Jay Dragon (& Friends)

Dreams Fevered!

This is something I've been working on off-and-on for the past month or so now, and I'm excited to share it with all of you. It's a Belonging Outside Belonging game (ala Dream Apart or Dream Askew) with no GM, about drama at a summer camp. But it's also a horror game about a nightmare monster murdering children and the race to stop that. It also kinda has a ghost GM?

This isn't quite enough to playtest with (it's still missing the Lindworm action cards and Acts 2 and 3) but it's nearly ...

100$ A Month (and other matters)

Wow, thank you so much everyone. I know in a cosmic sense that number is pretty small, but I can't articulate how much it means to me. This morning, I was crunching the numbers on what "having a part-time job as a game designer" would look like, and it ... feels much more reasonable than it did a year ago. You've all empowered me to pour my heart and soul into an art that isn't recognized by our society, but is something I deeply believe can help fix the world.

Now, I said that when I h...

The Rake is on Itch.io!

I just put The Rake, a game I posted on here a while ago, onto Itch.io. Go check it out! For patrons, the discount linked for Games For Lost People will also work for The Rake. 

Here's a link to the game. 

New Product on Itch!

Hi all, here's a new collection of games I've released! 

Games for Lost People is a collection of nine short, 1 page RPGs I've written over the past year. These are games in a traditional sense, in that most of them can be played to various ends, however they also function as short poems about mental illness, queerness, and recovery. You've seen almost all of these games at various points on this Patreon, but they've now been edited pretty thoroughly (with feedback from both larp d...

Development 18 - Apologies to Memories OR False Authenticity

Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist

Keep on loving, keep on fighting

And hold on, hold on

Hold on for your life

Queerness is equal parts a marketing demographic and a desperate call into the darkness. Whenever I read games about articulating or exploring aspects of marginalization and especially queerness or mental illness, I run into an authenticity problem. That is to say, when a game lacks whatever it is that makes it aut...

Development 17 - 3 Ways Not To Build a Labyrinth

 I've spent the last month or so reviewing Wayfinder game submissions for the summer, working with the Story Board to find the games we think are best for the summer. While reading the games, I found myself coming back to 3 or so core mistakes that everyone kept making, all the time. This isn't even about running games of any sort (especially since Wayfinder is so different from other venues), or even the raw act of creating and designing games. These are, in no particular order...

January Projects Summary

Hi All,

This is gonna be a new series of posts that is a monthly update on the games I'm currently designing and working on. The finished projects are available to my 3$ or more backers, and will be in a separate post. There will be a 200 Word RPG below, which has a Trigger Warning for explicit suicidal thoughts and feelings. I'll talk more about that later, though.

Life Updates

The past several months have been tough. I lost a lot of stability in my life, and a lot of dep...

Development 16 - Survival OR Fetishizing Aesthetics

Larp has something I'd like to call a problem of Fetishizing Aesthetic. Blasphemy from me, of course, as someone who spent a lot of the past few years writing about the aesthetic power of experiences. But a lot of Larpers have a tendency to fall in love with the way things look and feel instead of, oftentimes, what they end up meaning. As a member of a lot of progressive Larp Facebook groups, I watch people get called out over it over, and over, and over. The first level, the o...

This Will Kill That: In Dreams of Notre-Dame (Part 1)

Hey all, 

I know I mentioned this a while ago, and it's been my main project for the past month or so. I don't have a lot to show for it at the moment, but I've been doing a lot of research and sketching out (lots of notes in my notebook, etc.)

It's also been story season at the Wayfinder Experience, and as I've recently been elected to the story board (the organization responsible for choosing the games run during the summer), I've been very focused on going through and updating a ...

The Notre-Dame Project and Life Updates

Hi all! 

For my patrons, you've probably noticed I haven't been around for a while. Don't worry, I haven't given up writing! Schoolwork and depression has had me down, but I've recently begun a new project for my junior work in Art History. The plan and intention is a Larp about understanding art and perception, and the ways that that becomes inaccessible for us, using the Notre-Dame De Paris as a tool for realizing that. I'm going to be posting more about this over the next few weeks, an...

Development 15 - Embracing Moments of Contemplation

This has been sitting in my drafts for a week. It felt good to finally sit down and finish it up. 

All week, I've had Monet on my mind. Maybe it's because I feel disconnected from nature, caught up in the first few weeks of work and school. Or maybe I just got caught by the pattern of the clouds on the water. Regardless, my mind keeps coming back to Monet, as I sit in class or drive to my dorm.  Walking from class to class, I passed a lake surrounded by yellow and purple flo...

Development 14 - Where's The Story?

The summer whizzed by, and I've stumbled out the other side of it, having done a lot less work for all of you than I would've liked. I will be publishing a complete write-up of Motherlode soon, and I'll be talking about what worked of the three games I ran this summer. I hope to have that next weekend. I also want to do another article on game mechanics soon, talking about the notion of rules of rituals. Also I really hope to find time to write more RPGs! For now though, I'd love to...