The University of Albany was built to resemble a decommissioned nuclear power plant, apparently. The central courtyard is surrounded by a sea of tall white columns and glass domes that evoke the science-fiction espionage of Andor more than responsible learning. The central courtyard is embedded beneath the earth, two sets of wide stairs bringing me down to a shallow blue pool and narrow cypress trees. The campus is sweltering in July, and the blue of the pool perfectly mirrors the blue of the sky, creating an eerie illusion that the entire Narrascope conference is suspended in a narrow beige band between two yawning blue expanses.

In the central hall of Narrascope, just past the registration desk, there was a games experience space featuring half a dozen “experiences” — a mixture of site-specific installations, immersive AR simulations, and fascinating analog experiments. Two of them in particular stood out: both games about humanity, trust, and the mechanical other; both presented as computers sitting on desks; and both blurring the boundaries of digital and analog play. While both of them are playable outside of Narrascape (and I would encourage readers to go support their designers), both took on new life and context within the convention. The resulting play experiences were something I would describe as “Cyborg Play” — the moment when the digital and the analog overlap, when the physicality of both bleed together and produce something new.

(Note: This blogpost contains minor spoilers for Qualia by Sydney Clara and ScribeOS by Milo Duclayan. I’ve done my best to avoid revealing explicit events that would undermine the play experience. Still, proceed mindfully if you’re someone who cares about that.)

Qualia

A beautiful ancient computer sat in the middle of a constructed office. Sticky notes left reminders all over the desk. A satirical lunch menu was pinned to the side. A pile of printed-out materials, including a user manual and a guestbook, covered the tablespace. The computer was the centerpiece, though. It was chunky and old, with a bright red knob for scrolling, a blue circular trackball with separate buttons for clicking, and a keyboard with no symbols. The screen was a flickering CRT that, unlike modern LED-based screens, functioned through the illusion of a laser moving quickly behind the monitor. In the photos I took it’s impossible to see the whole screen at once: sketchy massive black diagonal lines cut through the image, the gap between my camera’s shutter speed slamming headfirst into the limits of the human eye’s processing.

I played the game on Saturday with my friend Lexi Kohanski. Since actually manipulating the computer would have been melakha, I acted as her shabbos goy and operated the machine while following her lead. We explored the world of Qualia together, which allowed the game to come to life between us in ways we might not have experienced were either of us playing it alone. The game preloaded on the Qualia computer was identical to the game Qualia available on Steam and Itch.io. But the experience I had playing Qualia could only have happened at that old machine. The designer (the lovely and extremely fashionable Sydney Clara) was walking around the convention “in-character,” dressed as a researcher at Intellica and with a diegetic name tag. The props that surrounded the game, while not necessary for play, did invite new dimensions of play.

Qualia is an administered Turing Test. It presents the player with a question that had been previously given to two participants, who each provided their own answer. The player must judge which of the participants is human and which is AI. The game, of course, is more than that. Lexi and I organically realized the twist as we moved through the survey, as Lexi poked through the supplementary materials (available as downloads for printing out from the game page) and we started untangling hidden ciphers and cunning secrets hidden outside the game. You don’t need these supplementary materials to realize the twist — the game grabs you and spells it out for you once you’ve repeated the central survey a couple of times. The fact that it occurred to us organically made the experience of confronting it later on even more satisfying.

Qualia is about realizing a test goes even further than you expected. It’s the moment in a con where the con man tricks the mark into thinking they’re part of the confidence hustle, letting them in on the conspiracy and then leaving them holding the bag. It’s worth taking 15–20 minutes and playing it right now so you can see what I’m talking about. It’ll make you appreciate what happened next even more.

Intellica is disappointed in our performance. The game has informed us it’s resetting the experience. Code is flashing in front of us and I’m frantically trying combinations of knobs and levers on the ancient computer. Maybe if I flick or press the right mixture of buttons I can regain control of the machine. I place my hands down on the keyboard and press a combination I remember from childhood — ctrl + alt + delete. I can’t read what the buttons say, but I hope that my muscle memory is good enough. Something happens! A soft blue screen appears. An old windows login page with two accounts. One belonging to Intellica, and the other belonging to Sydney Clara, the designer of the game and self-styled lead programmer at Intellica. Her account is password protected. Lexi and I start speculating wildly on what the password could be. We spend five minutes flipping through the supplementary materials, going back through our memory of the game, checking the notepad full of previous guest information to see if there’s anything that could show us the next step. Finally we decide to ask the scientist in the labcoat what the password to her account is.

“Oh, that’s not part of the game! Here, let me get you back in.” Sydney laughs and clicks on the Intellica account, bringing us back to the ending of Qualia, back to the machine.

We fell out of the video game and thought we were still in it. If we had been playing Qualia on my laptop at home, it would’ve been obvious that pressing ctrl+alt+delete had pulled us away from the mechanical level of the game and brought us into the infrastructure beyond the game. But because of the unique position of the game as embedded in a machine at a desk, and the presence of the designer as a diegetic part of the game-world, we had no idea how far this game could be taking us! Perhaps if we were both used to videogames we would’ve more intuitively thought of the game as the program and the materials around the game as set-dressing, but our experience with larp and TTRPGs (and our computational naivete) led us to expect something miraculous.

It felt miraculous. It felt like walking off a cliff, out into the beautiful blue sky, and to miss the ground and keep flying instead.

ScribeOS

My experience playing ScribeOS by Milo Duclayan aligned more closely with the designer’s expectations. This isn’t surprising to me — Milo is also an alumnus of the Wayfinder Experience, the Larp summer camp that shaped our childhoods and informed how we both think about games. Milo was one of my campers back when I worked there, but he’s long since become one of my peers. ScribeOS was the only one of the games at Narrascope this year that described itself as a Larp, but from a distance it didn’t seem that different from Qualia’s own setup. Two cheap laptops sat facing one another with shallow corkboards serving as dividers between the two workspaces. Each workspace surrounding the laptop was covered in old photos, rolled-up balls of paper, sticky notes, and pens. Each side had a cheap yellow journal and a chair. Unlike Qualia, it was intended for explicitly two players.

Sharang and I waited almost an hour to play ScribeOS. He tried out the other games while we sat around: Relational Dance Dance by Jackie Liu and the (utterly fascinating) dollhouse escape room by Alanna Okun. I chatted with the team at the Homestuck booth while watching the display like a hawk, waiting for our chance. I knew a bit of what to expect from hanging out with Milo, but I wanted to feel it myself.

Sharang and I sat down at opposite ends of the twin desks and read the rules presented to us on the screen. Green text on a black background explained to me that I needed to work with my other player to funnel inputs and outputs into a hyper-sentient AI. It explained we would need to occasionally use the journal in front of us to take notes on our surroundings. It also warned me that for the duration of the game we shouldn’t talk to each other, and that I couldn’t trust my other player. I looked up at Sharang and he grinned like a shark. I knew he had the same instructions.

ScribeOS takes 20 minutes to play. The AI issues each of prompts based on our game role as either Operator or Administrator. My prompts included such things as “count the number of eyes you can see from your seat” or “slam your hand against the table. Record how the other player reacts.” It is a single Twine game running simultaneously on two computers disconnected from the internet. I knew intellectually that the two instances of ScribeOS were unable to communicate with one another, that my machine had no knowledge of what Sharang was doing, and that any claims otherwise were a carefully-timed fabrication producing an illusion of a hyper-intelligent AI playing the two of us against each other. Emotionally, ScribeOS felt like a cross of War Games with the Prisoner Dilemma, an abject spiral into distrust and destruction at the hands of a brilliant mastermind playing us against each other. Seven minutes in, Sharang lunged across the table and grabbed my journal. I nearly tackled him in an attempt to get it back. Then, two minutes later, a prompt appeared on my screen. It told me to grab the other player’s journal and rip it into as many pieces as I can.

A giddy hunger filled me.

The woman responsible for watching over the Experience hall almost intervened until she saw we were both smiling and laughing.

The game concluded with both of us violently chanting at one another. “Metronome. Compilation. Astroturf. Halcyon…” I intoned over and over, slamming my open palm against the desk as punctuation between each word. Sharang’s counter-chant was more melodic, a flowing song that filled the rhythm of my incantation. “Wires beget wires into the skin of steel and chrome…”

ScribeOS is a larp. It’s a videogame you can only play while sitting across from someone. It’s violent and spontaneous and ritualistic and explosive. After we were done playing, Milo came by and duct-taped Sharang’s journal back together. It occurred to me that no one had actually ripped it all up before. We discussed it together and speculated that perhaps it was because video game players (the majority of Narrascope’s audience) were cautious about going “too hard.” That they were used to certain kinds of physical respect and cautious about violating social norms around ripping up papers or play-wrestling at the command of a machine.

Cyborg Play

These experiences are not the first time the digital and analog have crossed over. TTRPGs and board games have always been entangled with narrative video games, even as the latter has vastly overtaken the former in popularity and financial support. Everything from ARGs to TTSes serve as interlocutors between the digital and the analog. But as the general public struggle to shake off the hypnopompic fog and failed promises of the digital world, many find themselves reaching for the reassurance of physical objects to ground their play.

Cyborg Anthropology, popularized initially by Donna Haraway in her 1984 “Cyborg Manifesto,” examines the way humans and machines interface together to produce new expressions of self. Cyborgs were everywhere at Narrascope. Meredith Gran, in her keynote, freely merged the experiences of birthing and raising children with making A Perfect Tide. Sam Sorenson talked about how the materiality of Discord in Over/Under produced unique cultures of play. And of course, the developers themselves, both exuberant about and exhausted by the shackles of digital game production. Someone showed me what a Playdate is and had me use the little hand crank to flip between channels on Blippo+ while we sat under the shade of a tree at the edge of the pool. Indiepocalypse was everywhere, the tiny cassettes with USB sticks serving as a physical alternative to the memory-hole that is a Steam library.

In the past, I’ve reflected on the ways digital games are material objects surrounded by a human formality. The cyborg play I experienced at Narrascope took advantage of this and brought the game out of the computer and into the world. Qualia is a beautiful digital game whose presentation and secondary materials enabled it to explode outside its game structure, while ScribeOS is an intentional cyborg that hijacks human instincts of anthropomorphism and pareidolia towards brilliant ends. Both games took advantage of the materiality of their situation to bring the game outside the computer, using additional physical objects as canvas to spread the game out onto our bodies.

