Jesse Burneko

Haunted: Controversial Math In my last post, I mentioned how in the game where I finally played the murderer myself, I felt that the dice weren’t behaving as expected. You see, mechanically, the murderer is as at an ext…

And today I posted about some of the ideas behind Haunted's core resolution mechanic: meanwhileinravenloft.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/h...

Freeeeeeeeeedoooooooooom! #FreeSwordsWithoutMaster

I've always wanted to do a double feature night of "Sunset Boulevard" and "Gods and Monsters". I think those films would pair nicely.

It's weird because something like, "State what your character says and does within the imagined context" means the same thing and yet somehow feels more instructional and constrained.

Haunted: The Zine Was Too Lean So, after my epiphany put my publishing plans for Haunted on hold, something else changed my ideas about RPG texts and publishing. Ron Edwards started releasing his old games and new in an intrigui…

The process of writing Haunted was a real Goldilocks journey since my second approach was too small: meanwhileinravenloft.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/h...

TTRPG hot takes are what my Patreon on is for. I have one coming up in August. Subscribe now.

Just solved a problem with the programmer equivalent of "I search for secret doors."

Neither does "jburneko". I think it indexes your screen name, not your account id. Just a lot people use their account id AS their screen name.

For what it's worth, when I search for Spindlewheel or your name, your stuff does come up.

To go along with my Starling Data Center, I an have a Peacock Laser Defense Grid. www.science.org/content/arti...

Haunted: The Epiphany When I was nearing the end of writing my text, I decided to play Haunted at an online gaming event. It went pretty much as expected at this point. I posted about it here: A Tale of Two Agencies. It…

And today I posted about a pretty significant change I made to Haunted after I thought I had already completed the rules text.

meanwhileinravenloft.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/h...

Hang on… Working on my proof that starlings are Turing Complete.

It occurred to me that Pirate Borg might be a better Abney Park RPG than the official Abney Park RPG.

Note: PayHip has a blanket “no porn” rule but that somehow feels less vague than a hit list of concepts that could be cherry picked at any time for any reason against anything.

I think it’s too soon to jump ship on itch.io if you’re making basic weird fantasy/sci-fi stuff even with queer themes. However, I am thinking about setting my stuff up on PayHip sooner than later.

There’s some part of my brain that won’t accept that not all powers of 2 are perfect squares and I spend way too long wracking my brain trying to figure out what the square root of 8 is.

I feel like I move around which site I post my "grumpy" takes on.

You don't really want to publish a great game at a time in the world when people don't have money for it because they're struggling to afford groceries. But the thing to publish at a time when you need money for groceries is a great game.

Haunted: The Book Was Too Long Between 2011 and 2020 I had played numerous Haunted games and made numerous tweaks to its rules. Nothing I did seemed to solve the problem of the murderer either dying, going mad or ending up in pr…

Today, I posted about the first attempt at writing Haunted's final rulebook: meanwhileinravenloft.wordpress.com/2025/07/21/h...

You are a master of what I call “authentic marketing”. I tried to think of something like this for Haunted but I couldn’t. So, I just opted to blog about my journey developing the game. Feels better than just Look At This every week.

L.A. people: The Corpse Flower is preparing to bloom at the Huntington.

Do.... do I even want to know what you're alluding to?

Chicken rolled in Everything Bagel seasoning tossed in an air fryer is great.

Organizing RPG PDFs is a lot like sorting Lego. There are a ton of different ways to do it and they all eventually become wrong.

I think some people have a "Divine Providence" fantasy. My whole life has been scheduled by God/Fate which absolves me of responsibility and relieves me of anxiety. I don't think that's a particularly healthy fantasy but it seems be the subtext underlying this and related tropes.

A problem with making art is the aftermath of being in the flow can be such an emotional crash. You're back in the temporal world and there's no one who understands what you've done and what you went through.

And to give you the kind of ridiculous choices I had to make, I wanted to throw in a turn tracking token and my choices were like, "Okay you can add this custom cardboard circular cutout for $7.00 or you can have this stock black 3d printed bird for $0.75" So... you get the stock bird.

Time travel is my happy place. (IYKYK)

It's stupid expensive and I almost can not in good conscience urge you to get it (the DriveThru POD version is vastly cheaper) but if you must have a box and feel like splurging, who am I to deny you?

(I make the exact same amount of money on either copy).