games. Last week my mom told me that she looked at our website and in her objective opinion it featured way too much of ...
2021-02-16 17:11:52 +0000 UTC
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Happy February everyone! It's incredibly snowy here, and I'm writing this update while bundled up in my office and eating some cake one of my roommates baked. There's going to be a couple of exciting things coming this month! Grubby is going to be doing an article about the methodology and art direction behind Sleepaway and Uncanny. She'll go into detail about font choices, layout decisions, her priorities, and how she guided the other artists on the team. Additionally, I'll...
2021-02-09 20:50:46 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks! There's not going to be any new games coming out this month on here. Uncanny is coming out next month, Wanderhome is in a few months, and all my other projects are in various states of disarray and aren't great for showing off. I hope to have something for you next month — maybe some more Yazeba's, or a revamped look at STRIFE (a post-apocalyptic fantasy game with Luke from Games From The Wild Woods), or if I can get it together, a first look at the currently-unnamed magical ...
2021-01-18 17:12:41 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone! Really quick update, but you can now back my Patreon with an annual upfront membership to save money (10% if I remember correctly?). It's a super convenient deal and makes it even easier for Possum Creek Games to keep doing the things you all help support.
Also in personal news, Ruby is now upstate and we've been hanging out getting work done. Expect some rebranding on the Patreon ("Possum Creek Games is creating role-playing games") and a really snazzy new header.
2020-10-29 22:15:09 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons!!! I love you all dearly. I don't have any new content this month (my vacation ate up a few weeks) and I've previously said I wouldn't promise content every month regardless. My job has become "small business owner", a logistical hellscape of banks and accountants that would be way more demoralizing without your collective support. A couple things!
- Ruby is working with me full time now! I'll be updating this Patreon a little to reflect that, and you might catch s...
2020-09-29 02:56:44 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone, good afternoon! If you follow me on Twitter it's been kinda a crazy month! Wanderhome launched on the 4th, and it's made $225K+ at a dizzying speed, and in an instant I've kinda had to restructure my whole life and business and income? Perhaps I'll do a Patreon post on that at some point, but I've spent the past month meeting with accountants and learning about business and absolutely trying very hard to no...
2020-08-28 17:20:02 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone,
Thank you all so gosh-darn much. When I started this Patreon two years ago, I didn't know what it would be like or what we'd be doing. Some of you have been here with be since the beginning.
When I set up the Patreon originally, I wasn't expecting much - I didn't have much of an internet following, and I just expected some side cash while I navigated college. But a lot has changed since 2018, and for the first time in my life financial stability (even if it's not enor...
2020-07-24 21:38:15 +0000 UTC
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The Wanderhome Kickstarter launched August 4th, and I wanted to take a moment before then and introduce the team of artists working on Wanderhome! The priorities for this project was to choose artists with a ton of different styles and backgrounds, who can each bring something beautiful to the table. If you want to meet our core team, including our incredible cover artist
2020-07-20 22:15:30 +0000 UTC
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Wanderhome has reached 550+ followers, a full 2 and a half weeks before launch! I promised on Twitter that I'd post the Wanderhome style guide for everyone's enjoyment, should we make it to 550. And thus, here it is! I hope it is a useful tool for anyone interested in or involved in a large-scale project where you're working with a large number of artists.
For those of you who don't know,...
2020-07-18 23:13:58 +0000 UTC
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(Sidebar: For sales tax reasons, I updated the tiers to more accurately reflect what you get. I gotta figure out more things I can give you, in a way that doesn't create more work for me!)
This has been a good week for lil ol' me. Last week I won an ENnie and was nominated for two other awards, including Game Of The Year. Earlier this week I revealed the cover for Wanderhome (art by
2020-07-14 21:47:20 +0000 UTC
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I've been relatively quiet in the past couple of months. I know "quiet" for me isn't how most people define quiet, but it's true I haven't really posted here. I released a game last night (a Mountain Goats inspired "mixtape" PDF of lyric games called Altar Boys & Heretics) and Sleepaway was a part of the Itch Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality (which raised more than $8 Million Dollars to support Bl...