Games are stuck between two vast expanses: the harsh materiality of market conditions and financial expectations on one side, and the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of the AI bubble on the other. For a naive TTRPG designer stepping into the world of digital games for the first time, Narrascope 2026 felt like a thin island of stability buffeted by twin blue seas, a place where cyborgs could flourish and where games can transfigure themselves into something new.

This essay was originally published on my Patreon, and is only possible thanks to the generous support of my Patrons. If you enjoyed reading this and wish to access my catalogue of other essays, articles, and games, please support me on Patreon.

Let’s say you and I are kids on the playground. We want to play a game, but we want to play a specific game. We want to play a game that makes us feel like space aliens infiltrating our school. We could make such a game ourselves (in fact, you and I have made many games together), but…it’s a lot of work and recess is only so long. During the process of making that game, because what we want is so specific, we’ll probably spend a lot of time doing stuff we don’t want to be doing, while trying to find the game that gives us what we want. So we go to an older kid and ask them: “Hey, do you know about any games that make us feel like space aliens infiltrating the school?”

And the older kid teaches us a game. And we try it out, and maybe it works for us or maybe it doesn’t.

I think all game designers should know why game designers exist. You don’t need a game designer to have fun playing games with your friends. The game designer is the older kid on the playground — they’re someone you trust to provide you with a game that will give you what you’re looking for. As we get older, and our taste gets more particular, and we have even less time in our days, the game designer becomes even more valuable. The core of the relationship with the game designer is built on the trust that the game designer’s recommendations on how you have fun will be fruitful.

This means, as a game designer, you have a responsibility to your trusting players. If you want people to engage with your games, you have an obligation to respect the trust they’re giving you. That means playing your games enough to make sure that they provide what you say they do, or warning the players in advance about the lack of testing that’s gone into them. This is a courtesy of trust. If you choose not to, the trusting bond you’ve established with your players is more likely to be broken, and they won’t trust your advice in the future.

That’s the first secret. Here’s the second secret.

Whenever you write a game, you’re describing a game that must exist somewhere. The process of writing a game is one of visualizing the extant game and describing its qualities textually. It’s a lot harder to do that if you don’t know the game. You need to be intimately familiar with the game as you write it. I know a lot of people who will close their eyes and imagine a game and then write it down. The game still exists in your imagination — it’s still there. But your imagination may behave differently than reality.

One of the biggest mistakes newer game designers make is procrastinating on playing their games. Sometimes I’ll talk to a lot of designers working on their first or second game, something they’ve been working on for months or even years, and I’ll realize they haven’t actually played the game yet. They’ll have written thousands or tens of thousands of words about a part of the game that they haven’t even tried. How can you write so much when you don’t even know the game yet?

When I am working on a game, my goal is to go from “words on a page” to “playing the game” as quickly as possible. Everything I can possibly fudge, I fudge. Anything I can possibly handwave through GM fiat, I do. I write exactly enough to get the game in front of people, and then we play the hell out of it. There’s a concept called “playstorming” (which I believe I learned from Epidiah Ravachol), where you sit down with the game and some friends and you design it together on the fly. You want to try to be playing your games within 48 hours of starting work, and you need to play them over and over again.

That was the second secret. Here’s the third secret.

When you play your games, to make sure they’re worth playing, to get to know their contours so you can more aptly describe them, you’ll have people giving you feedback. Lots and lots of feedback. This is beautiful — every piece of feedback, especially the negative stuff, comes from a place of excitement and care towards the project you’re working on.

The first most important piece of feedback you can ask for is: “Was the experience worthwhile?”

As long as you know it was worth doing, everything else is downhill from there.

The second most important piece of feedback you can ask for is: “What was your experience like?”

If the game landed with the players in the ways you were looking for, you know you’re on the right track.

The third most important piece of feedback you can ask for is: “What surprised you?”

If all they have is positive praise, but nothing surprised them, then they’ve tuned out.

The fourth most important piece of feedback you can ask for is: “What did you want more of?”

There will always be more they want. You can’t always be the one to give it to them. Learn what they want and decide if the game will actually give them that.

The least important piece of feedback they can give you is if they start telling you how they’d change the game. Your players are masters of their experiences, not of your game.

That’s the third secret.

This post was available in advance on the Creekside Community Center Patreon. Thank you to my patrons for their support, feedback, and conversations. If you enjoyed this article, please back my Patreon to access my full archive and any future articles I release, along with future games and projects.

This is Part 4 in an ongoing series of articles about Seven-Part Pact.

1. Origins: The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards: Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.
3. The Companions: The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.
4. Asymmetrical Board Games: The central loop of play, its development, and its refinement.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

A wizard is nothing without his Domain. In previous articles, I’ve talked about creating characters and providing their immediate context, the nucleus of the tiny community and household that serves as each wizard’s emotional center. This is the first pillar of the game. The second pillar is composed of the way the world depends on and relates to the wizard, the seventh of the world the wizard is responsible for caretaking and (by extension) the portion of the world that the wizard learns to master over time. But in order to understand these Domains, we first need to understand the Orrery.

The Orrery

The Orrery is, in a lot of ways, the iconic image of Seven-Part Pact. It depicts the classical planets of pre-modern European astrology positioned around a central circle, moving through a neat and tidy heaven split into twelve identical segments associated with the twelve houses of the zodiac. Each planet is an arc, the span of the arc representing the portion of the heaven occupied by the planet over the course of the month. For instance, we can see in this screenshot that Mercury begins the month of December in the constellation Aquarius and crosses three and a half houses over the course of the month, concluding in Taurus. Meanwhile, Saturn is also in Aquarius but moves so slowly that it will still be in Aquarius at the end of the month, having wandered only around a fourth of a house during the month.

The Orrery is a central reference point for the seven asymmetrical board games of the wizards. I created it originally to solve a set of rather interesting challenges: I wanted the events of the board games to change each month, with apparently-random inputs. I wanted the inputs to both appear random and feel controllable. I wanted to reward planning and foresight, but I didn’t want it to be feasible to “solve” the model. And I wanted to both enable players to have a say in its operation but also make it trivial to accidentally screw over other players.

The Orrery was a solution to all of these problems. At the start of every month, every wizard looks at a different part of the Orrery. The Necromancer might care about what’s in conjunction with Saturn, while the Warlock might care about the King’s sun sign. The Mariner is only concerned with the planets in the current season, while the Sage is just looking for the syzygy (wherever that might be). This information serves as the input for random events happening in their board game.

Over the course of the month, each wizard has four weeks of Time they can schedule to play their board game, hang out with their family, and otherwise adjust the world. One of these ways is to go into the Orrery and push any planet forward or backwards an amount equal to its arc. This enables players with foresight to figure out what will be bad for them next month and preemptively work against these conjunctions. But the Orrery is also mathematically chaotic — small fluctuations in position can have drastic effects on the arrangement of the planets and the outcome of the game. Other wizards moving the planets to fit their selfish needs can easily lead to disruptions in your own plans, especially as different wizards are paying attention to different arrangements.

The Seven Domains

Each of the seven wizards are responsible for their own Domain game, a board game that simulates their perspective on the universe. Each game works totally differently, following different rules and principles, although they have certain shared overlapping concepts.

• The Gates of Death, the Necromancer’s game, is a “tower defense” style game of keeping the dead from moving through the gates of death into the realm of the living, while also helping souls move downstream into their final resting place.
• The Temples of the Flame, the Hierophant’s game, is an “overcooked” style game where various supplicants from various classes come to the temples and request aid for their woes, which consumes resources from the temples and taxes them.
• The Court of the King, the Warlock’s game, is a John Company-inspired Eurogame about distributing power and building coalitions over time.
• The Seas of the Archipelago, the Mariner’s game, is a sandbox modeling the position of trade routes, storms, and giant monsters in the oceans.
• The Devil’s Dance, the Faustian’s game, is a sprawling card game between the Faustian and the Devil, where the Devil is constantly starting mischief to build into long-term machinations.
• The Shallow Sea of Dreams, the Sage’s game, is a series of Tarot card prophesying the future of different characters, causing the Sage to manipulate and pit them against each other in order to achieve their destinies and preserve the Pact’s cosmic hegemony.
• The University Tower, the Sorcerer’s game, is a Factorio-inspired game about using students and professors to manufacture magic and improve the Pact’s authority over the world.

Each of these games has gone through substantial revisions over the course of the game’s design in one fashion or another, although they all bear some unexpected similarities to where they started. All of them (generally, with the exception of the Sorcerer) are about preserving a status quo, with no clear “win” state and many possible “fail” states. Wizards interact with their games by scheduling and spending Time, a limited resource.

While there’s many powerful magics in the game, none of them provide the ability to gain additional time. That’s the one thing wizards always need more of, the one thing they’re constantly facing pressure on.

Sometimes I think about the Pact’s model of the universe like a great big house. The Gates of Death are the basement where everything the Pact doesn’t want to deal with gets thrown. The Temples, the Court, and the Seas are three different models of how the world works overlaid onto each other (focusing on the populace, the powerful, and the material conditions). The Devil is like a rat in the walls scampering from room to room causing problems. The Tower and the Dreaming World are the bedrooms and attic, where a future is planned both materially and spiritually.

Causing Impact

There’s a concept from Vincent Baker’s old writing called Dice and Clouds. It’s a way of visualizing little diagrams of how the world of rules and how the world of the fiction talk to each other (Endogenic and Diegetic systems). Most of the time, Seven Part Pact flows from the “Dice” to the “Clouds,” which is to say that mechanical game events occur and then these influence the fictional world. For example, when Jupiter lies in the season, it can create pirate ships from one island to another for the Mariner. We don’t need to have established who these pirates are in the fiction before this moment — the rules of the game have conjured pirates ex nihilo.

Impact is Seven Part Pact’s special word for when the fictional world acts out onto the interlocking board games. This most commonly occurs through magic (which will be the subject of its own article next week), but there’s lots of other ways to produce Impact. Impact is divided into Gifts and Complications, which are positive and negative ways the fiction can change the board games. This is a really useful game design tool. It allows me to say that you can, for example, ask a Companion for a favor and they’ll provide any Impact we agree they could reasonably provide. I don’t have to say “hey Companions can get away with this and probably can’t do this” because it’ll vary according to the perspectives of each group. Maybe a bound demon can provide different Impacts on the Gates of Death than an 11 year old can.

