Graham Walmsley

I'm playing Strange Antiquities, which I love, but then I loved the predecessor game so it's not surprising

Plus Outer Wilds, which I love parts of, but also find really hard.

This is an amazing deal from Chris, don't miss it.

(I once did a "Pay What I Want" sale and got several complaints that everything was at its normal price.)

Bleak Spirit by potatocubed A tabletop RPG of a lone wanderer in a strange, melancholy place.

Spooky Season is upon us, so I am charging FULL PRICE for my spookiest game!

potatocubed.itch.io/bleak-spirit

Oh that's you! Thanks so much for playing.

I'm at Concrete Cow, a friendly RPG convention in Milton Keynes. Alien Archaeology went well and surprisingly smoothly

I've just made a note in Google Keep to write a game called "Urinal" and I hope your evening is going well too.

This went beneath my radar, but my goodness, it's a crowdfunder for a reprint of some of the most respected and seminal indie games. Please repost, please back it.

Oh, yeah, Lady Blackbird and to some extent Blades in the Dark. Lady Blackbird takes Keys from Shadow of Yesterday, tags from Fate and elsewhere, etc etc

You know, the language-deciphering mechanics of Alien Archaeology are both incredibly hard and one of the most fascinating design challenges I've ever had.

This Blighted Isle: TERMINUS Missing people, a new train line, and buried secrets combine in this system-flexible TTRPG horror scenario set in modern London.

Folks, I'm closing late pledges on the TERMINUS Kickstarter tomorrow evening!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/pat...

Post-Kickstarter copies will cost a little more and probably not be available before Dragonmeet (end of Nov).

And, while I'm posting music, I watched this this morning and it made me happy.

www.youtube.com/results?sear...

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand on Steam Inherit a crumbling English hotel and restore it by day—while battling ghosts by night. With a sardonic cat, a talking power tool, and a twisting supernatural plot, this is a musical mystery unlike an...

I've been singing the theme tune to There Are No Ghosts At The Grand for days.

store.steampowered.com/app/3725190/...

The cover of Wyrd Science magazine issue 7, with the magazine opened to show the first pages of my article titled 'Playing Games in the Bomb's Shadow'.

And here we are! The latest, greatest issue of @wyrdscience.bsky.social, incorporating an article on the Cold War and RPGs by...me!

@ljmuimpact.bsky.social
@ljmuhistory.bsky.social

That's beautiful! I want one.

This is interesting to read - most of this stems from Apocalypse World, I think.

Coming soon: Apocalypse World: Burned Over The 3rd edition of the groundbreaking original.

What on earth brain it's 11:59 on the countdown clock and you're rewriting basic moves?

ARE YOU TRYING TO FUCK WITH ME, BRAIN?

I WILL DENY YOU CAFFEINE DO NOT TEST ME

www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

I love Pasión de las Pasiones! I *sort of* like that, but even so, the mechanical success/failure penalities aren't my thing. I like it when having a Condition/Wound/etc makes fun things more likely to happen, in some way (which I think is what Mothership does).

Oh interesting, have you got an example?

They both do reverse death spirals, yeah

Oh yeah, I love that kind of thing. You don't see it much these days.

I feel I often see it used unthinkingly, as part of "Roll 2d6 + skill against a Difficulty Level set by the GM, subtract 1 for every Condition you have".

It's fine when it's used...thinkingly? And the design of Blades in the Dark is very thoughtful.

One thing I like about Vaesen's conditions is that they add interesting character traits you can roleplay. I like Vaesen a lot.

(I hadn't realised I was talking about Forged In The Dark games! Whoops.)

Please stop doing Failure Spiral mechanics. That is, don't do mechanics in which doing badly leads to penalties on future rolls. You see this mechanic everywhere - wounds and "conditions" are a common variant - and it's not fun.

(Mothership's Conditions have a bit of this but are more subtle.)

A thing I love about Mothership's game design: when you fail, you gain Stress.

But Stress doesn't make you less likely to succeed at rolls. So you don't get the annoying "failure spiral" you get in many other games. It makes you more likely to Panic, which is fun!

Is that "a relationship that springs out of a particular situation", for example, when you go on holiday and meet someone there? It sounds like one of those words that got talked about but wasn't really used.

I liked that exhibition!

Me too. I think you have to be careful you're using the player's creativity (fun) rather than giving them work to do in fitting the pieces together (not fun).

In fact, I think one of the best things that indie gaming did is make the GM role better, giving all kinds of new tools.

One of the best things about indie games was bringing players into the narrative.

But...I feel this spilled over into a weird ambivalence towards the GM role. I like the GM role; I like facilitation; I like prep; I like starting a story for others to finish; and I feel indie games missed that a bit

It really depends what kind of creativity you mean and that's the problem. Being "creative" at work isn't necessarily the same as being a creative artist. Having a creative personality trait isn't necessarily the same as producing creative work. And so on.