2020-06-19 01:52:26 +0000 UTC
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Good evening everyone! I've stopped apologizing for not posting frequently here, and that's okay! It's been a long month for me, just as I'm sure it's been a long month for you. It's been interesting - my work hasn't been interrupted by conventional forces (after all, I do still work from home), but the pressures of quarantine and the distance of my friends has been weighing on me. As the fine scholars AJR said, one hundred bad days makes for one hundred good stories, and one hundred good sto...
2020-04-09 01:12:55 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much to all my new patrons and supporters. Your help means the world to me, and I'm not sure where I'd be without all of you.
Hey everyone, I wrote some big ol' theory about RPGs! I'm sick of all the theory that naturally and automatically assumes designer intent is the most important thing there is, and I'm also sick of massive misunderstandings revolving around big texts. So with that in mind, I wrote Engine Theory with the help of Natalie Libre. I'm going to be ...
2020-01-27 19:44:15 +0000 UTC
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My much-anticipated third volume of Games For The Missing & The Found is here, and it is only going to be online for 24 hours! Get it now, before it's literally too late!
2019-11-15 02:20:40 +0000 UTC
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So, Sleepaway is done! Well, almost. The text is all done, the layout is all done, and all that's being worked on right now is the art.
Meanwhile, I've spent the past week on a small farm in Colombia with my dad, doing some mental health recovery and writing games. My current projects, while I wait for Sleepaway, have been Kid Impossible (which I just released on Itch here) and an as of yet unnamed Prin...
2019-09-16 17:05:09 +0000 UTC
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As promised, here's the second game I wrote this summer, for your personal viewing! It's called White Dirt Red Rain, and it's about post-apocalyptic jungles and a crazed rush for survival using an immersive mechanic based around sand. It's high-octane and crazed, and I hope it inspires your own creative work!
2019-07-28 15:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
Camp has finished for me for the summer, which means it's time to unload a lot of my creative work over the past several months onto all of you! Over the next several days, once a day, I'm going to post some of the work I've been doing for my Patreons only. While not all of this will make perfect sense (as documents like this are intended for Wayfinder's unique style) there's still a ton of cool creative stuff in here that you might want to think about in relation to your ...
2019-07-27 15:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Hi all,
I've launched it! The Kickstarter for Sleepaway! It's here! Holy moly! Please go check it out, I'm so excited about this game (as I'm certain you've seen) and wow oh wow is this going to be an awesome, crazy wonderful ride. A "horror game with heart" a "psychadelic nostalgic nightmare party," a "ritualistic symbol-weaving machine," Sleepaway is unique, exciting, and I hope you all take some time and play the playtest kit so you can experience why it's so cool yourselves...
2019-06-05 09:47:19 +0000 UTC
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The worst part about being about to start a Kickstarter, but not quite about to launch yet, is that I have a lot of creative energy and nothing much to do with it, and a general nervousness to release. It's the perfect time to revisit old works and bring them together!
House Larps is a set of ten games by myself and JJ Muste. They're unpretentious larps about everything from friends to horror to schoolwork to smoochin'. If you've been my patron for a while, you'll recognize a lot of my ...
2019-06-01 01:26:09 +0000 UTC
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Thank you all for your endless support. While I figure out video camera stuff and get onto my feet, I figured I'd post an old game from a while ago I dug up from my Google Docs and got a little chuckle out of. It's a party comedy secret role LARP about a dysfunctional family trying to accomplish their goals while also guess everyone's secrets.
It needs a lot of playtesting to make, erm, playable, but thanks to your support, that's an actual feasible thing for me to get up to? So thank y...
2019-05-28 16:22:26 +0000 UTC
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Hey all,
Kickstarters are hard and scary! I've been agonizing for weeks about how best to do it, while also marching forward with preparation. While I don't have anything nuts to show you right now, I figured I'd include some sketches from the work my dear friend and talented coworker Worsey is doing for the cover art.
The Kickstarter will be launching June 5th, and I'll post about it here alongside everywhere else. I'll also have a special gift for all of you!
Me...
2019-05-26 12:48:26 +0000 UTC
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Hey all,
I decided last night to publish Sleepaway onto itch.io. I'm currently in too fragile of a financial circumstances to not have a storefront I can promote the game from, and I want to start getting the word out about this game pretty much immediately. However, this means all of you can buy it! As usual, my Patreon discount linked to earlier works, giving you 5$ off. This document isn't meaningfully different from the one available to my Patrons, and I'll continue to post playtest...
2019-05-13 10:30:39 +0000 UTC
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