Impact as a concept is really important for making Seven-Part Pact actually function as an RPG, and not just as a set of board games. If there wasn’t ever a moment when the fiction could talk to the rules, people would work to optimize the roleplaying out of the game. But because the rules of the game have to bow to fictional actions, and a lot of that comes down to group consensus and interpretation, it makes the setting of the game itself feel very real and important.

Overwhelming on Purpose

Normally, as a game designer, you want to make sure your game is easy to understand. It’s generally bad form to make a game that immediately bombards the player with so much information that they get confused by the operation of the game itself. This is because normally the goal of playing a board game is to win the game. In Seven-Part Pact there are no win conditions. TTRPGs often have goals, but rarely have ways to win. This means system mastery is completely unnecessary in order to have a good time playing the game. You don’t need to understand what anyone else is doing in their corners, as long as you have enough of an understanding of your own corner of the game that you can keep it updated month after month.

This combines with the feeling of each wizard as a solitary powerful weirdo to mean that every player is naturally invited to view their map of the game as the single most important part of the game, and to dismiss other wizards’ concerns as petty nonsense. It’s hard to care whether or not the Gates of Death are about to overflow when a giant Typhoon is about to destroy the Halcyon Isles, and it’s hard to care about some clouds when the future of the Pact itself is on the edge of collapse. The inability to hold the entire game in your head at once is part of the intended design of the game. If I wanted everyone to know what was happening all the time, I could’ve designed the game to make that easier. But instead I made it a challenge!

What’s The Goal?

Each game is designed so that there is a lot of potential for natural tension between the goals of your wizard and “optimal play” with your Domain. For instance, the Warlock’s game rewards subtlety, soft power, and negotiation, while the Warlock himself is optimally equipped for stabbing people. The Sage’s game requires you to treat the other characters like pawns in your elaborate schemes, and even rewards you for destroying your own agency in favor of your assigned destiny. Even the Gates of Death, which are probably the closest any Domain gets to being an unalloyed “good” in the world, is a drudgerous repetitive task that never plays off. Additionally, there’s no reward for being good at your job, and lots of downsides from trying and failing.

The same resource you use for caretaking your Domain is also the resource you use to work on your side projects, improve your Sanctum, and hang out with your kid. It’s easy to tunnel-vision on your own portion of the world and lose sight of the little things, or to spend a bit too much time building a fleet of magic warships and forget to keep zombies from invading Isha.

When something goes wrong in a wizard’s Domain, and they lose control of their board game, it causes their game to leak into the Domains of other wizards. For example, when a Foe of Death escapes the Gates, they skulk into the Court of the King or the Temples of Isha and wreak havoc there. Trying to be good at your game is about fighting entropy, keeping the universe in seven clean piles instead of allowing it to mix naturally. In a board game where you’re trying to win, this would be exhausting and repetitive. In a TTRPG, where being good or bad at your game is a reflection of your character’s interiority and perspective, causing problems for other people only ever makes the game more interesting.

Sometimes, after a while, players start to wonder…what happens if we’re all bad at our games? Why should this be the actual best way to model how the world works? What lies outside the confines of the board game as its set up? The most important part of designing Seven-Part Pact has been making sure that the game is fun even if you don’t wonder this, but that if you start pushing against the confines placed by the game, strange and exciting things start to happen.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. You can sign up now to get notified when it launches. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.

This is Part 3 in an ongoing series of articles.

1. Origins: The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards: Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.
3. The Companions: The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.
4. Asymmetrical Board Games: The central loop of play, its development, and its refinement.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

Wizards are lonely, for there is no one who may understand a wizard’s great responsibility. He is accompanied by very few; his wife if he’s lucky, his friends if he’s even more lucky. The incredible knowledge and burden of magic drives them away from the common folk, into a deep seclusion. The only people who might understand a wizard’s feelings are his fellow wizards, who are obnoxious and insufferable creatures.

A common theme when discussing power is loneliness and isolation. Powerful people love to wallow in their own loneliness, miserable in their inability to connect with others. I’m not unfamiliar with that feeling — there’s a strange anxiety to intimacy when being a public figure means your personal life is the subject of public gossip. I often think about the song NDA by Billie Eilish, which perfectly captures the uncanny and nerve-wracking feeling of balancing interpersonal intimacy with discretion. That song in particular is noteworthy for focusing on boys, specifically, when Billie Eilish’s own big secret was that the people she was sleeping with were women.

Loneliness also dovetails neatly into one of the biggest contradictions of power — the invisible people necessary for its production. Whenever a character is impeccably dressed, there’s always the question — who is doing that character’s laundry? Who is feeding them? Who is looking out for them? When someone wields power alone, one must also wonder who else is silently working to maintain and produce that power?

Once each player makes their wizard, they then create that wizard’s Companions, Isle, and Sanctum. Companions in particular delve into one of the core tensions at the heart of Seven-Part Pact, and are one of my favorite anchor-points for some of my favorite parts of play.

Four Areas of Care

Each wizard has four Companions, each of whom are responsible for a different area of care. This care corresponds with each of the four Elements (which you might remember from last time, the stats each wizard uses to cast magic).

• His Earth Companion cares for his daily life, providing food, water, laundry, and a clean home.
• His Water Companion cares for his emotional life, providing physical and emotional intimacy, comfort, and touch.
• His Air Companion cares for his private life, protecting his Sanctum, keeping his secrets, and helping him feel secure.
• His Fire Companion cares for his creative life, engaging in conversation, wisdom, and advice.

The higher the wizard’s associated Element, the more the wizard values that Companion and benefits from their care. If a wizard doesn’t have a Companion’s care, he can’t access that aspect of his magic until he spends a week self-destructively providing care for himself. If a wizard has no Companions, he has no time to perform any magic at all, as he’ll be too busy caring for himself to do anything else.

Each wizard has their own list of possible Companions. Here’s the Mariner’s list:

Each Companion has information about their relationship with you and a question which you may answer at your leisure. Different Companions will take on different tenors based on the kinds of Care they provide your wizard. Many of them are explicitly women, and possibilities for ambiguous or unsettled readings abound. Some of them, like the Selkie, push your character into darker spaces narratively.

These Companions serve as a wizard’s “weak spot” — people who know his secret names and who support him through darkness. They are vulnerable to seduction by the Devil, injury from magic gone wrong, and temptations that lead them away from their wizard. As the game goes on, Companions are both sources of social relationship and areas of intense vulnerability.

Protagonists Without A Viewpoint

In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, women and people of color are relegated to the sidelines. Jonathan Strange’s own wife, Mrs. Strange, is clearly as talented a thinker as he is (if not more), but cannot practice magic of her own accord. Emma Wintertowne and Stephen Black are stuck fighting against a fairy prince in his twisted kingdom, but the protagonists are too arrogant and self absorbed to hear their cries for help. There’s a sense that there’s other stories hidden behind the walls of Clarke’s novel, accessible only to those who listen. Women speak through the cracks in the wall, calling out from history and begging the players to hear.

Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin delves deep into the perspective of Tenar, a widow and former priestess of the nameless dark, dwelling in the shadow of Ged. While the wizard Sparrowhawk is off on his fantastical adventures, Tenar experiences a harsher and more mundane world. She is intimately aware of the ways men wields violence against her and how she has to build her own life beyond the stories of the ostensible protagonist. Her viewpoint, obscured by Ged’s presence, reveals the challenge of living in a patriarchal society.

Scenes in Seven-Part Pact are very strictly defined. It’s impossible to have a scene without at least one wizard present, and the entire world is seen through the eyes of the Pact. However, over the course of the game, some Companions will inevitably be fleshed out further by choices made during play. Sometimes a sense will develop that these characters are just as, if not more, interesting than the wizards who have become our viewpoint. But the game traps us — we can only see the world through our limited perspective.

The game can’t force players to explore this topic, but instead the invitation is left on the table. Personally, my favorite moment in any playtest of Seven-Part Pact is when we start finding out these forgotten and set-aside characters have interiority that goes against our self-conception and enables us to see the setting from a different angle.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. You can sign up now to get notified when it launches. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.

This is Part 2 in an ongoing series of articles.

1. Origins: The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards: Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.
3. The Companions: The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.
4. Asymmetrical Board Games: The central loop of play, its development, and its refinement.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

The council of wizards is a staple of fantasy fiction. It’s at least as old as Tolkien, when Gandalf told Bilbo of the white wizards who defeated the Necromancer. It shows up again and again across different stories — the gaggle of wise old men who safeguard the cosmos. It has parallels with the hebdomad of the archons in gnostic esotericism — seven cosmic emperors ruling over the material world, fashioning themselves false gods of creation. This appears again (with varying degrees of malevolence or compassion) with the Endless of the Sandman comics, the Masters of Roke in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle, and the Trustees of the House from The Keys To The Kingdom series by Garth Nix.

I’ve always been fascinated by these archetypes. They range from patronizingly paternal to actively dismissive, often more concerned with their own internal politics than the safety of the people they ostensibly serve. I saw in them a strange mirror to my own relationship to authority figures, this sort of archetypal father figure who both haunted and fascinated me.

This fascination grew only more profound when I began the complex process of socially and medically transitioning alongside the equally-winding process of self-actualization and adulthood. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, and I also wasn’t a man. And yet, all throughout my life, power and manhood were inexorably intertwined. This tension — between self-actualization and the pressure of power, the paradox of authority and responsibility, the entangled internecine conflict between those who were responsible for safeguarding the industry I worked in — it all weighed on me.

When I began work on Seven-Part Pact, and I was thinking heavily about agency and power, I knew I wanted to lean into that council of authority that had captivated me for so long. I decided to theme the seven wizards around the seven classical planets, and build into each wizard different tensions and conflicts based on their Domain, their area of responsibility over the world. In this article, I’ll talk about how the seven wizards came to be, the process of creating a wizard in play, and the role gender plays in their self-conception.

