Clayton

Fake it until you make it as they say. And I’ve been playing the role of a TTRPG game designer for about 12 years! Now the mask has become my very nature. I am going to play the Masquerade game with vampires, for real. After years of working as an independent game designer, like a good Anarch, I joined the Camarilla. I am now the Lead Game Designer at White Wolf, the legendary publisher that made me realize TTRPGs could be about a lot more than killing monsters. I can be one of them, and surprisingly be even more human! The first book I ever read in English was Vampire: The Dark Ages, and now I get to work as a game designer full time for the first time with the World of Darkness? I couldn’t be happier! To live and breathe the universe of Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Hunter, Changeling, Wraith, and all other games every day, and be able to collaborate in shaping its future is a dream come true. These games were formative in my TTRPG industry, in the Brazilian TTRPG community, and are incredibly relevant to this day. Especially these days I would say. And with me I am bringing my game design philosophy of “playing more with less” to help make the game more accessible while honoring the more than 30 years of World of Darkness! I just want everyone to enjoy the game as much as they can, with as little effort as they can afford. Oh, and I am still an Anarch at heart, don’t worry!

Me with a Bloodlines 2 tshirt setting in a throne under the Ankh banner!

A castle with the ankh banner hanging from a window

Me wearing a shadowy cloak

So this happened…

I am White Wolf’s new Lead Game Designer!

I will figure out how to post the whole text here, but there is a picture with the announcement and the alt text has the full thing!

#TTRPG #RPGLATAM #VtM #WoD #DnD #NotDnD #ShowYourWork

Wow, this is great! I'm excited to see what you do with it.

Yeah or else! (Or else we ask again.)

I'm excited/terrified of all the submissions I'll be sifting through.

We keep finding these pleasure/pain frontiers. Always a combo. Never just pleasure.

Starting thinking hard and getting hyped: the Bloggies are coming.

Haha, I’ve already thwarted that plan by banning my blog from the running

Absolutely! I think even now, with design and production better than ever, IA has improved at a much slower rate.

No disagreement here. As time passes, I'm more and more excited by good structure and information architecture over everything else in layout.

(Don't ever do that again. We need the engagement.)

That makes you the coolest person who participated that year!

This is the art you can expect from a guy who put all of his meager points into blogging and the pen tool.

It will not be leveling up in time for submissions in January.

The Bloggies 2026! The blogosphere's annual celebration is coming back.

I come to you like Paul Revere on the back of a liger. The Bloggies are coming!

Like, share, and subscribe.

www.explorersdesign.com/the-bloggies...

Stacking The Deck – Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas Fallout: New Vegas turned 15 in October, so I’m a bit late with this post, but whatever. With season 2 of the Amazon show coming up, I’m more eager than ever to revisit the Mojave Waste…

All the good posts get published when I'm asleep or walking the dog. @dicegoblin.blog, this is a good one.

The faction diagram should be copied to death.

dicegoblin.blog/stacking-the...

I appreciate you sharing the newsletter every time a new issue comes out. I'm subscribed, but I always end up reading it through your posts.

Everything is pointcrawl! Exploring hexcrawls, pointcrawls, and other crawls to see if everything is actually just a pointcrawl. How we can reduce the illusion of choice and instead have players make meaningful decisions?

In a way, all crawls are just pointcrawls with extra details. What's important is making those extra details meaningful.

This is a great article. Required reading. Everyone should follow @exeunt.press if they haven't already.

www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/everything...

PAXU: Cram a Month of Gaming into One Weekend — Prismatic Wasteland I Played Seven Games at PAX Unplugged and Lived To Tell You the Tales Thereof

I had fun at PAX Unplugged! I played over 20 hours worth of games and went out to the local taverns every night. How did I do it all? That’s proprietary, but you can instead read all about the games I played
#osr #ttrpg

DONE Now on Kickstarter: Hinterlight A peek into the process of cover designer Robbi Burns

I love the @rascal.news announcements
It's pure gift to the community
Lots of folks also fail to use it well

Sure, you can tell people to buy/back/get your game
It's better when you talk about what makes your game special

@robbiaburns.bsky.social kills that here

www.rascal.news/p/8aaf9647-0...

I'm sorry Mr. Exeunt Press. It won't happen again.

Mapping the Blogosphere An interactive graph of TTRPG blogs, showing who links to whom, how communities change over time, plus stats and how it all works.

Another highlight of this month's Explorateur are all of the other blog-related projects. It's old news at this point, but Elmcat made an interactive map of the blogosphere.

It's interesting because it's a map defined by connections—not necessarily audience.

The Bloggies 2026 A yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games.

The big news this month is a teaser for The Bloggies 2026. Don't worry, you've got plenty of time. Submissions don't open until the New Year. Until then, write, bookmark, and count the days.

www.explorersdesign.com/bloggies-2026/

An official announcement will go out later this week.

The Explorateur: Issue #14 Monthly design jams, critique, theory, and inspiration for tabletop rpg designers by rpg designers. Vetted. Looted. Curated.

The Explorateur #14 is out now! The only newsletter designed to level-up your design skills (how's that for sales copy?).

Please like, share, and subscribe. If you have any links you particularly like, drop a comment on Explorers Design or here.

www.explorersdesign.com/explorateur-...

They sure are! I'm moving them a little this year so I'm not rushed to read and curate the final list around the holidays.

A small announcement will be in The Explorateur tomorrow and an official announcement later in December. Submissions will open in January. Voting opens in February.

Save vs. Total Party Kill - Defining the OSR I have joked on Twitter that the three defining characteristics of the OSR are: No one can agree what the OSR is. No one can agree what the R stands for. The OSR is always over.It takes bravery to ...

Two brave souls attempt to define the OSR — and succeed? Sharing two posts I found and enjoyed recently.

ive struggles for ages to explain my deepset love for OSR design tools to other ttrpg folks and im grateful someone has finally written a blogpost that so clearly elucidates how OSR play is built. required reading imo

This makes me bite my fist with envy.

Two opening illustrations for Blades '68. On the left, "Introduction", with a woman wearing a black outfit and polka dot headscarf, firing a pistol. On the right, "Characters", with two figures standing in foreground. Once is a dark-skinned man wearing a double-breasted jacket, and beside him is a woman wearing a sort of poncho thing (I don't know what it's called). Anyway, it's all very 1960s.

Two chapter opener illustrations for Blades '68. On the left is "Crews", with five 1960s figures walking across the frame. On the right is "System Changes", with a man in a suit working at a huge room-sized computer system.

Blades '68! It's all go!

Here are some chapter openers I've been working on.

This is genuinely funny and accurate. Bloggies submissions will be opening soon-ish. I have to pick up everything I made for it last Spring and schedule some posts.

Thanks for saying so! I know Eco Mofos took inspiration from the template, but it looks so much better than I ever envisioned for the template!