summoningcirclepress

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Dreadmall is coming along, what I'm really excited about is the progression system I've cooked up. Playbook moves track XP on their own and evolve into weirder forms as the game progresses, culminating into a victory condition for the player. Try a taste of the dollmaker, for example:

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i published an article about using ttrpgs in higher education classrooms with rascal :) got to interview two VERY cool game studies professors and also talk about my own experiences !!! 5 minute read, please check it out :D

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200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

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The World We Left Behind is a 1-5 player worldbuilding TTRPG about uncovering the mysteries of a deserted planet.

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10 Ways To Support Your Favorite Small Presses

(these tips also work for supporting your favorite authors!)

Reblog reblog reblog! Reblogging their posts on tumblr is one of the best ways to help new readers find them.

Tell a friend. Word of mouth is golden. If you enjoy a book, recommend it to a friend who you think will like it too!

Leave a review. Whether you review on your social media, reading tracker app (e.g. StoryGraph, Goodreads), or on your preferred book retailer, every review helps.

Request that your local library purchase their books. And if your library has a service like Hoopla, see if their books are available for check out!

Subscribe to their newsletter. Most presses have semi-regular email newsletters where they give publication updates. By subscribing, you can keep up to date on new books and other fun stuff. (Plus, you might get cute cat pictures)

Give a one-off donation via Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, etc. Everything so far has been completely free. But if you have a little cash to spare, this is a great way to show your support.

Pick up an ebook. You get to read an awesome book AND support your favorite press??? It's a win-win! Also, if your press has their own store, consider purchasing directly from them rather than through a third party.

Pick up a physical book. Not only do you get to support your fav, you also get to add a beautiful book to your bookshelf! And if you purchase directly from them, you might get some extra goodies or even a signed book!

Become a member on their Ko-fi, Patreon, etc. One of the biggest struggles with publishing books is the lack of consistent income. Providing monthly financial support can help the press stay steady during slower periods. And it probably isn't as expensive as your think! (Here at WPP, our Ko-fi membership tiers start at $1 per month)

And finally, let them know that you enjoy their work! Publishing is a long, lonely process that involves a lot of smashing keyboards and trying to decide where the commas should go. Telling them that all their hard work has paid off and that you enjoyed what they created will make their day. I guarantee it.

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a game where we hurt each other

Last month, I played perhaps the most intense TTRPG session of my life as part of the Dream Library’s discussion of Bluebeard’s Bride, a game of “feminist horror” (more on this later) published by Magpie in a gorgeous print edition. Over the course of the month of October my guest lecturer/collaborator @marvelousmsmolly I collectively hosted three sessions of what was by far the most challenging game the Dream Library has ever discussed. 

We came to Bluebeard as the second part of our fall semester covering games of intimacy and monstrosity — a unit which began in September with Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts 2 and is continuing this month with Vampire: The Masquerade (If you want to get in on the VTM discussion and future semesters, please, come join). Both Molly and I suspected that Bluebeard was going to be both a quieter month and a riskier text — but opted to play through it anyway, albeit with some tools in place to make sure everyone knew what they were getting into with a book that doesn’t pull many punches. And with all that, the first two sessions went... fine? We had some lumpy pacing, some conflicting styles of play, some questions about how a game that really seems to encourage player bleed can possibly be played online, but for the most part things were fine. Not great, not bad — not worth the anxiety we’d had about them.

And “fine,” of course, doesn’t make for interesting conversations, so Molly and I took a step back. We talked about what was going wrong: a sense that neither of us quite felt comfortable hitting hard enough, even though we asked players ahead of time and at the start of sessions to tell us what was off the table. A frustration that player choice had trended towards the Bride as a detective/hero and not someone embodied in a world of horror. A confusion — once again — over what it means to “shiver with terror” in a discord call with some friends online. Out of that conversation came a new idea: rather than two more one-shots, Molly took some time to charge up a spirit bomb and put together some more formal prep, then recruited a group she felt could get together for a more curated experience. She wrote up her own excellent thoughts on what went down — along with a lot of session details — but you’ll have to join the Dream Library for that. 