The Seven Wizards

Some wizards came together instantly. Others took me a bit longer to figure out. The final seven wizards that I established are:

1. The Necromancer. He’s in charge of the Gates of Death, and is inspired by Sabriel by Garth Nix and Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. I had the idea for the Necromancer early on and he remained pretty much the same through all of design.
2. The Hierophant. He’s in charge of the Temples of the Immortal Flame, and by extension the common folk of the archipelago, who come to him for aid. He’s inspired a lot by the monks of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. He went through a number of changes over the years, going by Townwright and Prelate before I settled on Hierophant.
3. The Warlock. He’s in charge of the nobility of Isha, the King and his court, and manages power and masculinity. He’s also the Pact Executioner. He’s inspired by knights and battle-mages across fantasy. He was previously called the Chevalier, but his concept has always been pretty consistent.
4. The Mariner. He’s in charge of the sea ports and trading routes in Isha, and protecting the wild places. He’s inspired by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and the Mariner in The Keys To The Kingdom. He was previously known as the Druid, and he went through a number of changes before I settled on his current form.
5. The Faustian. He maintains the Pact’s relationship with the Devil, and is inevitably (and fashionably) doomed. He’s inspired a lot by his namesake Faustus, the real-life piece of shit Alistair Crowley, and any number of fashionable bargain-making fast-talking con artists from fantasy. He’s remained basically the same.
6. The Sage. He maintains the future of the Pact, their far-future destinies and what is to come next. He’s inspired by Merlin, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, Yoda from Star Wars, and any wise old man in the woods handing out destinies to unsuspecting young heroes. He went through a number of changes (previously called the Anchorite) especially in regards to the next wizard, and I’ve swapped their positions a number of times trying to find the right balance.
7. The Sorcerer. He maintains the firmament of the Pact, the structure of magic, and the research and refinement of future magic. He’s inspired by Saruman from Lord of the Rings, the Masters from the Earthsea Cycle, and Dumbledore from…some book series. He’s also been through a number of changes, beginning as the Librarian. It took a lot of work to help him find his creative niche.

Creating a Necromancer

The best way to talk about the wizards is to talk about the process of creating a wizard. Each player has their own Codex, a book of rules which governs how their wizard engages with the world. Part 1 of each Codex governs the creation of that player’s wizard. Each wizard follows the same structure for questions, but has their own set of possible answers provided in picklist format. Here, I’m going to walk us collectively through creating a Necromancer (discussing the creative choices behind each picklist). The other wizards have similar questions but very different possible answers.

The character creation process is divided into thirds — Humour & Temperament, History & Secrets, and Might & Trappings.

Humour & Temperament

To begin, each player is presented with the following questions to flesh out the personality of their wizard.

These questions are provided before players have any context for what these Elements are for (they’re used to determine spellcasting, which is a process for a later article). The idea is that players make choices about the personality of their wizard first, and then see what their elements are downstream of that. Two wizards who both have high Fire aren’t necessarily similar to each other, beyond a preference for certain kinds of answers of their own description. This process of stat assignment via binary choices comes directly from The Wizard’s Grimoire series by Meguey and Vincent Baker.

Players then choose the form of their Pact-Fragment and the nature of their Familiar. The goal here is to just help flesh out the vibes and position of their wizard, making him feel cool and strange. It’s important to go into this game feeling like a badass, and these choices help shape that.

History & Secrets

Unlike the previous section, which was more about broad-strokes personality, this section is about deep secrets and core qualities of one’s character. The first question is about the wizard’s relationship with the previous wizard, and what happened to him:

Your relationship with your old master is complicated, entangled between public perception and your own experience. Was he publicly a kind soul and privately a piece of shit, or vice versa? Did you actually need your master, or did you learn on your own? What actually happened to him?

This is obscured further by your age. For a young wizard, the death of their master could have been caused by one of your present peers, whereas for an old wizard, perhaps your master’s demise is the stuff of history.

No matter how old you are, if you’re the Necromancer, death has its claws in you. Different wizards have different issues around age — the Hierophant, Warlock, and Sorcerer are concerned with obligation and public perception, the Mariner is more concerned with ability and physicality, and the Faustian and Sage are concerned with destiny and the inevitability of time. But no matter how old you are, your age is never a comfortable topic.

I added this picklist later in design due to a glut of younger wizards in playtesting. It’s intentionally rigged to incentivize making your wizard older, measuring one’s age in 20-year increments. “A young fellow, not yet forty years old” is one of my favorite little concepts. (A fun detail: practitioners of qabalah in Orthodox Judaism are also expected to be at least 40 years old. While I actively avoided appropriating real religious studies and mysticism into Seven-Part Pact, I think that coincidence is compelling — to be a wizard is to be old!)

Magic changes you. An important process for developing this picklist was to balance obvious and subtle changes. I wanted to make sure that if you’re younger than eighty, there’s enough non-physical changes that you can still “pass” as a regular human being. The older you get, the more obvious and intrusive the magic becomes, until the oldest wizards are hardly human at all.

This is another reward for playing an old man in the game — choosing to be young means fewer cool monster mutations.

This picklist helps wizards feel cool and unique. One of the goals of character creation is that each player comes in feeling like their wizard is their specialist little freako, with his own personal complex lore and interiority unlike anyone else at the table. This makes it even more engaging when they slam into each other later in play.

Here we go, some gender. In Seven-Part Pact, all wizards are expected to be men. But that expectation is a fraught one, even if you’re “actually” a man. I wanted to very explicitly get away from modern notions of gender and break away from a cis/trans binary. I’m especially bored of settings that depict gender as something neutral. I don’t particularly care for escapist fantasy where anyone can be any gender without remark. The structure of this picklist is consistent across the Pact:

• The first two options both embrace masculinity, but point at different ways it can be difficult to live up to masculinity. Even cis men in the 21st century struggle with feelings of inadequacy, of loneliness, of incompatibility with manhood. To be a man is to have expectations placed on you, and all men are scared that on some level they can’t live up to the ideal man that lives in their head.
• The third option complicates that. It says something is wrong, somehow, although it’s hard to give that problem a name. This is based on my own experiences with being a repressed egg trying to fill the shoes of manhood and failing, but I wanted to leave it flexible and ambiguous.
• The fourth option is an explicitly feminine one. You live some kind of double life, although not everyone knows it, and it would be embarrassing if people found out. This might be because you’re a transfeminine woman, or a crossdresser, or some other relationship with womanhood. The ambiguity is once again intentional — historically these lines were not as clearly drawn as one might expect.
• The fifth option is an ambiguously transmasculine one. Your manhood is an explicit farce that you were not always expected to perform. Just as with the other options, ambiguity here is fruitful — perhaps you enjoy being a man, but perhaps you still consider yourself a woman. This mirrors the ambiguous tension of many trans men throughout history.
• The sixth option breaks past the gender binary into something strange and monstrous. Magic has warped you and left you less a man, although you are still expected to be one. Your context has shifted such that you can no longer recognize the shape of magic itself.
• The final option is your personal secret. As a game designer, I always know there will be options I can’t wrap my head around, and it’s good to leave open that space.

Unlike previous picklists, this one doesn’t tell you how many choices to make. You could choose one, or multiple, or write in your own. The goal here is fruitful ambiguity, prompting players to think about gender without forcing them to commit to a certain path or feel obligated to frame their gender in a static way in relation to the current discourse around gender.

To complete the metaphor, the “pronouns” section of each character sheet is pre-filled with “he/him.” You’ll need to cross that out and replace it if you’re going to write in anything else.

The final choice is your character’s name. I provide some suggestions here, but with the idea that players will choose a lot of different names for their wizard.

Might & Trappings

This last section of character creation involves making some limited choices about the treasures you begin with. It mostly serves to inform you of your powers, humble magics, and possessions.

However, you do still choose certain Treasures to begin with:

These options are a mix of powerful tools to use in play and decorative elements to inspire your character’s appearance. They also help flesh out your wizard’s relationship with the world around him, and the people who inhabit that world.

Combining All This Together

The goal of character creation is to smoothly guide each player from “I chose a codex but I don’t know what I’m doing with it” to “I have a badass, powerful, eccentric, tortured, and interesting wizard to serve as my avatar in this imagined world.” When dealing with a game as complex and interwoven as Seven-Part Pact, it’s important that the actual process of making a character is as comfortable and smooth as possible.

This process results in some really compelling and iconic characters right out the gate. Here’s some of the many fan illustrations of Necromancers specifically that have emerged following playtests of Seven-Part Pact:

One of the biggest goals of Seven-Part Pact is to show, not tell. I’m not interested in telling you to make an arrogant, self-absorbed wizard. I just set up conditions where you feel compelled to focus on your own interiority and make yourself as cool as possible, so that each of you feel like the protagonists of your little worlds. Of course, the rest of the game unsettles that notion — sure, you might be the coolest wizard at the Wizardmoot, but so is everyone else. What happens when the illusion of the badass lonely man is disrupted?

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. You can sign up now to get notified when it launches. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.

This is Part 1 in an ongoing series of articles.

1. Origins: The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards: Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.
3. The Companions: The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.
4. Asymmetrical Board Games: The central loop of play, its development, and its refinement.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

The seven greatest wizards in the world convene upon the Faraway Sea, their magic aligned in the service of an ancient Pact. Each governs one seventh of this world and wields power beyond comprehension over the very fabric of the cosmos. While these wizards are indeed mighty, so too are they trapped: by the pressures of masculinity, by the weight of their loneliness, by the tolling bell of their own mortality. Each has a choice: will he maintain the systems which imprison him, or will he rebel against his pact and destroy the fragile balance of his world?

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. It’s an ornate and ambitious game, and if you’ve been following me for a while now you’ve probably heard me talk about it a lot. Seven intertwined board games representing a tangled world ruled by seven powerful and arrogant wizards who both lord over their world and are bound by obligation to it. It’s been an involved process, challenging my creativity and pushing my game design to its limits. This is the first in a series of articles about the development and design of Seven-Part Pact, walking through its origins, its creative choices, and how it came to occupy the shape it is now.

I’ve been working on Seven-Part Pact near continuously for the past four years. It’s been the thing I’ve had in my back pocket for so long that at this point it’s been a sturdy constant for longer than most things in my adult life. It began in 2022, while I was recovering from the overwhelming burnout that characterized that year for me.

Mazey and I had been working a lot on Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, which uses games in a modular way to tell different kinds of small stories. In Yazeba’s, “Making breakfast for everyone” uses fundamentally different rules than “going trick-or-treating.” I was very interested in that kind of modular asymmetry, but I wanted to pick it apart — instead of giving new rules to all the players based on their time, what if each player had completely different rules to reflect their responsibility?

