"Modifier" Backlog

The Spiral is an original genre-less game system, built to simplify the RPG experience for any story you might want to tell. Parable of the Pit is a Powered by the Apocalypse game without playbooks that puts the ordinary players in a terrifying dungeon from which they must escape. Aleks Samoylov talks about designing both … Read more

Are you ready to party? That’s nice, how about this podcast instead. Aaron J Amendola is here to chat about his party game Earworm, which is all about vocalizing your favorite jams for that karaoke bar experience in the comfort of your own home. We talk about the unique aspects of party games and how … Read more

Fraser is back with another cyberpunk adventure, this time a climate-fiction inspired take on Blades in the Dark. We talk about the vastly different ways players can interact with the lore and how this cli-fi blend looks at old cyberpunk tropes in a new way.

Alex Roberts joins me for maximum pod-feed confusion, but mainly to talk about her first game, codenamed Tension. Inspired by Dread and romance games like Kagematsu and Hot Guys Making Out, this is a game about the emotional tension in a tricky relationship. We look at the game’s evolution, negotiation an safety mechanics, and learn … Read more

Roughly translated as “the sexiest RPG on your shelf”, Pasion de las Pasiones is the telenovela RPG from Brandon Leon-Gambetta. We talk about: Latinx representation in games, telenovela tropes, statless playbooks, Hugh Jackman, and Pippin the Corgi. (There are tangents.)

Expedition is an RPG system that combines cards and a mobile app (all free, all open-source) to streamline the RPG experience, allowing you to play the way you want to. Built to be modded, Todd shares the strengths and challenges of playing the Expedition way, and may be just the project you were looking for!

John Harness got 280 characters on twitter before it was the norm, and decided to turn it into a game design challenge. Paul Czege answered the call. We talk about the challenge, what we can learn from small games, and take a look at the amazing contributions.

Iron Edda is a game that exists across several systems and has a second edition in the works, and Tracy Barnett joins us to talk about how it got that way. We discuss what makes something an Iron Edda game, what different systems bring to the fiction, and where it’s headed next.

What goes into bringing an existing game into a brand new setting? How should you approach writing settings that are unfamiliar to you? James Mendez Hodes talks about all that and a bunch of other cool stuff!

7th Sea is a game about being an awesome hero, but there’s more than one way to be a hero. John talks about the Western and Eastern hero archetypes, and how they’ve been working on modifying the existing 7th Sea system to tell new kinds of hero stories.