The result of all that curation and preparation was that on October 23rd a group of four trans women — Molly, @jdragsky, our friend Mars, and I — sat down to play Bluebeard’s Bride knowing exactly what we were in for. We would be playing a transfem Bride, Bluebeard would be cis, and we would be hitting transfem-specific horror as hard as we possibly could. 

I’m going to quote from Molly’s reflection, where she wrote:

“Another really great aspect of running this game for this table is there was such a clear feeling that we all understood, wordlessly, what was going on... There are some moments in Allison Rumfitt’s gothic horror novel ‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’ where it felt like the author, a trans woman, was dropping phrases knowing exactly how her transfem audience would react... This had a twofold effect of both giving the players a chilling moment but also, a very brief but appropriate separation between fiction and player where could all grimace and be together in that discomfort before pushing on. People knew what I was doing. The problem with the original game is it doesn’t really want to discuss the politics of what “feminine horror” means. Because of this you’re really lacking some focus. I think a table of cis women could actually play bluebeard’s bride in the way we did last night and have it hit hard for them if they approached it correctly, I don’t think our experience was uniquely elevated by our trans reading, however that was one of several tools we used for that elevation.”

Setting aside the strengths and weaknesses of the original text, that sense of shared experience was key to our game and key to allowing us to hit — and get hit — really hard and trust that our coplayers were there with us. Compared to our earlier efforts (prioritizing safety by taking things off the table via lines/veils) tightening the topical scope from an ambiguous “feminist horror” to a specific transfeminist horror in the context of a chaser bf, in the context of an economic disparity, in the context of the medical pressures of transition in the contemporary U.K. allowed Molly, our lovely host, to hurt us knowing that we were all in it together and choosing to play this game. It transformed the horror from an obstacle in an adventure game into a thing we were seeking out: a pleasure/pain we asked to feel. 

In a games discourse that is — understandably — interested in protections which might be implemented anywhere, including at cons and home tables with much less of an art-and-politics interest, safety tools are often thought about as a negative thing, a preemptive cutting away of all the things which might end up hurting us. I think that’s part of why people can have a hard time filling out a lines/veils list in advance of a session. What are all the things in the world I’m sensitive to? What are all the contexts in which I’m sensitive to them? Good sensitive or bad sensitive? Sensitive enough to cause a scene? Sensitive enough to make it off the table? 

In place of that — and in a table with a really remarkable amount of trust — this final Bluebeard session leaned in, hard, to the things that hurt us. That was the game. Molly wrote a lot about kink in her reflection, and I think she was right to do that. The point of the game was to hurt each other and to feel, and it was a better game for keeping that in mind. It was an actual horror game, and not just a game with horror aesthetics. I agree with Molly that there was nothing essential about having an all-transfem table — I think what we did could be done by anyone, even with the base Bluebeard’s Bride. What was essential was having a table where we all trusted each other enough to play a hurting game and to know that we were there on purpose. It elevated Bluebeard’s Bride into a really fascinating, messy experience — one I can’t wait to play again.

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reading a bunch of haunted house games for a potential article and This Discord Has Ghosts in It may have the best single example of play in any rpg

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Gonna drop the first three pregen character playbooks for Over the Wailing Wind – my in-dev supernatural gothic romance game – early tomorrow morning for Dirtgoblin Community Center paid members.

Doing super tight, succinct character and game design while giving it the full layout and illustration treatment is an interesting exercise, it's getting my gears spinning about how to potentially approach future projects

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happy nearly halloween :D it's itch sale time!! come get yalls ttrpgs

the sale features ...