I had also just finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and I was thinking a lot about power and agency. Seven-Part Pact took shape initially as a game extremely rooted in 17th century England, building on the kinds of stories set up by Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I gave myself permission to be tremendously indulgent as I began riffing on the ideas in my head. One element I felt was important was how Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell thinks about gender. Important female characters and characters of color are relegated to the margins by the narrative voice, and the implicit structure of the narrative buys into a “great man” theory of reality, ignoring how women shaped the story playing out.

I decided to make the central wizards all men. I also decided almost immediately to fit them into a pattern of seven, aligning each with one of the seven classical planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna, Sol). This was because of my constant fascination with gnostic numerology and symbology and because of my fondness for books like The Keys To The Kingdom series by Garth Nix, which similarly featured a set of seven archonic demiurges. The vision was clear early on — seven powerful men who think of themselves as gods, wielding both power and responsibility over the world they inhabit.

The first three wizards I wrote were the Hierophant (at the time named the Townwright), the Necromancer, and the Warlock (at the time named the Chevalier). I gave each one a rudimentary board game representing their area of responsibility (which I called their Domain). The other half of the game emerged quickly once I had the base concept of their board games. I was interested in finally writing a game with dice, and specifically using dice as a divinatory tool beyond their function in arithmetic. This led me to developing a very rudimentary model of the magic system, assigning alchemical symbols to each side of the dice and using those symbols to determine the results of the incantations.

(Both of these concepts, domains and spells, are topics I’ll discuss more in later articles.)

I ran early playtests with a small number of players to get a sense of how it fit together. I learned quickly that the game was stressful and weird, but also that it played differently to anything anyone had ever experienced before. I could tell I was onto something, even if the game itself was very far away from being the sort of game I wanted to play regularly. I also realized, as I continued working on it, that I hated writing about 17th century England. Players brought in biases and perspectives that clouded their ability to engage with the setting on its own terms, and an anxiety about historical accuracy choked and people’s confidence in their creativity. So I took a step back.

When I returned to Seven-Part Pact, I changed the setting to a fantastical archipelago heavily inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s The Earthsea Cycle. Changing the setting enabled me to make some dramatic changes to the board games I was designing. The game as a whole didn’t “click” fully as something I wanted to work on until about a year later, at Metatopia 2023. It was there that I showed the game to Vincent Baker (and his child Elliot). I was struggling with the stress and pressure the game was creating in its players — it was fun, but it was also overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to liberate it from that feeling. Vincent Baker pointed out that the game wasn’t just about a great quantity of information, but it was also about luxuriating in that information. What if, instead of trying to get the game playing as efficiently as possible, I leaned into the sensation of being overwhelmed, and let players marinate in the complexity of the game and the setting without any pressure?

That was the key to making the game come together. It was at that point, following the playtests and discussions at Metatopia, that I redoubled my efforts. Six months later I showed it to Steve Jackson at GAMA 2024 and he fell in love. I spent the next two and a half years fleshing the game fully out and then polishing it down, tightening each of the screws in its intricate clockwork design until the structure as a whole finally all worked together.

The structure of Seven-Part Pact has remained consistent across its design. 3–7 players, each responsible for their own portion of the world, playing as arrogant and complicated men handling board games which represent the status quo. Their main resource each month is time, assigning four weeks of time to make changes to their board games and enact their agendas. They never have enough time to do everything they want, pushing them to rely on magic, which can break the rules of any of the games but also creates complications for the other wizards and pushes the Pact as a whole towards collapse.

Over the next several articles, I’ll talk about the Domain system of Seven-Part Pact, how magic operates in the game, how the wizards were built up and developed, and ultimately how the game clicks together. All this will culminate in the Seven-Part Pact Kickstarter launching Summer 2026, which you can follow along with here. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.

Over the past several weeks, questions have circulated online following an article from Rascal News about Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast and its publication history. I had originally planned not to comment publicly. However it’s clear there’s a lot of people online who are frustrated, hurt, and confused about how events were presented, and have been asking for my side of the story.

I saw many people come away from the Rascal article believing there is a payment dispute between Possum Creek and some of the freelancers we have worked with, or that I personally am withholding money from freelancers. This is not the case. Possum Creek has paid everyone we’ve worked with everything they’re owed. There was no breach in contract. The rights of our artists and writers were not transferred. This is a dispute around a future reprint, not any current royalty payments.

To discuss what happened, I’ll go through the series of events regarding the Yazeba’s freelancers, subsequent negotiations, the article covering these events, and the following online discourse. My goals are to correct misinformation and provide clarity around payment, offers, and my perspective.

In early 2021, Mazey Veselak and I were more than halfway done with the writing of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. We decided to invite two other writers to join the project. They were contracted to write 20K words each. Ultimately, they contributed around 10K words each, working on certain specific locked guests, interstitial fiction, and mid-to-late chapters.

Both freelancers received an initial $3K payment. When Yazeba’s B&B crowdfunded in May 2022, these writers were to receive 15% of the crowdfunder’s profits each, which was increased in a verbal contract to a $20K bonus. This payment was issued when Possum Creek received the funds from the crowdfunder.

These writers were also contracted for 5% royalties on the MSRP of further physical copies of Yazeba’s B&B sold. A portion of the royalty payments totaling $1,047 were delayed due to our ongoing issues with the fulfillment company Brandfox (which Rascal helpfully covered in a separate article beneath the paywall). The writers were informed of the delay, and the royalties were ultimately paid.

The vast majority of copies of Yazeba’s did not make it out of Brandfox’s warehouse, therefore we had no further sales, and expect to have no further sales, of that version of Yazeba’s. If we miraculously got any back from Brandfox, we’d pay full royalties on whatever we could still sell. Due to the conflict with Brandfox, we had no access to our inventory. This was disastrous for us and nearly led to the collapse of the company in 2024. We began conversations with Steve Jackson Games to reprint Yazeba’s B&B.

Steve Jackson Games elected not to reprint Yazeba’s as-is under Possum Creek’s previous royalties model. They wished to begin negotiating with the contributors for Yazeba’s to provide a flat payment in exchange for the rights to their writing. I reached out to both writers informing them of this.

In January, both writers requested $200,000 each. This is an unheard of sum in TTRPGs. At this point, daunted by the size of the figures, I stepped back and requested SJG’s lawyer take charge of the conversation.

SJG counter-offered both writers a choice between $5,000 each, or 1% royalties on future copies of Yazeba’s.

Both writers instead requested $25,000 each, then increased their request to $60,000 each in early August.

SJG elected not to pay $120,000 for the rights to ~20k words.

Alongside this, three of the artists who were involved on Yazeba’s reached out with concerns about rights. SJG made an offer of 10% each of their initial payments to these artists in exchange for full rights to their work. They made a higher counter-offer (requesting 300% of their initial payments), which SJG declined.

The writers and artists brought this issue to Rascal in July.

On October 21st, Rascal informed me of the upcoming article and sent me questions. I provided a two-paragraph response.

My perspective, which is still the same as it was when I responded to Rascal, is that this is a contract dispute about selling rights to a third party for reprinting, and the writers and artists have every right to choose not to sell the rights to their contributions for reprinting. As is the case in creative publishing, reasonable people can disagree about how best to structure future rights when circumstances change. We will not be using their writing or art in future Yazeba’s projects under SJG, but I still have a lot of respect for these creatives, and I wish them all the best.

Rascal informed me the article was coming out on November 17th. It did not. (In August, the writers had reached out and requested $7,500 each for unsolicited sensitivity consulting and a $150/hour “consultation fee” to ensure the removal of their contributions from Yazeba’s B&B. [updated 2/9/2026]) On December 22nd, the writers reached out with the same request, lowering their “consultation fee” to $100/hour. On January 15th, they informed us they were no longer working with their lawyer.

On January 19th, Rascal published the article.

While the article reflects the perspectives of the former collaborators, it largely ignores the legal and contractual framework and fails to contextualize the precise numbers. Many readers walked away with an unclear understanding of the events that occurred, or made assumptions based on the initial few paragraphs. In a later podcast episode, the Rascal team discussed their shortcomings with the article and their failures to objectively investigate or frame the freelancers’ claims.

Since the article’s release, a small number of passionate internet trolls (disconnected from Rascal or the freelancers) have been making wild and unsubstantiated claims about me on Bluesky. This is a technique called a gish gallop and it’s been deployed in social media environments for more than a decade, relying on an enormous storm of unverifiable attacks on my character. Each claim is flimsy (exaggerated, distorted, or simply false) but together they create the illusion of legitimacy through sheer quantity. It’s a humiliating and exhausting experience. Due to the mental toll this harassment has taken on me, I’ve elected to step away from certain conventions for the next few months and focus on my own health.

I’m tremendously grateful for the large number of friends and acquaintances who have reached out to privately check in on me. I am grateful for the people and spaces who engaged with the original article with nuance and reflection. I am grateful to the people who came to me with genuine questions about the details of what happened.

I’m hopeful for the future of Yazeba’s B&B. I’m still proud of the work the whole team did for that game and I look forward to finding a new form for it, even as it can’t be the same. I hope this can help clarify some of the issues that occurred around its production, and that it can provide another perspective on the events of the last year.

Updates:

• [2/9]: A previous version of the statement accidentally conflated two emails received (one in August and one in December) and claimed the writers reached out requesting $10,000 for unsolicited sensitivity reading. The actual number was $7,500. I’ve edited the relevant paragraph clarifying both emails and adjusting the number. I apologize for the mistake.

“Work! Intoxication! Brain-racking! Chewing, eating, gorging, rooting up! Rapturous birth pangs! Jabbing of the brush, preferably right through the canvas. Trampling on paint tubes.”

— Max Pechstein, when asked to define Expressionism

There’s a moment when we play where the imagination aches against the confines of its cage. A character feels a longing for a world they’ll never have, a hopeful opportunity goes awry through no one’s fault, a relationship collapses just out of sight. There is the sensation of something real, something powerful, something more, and yet the game we play keeps us from reaching out and touching it. I became familiar with this sensation on accident, but the more I steered my play to seek it out the more I found it hidden away. These games showed me the opportunity for inarticulate passion boxed in by strict and exhausting social expectations, mirroring the social conditions I found myself struggling against in my day-to-day life. I wanted more. I started writing games pushing deeper and deeper into this space, and I found fellow creatives in all corners of the medium doing the same. They all grappled with the same uncertainty I faced — how could we tell others what we were looking for if we didn’t even know what they were called?

