Mike Martens | Clear Keep

Mockup of a small zine titled “Triple-O: The Player Character Emulator” on a warm yellow background. The cover features a retro black-and-white illustration framed by a colorful zigzag border in cyan, pink, and yellow

open spread of the Triple-O zine laid flat on a warm yellow background. The page is titled “Setting Things Up” and explains the first steps of play. The layout features colorful zigzag borders and a clean, readable zine design.

Play solo as the GM!

Triple-O, my beloved player character emulator, is coming back in zine format!

More tables, examples, and use cases!

Run published adventures, emulate NPCs or allies, playtest your own prep!

Follow today on BackerKit (free one-page version for early backers)

👉 is.gd/tripleo

The cover of Blades in the Dark next to the cover of Blades '68

In celebration of the imminent Blades ‘68 campaign, I thought I’d talk a bit about its graphic design.

BUT FIRST let’s compare and contrast with the graphic design of Blades in the Dark, a landmark in the history of RPG layout.

Type nerdery ahoy 🧐

I also find it helpful to consider the writer as part of the conversation.

Thinking about how/where/why I am contributing to the conversation has helped me get much better as a designer.

“The game is a conversation” means more than “it’s people talking in turns.”

How does a good conversation flow? What helps it? How is it shared?

In any conversation, a lot happens when we turn the speaking role over to someone else.

We're not just listening to the other person, we're processing our own perspective, considering how it will shift forward.

The "What are you afraid might happen?" prompt forces us to take this beat.

This all happens quickly, but it also just gives the GM/keeper a beat to think.

When a move is triggered, a keeper has to facilitate a mechanical sequence – ideally as succinctly as possible.

Doing that while contemplating narrative branches is tricky.

Once a player answers the prompt with their notion, the keeper often notches it up with an "It's worse than that …" suggestion.

This forces the table to consider how mixed results might look. It breaks our black-and-white myopia. Makes us consider the wider stakes of the action.

"What are you afraid might happen?" does a few sly things.

1. Solicits the player for their idea of a messy result.
2. Opens consideration of the result spectrum.
3. Generates additional suspense on the roll.
4. Grants time for the keeper in the conversation.

On the other hand, this is just plainly more to process in a brief moment for the GM/keeper.

When we know the character's goal, we can clearly foresee success and failure for that goal. But success with a twist of failure? Or failure with a dose of success? That requires more thought.

Mixed results are a mixed bag.

They're super rewarding once applied: A messy narrative branch is the most interesting one, and it's what allows for the beat to zoom out. We don't need a mix of small hard successes and failures: We can cover a complex beat in one mixed result.

I run a fair amount of CfB and am deep in playtesting Planet Raygun, a system that applies CfB's core components into a heist format.

Sometimes I forget to ask what players are afraid will happen on a roll result. And I realized the other day this feels the same as running any PbtA game.

PbtA games at large should pick up the "What are you afraid might happen?" beat of risky rolls that's used in Carved from Brindlewood.

This relieves SO MUCH pressure on the GM/keeper. And not just when directly using the prompt's answer …

Cairn Press The official website for the Cairn Press imprint.

As of tomorrow, Cairn Press is live!

Bring me your modules, your supplements, your hacks - as long as they are Cairn adjacent, I'll take consider it!

More soon.

cairnpress.ink

No worries: We live in strange times.

It can’t as it’s no longer a public company!

Crusher’s. Grandma’s. Ghost lover.

If your blade is on a hunger strike, you will need to either consider its demands or just wait it out. Sorry if this isn’t the answer you wanted to hear.

TNG is largely horror plots …

Quick correction to the Gizmodo piece: The stock price doubled last year as part of the buyout by Bending Spoons. (There was a layoff round before the purchase was announced as well.)

Contributor Highlight: @madelancholy.bsky.social coordinates by day, and then spends time playing/running TTRPGs, game writing, or editing video for their YouTube actual-play channel Madelancholy. They have written for Brindlewood Bay and contributed to the Sprigs and Kindling community zine.

thhhe le mon of PINK

This is a must-read.

Rivals: A Ghosts of El Paso Zine by Michael Van Vleet 12 Brand-New Rivals for The Kid!

Do you play The Between: Ghosts of El Paso? Does your table have a Kid? Do they need more rivals to shoot at?

@picaroon-jack.bsky.social and I have got you covered.

Rivals is a small zine w/ 12 rivals ready to thrown down and, likely, die in the dirt.

signalstation.itch.io/rivals-a-gho...

And it’s worth remembering that paid reach is not paid conversion. People don’t buy a thing JUST because an ad exists.

This is where you go down the rabbit hole of a marketing funnel, market fit, the global economy and all that.

But trying a few ads somewhere isn’t hard or necessarily expensive.

Do you have to advertise to successfully fund a project? Nope!

I’ve mostly run campaigns organically and done fine: Well enough that I’ve been able to do consistently more with projects than I aimed. (I’ve found I’m not super interested in the advertising element of “success.”)

Side note: Where we go for online community and where advertising can go to reach those communities have shifted dramatically over the past 6 years. If you’re largely here or Discord, there’s also currently a high barrier between the two as well. It’s definitely a puzzle!

Stretch goals don’t guarantee reach on their own.

But stretch goals might increase relevancy of advertising to a certain segment: Stat blocks for other systems, guest writers from other scenes.

If your intent is to increase reach, carve out some funds to advertise it.

If you’re choosing between investing in a stretch goal or advertising *in order to gain more project impressions*, I would expect better ROI from advertising.

Paid reach guarantees impressions in a noisy, often randomized landscape. It’s the direct route to that objective.

#Zimo My biggest crowdfunding campaign was the one I bought social media ads for. Not a lot, $50-100 worth, something like that. <1% of total revenue.

I wasn’t methodical about testing to draw direct causation, but it’s worth trying if you want to expand reach.

Democrats can and must make it clear there will be trials and anyone even somewhat associated with ICE will face them. Maybe give a quit-your-job deadline on appeasement and give people 72 hours. I don't know. But currently the plan is to let them murder us in the street and get away with it.