mastodon 4.7.3He/him. Chronicling and contributing to the golden age of tabletop RPGs. notrueindian@outlook.com
Bundles on Bundles
I. Spotlight The No ICE in Minnesota bundle is live. It's already raised a ton of money for a immigrant legal assistance organization. But if you haven't picked it up, it contains thousands of games, including Exquisite Biome (a worldbuilding game), Demon Driven To The Maw (a nice Cairn adventure), Desert Moon of Karth (a Mothership setting/adventure), Girl Underground (Alice in Wonderland PbtA game), and so much more.
New newsletter! Among other tings, the IGDN announced their list of nominees for the Groundbreakers, their awards. It's a very cool list with lots of nominations going to The Time We Have, a two-player game of brothers losing each other during the zombie apocalypse.
http://ttrpg.in/2026/04/26/groundbreakers-knutepunkt-daggerheart/
Awards, Satisficing, Prep
I. Spotlight The Awards 2026 is open for submissions. Read the instructions and please submit your game. The shortlist for Canada Roles, a new RPG awards, is out and if you're in Canada, you can vote on it. II. Media of the Week Nothing this week! You too can support the newsletter on patreon! If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know…
Goodbye 2025!
I. Dear Reader, We skipped last week (unplanned) and we're going to skip next week (planned) so this is officially the last newsletter for 2025 and since it's the end of the year, let's talk about my plans for 2026. While I've been a journalist off and on since 2015, I've never actually done it full-time at a news organization. I was one of the world's permanent freelancers.
Cold Starts & Campaigns
I. Spotlight A couple of links that are interesting to put next to each other: Martin Ralya has a very thorough post about how they're running a zero prep (well, they do campaign prep but almost nothing session-to-session) improvised sandbox campaign with Traveller. While most sandbox theory comes from the OSR or older trad design, it's nice to see someone approach from the position of "how to do this while making everything up one the spot more…
Awards & Philosophy
I. Spotlight The Awards 2026 is looking for judges. If you're ready to read a bunch of games, regardless of your previous experience level, you should consider applying. It's a hell of a way to be exposed to the weird and experimental side of the hobby. It's a lot of reading but if you've got the time, I think most people who have learned a lot from the process!
Blogs & Mysteries
I. Spotlight The Bloggies begin and end in a whirlwind. The winners for the main categories have been announced. Here are my favorites among them: In Advice, it's Writing Rooms in Pairs which is Sean McCoy's technique for populating dungeons. In Critique, its How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons, which is the start of series on Jaquays' influence.
Apocalypse Power
I. Spotlight On Notes From The Labyrinth, a delightful review of the erotic and violent work in progress PbtA game Praise the Hawkmoth King: "Praise the Hawkmoth King is fun, it’s just also a warning about how easy it is to become complicit. How easy it is, once you’ve been given modicum of power, to turn around and use it to punch down out of fear of becoming one of the powerless Them again — out of fear that if you don’t turn and take advantage of…
Difficulty and Challenge
I. Spotlight A Knight at the Opera writes about how to talk about difficulty in RPGs. This is a great topic and Dwiz has a neat binary of challenging decisions versus challenging actions. "Chess is a game that only ever features decision-challenges. There is never a risk that you fail to execute a move you've decided on... By contrast, the sport of High Jump is pretty much only concerned with execution.
Two Weeks In One
I. Dear Reader, It finally happened. I missed a week of the newsletter. I don't know if I've unintentionally skipped a week ever in the five years I've been doing this. Given that, I want to take it seriously. I don't like admitting I've spread myself too thin but that's basically what happened. Normally, I go into a kind of hibernation in December where I stop writing this top section up here and just focus on the links — the curation.
List of Lists
I. Dear Reader, I don't know if it's just me but even though it's mid-November, I'm already in end-of-year mode. My two regular tables seem to reflect that as well. One went on hiatus till the new year. The other is still going but we're hitting what will probably the last session of our god-killing campaign next week. After that, who knows.
Gears
I. Spotlight WS Healed, co-designer of Most Trusted Advisors, writes a long essay about games and interpretation that takes a very academic route but still ends somewhere extremely practical: "Don’t try to make your text a meddling busybody in the process of the game’s negotiation, whether to micromanage or to roll over and show its belly — not only can rules be opinionated, one of the best things those rules can do is invite opinions back."
Reaction Rolls & Reviews
I. Spotlight Carouse Carouse is a group newsletter that started last year and I'm not sure I've ever linked to it before. It's great! The latest issue has an end of year awards style post, curated links, and a wacky review of Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?!, a solo game by artist and designer Wym Lawson that oozes with charm.
Endies 2025
I. Dear Reader, People are posting about their favourite games of the year (regardless of when they were released) using the term Endies 2025. I did this last year but Endies does have a certain ring (maybe a worse ring) than Games of the Year so let's try it out. Here's what I got: One-Shot Game I Played With Everyone I Could…
Deep Thoughts
I. Spotlight Lots of good stuff this week and I can't pick so just check it all out and pick your own. As always, have a good week, folks. Hope it's a good one. II. Media of the Week I enjoyed this video that's a deep dive into plastic miniatures: the economics (surprising), psychology, and ethics. No Pun Included are great and I even enjoyed the fact that this whole thing was brought on from an underwhelming experience with the…
Subjectivity
I. Dear Reader, One of the things I figured out this year is that writing about games is a celebration of subjectivity, of personal experience. There's been a long semi-academic debate about how to review games (going back at least to Robin Laws' essay The Hidden Art) and I think I let it trick me into thinking the task was more complicated than it is.
Media Week
I. Dear Reader, It's a media-heavy issue this time as I catch up on weeks of people releasing stuff to watch and listen to. There's actually so much media that I've decided to save some reading links for next week. I hope you're all doing well and thanks for reading! Unreasonably confident that next week will actually arrive, Thomas
Recaps & Refreshes
I. Spotlight It's a new year and so welcome to the new format for the newsletter! Like I said in my previous post, I'm taking the pressure of having a whole post every week ready to go and focusing on curation. The main change is this new section at the top, which I'm calling the spotlight. It is going to be the place for highlighting either the most interesting thing of the week or a collection of links that together make up what I think the…
Breathlessness and Incoherence
I. Spotlight This isn't about RPGs but there's been interesting conversations happening across the videogame sphere around Pokopia, the new Pokemon game. Grayson Morley talks about the tone of breathlessness that so often suffuses the reviews of games: "I'm sorry, but Pokopia isn't a meditation on a post-human world and the ravages of climate change. Pokopia is a tidying sim with some writing that asserts a few things.
Holiday Mode
I. Dear Reader, I wrapped up two games this week: The Defy the Gods game that has been going on since July. It ended really triumphantly, appropriately bombastic and dramatic and fun — everyone got what they wanted out of it for their characters and the story. I also wrapped a four session run of Ironsworn: Sundered Isles, which also ended in a surprisingly sweet way.
Answering & Not Answering
I. Spotlight Apologies for spotlighting myself but: over at Rascal News, I've launched a new podcast called the Rascal Reading Club. It's a book club podcast in two parts. The first section is where I read a book (the first episode about the Wardens' Operations Manual for Mothership) and the second part is where I respond to listeners' comments.