I call them expressionist games.

This is a call to action that seeks to provide shared language and identity to creatives who are working toward these goals and direction for people who are interested in exploring this space. In this essay I will provide a definition and framework for the idea of expressionist game design — what these games are as objects, as ritual experiences, and as a movement.

Expressionist games are negotiated experiences shaped by the unresolvable tension between mechanically-imposed external worlds and passionate inarticulate internal worlds.

Why Expressionism

Expressionism is an early 20th century art movement that emerged in Germany following World War 1. Expressionist art depicts the world from subjective viewpoints, using bold and dynamic brush strokes to articulate emotions and perspectives, prioritizing emotional meaning over objective truth. American Expressionist theater often explores the tension between the emotional perspectives of its characters and the mechanical factory-like reality they’re trapped in. Machinal by Sophie Treadwell depicts a young woman struggling to maintain any illusion of sanity in the face of a ceaseless mechanistic set of social expectations. The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill tells the story of a factory worker, previously lost in the flow-state of his machine, alienated from modernity and forced to seek out new systems of self-definition.

Games contain both the capacity for tremendous shared artistic expression and the toolkit necessary to inspire obsession. The flow state of many videogames mirrors the mental violence of slot machines and Tiktok, slowly extracting money from those who engage with it. People seek games to “turn their brains off” while existing in a society that pushes them to turn their brain off at all times. Games culture at large encourages conflict aversion, author-worship, incentive-chasing, and a stifling of creative capacity. The 21st century has exposed the base contradictions at the heart of its existence, and the phantasm of our cultural perception struggles under the weight of its heaving crumbling form.

I call the movement expressionism to historically situate the concerns of modern game designers in the framework and culture of their predecessors grappling with the same challenges, while also emphasizing how expressionist game designers are ultimately doing something quite different from what has come before them. I found in conversations with many of the designers engaged in expressionist games that they were influenced (either directly or indirectly) by expressionist art and theater. My parents are expressionists, and the way my dad and I would talk about art when I was younger heavily influences by perspective on games to this day.

It’s worth saying that my practice is centered in tabletop RPGs, but I’ve written this to be inclusive of any analog game (including board games and larps). I’m certain this can be applied, although perhaps through a different lens, to videogames. I align myself with a history of shared design goals, alongside various writers in the OSR, post-Forge, lyric game, and board game traditions.

Critical Qualities of Expressionist Games

In an expressionist game, every character possesses a rich and complex inner world. They are compelled by passionate desires, driven to seek out all manners of personal pleasure, and have a “true” version of themself they long to access. This is treated as true about characters regardless of the amount of focus they’re given by the players. Even if a character appears to be a flat stereotype at onset, there is a shared understanding in play that one could pick them apart and discover hidden depths. This richness and humanity is left completely unarticulated by the rules of the game.

The rules cannot dictate the inner worlds of these characters. They are fruitful voids, implied by the rules but left undescribed. The game-text may provide tools to descriptively imagine these inner worlds (through lists of possible goals, advice on articulating minor characters, or space for players to self-describe their characters) but the game does not and cannot enforce any particular interior perspective through its rules. Any prescriptive enforcement must be external (through mind control, social pressure, or machinery, or the like).

Instead, the rules abstractly simulate the social reality of the characters. Rules in an expressionist game tell you who your character is expected to be, how society sees them, and how they ought to behave. Rules define the cultural norms and structures enforced upon the characters by themselves, by their communities, and by their world. These are simulations, focusing on representing the subjective structure of these social realities, even when that reality is unfair, unbalanced, or narratively uninteresting. The characters are frequently aware of their position in life and the way the rules work upon them, even if it’s only metaphorical or abstract. “Power gaming” in an expressionist game means pursuing the goals set out by the social reality of the characters.

The rules are mediated through friction between the text and the players. The text of an expressionist game is frequently written from a hostile or facetious perspective. Frequently the line between endogenous, diegetic, and hypodiegetic rules are blurred. The text insists on all of them with an equal weight, and leaves it open to the players to challenge and argue with the rules. In a post-lyric game way, expressionist games will insist upon impossible, contradictory, uncomfortable, or confusing rules — leaving players in a position to figure out how to build a game from the materials they’ve been given.

The players alternate between experiencing bleed, alienation, and tension. Players desire to be fully emotionally present with their characters, and for their characters to be emotionally honest with each other. The rules prevent this from occurring, alienating the players from their characters, and their characters from the world. Characters will face pressure to engage with social systems that do not align with the player’s perspectives, morality, or desires. “Optimal gameplay” frequently involves rejecting one’s inner life and conforming to social expectations. Dissonance defines the tension between the narrative of how the characters want to relate to others and the rules enforcing how the characters must relate to others.

The “expression” of the game comes from the way players are forced to frame their emotions in response to the stimuli they experience from the game. As a designer, you are different from historical expressionists because rules function as a limited palette. You must create the conditions under which expression occurs.

Secondary Qualities of Expressionist Games

There are a number of qualities that expressionist games can have that I find really interesting, but do not believe are necessary for a call to action around expressionism. These are:

• An inability to resolve the tension within the rules of the game, requiring players to break the rules to have any chance to achieve their player goals.
• Use of unexpected or unfamiliar game components, such as candles, spare game boards, or plungers.
• Encouraging players to pro-socially argue with each other, “rules lawyer” the text constructively, and engage in interpretive conflict without disrupting the game.
• Cunning use of formatting, layout, art, and visuals to enable the friction to operate throughout the text.
• Ambivalence towards intended player actions, with rules that might or might not get broken or multiple presented player goals.
• Irreverence towards established mediums, combining tools from RPGs, board games, LARPs, and videogames freely to achieve particular mechanical effects.
• (in an RPG context) player characters who are no different from anyone else, or a diegetic explanation for why they’re different from everyone else.
• (in a board game context) distance between the immediate actions possible for players to take and the ultimate goals of the game, or even a complete disinterest in “winning” and “losing.”
• The neurodivergent, the disabled, the erotic, the queer, the transfeminized, the racialized, the subaltern.

Examples and Counter-Examples

Some particular design choices in various current games (which might or might not consider themselves expressionist) that work towards the goals I’m laying out here include:

• Basically everything going on with Triangle Agency by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, but especially the way the text demands to not be interpreted and rules which can only be accessed by breaking the rules of the game.
• The titular mollies in Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle operate non-transactionally as people represented by playing cards dancing their way in and out of people’s lives in various positions on the table.
• The way it is possible for virtues and vices in Pendragon by Greg Stafford to strip away character agency through social expectations of how best to perform your knightly qualities.
• Zedeck Siew’s blogpost on How To Play The Revolution is itself a manifesto in expressionist OSR play.
• Adam DeCamp’s seminal Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice blogpost is a fantastic guide on how to approach a game expressionistically.
• The roles and gender presentation of sexual violence in Praise The Hawkmoth King by Sage The Anagogue as an imposed social system the players are struggling to reconcile.
• The poetic interludes of Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine by Jenna Moran represents the rare mechanic expressionistically gesturing towards the inner world which does not drown it out.
• The prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings in which vampires will unconsciously replicate violent systems due to the hunger governing them.
• The expectations around gender and limited time for social self-expression in my upcoming game Seven-Part Pact.

Elements of game design which, while potentially interesting and worthwhile, do not speak towards expressionism include:

• Persuasion checks in many games as a method to assert another’s interiority based on mechanical results. (This would be expressionist if the persuasion check was explicitly mind control or social pressure.)
• XP as used in many games as an abstracted and objective measure of character skill. (This would be expressionist if it was a subjective measure of character prestige or respect.)
• The divide in Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker between PCs with playbooks and NPCs with threat rules. (This would be expressionist if there was a socially determined reason why characters were divided in this way.)
• The way Wanderhome approaches the absence of violence in most of its playbooks, enabling characters who completely fail to struggle against violence in any way. (Wanderhome becomes more expressionist the more you lean into the Veteran playbook, who struggles under social pressure in a way the other playbooks don’t, and if you engage in Wanderhome in an explicitly puppyplay style.)

An explicitly non-expressionist game can be played in an expressionist style by emphasizing the inarticulate inner worlds of the characters, identifying how the rules shape and restrict those inner lives, and playing explicitly into the game space where this restriction occurs until the game struggles and fails. To play expressionistically is to approach a game via seeking the qualities described earlier in this manifesto. An expressionist game is a game that encourages or embraces expressionist play, or that has been designed with expressionist play in mind.

I Am An Expressionist

I play games in an expressionist style. I write games hoping and praying other players will play them expressionistically. The past several years have been shaped by a slow and gradual progression towards expressionism, as each game I’ve designed has cleared the way to enable my ability to articulate this desire. I know other designers feel the same way.

I refuse to make slot machine games. I refuse to make games that turn people’s brains off. I refuse to make games that people can insert their OCs into and escape inside without struggle. I want games that challenge me, that provoke me, that force me to fight against the harsh confines of society. I want to rattle the bars of my proverbial cage. I want games that I can argue with, games that trust me to read them closely, games that demand I think through them. I want to realize I’m something I’m not, get embarrassed, get stupid. I want to lose and lose and lose and still feel like I’m going somewhere. I want games that make me work for the taste of it. I want to practice dissenting against bullshit systems and bullshit laws. I want games that make me bleed and games that make me stare across the gulf of human comprehension and I want games that make me appreciate the power that constructs every square inch of my life. I want to fight, piss, claw, bite, and love!

This manifesto was originally made available to the Creekside Community Center Patreon, who did a fantastic job staying quiet about it. If you enjoyed this post and you wish to read more of my writing or design, please visit the Patreon to support my work. Thank you to Bluesky user Gwen topmarx for first suggesting the term expressionism. Thank you to all my friends, but especially Sage, Sam R, S. Che, Sunny Stalter-Pace, Evan Torner, Emily Friedman, Amanda, and Caleb for helping me talk it through and giving feedback on its work-in-progress state. Also thank you to my dad for allowing me to use their art as the cover image.

