This covers a lot wider than what I’m familiar with but seems like a decent primer for anyone trying to dig up history on the outgrowth of indie RPGs post-Forge/Story Games https://aavoigt.com/f/the-golden-age-of-indie-rpgs.
Signalboost: A bit of history on indie RPGs
December 29, 2025Game Hype: Dragon Slayers
December 21, 2025I had picked up GILA games Dragon Slayers a while back and just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Which is a shame because I think this game actually does a lot of really clever things in a very understated way.
Gameplay-wise, I think Dragon Slayers hits a lot of buttons for what many modern D&D players want who aren’t already served by a more complex gridfight game like Pathfinder:
- Bespoke mechanics for your character
- Light tactical play, but fast and less complex tracking
- Go on adventure, fight monsters, return.
- Easy set piece battle design, easy monster tracking for GM
You’ve got a number of character classes, each designed to interact with their own custom rules, but each set of custom rules is not terribly complex. One of the cool things is that every character class has some Support Actions – things they can do in a fight to aid another character, and every class has a Camp Action which is a benefit they grant during the rest.
This is one of the things that helps ease a long standing problem with D&D-ish games, of party balance. By making all these things built-in from the start, you don’t have the problems where “people made bad choices in their build” that can make early play less fun.
Taking a page from PbtA style design, each class is basically 80% complete; you pick a couple of skills and such and have a few advances you can take to customize and improve the character. This also means it’s very easy to pick up and play for this game, which makes it much easier as an entry level game for players. (I think the GMing isn’t complex, just that this is clearly a game that assumes the GM will have some minimal experience elsewhere first).
Combat uses the idea of zones, making it easy to scribble out an abstracted map on the spot if need be. Characters can Move & take two actions, just that they generally can’t repeat the same type of action twice, which means there’s more incentive to do Attack/Support Move and set up team actions between each other, or do small stunts and such.
Zones also work pretty well for the setting up effects from monsters. DS’s take on the red dragon has a brutal but exciting mechanic; whatever zone the dragon enters is destroyed; presumably the combination of fire blasting everywhere, flailing tail and smashing claw. The players need to move to another area or they will eat heavy damage by the end of the turn. It’s cool, simple mechanics like this that pretty much guarantee fun set piece battle action in play.
Now, the game does note that it doesn’t have a deep advancement path, which I think is something a lot of modern D&D people want, because they usually also want months or years of play as an ideal. For that reason, I think the game as it stands fills a better place as a short term play game or an intro for many people to action roleplaying. Hopefully supplemental material or fanhack stuff will be made in the future, or, if you’re that deep into it, you can probably build it out yourself, though I think the class stuff is probably the harder part to create as far as the way the game works.
I’ve just moved it up on my “play soon list” because I’ll be seeing friends in town and a pick up game might be exactly what we’re looking for.
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Murkdice’s 12 NPCs – A fun little NPC flag system
December 8, 2025Murkdice wrote The Only 12 NPCs You Need and it feels like a great little meta tool to throw on top of whatever game system you have where you need to have NPCs with motivations and goals.
I’ve always found that a better way to prep and run games; the players play the NPCs, the GM looks at the list of NPCs and sets up actions they take in return. Easy improv built on minimal prep. No need to do massive plot tree preparation.
This tool feels like a cousin to my Faction Personalities Tool. You could, also choose to take the NPCs’ goals and build them in relation to the player character’s goals and flags.
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The Right Nightmares
December 2, 2025There is a fun space in RPG stuff you can play with; hard enough topics, but not so hard or tough it makes you feel depressed and shitty. One of my friends basically pointed out the fun of it is that you can make “fighting back and winning” against the shitty issues part of the game. It’s really about playing with the right nightmares.
Hurts so good is a narrow target
I think part of the reason there’s been a lot more talk about safety tools in the last decade has been people trying to find ways to navigate to the right nightmares for their particular group. That said, I feel like games that take you 80-90% of the way to a specific set of issues makes it easier for the group to navigate and understand what game they’re playing and then negotiate more specifics.
Framework vs. A Selected Package
So, Sorcerer, is ostensibly designed to do this, but mostly depends on the group having a good amount of genre knowledge to kinda suss out what / where to take things. It’s a framework but you end up with the first hurdle of someone having to fill that in to a level, THEN to use the Lines & Veils the game details or work it out otherwise.
In contrast, games like Praise the Hawkmoth King or Girl Frame bring the issues up front about what it’s doing and what kind of heavy shit to expect from regular play. Granted, I imagine many groups will go “oof too far” but I think having games that just go for it up front starts as the a negotiation space for what ARE the right nightmares for a given group.
Contrasting experiences
So… years back I remember playing briefly in a Sorcerer game and unfortunately I think the actual focus themes were not locked down well and I was also in my early 20s; I vaguely remember playing my character as an edgelord “sacrifice people for magic” type, which… is empty and not particularly interesting.
In contrast, later on, I was playing in a Bliss Stage game and there’s a scene where my character is talking to a good friend and he says something crude about the girl my character has a secretly has a crush on so my character flips out and we get into a fist fight. What was heartbreaking is that basically all of our characters are basically doing what teens in high stress and bad emotional management do, that is not conducive to saving the world from aliens. (Ironically it did increase our Intimacy level since fist fights count as physical contact which was a short term stat gain at the cost of longer term cohesion… aiyah).
The right issues, the right nightmares, aren’t necessarily about how hard you go, but the context of the problems and how we, as a group, have managed to express our characters’ humanity and vulnerability in all of it.
Obviously the rules don’t “make” that happen by themselves, but much like how a bicycle can help you go faster/further in travel, a good system lets you communicate Flags and align in play much faster. A lot of play with older designs when I was growing up always focused on the “right group” but that was just unexamined “Can the group find a way to coordinate where to push/pull in play to hit the right issues for each other?”, also often buried under a lot of bad advice to not openly communicate or consider larger structure or themes (“That’s metagaming!”).
Anyway, I’m very excited about the turn of many games and that folks are doing so much great design in these spaces.
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Game Hype: Threadcutters
November 30, 2025I had crowdfunded Threadcutters and just recently got the physical copy. In this game, you’re playing supernatural assassins who are running hits on supernatural entities that control one of the four worlds. It feels like a meeting between John Wick, White Wolf, Persona videogames, and Machineries of the Empire.
Each assassin gets blessings from some of the Arcana of the Tarot, these give you abilities that so many times per mission you can enact an effect, such as knowing a character’s fears and darkest secrets, issuing a command that will be followed to an NPC, and so on. Then, for the actual hit after you get the target isolated, the game shifts to tactical grid combat on a 6×6 grid and you have separate gifts specifically for this portion of play.
Each potential target gets a full section of personality/history and a full adventure, designed to be played in a single session. A specific grid map for the showdown is included as well.
The game uses Tarot Cards, and has a particular mechanic I think is interesting… normally if the card is upright, you get a positive outcome, and if it’s reverse, you get a negative outcome… BUT, if the thing your character is doing is a perfect thematic match for the card, you get the positive outcome anyway. Since each hit has a shared, partial Tarot deck in play, loaded towards the suit of the world you’re in…. so it makes sense as players to slightly adjust your plans and methods to favor the methods of the place.
Well, this is like the 13th or 14th game on my “I want to play this soon!” list, so I recommend folks go check it out.
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Deeper in the Game 