two solo games

the graveyard game: write an ethnography of a magical, haunted graveyard, built on the for truth's sake system

osteotzee: play as a bone auger putting great beasts to rest using a yahtzee scorecard

one duet game

mama werewolf: play as a werewolf mother and her child, playing out emotional scenes over the course of a month with tokens you find out in nature

three multiplayer games

familiar field trip: play cooperatively or competitively as witches' familiars trying to wreak havoc in the village, completing challenges and wracking up points

crescent grin: play as noir detectives in an eldritch world in a twisty turny one shot built on horseshoe srd

interstate 10 1/2: play as roadtrippers facing bizarre threats in a light horror comedy game build on horseshoe

one lyric game

you are thinking about silver: an autofictional game about a memory from when i was 14, reimagined as if my family were werewolves

two d&d 5e homebrews:

psychopomp sorcerer: a subclass for playing as a sorcerer tasked with delivering souls to the afterlife, featuring three unique flavors and spell pools

witch class: a constitution based half caster class with a whole new way of casting spells (no slots!), familiars, curses, and more! includes 3 subclasses. made with @hmooncreates

get everything for 40% off or all 9 for $18!!

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I'm not sure how else to tell you that Splat 5: Golden, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine is out on itch.io

Tell a friend! And the tell us you loved it.

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I'm not sure how else to tell you that Splat 5: Golden, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine is out on itch.io

Tell a friend! And the tell us you loved it.

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Splat 5 is now out to the public

That's right, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine: Splat, is available on itch. Community copies there for ya if you can't afford it! All funds help us make another one.

What's Inside

Meguey & Vincent Baker in conversation with Rae Nedjadi about Apolcalypse World, the Powered by the Apolcalypse school of design it launched, and how games like Apocalypse Keys are redefining that system.

Filipino designers momatoes and Waks Saavedra discuss the TTRPG industry and culture in Southeast Asia, the rise of #RPGSEA and other regional tabletop movements, and how to support their continued growth.

Industry icons Orion D Black and Jay Dragon give an inside look at the life of an indie designer: how indies fought for better pay and won, how they built new communities online, and where the scene will go from here

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You've started growing gills and it's time to get good at your improvisational firefighting because you're about to form a symbiotic attachment with the freaks of this new world.

Plasmodics is live on Kickstarter now!

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Happy Pride Month from this queer co-op zine publisher to you. Support your local queer artists and writers and businesses. Support your local mutual aid networks so queers of all generations have access to safe and affordable housing, food, jobs, and a good life.

And chase queer joy whenever you can!

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Happy Pride Month from this queer co-op zine publisher to you. Support your local queer artists and writers and businesses. Support your local mutual aid networks so queers of all generations have access to safe and affordable housing, food, jobs, and a good life.

And chase queer joy whenever you can!

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How To Support Indie TTRPGs

A lot of indie ttrpg people are coming back to, or trying out tumblr for the first time. For better or for worse (I'd argue worst lol), twitter has been the main marketing tool and driver of sales for a lot of indie people. Whether or not twitter is going to completely fade away, who knows! But it's never a bad idea to take some eggs out of that single basket.

So what does that have to do with tumblr? Well, if you see a post about an indie ttrpg (games, art, podcasts, streams, design, whatever!) give it a reblog! Same as you'd do for any cool art, gif, video, or music!

Want to take it a step further? Go check out that person's links (which related, to all the posters out there, make sure your links to your itch pages, drivethru pages, personal sites, etc are handy!) and here's the crucial part, if you think something is cool, buy it! Indie ttrpg stuff is nearly always wildly underpriced (which is a convo for another day), so chances are you can find something that's within your budget.

If you can't buy it, bookmark it for later! Also, it's super common for itch.io creators to have a pool of community copies freely available for their games. Take one! Check out the game! If you like it, buy it later! If you grab a community copy, an extra cool thing you can do is leave a 5-star rating!

I would love to see the indie ttrpg sphere flourish on tumblr, but that can't happen without support! So show your favorite indie ttrpg creator some love, and also go exploring to find some new favorites!

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OK COOL NOW LETS PAY ARTISTS FOR MORE ART!! ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

FUNDED! This means we're gonna get to bring Little Wolves to life, and you'll all get to explore the mystical Enchanted Forest at your tables, with your friends. We can't wait to get to work finishing it up :)

We still have stretch goals & community achievements to unlock! We're pretty close to the next achievement for a free sticker at 250 backers, and once we hit $22k raised we'll be getting more amazing art packed into the final book!!!