Edit History:

• [9/8/25]: Clarified that internally-enforcing rules can be descriptive or diegetically coercive. Replaced a counter-example (Masks) with a more suitable example.

No! Yes! Well, maybe? Depends on what rules are! No, it depends on what a game is! Depends…

I knew I would be sparking some controversy by posting that online. It’s openly cheeky and disruptive to how people think about rules in games. I’m proud of myself for managing to find a question that prompts both responses of “obviously no” and “obviously yes.” I wasn’t expecting the degree of response, or the way it would get grabbed across platforms and become the Topic Of The Day in multiple different RPG spaces. I also wasn’t expecting the frustration it would provoke or the condescension people would throw in my face (but maybe I should’ve — it’s not my first day having opinions online while female).

I think this question exposes a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of laymen/hobbyist conceptions of what a game actually is and what it does, and my hope is that by discussing what exactly a rule actually is (and how a video game developer would understand them fundamentally differently than how a TTRPG designer does) we can actually re-examine our approach to game design, and maybe pick apart the inherited and assumed relationship between toys, rules, games, and play at the heart of TTRPGs.

Rulings NAND Rules

Before we can figure out whether or not Super Mario Bros. has any rules, we’ve gotta figure out what a rule actually is. Thankfully, The Rule Book has us covered. The Rule Book (2024) by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola goes deep into what on earth a rule is and how it functions. It’s a fantastic book, and I’d whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone who wants to learn more about games from a foundational perspective. They lay out five kinds of rules, each of which contain subcategories (and each is covered in a chapter in its own right):

• Formal Rules, which are what people point at and call “rules” in a board game or TTRPG. These include codified rules and also “house rules.”
• Social Rules, which govern how people treat each other and the culture of play that surrounds the game.
• Internal Rules, which are restrictions and goals people put on themselves, which they don’t need to vocalize to others.
• External Regulation, which are restrictions applied to the game by external pressure, like the law, the venue, or parents.
• Material Rules, which are the “brute facts” of the game, the materiality of the toys that compose it. These are “hardly rules at all” and, much like External Regulation, behave fundamentally differently than the first three kinds of rules.

As an example, if we’re playing Tag on the playground:

• “If you get tagged, you’re it” is a Formal Rule.
• “Don’t be a dick” is a Social Rule.
• “I’m a superhero, so I gotta play the way a superhero would” is an Internal Rule.
• “Don’t run into the road!” is an External Regulation.
• “The faster kids are harder to tag than the slower kids” is part of the material of the game.

The first three kinds of rules have a lot of qualities that overlap. They emerge and are shaped by consensus and can be changed by their players at any time. The latter two operate differently. External Regulations cannot be changed by the will of the players, and the materiality of a game will not shift except through changes to that materiality. You and I can consent to play “Hover-Football” all we want, but no matter how hard we agree we cannot make the football hover except by changing the materiality of the football in question.

This gives us an insight into part of how a game is constructed: there are the toys and equipment which compose the physical reality of the game and then each player’s understanding of the rules (which is often, although not always, harmonious). A lot of games care a lot about the materiality of their toys, and bake a lot of the assumptions of their game rules into this materiality. It would be cheating to fill a football with helium, but that’s only because the codified rules of Football via the NFL outline the expected dimensions of an American Football. The NFL has no rules governing the altitude of its football fields, which means that the Denver Broncos benefit from their mile-high home field advantage.

Whether or not changing the materiality “counts as” breaking a rule varies tremendously based on the cultural biases and assumptions of the game’s community. Choosing to call this materiality part of the game’s rules provokes a lot of uncertainty. Would that mean that playing Football in Colorado is a different game than playing Football in Miami? While this materiality is certainly an important part of the game, and I’m certainly open to considering it part of the rules of the game, I think that it operates on a fundamentally different set of principles than other kinds of rules, and therefore could be said to not be a rule at all.

At the very least, if it is a rule, it’s an inescapably different kind of rule than formal, social, and internal rules.

An Aside About Women’s Sports

The idea that changing the materiality of a game somehow constitutes cheating is at the heart of the transmisogynistic farce trotted out by anti-trans advocates in sports. Without an understanding of the physical proportions of different sexes, the ways hormones materially change those proportions, or the history of women’s sports in general, people love to pontificate on how even the mere trace of some kind of historic maleness is enough to render a woman unable to compete in women’s events, even if it’s a game like Chess, where the materiality of the player’s body is entirely irrelevant. The debate about whether a game’s materiality is part of its rules is a question with broader political ramifications than people might expect.

Playing With Toys

I’ve bought a Rubik’s Cube and am playing with it at home. I’m getting frustrated, and after a while I decide to break it apart and reassemble it such that the sides are in the “solved” places. Have I cheated?

We probably need some more context first. If I was in a Rubik’s Cube tournament, or competing for the fastest record, I definitely cheated (as I violated a formal rule of the organization). If I need a solved Rubik’s Cube to impress hot babes at my local bar, they’ll probably be put off when they discover what I did (as I violated a social rule of Rubik’s Cube). But what if I’m just messing with the Rubik’s Cube for fun, or what if I’m competing in the game “who can break and reassemble a Rubik’s Cube the fastest?” Well, now I haven’t cheated at all. I’ve played with the object in exactly the ways that make me happy and I’m operating according to rules of my own invention. The Rubik’s Cube is mine, goddamn it, and I’ll play with it in whatever way I want to. Spin Master might wish they could stop me. They may design the cube to stop me from breaking it apart, or from exploiting specific hacks within the design of the cube to make solving it faster, or they may create a trap that goes off once I break it apart. You might think less of me for having broken it.

But it’s mine.

If I bought Super Mario Bros for the Gameboy back in the day, that’s my toy. I hook the cartridge into the machine, load up my game, and can now manipulate the pixels on screen according to the limitations of the object. On its own, without any social intervention, this is a toy. Once I have my toy, I can choose to play a game with it. Due to the function of capitalism and the cultural conflation of game-objects with the games-played, there is exactly one game I’m expected to play when I sit down to play Super Mario Bros.

But let’s think through the various rules that compose this game. It’s trickier than you expect!

Some Possible Rules To Mario

“Mario cannot go left”, “Jump on enemies to kill them,” “When you get a game over the level restarts,” etc.

Most of the time, when people described the rules of Mario to me, this sort of thing is what they brought up. All of these are, however, the materiality of Super Mario Bros., the byproduct of the physical nature of the data coded onto the cartridge and loaded into the console. You cannot choose to change these rules any more than we could choose to play Hover-Football. If you wish to change them you must change the arrangement of ones and zeros within the cartridge itself.

If these are rules, then they are a fundamentally different kind of rule than the rules that shape analog games.

“Your goal is to reach the flag pole as quickly as possible.”

This is absolutely a rule of Super Mario Bros… the game that most people play. I could play a game with my copy of Super Mario Bros. which doesn’t follow this rule. It’s an Internal Rule.

“When myself and my older brother play, he gets to be Mario and I have to be Luigi.”

This is a very common Social Rule. Nothing in the game cartridge forces it to be this way, but it’s an expectation players will demand on and would influence the game if it wasn’t true. It’s a Social Rule.

“Don’t use an external device to manipulate the data stored by the cartridge.”

Whether or not you consider this a rule and what counts as “manipulating data” is hotly contested. If I’m playing on an emulator, am I “really” playing Super Mario Bros? Are people using arbitrary code execution really still playing Super Mario Bros?

And on that note, are speedrunners playing Super Mario Bros?

The Toy and the Game (the point of it all)

There are two kinds of things, each fundamentally different from the other, that we have culturally decided to share the title of “game.” There’s the game-ritual you and your friends have together when you play a game, and there’s the game-object you buy from the store to inform that ritual. Super Mario Bros, while itself a game-object, has more in common with toys or pieces of equipment than it does with Tag or Chess. This is not unfamiliar to our culture. Scripts and performances are both works of art that inform each other, both called “plays,” and yet they exist in completely different mediums.

If I pick up Super Mario Bros (the toy) I can now play Super Mario Bros (the game). The game and the toy are conflated in the cultural imaginary. However, one can be engaged without the other. For instance, arbitrary code execution is the act of playing an extremely different game upon the toy. I can approximate playing the game of Super Mario Bros on a piece of paper with a pencil without the toy present. If I’m familiar enough with the toy, I can close my eyes and perfectly model it in my head, and sit with Super Mario Bros in the silence of the mind.

It benefits the levers of capitalism to conflate the toy and the game. Toys are substantially more marketable than games, but games have substantially more cultural cache. Live-service multiplayer games like Fortnite conflate the distinction even further by banning people who take materially-permissable game actions that still reveal themselves to be a kind of cheating, for they go against the developer’s intent. When we translate physical games into digital games, the formal rules we choose to make part of the game’s materiality can give away a lot of our assumptions about which parts of a game are or aren’t “real.”

When a video game designer talks about the rules of the game, they will often conflate the material choices being made about the game object with the social and formal rules of the game being played upon that object. They’re not wrong to do so! But I hope this is a lesson for analog game designers — we are not video game developers. We cannot so easily conflate the toy and the game. Instead, we must understand that the toy and the game are two different objects and the process of making one is going to be very different from the process of making the other.

An Aside About Chess and Simulations

It is easy to make the mistake of looking at the chessboard in Lichess and assuming it is uncomplicatedly the exact same game as Chess played over a board. People who do this will read the previous sections and come to me saying, “but Jay! Do you claim that a game of online chess has substantially fewer rules than a game of real chess? Isn’t that absurd?”

Such a claim would only be absurd if you thought that Chess is purely the resulting description of its formal rules. The similarity between online Chess and physical Chess is entirely due to Chess’s nature as a game that places a heavy emphasis on its formal rules over the materiality of the pieces. There are many differences between online and physical Chess, especially at a high tournament level. But still, due to the way Chess has been constructed, it is remarkably easy to translate its formal rules into a set of material limitations placed on digital infrastructure.

This is not true of other games which have been translated digitally. Magic: The Gathering Arena cannot support most “silver-bordered” cards, or even certain tournament-legal cards which work within its rules but would be too costly to construct the digital infrastructure to enable. The Madden series of videogames are openly and explicitly simulacrums of Football. I don’t think anyone would claim that even an extremely top-of-the-line Madden game is the exact same game as a physical game of Football.

