In the course of writing, playtesting and now publishing Bite Marks I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about safety tools. The conversation has expanded so much since I started role-playing 29 years ago and I love how people are thinking about play culture, baking safety into mechanical design and normalising the use of safety […]
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Getting from an idea to a first draft.
This is a companion piece to Josh’s blog about curating ideas. My method of curation is slightly different to his; but I wanted to talk first about my process getting from a game idea to a first draft. Full disclosure… I am an incorrigible consumer of productivity systems and books about ‘getting creative work done’. I love reading about […]
How I curate my ideas
It is fashionable in game design circles to say that an idea is worth zero dollars. This is meant as a rebuttal to people who try to sell you their brilliant idea for a game. Which, fine – those people can’t really sell you an idea anyway, so that is indeed worth zero dollars. But […]
The League Presents – Actual Play with a difference
We’ve started a new Actual Play podcast where game designers play each other’s games! This is the first series: we’re playing Bite Me!, our game of werewolf pack dynamics that’s currently on Kickstarter. The game is being GM’d by me (Josh), with an august group of designer-players including Becky Annison (the designer of Bite Me!), […]
Roleplaying with my kid
I’ve started the inevitable experiments that all roleplaying parents must at some point attempt: roleplaying with my children. Specifically, my son R, who is five years old. It’s been pretty interesting. I started out very informally with R – just telling him a story and testing out various interactive approaches. Describing a situation and asking […]
How can we get more people playing RPGs?
This is the #RPGaDay2018 topic for day 8. I’ve answered most of these as simple social media posts, but felt like I had quite a bit to say on this one, so it’s getting its own blog post. Let’s start by saying that “we” means a lot of different groups of people, who have different […]
Black Armada mailling list
We now have a mailing list! If you’d like to get news about Black Armada’s games, including forthcoming products like Last Fleet, you can subscribe to the list using the form below. We anticipate sending emails to the list around once a month. We treat your data with respect and won’t share it with anyone else. […]
X Marks the Spot – call for playtesters
X Marks the Spot is a game of pedantry and quick-thinking repartee about drunken pirates planning a daring voyage to a dangerous land where buried treasure awaits you. I’ve just finished the latest version, following the first round of playtesting, and I’m keen to find people to playtest the new rules. It requires 3-5 players, […]
List of UK game designers
For those who haven’t seen it elsewhere – I have created a list of UK game designers. I have mostly done this because I intend to try and play and run more games by UK designers, and then… well, I got sucked into being completist. Here it is: List of UK RPG designers Something tells […]
Approaching the Problematic: Lovecraft and Me
It is important to be honest when something you love is problematic. I love Lovecraft’s work and at the same time I hate his worldview. I will not try to excuse the fact he was a bigoted racist nor that his outdated ideas about women, sex and mental health were hurtful and damaging. (If you […]