The next part of the Grimoire is complete! Covering the magic of divination (see far away things), apotrophaism (protect against bad things), invocation (summon and bind bad things), and thaumaturgy (ask nature to do weird things).
(here was 2024-07-15 15:23:48 +0000 UTC View Post
The first part of the newest draft of the Wizard's Grimoire is complete! It contains seventeen spells, and has a refresher on how magic works in Seven-Part Pact, along with a couple of updated rules.
If you need a reminder on how Seven-Part Pact works, you should peruse this t...
2024-07-02 14:59:50 +0000 UTC View PostWere you wondering why the Guardian's ward is a small black cat? Are you curious about why each little flower was chosen? Do you want to see Grubby and myself make fun of all our little typos in our three-year-old PDF? Well now you can!
The Wanderhome Director's Commentary is now available ...
2024-06-03 22:54:13 +0000 UTC View PostC. Thi Nguyen says that the medium of games is composed of agency. I don't know if that's true broadly, but I also think that it's definitely not true for TTRPGs. If we wanna imagine TTRPGs as being in relation to agency though maybe one thing we could do is think about anti-agency, or p...
2024-05-27 19:23:03 +0000 UTC View PostBehold the Hierophant, known as the Keeper of the Flames, Grail-Bearer, and the Weary Sixth Magus. He is the caretaker of the four immortal flames burning within the temples of Isha, and t...
2024-05-23 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostBeen having a rough week, so I drafted up a little thing you can put in your game of Pathfinder, Worlds Without Number, Into The Odd, or any other game that features dungeons and dragons.
Been thinking a lot about how, among my many issues with a lot of ...
2024-04-26 15:44:27 +0000 UTC View PostBehold the Necromancer, known as Keeper of the Gates, Skull-Bearer, and the Grim Seventh Magus. He is the guardian of life and death, the gray and ashen line of gates which keep Isha safe ...
2024-04-18 15:50:02 +0000 UTC View PostWhen I look at any tabletop RPG, the first question I ask myself is: What does this game offer me that I couldn't achieve by playing make-believe with my friends? See, I could gather a few friends, sit down at a table, and pretend to be dungeoneering adventurers or superheroes or whatever. We cou...
2024-03-31 23:05:58 +0000 UTC View PostHere's a game I whipped up, a rules-lite experiment based on conversations I've had over the past few months about the nature of games. I'll post it on Itch.io soon enough, I just wanted to share it now with all of you.
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These are the essential social norms I use when I play ma...
2024-03-11 16:19:11 +0000 UTC View Post
You are a thief in a dungeon, or at least you're pretending to be, and there's a warrior blocking your entrance to the next room. Are you able to successfully fight your way past?
Well,...
2024-02-23 16:50:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I hope we get to play a game together. Playing together is the foundation of every close relationship I have — everyone I love in my life, I can find some way to play with them. There ...
2024-01-23 20:25:22 +0000 UTC View PostAnother year comes and goes, and it's time once again for me to write about Possum Creek's year in review. This is the third article of this sort that I've written (2022 and 2024-01-09 15:10:28 +0000 UTC View Post
For those of you who don't know, every year Possum Creek likes to make a special t-shirt commemorating the upcoming year. Think of it a bit like how summer camps have a different shirt every summer! This year we have an amazing design by the incredible 2023-11-09 18:51:17 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a guest article by the fantastic Kyra Helfrich, a longtime friend of the Possum Creek and who was the screenreader consultant and ended up pouring 3 months of their time into making the PDF of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast as screenreader-accessible as possible. Please laugh and cry wi...
2023-09-06 14:25:47 +0000 UTC View PostMy friends and I have gathered to play Telephone. It's our favorite game, and we've spent months practicing to make sure we can hear each other as clearly as possible. We sit in a circle and confidently enunciate our chosen sentence into each others' ears, and at the end of the game it's...
2023-08-18 16:45:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Even games have a voice. When you sit down and read a tabletop RPG, the game itself speaks to you. The choice you make around narration heavily informs how people learn and play the game.
I wrote a new article! It's a bit rambly but I hope it's still helpful for people. I just finished moving into a new apartment and outside of my fiction work I'm going to try and get more writing done for folks, so if there's ever any essay topics you'd be interested, please let me know and I...
2023-05-03 18:03:23 +0000 UTC View PostHi all, it's Jay here. As you can imagine Possum Creek has been pretty busy creating Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast (we're sending everything to the printers May 10th! The digital came out last month!) and also Inscrutable Cities and also I've been moving. I decided I wanted to do a little thing fo...
2023-04-26 03:30:04 +0000 UTC View PostHi babes I wrote a short story over the past couple of days and decided to post it on here. Content warnings for queerphobia and suicide (obviously), along with body horror associated with cybernetics, unreality, and extremely gross weird sex (I mean it!). It's about a trans girl who tries (and f...
2023-01-21 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe year is over, and what a year it has been. This marks the second year I write a "year in review" article (2021 can be found here), and this time I'm working on this article at...
2022-12-26 15:04:10 +0000 UTC View PostIn my dreams I found the Quarry dark and starless. I leapt the locked white gate and walked the ramp past the stones until I reached the perfect lake, and then kept walking across the water until I reached the far banks where the swampgrass grew. Among the swampgrass fireflies danced, an... 2022-12-22 13:48:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks, Jay here. It's November (already!) and I wanted to update y'all on what's going on at Possum Creek and give you all some exclusive tidbits of what the future holds.
We're working on a new crowdfunding project with Backerkit towards the end of the month....
2022-11-05 21:15:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I was talking with a couple friends about tabletop games, and I found myself using the metaphor of "The Shallow End" a lot, and I figured I should write a little blog post explaining what I mean. I think this metaphor is a useful way to think about player engagement and how to build games that ma...
2022-09-23 16:18:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello my dear patrons, and happy Firetop! Summer has come to a close, and the first winds of autumn are starting to pick up. I wanted to update everyone on what Possum Creek is going to be up to for the next six or so months, special coupons just for patrons, and what we're planning to do for all...
2022-09-18 20:38:05 +0000 UTC View PostThis article is a bit more academic and a bit more weird than what I normally write! I hope this essay can be a productive starting point for new modes of engagement with tabletop RPGs in a poetic context. I'm a bit rusty with the academia side of things, but I hope you enjoy regardless!...
2022-08-10 22:36:44 +0000 UTC View Post
I realized I forgot to upload this, so here's the newest episode of the podcast! Kazumi and I talk about game balance, why basically everyone misunderstands it, and how we can implement it in our games.
Hey folks, welcome to the next episode of Creekside Convos, where Kazumi and I talk about how mechanics feel, GNS theory (!), and why we think playtesting is really important.
References:
Edit: Changed audio source in hopes that this will go into the RSS feed. My apologies for many emails today.
Hi, welcome to the first episode of Creekside Convos, a new podcast with Kazumi and myself about tabletop games, identity, complications, and meandering tangents. We've been...
2022-06-02 16:01:03 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks, I just finished reading Bernard De Koven's 1978 book The Well-Played Game, and in a fever dream of a mindset I wrote two thousand words on Among Us! I hope you like it — I think it can ...
2022-05-30 19:32:27 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons, it's nice to say hi! As you can imagine, I've been really busy lately with Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast (don't forget to back on Indiegogo here) which as you're all aware has been in development for years. You can actua...
2022-04-12 19:17:48 +0000 UTC View Post