Other Projects
Not every project is a huge thing for me. Sometimes I go off on a whim and make a small thing. Sometimes I work on a project quickly for a friend or a game jam. And sometimes things just slide in importance until they’re not a core part of my portfolio anymore. Still, I don’t like letting them disappear, and some of them are still good enough that I want to highlight them somewhere.
Diadem
Taking place in a historical crisis for the Roman Empire, this is an alternate history of the election of an Emperor by the various leaders in the army camp. Every day things get worse, and each councilor both wants a ruler who will favor them personally and also wants a leader who can actually stop the coming troubles. Sabotage each other, make alliances, give passionate oratory, and keep trying to vote until you break the deadlock.
While styled on history, it’s not important to actually know anything about the situation. Really, this is an election story about compromising, and knowing when you can’t compromise without losing everything you care for, and how the line gets harder and harder to find as the state of the world falls apart.
A GMless game for exactly 5 players. It can work with 4, but it’s better with 5.
Cost: $7 (PDF)
In The Court Of The Poison King
A card game about four Courtiers in the “service” of Mithridates, the Poison King, in the days leading up to their defeat at the hands of the Roman Republic. Each Courtier is desperate to be the last one standing as the King’s eye turns on their closest advisors.
Players secretly set up their actions, targeting each other and protecting themselves, but for every turn that someone doesn’t spend an action fending off the Romans, everyone gets closer to death. Even the Venomous Ghosts of the dead Courtiers will keep playing, haunting their rivals and complicating the players’ dynamics.
The game is for precisely four players and lasts 30 minutes. I highly recommend the physical deck — even as I think most of my games are better in their physical copies, the card-based ones hugely benefit from a real deck.
While styled on history, it’s not important to actually know anything about the situation. This is a story about how treason and violent ambition only serve to fail everyone, and how the pressures of impending doom amplify and distort those ambitious desires.
Cost: $5 (PDF), $10 (Physical Deck)
The Shining Void
A Powered by the Apocalypse game about sci-fi action heroes on a spaceship. Modeled on Mass Effect specifically and Star Wars, Star Trek, Dark Matter, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Killjoys generally. Pairing two half-playbooks for Cultures and Roles, characters are fundamentally heroic, participating in grand, sometimes operatic stories about people who are good at what they do and even better at risking it all for what they believe in.
Ultimately, The Shining Void hasn’t received a fraction of the refinement of Legend of the Elements, but still stands as a fun, diversity-focused take on the space opera genre.
Cost: $7 (PDF), $20 (Softcover)
The Quiet Tower
A game about Hubris and Creative Differences. It is about building something ambitious, at first together, and then in spite of each other, until it all falls down. The game is played with a large sheet of paper everyone will be drawing on, as well as a Jenga tower.
Inspired by the structures of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder and Dread by Epidiah Ravachol and Nathan Barmore, the Quiet Tower goes through four phases, represented by the card suits, answering prompts with each draw. During the early days, you’ll start building the tower from scratch, and as the game continues you’ll begin to pull pieces along with placing them as the creative process among the Builders starts to go awry.
Cost: $5 (PDF)
Trouble Comes To Town
A one-shot scenario for Apocalypse World about a community thrown into sudden turmoil by the arrival of a dangerous visitor. Remastered in 2025 in anticipation of Apocalypse World 3rd Edition!
Apocalypse World is designed by Vincent and Meguey Baker.
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)
Montsimmard 9:38
A collection of playbooks, city hubs, and advice for Urban Shadows 2nd Edition to play an urban fantasy story in a particular time and place in the Dragon Age setting. A full reskin of the Circles (now Spheres), a full dozen playbooks (each with two subsystems), and tools to play easily, including a primer on the Dragon Age setting to get unfamiliar players up to speed.
Urban Shadows 2nd Edition is created by Magpie Games and principally designed by Mark Diaz Truman and Marissa Kelly. Find the game and more at magpiegames.com. The original game is required to play, or at least the playsheets are.
Dragon Age is owned by Bioware and principally created by David Gaiter.
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)
Vibroblades in the Dark
A supplement for adapting Blades in the Dark to playing in a cyberpunk setting! Four playbooks and several subsystems, including Cyberware, a replacement for the Attune Action, and an optional initiative tracking structure. The playbooks are The Doctor (a medic and scientist), The Driver (a speedster and safety net), The Hacker (a trespasser and egotist), and The Mod (an outsider and a cyborg).
