I like the theme of interconnectedness between digital and physical in all things Citizen Sleeper. This world feels more real this way.
Interesting how first game was to a large extent about this juxtaposition.

With each passing day this topic feels ever more important

You know the saying about shooting for the moon. I think I find an alternative ending to be true

You will crash and burn in the atmosphere, but someone will make a wish on your shooting star.

Trusting yourself. That's the hardest part.
Trusting that at the bottom of your ability there still will be something bright, something worth the effort.

That's why after years of not being able to finish anything, I'm actually editing some of my older work, making it readable. Pretty good actually

Even if what you make is actually flawed in so many ways. If you try to the best of your current ability, even if the best you have the capacity to do is just to show up. More than once I prepared a session during 20 min bus commute to the RPG club.

Seeing people coming back week after week for months, and hearing later that these sessions supported them during stressful times... well, it turns out that doing something that matters to someone, however few people, is a great motivator.

To clarify, it was never the plan to have a year-long campaign. It just so happens that I'm very bad at assessing the scope of a project :D
It was supposed to be a short open table mini-campaign to just experiment a little.
But suddenly there was a stable pool of players, and we just kept going.

Rewatching the same lectures over and over taking and retaking notes, practicing if a little.
Internal work also matters, burying unfinished projects, letting go of could-have-been's.
But what also helped is running RPG sessions every week for the last year.

But this year I think I've started to recover. And just as with the reasons for stopping, I feel like I can't fully grasp the reasons for picking the pen again.
Some of that comes from genuine effort to improve my skill. I'm failing at structured learning, but at least I'm failing forward

There were some objective factors that fed into my writing block: graduation, struggles with continued studies, then Covid and everything that came after.
But internally something just kept me from going. A bit of perfectionism, maybe informed pessimism, just plain fear of failure on all levels.

10 years ago, at the start of 2016 I've started my writing journey.
A lot of uninformed optimism, blindness to my inability, many mistakes, experimentation. I writed just a few short stories, but by 2018 I had my first magazine publications.
And then I hit a wall.

TTRPGs are like authentic folk singing — a communal experience. You may have a leader who directs the flow, but each voice is valuable for the harmony. You also have props, special instruments and sometimes costumes that bring the experience closer to the realm of ritual.

The art of… key art. The color palette, the wind, the slowly rising snowflakes — even without reading the description, this short clip gives me everything I need to know to subconsciously decide if I want to get this game (I do).

This is a passage from the latest Esoteric Ebb blog post. It talks about one of my favorite parts of agency in RPGs — having items you choose to pick and hold in your inventory be unexpectedly relevant in your quests or dialogues. This makes the world seem more real, connected like a real place

Having an artist to sketch your adventures in the party is the best!
In one of the games I play we had two artists, and many sessions ended with adorable doodles.

Do your players make art inspired by your TTRPG sessions?
One of my players recently released a song taking some inspiration from our adventures.
I couldn't be more proud.
Take a listen here: band.link/witch_lighth...

Or the Thought Cabinet in Disco Elysium, it weaves bits of narrative into the thought description, and makes you actively pursue those to unlock more context.

One technique I liked is using stories as part of the meta gameplay, having player engage with the game's systems to reveal the narrative. In Transistor by Supergiants, each of your skills is connected to a side character, and only by using the skills in different contexts you unlock their stories.

We as humans experience time linearly. Since games are experienced in sync with real time, jumping through time and PoWs is pulls us out of the alignment with the character we inhabit.

But if we turn those stories into gameplay sections, we will have to use some sort of dreams or flashbacks to make the character jump between time and space. But I feel that it may break immersion.

It got me thinking, can we use this technique in digital games without it being awkward? We can have cutscenes or audiologs, or books, but we ask the player to stop whatever they were doing and passively experience a story we tell them. I feel that it doesn't make use of the strength of the medium.

I'm reading a Young Adult folk-horror book, and it includes a lot of interludes, small diegetic stories that the main heroine hears, reads about or remembers. They make the world bigger and creepier, establish paranormal encounters as something not uncommon, the barrier to chthonic world being loose

If I decide to implement inventory systems into my digital game projects, I would really like to have more of such unique item/narrative interactions.

Another more content-heavy approach is to make elements having separate contextual uses. I'm not talking about multi-purpose tools in gameplay, I'm referring to instances like making Molotov in Disco Elysium for an important part of the story when you've met some specific conditions

One way I saw digital games emulate this style of play is by making a lot of connecting systems. Larian Studios are pretty good at this, implementing complex elemental interactions in their Original Sin games.

In my Cairn games I allow creative spell/item stacking. Yes, you can put a necklace that allows you to fly but strangles you on the enemy sentient skin suit to make it into a helium balloon. Yes, you can repeatedly use "Evolve" spell on ally with angel blood to turn them into a seraphim-ish creature

At worst, this type of play turns into the old adventure game where you have to guess one "correct" way of doing things. But at best, it makes the game a scene for creativity and improvisation, where players are encouraged to adapt and use the instruments they have in unexpected and innovative ways.

There are different styles of play in TTRPGs. One of them is deemphasizing dice rolls as part of conflict resolution. In OSR-like play you are supposed to use the game environment to achieve your goal, and the referee is supposed to simply allow you to succeed if your solution makes sense in-world.

My list:

House spirit synonyms
Sir who addresses
What is manuscript
Papyrus
What is deck
Peasant day routine
Women status in Athenes
How to say bookstore in Polish
Do you need to wash horses
Is pig considered cattle
Cairbre Cinnchait
How to divide a circle into five equal parts

The last thing my halfling saw before he fell unconscious.
Almost a TPK

Each time I add my +10 to attack roll as my little halfling warlock, I am reminded of all the choices I made to achieve this.
Just as when I subtract -1 from any perception rolls XD

When I add a bonus from our paladin's aura, I see character relationships in numbers, affecting the play world.