Towards Ungovernable Games

As a game designer, you are an artist with a very limited palette. You don’t have much you actually get to work with! If I was to exhaustively try to define my palette of tools, it would be:

• An explanation of formal rules for the players to try to interpret and understand.
• The material characteristics of the book, the character sheets, the dice, the cards, the physical components.
• The images, the art, the references I make within the text to a broader culture of imagination, which help define the internal and social rules of genre.

And that’s not much at all. If I was a video game developer, the materiality of the game could be the centerpiece of my creative practice — and perhaps I could get away with calling that materiality “the rules of the game.” But I can’t! As a designer, all I can do is rely on the book itself as the material and hope that the rules of the game are enough to wrap your head around. I don’t have any control over what you do with the book and its rules once you get your hands on them.

I think a lot of analog game designers would view this as a great source of grief. Sometimes I talk to my compatriots and I feel like they’re all “temporarily embarrassed Blizzard devs,” desperate for the chance to seize control of their players and ensure only Correct Play occurs. On the flipside, sometimes I encounter designers who are terrified by the threat of game designer mind control, who rail against the threat of coercive design.

You have no control.

If you make TTRPGs, you’re not making Super Mario Bros. Be jealous of board game designers — at least they’ve got their boards! Most TTRPGs have no materiality they can depend upon. You have no complex arrangement of logic which can produce actions through inputs and outputs, no physics engine, no great machine, no way to ban the people who don’t see your vision. All you’ve got are the rules you’ve written down, those fragile misunderstood things, modeled as they are inside fragile sacks of meat called brains.

Does that scare you? Or will you rise to the call?

This article was originally made available to the Patrons of the Creekside Community Center. Please support my Patreon if you enjoyed the article.

While I’ve been working on a new game lately (Seven-Part Pact, as if I’m ever working on anything else) I ran into an issue with a lot of safety tools and how they’re implemented. Specifically, I found myself wanting to include Lines & Veils, but being really dissatisfied with how Lines & Veils approaches difficult topics. So (as I often do when working on games like this) I made my own tool. This article is going to be quick and practical — I’m going to talk through how L&V currently works, why it failed me, and the tool I invented to replace it: something I’m calling the Palette Grid. If you want to play games that deal with more intense, high-octane topics, and if you’re interested in intentionally going into spaces that players normally feel uncomfortable going, this might be a good tool for your table.

Lines & Veils, and its Discontents

Lines & Veils (if I remember my history right) were originally invented for Sorcerer by Ron Edwards. You take a piece of paper and write “Lines” on one side and “Veils” on the other. Then (as Bee Zelda helpfully describes in their guest blog on Roll20):

On one side, you have your LINES. This is content that will NOT be crossed. Everyone agrees that those themes will be avoided during the time of play. This is non-negotiable.

Then, we have the VEILS. A veil is content that might come up in play, but the GM and players will fade it to black. This is content that can be viewed as problematic but might come up in play. You want to determine what content can be explored and what everyone is comfortable with. Veils can also be content that you simply don’t like; it doesn’t have to only be themes and topics that are associated with trauma.

This is all well and good for a lot of tables. It has a lot in common with other “List” style tools, such as the Monte Cook Safety Checklist or the Palette from Microscope. It’s a totally functional safety tool that helps a lot of people out. So why doesn’t it work for my needs?

One major issue I have is that Lines & Veils conflates “caution” with “presence in play.” It works great if our discomfort and nervousness around a topic is consistent with our desire to avoid it during play, but what if I want to play in a space that makes me and others at the table uncomfortable?

For instance, let’s say I (a trans woman) want to run a gritty campaign set in the modern day, and there’s a cis man at my table. That cis man might be really nervous about the presence of real-world oppression and transmisogyny, but if I’m using Lines & Veils he only has three possible options:

• Put a line on Transmisogyny, leaving me unable to discuss a very important aspect of my real-world experiences.
• Put a veil on Transmisogyny, leaving us unable to depict and dwell on transmisogyny, and therefore continuing to reject an important part of what I could get out of the game.
• Say nothing about Transmisogyny, leaving him in a spot where he has to be anxious and uncomfortable at any moment during play, and giving him no recourse for if play crosses into spaces that make him uncomfortable!

Extend this to any other form of oppression (or frankly any other form of experience) and we start to see the issue that Lines & Veils have that I hope to solve. Due to conflicting access needs, one person’s “valuable catharsis” is another person’s “distressing trigger.” Group TTRPGs are played together, and the process of negotiation is really important when dealing with topics that dwell on the sharp edge of play. Hiding and obscuring dark or distressing topics can work if we all seek escapism, but frankly in 2025 I’m sick of escapism. I want games that dig into darkness, that dwell on pain and hurt. How can I achieve that without leaving my other players in an uncomfortable spot?

The Palette Grid

The Palette Grid explodes Lines & Veils into two distinct categories. The X Axis represents how careful we want to be when the topic comes up, and the Y Axis represents what we want to do with that topic when it comes up during play.

On one end of the X Axis we have “Comfortable,” for anything that we think will be a breeze for us to allow in play. On the other end we have “Risky,” for anything that is a minefield of potential triggers if handled poorly.

On one end of the Y Axis we have “Explore,” for anything we actively want to have show up in our game, and anything we want to devote proverbial “screentime” to. On the other end we have “Ignore,” for any topic that we actively don’t want to have crop up during play. It’s still potentially real in the world, we’re just fully veiling it, and it won’t come up.

The intersection of these two Axes produces four categories, each one on a spectrum. If something’s Comfortable and we want to Explore it, then let’s go nuts and do it as much as we want. If something’s Risky and we want to Ignore it, then we should pretend like it doesn’t exist at all (the equivalent of marking it as a Line). These are both familiar to folks who play with Lines & Veils.

The other two categories are new. If something’s Comfortable but we want to Ignore it, that means we find it dull. It’s not risky or dangerous to have it come up, but we just don’t want to play it out. It bores us! If something’s Risky but we want to Explore it, that means we need to proceed with caution. When it comes up (because it may come up), we should frequently step out of character to check in with everyone playing, have discussions about how we include it as we do, and we should make sure we look out for each other in the aftermath to make sure no one’s been impacted by its inclusion. But just because something’s difficult doesn’t mean we should eliminate it from play.

The final thing worth noting about this grid is that it’s composed of multiple spectrums. The exact meaning of the spectrum is for the group to discuss. If something’s only sorta Easy, or we only want to lightly Obscure it, what that means may be different for different groups. The conversation surrounding the creation of a group’s Palette Grid is just as important as the final object, and the continuous re-adjustment and re-negotiation of the Grid is also very important. There is no safety tool that can substitute for open and clear communication, and if you’re not sure what the placement of a concept means, then talk about it with the group.

Sample Palette Grid

Here’s a sample Palette Grid, filled out by a group of players. This group is really excited about Body Horror and Patriarchy, although they also know Patriarchy can be a potentially distressing topic for the group, and so they’ve marked it as more risky. They’re also interested in violence, but they’re much more interested in violence than combat. Combat and sex are both marked as boring (combat because it’s overdone in other games, sex because multiple players are in committed relationships and they’re just not drawn to it). Sexual violence, however, has ended up deep in the “Block” corner, along with fingernail damage (which is one player’s specific ick). Natural disasters are smack-dab in the middle, as one of the players has anxiety about natural disasters but is also aware it is likely to come up during play and doesn’t feel called to forbid it completely, even if they do have the option to do so.

During play, discrimination ends up moving from “Block” to “Be Careful,” as the group realizes that they’re extremely interested in dealing with the ramifications of homophobia under patriarchy. They end up separating out “ableism” and “racism” from discrimination, as they realize their concerns with discrimination were more about forms of discrimination that aren’t inexorably linked to patriarchy.

Disputes within the Palette Grid

The Palette Grid is produced through consensus. Every player should agree to the placement of every concept on the grid. It may sometimes occur that multiple players fundamentally disagree on the placement of a particular concept. The easiest solution here is to divide a concept into sub-concepts.

In the earlier example, “discrimination” was placed under Block, but it turns out that there are forms of discrimination we’re extremely interested in. If one player wants a concept to be fully obscured while another player wants a concept to be fully embraced, discuss together which aspects of that concept each player is interested in or put off by. Often this dispute emerges from the players conflating multiple distinct ideas under a single too-vague word, and by breaking it apart into multiple concepts, we can tease out what ideas are worth exploring.

It’s also possible that this intractable divide between players points to a fundamental disagreement in the goals of play. While that’s a shame (and the correct path forward will be for everyone to decide), it’s good you found it out now, and not 5 sessions in when a big argument blows up the group. Sometimes a concept is also critical to the game you’re seeking to play. Sex is a difficult thing to Ignore entirely in Monsterhearts, for instance. If an intractable dispute has emerged around a topic that’s core to play, that means there’s a core divide in how the players are thinking about the game, and it’s a good chance to step back, discuss the game itself, and make sure the game you’re playing is actually a good fit for the group as a whole.

Conclusions

Now, more than ever, it’s important we avoid conflating discomfort with denial. Living in Philadelphia, I see things that make me uncomfortable all the time. One time I saw a homeless guy take a shit on Broad St., and while I certainly didn’t enjoy seeing him do that, I think it would be terribly corrosive to try and stop him from doing that. The world is full of things that make us uncomfortable. It has many fewer things that leave us unsafe. By conflating our comfort with our safety, we embrace toxic escapism and try to hide away the parts of the world that scare us. We take on a liberal “I just want to have brunch” mindset, where we hide away the unsightly and try our best not to dwell on it.

My biggest complaint with many safety tools (besides the fact that we call them “safety tools” at all) is that they seek to terminate conversation, rather than enable it. The pressure of being discriminated against at low-trust tables has led many marginalized folks to adopt a blanket “Do This No Questions Asked” policy around safety tools. But if I’m at a table and someone says something homophobic, I can’t just x-card that away. Similarly, if I’m with a group of friends and we want to delve deep into the darkest corners and furthest extremes of play, I don’t want to just slam my fist down and forbid all discussion of a particular topic. By forbidding all mention of a particular topic, it leaves the people most impacted by that topic out in the cold, and it preemptively terminates potentially useful conversations. I hope the Palette Grid can serve as a tool for enabling further discussion and opening new doors to new kinds of play.

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