As a bonus, there’s an extra download here for the Hivemind (many bodies, one mind). I made these generally for some friends who were doing a cyberpunk skin of Blades in the Dark, and liked the results enough that I published them.
This work is based on Blades in the Dark (found at http://www.bladesinthedark.com/), product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)
Remember Us.
A surreal horror game involving weighing rice and snuffing out tealights in a dark room to tell the story of an expedition to a strange land that never came back. It explores lost stories and the allure of the dangerous unknown.
This game was developed for Game Chef 2018, featuring the theme of Lost Stories, focusing on the ingredients “Weigh” and “Blunt.” Inspired by Annihilation, House of Leaves, and TANIS. The descent into the unknown is a compelling story premise, and the unusual mechanical design, bordering on a LARP-y approach, underscores the drama.
Cost: $5 (PDF)
An Essay On Balance
Fully titled “Balance: Rejecting the Myth of a Singular Balance in Favor of a Three-Pronged Approach to Optimizing Game Design,” this essay presents a framework for refining games through both text review and playtesting.
Balance is often misunderstood. It is obsessed about by audiences with a narrow view of it, while it is completely disregarded by others who might seriously benefit from considering it more fully. Written for the Game Design Essay Jam on Itch.io, this essay is meant to be applicable to any game, and is more about the approach than any specific mechanical techniques.
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)
Setting Up Titles On DrivethruRPG
It can be a huge hassle to set up games on DTRPG, but I’ve done it a bunch and I continue to believe it’s a worthwhile marketplace, so I wrote a guide. It is visually bare-bones, but highly informative.
Written for the TTRPG Resource Jam on Itch.io, this helps readers set up their games on the most robust marketplace website for TTRPGs. The volume of games and traffic on DTRPG, as well as its promotion tools, strong recommendation engine, easy-to-browse catalog, and print-on-demand offerings, all make it a hugely convenient market for buyers. Itch is better for presenting your games on a nice page, but it struggles hugely as a marketplace website. Ideally, your games should be on both sites, so this guide can help you with DTRPG’s byzantine publishing system.
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)
Monsterhearts Custom Content
I think Monsterhearts is one of the best games ever. I’ve written several Skins myself, and collaborated with my partner on a couple, plus I have a couple of quick-start scenarios I’ve written.
This collection of content includes:
The Doppleganger: A Skin about jealousy and hating yourself and wishing you were more like your heroes. They transform themselves to slip into others’ lives, only to be frustrated and furious when their idols are as hollow or flawed as they are. This is one of my earliest designs, but I still love it, it’s a lot of fun and the mix of metaphor and mechanic still feel just right.
The Ghost (tLBP Version): For all that I love Monsterhearts, the Ghost has always fallen flat to me. I wanted to take on the themes of the Skin and rebuild it from the ground up. It’s a more intense and frightening experience, and a more mechanically-connected one.
The Ice Queen: My friend Orion Canning wrote a Skin called The Firestarter, about suppressed and targeted rage. My partner prefers ice, and reskinned The Firestarter into The Ice Queen, who is literally too cool for this shit. Ever wanted to a be a hipster whose resentment for those who actually care about things literally destroyed those things? This is the Skin.
The Fledgling: I designed this with my partner. It’s about a newborn vampire or succubus, still torn by the morality of the hunger but excited and desperate to give in and feed. We like vampires, and we do like the Vampire Skin, but wanted one that played a little more with the addiction aspect of vampirism. Its take on the concept remains quite distinct from the Ghoul and Infernal. While the Ghoul is about the endless need, and the Infernal is about the cost of chasing the next hit, the Fledgling is about the highs and crashes and the way they forge a vicious cycle.
Won’t You Be My Valentine, You Lovely Monster?: A quick-start scenario for Monsterhearts. It’s a set of love letters to get a one-shot scenario off the ground fast.
The Witching Hour of New Year’s Eve: A quick-start scenario for Monsterhearts. It’s a set of love letters to get a one-shot scenario off the ground fast.
There’s a collected ZIP, and also they’re all available individually.
Monsterhearts is designed by Avery Alder.
Cost: Pay What You Want ($0+)