Hey, everyone! I'm mostly on Bluesky these days, if you want to keep up with what I do. I'm in the process of making five different Silkpunk-themed characters, and posting them on Patreon as they're finished. Everyone else will have to wait for the full set to be finished. I just got done with the third one today, so there's plenty to look at already - if you want to chip in and put some helpful pennies in my pocket.

The first episode of my self-indulgent comic about food and monsters is now available to everyone!

Noah, down on his luck and flat broke, encounters a weird but friendly stranger one night, and accidentally ends up the personal cook of someone not-quite-human.

Episodes 2 and 3 are already up on Patreon, where the comic will be posted as I finish pieces of it. Patrons are currently 7 pages ahead of everyone else.

If you like what I do, please consider chipping in some money so I can keep doing it.

bumping this up! got a new comic project for the first time in a very long while.

IOS users and Patreon. Big old heads up.

"Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This means that starting in November, new memberships purchased in the iOS app will be subject to Apple's 30% App Store fee.

First, we want to be clear about one thing: this will not impact your existing memberships at all. Apple's App Store fee only applies to new memberships purchased in the iOS app beginning in November 2024."

Apple users, if you make your pledges through your browser you can dodge this fee.

This is just apple doing its usual nickel and diming to take a slice of every pie.

Always pledge through your web browser! Whether on desktop or mobile.

Any time you pay via an app downloaded from the App Store when a website version exists, you're either paying a higher price than everyone else, or the person you're trying to pay is giving up a huge cut of their earnings to Apple - which usually requires them to raise prices across the board.

Order link for my book!

I read all of this book in one sitting yesterday because it is completely un-put-downable. A phantasmagorical masterpiece. I'm going to be turning this one over in my mind for a long, long time. It makes me want to draw and write, which is possibly the highest compliment I can give to a book.

my biggest creative passion in life is ‘the project I’m not supposed to be working on right now’

ok wait… I actually love hearing about the different stuff people are doing. tag with the creative project you want to be working on (vs what you’re supposed to be working on)

Did you know, I've got a comic in the works? Slice-of-life about a guy cooking for another totally normal human man with teeth like a shark.

It's Patreon-exclusive for a little while longer, but if you want to get ahead of the crowd, there's 7 pages up already.

(the logo is still a work in progress, but we're getting there!)

With space in my to-do list and my hand feeling okay, I am dusting off the Patreon Character Design Poll once again! Patrons get to pick a theme, and I design the character(s)! The poll will be running for the next two weeks. Previous polls have resulted (as evidenced by this post) in weird west weirdoes, archfey, monster chefs, the casts of imaginary mecha anime, and a whole lot more!

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

Introducing Trilogy

Yesterday I released Trilogy, a new tabletop RPG crafted to support you in having grand adventures in worlds of your own making.

There are several reasons I started writing Trilogy, but the biggest one is that I ran a Dungeon World podcast called Crudely Drawn Swords for seven years and that was a lot of time to think about what we were playing. To a degree Trilogy is the game I wish that we could have had to run the podcast.

Starting from the question "what would a purely PbtA game for epic fantasy look like?" I started thinking more widely - what do I want from a fantasy game? And the truth is that I want a game that supports the structure of characters and their interactions but doesn't tie itself to a specific setting.

Trilogy begins with The Appendices - conventionally in epic fantasy these are at the end and document information about the wider world that might not have made it into the story, but here it is where you sit down as a group and decide what tone you want your game to have, and your world looks like. What kind of place is it? What magic is there? What is religion like? What are the major cultures where the story begins? How would it feel to be in this world? Trilogy doesn't tell you any of these things, it gives you the tools to think through how you want your world to look.

This creates a secondary challenge - without knowing what the world looks like, how could I design character classes for this type of game? Trilogy answers this by going back to the fundamentals - instead of a conventional character class, the playbooks in Trilogy represent a narrative arc. Some of them, like The Fighter, The Priest, or The Magus, look like familiar classes. Others, such as The Volunteer, The Mentor, The Weapon, or The Defeated, are a little different. Character arcs have a set of turning points, story beats that allow you to advance along your arc after you have collected a certain amount of experience. Some are positive and others negative, you choose which ones you want to hit and when, but every character's story has its highs and lows and to get the most from the game you need to lean into both. A character can pass through three arcs as they grow and change, like the three volumes of a trilogy.

The aim of the game is to create a slower but satisfying sense of progression - instead of hit points characters take Stress and Harm like in other Powered by the Apocalypse games that can have both mechanical and narrative effects. That makes combat feel dangerous, but the game also offers more ways to solve problems without getting into combat - I have played games where the player characters never got into a fight, instead resolving confrontations through an ingenious selection of alternative strategies including "lying" and "vomiting magic ink all over the floor." I'm genuinely enthusiastic about this game - I think I would be as excited about it if somebody else had written it. It leans hard into the joy of discovery and the excitement of adventure - you can play it as spooky and whimsical or gritty and hard-edged and anywhere in between.

Because I was writing it I even got to make most of the examples of play roll out as the story of someone's game, something I always appreciate when I read it. It also contains every technique I use as a GM in the hope that even before people get the chance to play it (heaven forbid any TTRPG afficionado have books we haven't got around to playing yet!) people who read it will still be able to use that advice in their other games. So that's Trilogy, the game I've been working on for the last few years. I think it's pretty great and I hope you will too:

Obviously it's a full-priced game and that's a big gamble from an unfamiliar creator - if you want an idea of what it's like in practice we've got the CDS team back together and we're starting a streamed campaign so you have a chance to see it in action. You can find that over on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxpXacko9Nc

The first episode includes me notably failing to use OBS at both the beginning and end, and I can't make any promises things will improve in that regard, but it should be a good opportunity to see how the game shapes up from this start and with this crew I know it's going to be funny and take some wild swings. If you're interested in reviewing Trilogy or you really want to give it a try but you can't afford it, drop me a message

Our streamed Actual Play of Trilogy has now got to the third session so after creating the world and the characters, we're now getting into character:

Was I expecting the game to begin around a reality TV show? No. Have I watched any reality TV? Also no.

I've only just started reading through my copy of Trilogy, and I keep stopping to go "ooh, THAT is neat", which is always a good sign with a game. Can't wait to dig deeper into it!

It's my birthday today! 🎉 In honour of that, I'm running a sale on a bunch of my games on Itchio for the next seven days! It's 36% off because that's how old I'm turning this year.

Pick up a game about witches, journeys, lesser gods or dying cities - or buy them all at once!

Happy Valentine's Day, folks! Remember, if you find yourself being made to marry a giant dragon terrorising the kingdom, you do not have to go quietly (bring your sheep-shears).