Nostr notes by Indie Game Reading Club (Unofficial)

Post-Con Deep Dive #3: Dragon Braggin’ Last of my new-to-me ...

2026-10-29T04:09:17Z

Post-Con Deep Dive #3: Dragon Braggin’

Last of my new-to-me reviews from games I ran at RinCon in Tucson a few weeks ago. This is a short one. But very sweet. A palate cleanser after last week’s look at Elder Mythos.
Decaying Orbit
Available from Storybrewers Roleplaying
Sunday I offered an amuse-bouche, a charcuterie board of small games that would not take up the full four hour slot. The first thing I ran for my group of 6 (me included) was Decaying Orbit, which I’ve written about before. If you don’t go through the link, the short version is that Decaying Orbit is a For the Queen adaptation in which everyone plays a part of an artificial intelligence running a space station falling into a sun. For the game I ran at RinCon, I suggested a different station than my first go, a research station rather than a colony ship. Went great, and almost everyone at the table was new to For The Queen style prompt games.
Everyone wants to slap that Corrupted Memory button. Also in the picture and tragically unplayed: Zhenya’s Wonder Tales from Bully Pulpit Games.
The most fun is watching folks realize how fun the “Corrupted Memory” option is: when someone is playing out their personal recollection of what the AI was doing during the trip, any player can tap a little card that says Corrupted Memory and cut them off. For the players who have never experienced it, it seems rude at first blush. So I had to pick the perfect moment to leave a provocative question unanswered. I think I tapped it during my own thing, describing a mysterious mass that appeared attached to the backside of our solar panels. “What’s it look like? Are there cameras back there?” “Yes,” I say, “Let’s zoom in oh no corrupted memory!” Everyone at the table cackled and started to compete to be the first to tap the sign.
Dragon Braggin’
Available as a boxed card deck from DriveThruRPG
The new game I ran, though, was Michael Miller’s (of With Great Power fame way back in the day) Dragon Braggin’. It’s another For The Queen hack: they’re terrific light RPG-adjacent fillers! This one’s quite far afield from the original. You start by picking from one of four broad categories of characters: Wonders (wizards and such), Strikers (assassins, burglars, etc), Defenders (knights, barbarians) and Supports (bards, clerics). Then you deal out a string of events describing a dungeon delve you’ve just come from. The facts on the cards are objective facts about the delve. When your character type comes up you concoct your own version of events, and the other players ask followups.
When the retelling is over, you start several rounds of toasts, boasts and roasts about your own and others’ antics during the delve, chosen from a river of three available toast cards or a blind draw from the deck. The whole time, you’re competing for your win condition, which you’ve chosen in secret before the toasting begins: first pick of the treasure, the dragon slayer, the leader of the party next time, and the biggest braggart. At the end of each round, everyone votes for one of the titles, and the voting criteria are different for each. Sometimes you can’t vote for yourself, sometimes you can. The toasts you’ve chosen might also give you extra votes to pass around. There are some interesting mechanical wrinkles that make this bit really sparkle.
Maybe it was just a lucky first play but I thought Dragon Braggin’ was brilliantly constructed. My wizard got hilariously roasted to hell and back, petty little snipes and heartfelt congratulations were shared, and the whole game ends with the winner of the braggart sharing their sincere feelings with each of the party members. It was the end of the con and it was just a perfect way to wrap things up. One hour, up to six players, and you’ll probably pee yourself laughing. My current favorite party RPG.

https://indiegamereadingclub.com/post-con-deep-dive-3-dragon-braggin/

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E3: It’s Always Trade-Offs Episode Synopsis Paul and Dusey ask ...

2026-10-23T03:48:24Z

E3: It’s Always Trade-Offs

Episode Synopsis
Paul and Dusey ask and answer: is player agency always sacrosanct? Should every new roleplayer start in a dungeon? Did Tolkien know how to name women and did he care? And why everything in every game, table and session is a trade-off. Plus talk about The Slow Knife and Urban Shadows.
Weird Terminology and Acronyms
Bleed: The spillover of emotions between character and player.
DungeonTube: The ecosystem of YouTube creators who make videos about D&D and other RPGs.
Flags/Flagging: An indication of a player’s interests, or disinterests, at the table. An explicit character motivation or goal, a belief, a very high skill, a character class, really anything at all that tells the table “I want this” or, perhaps “I do not want this.”
LARP: Live Action Role Play. Once again we direct you toward Wikipedia for more information. It’s an incredibly rich, complex body of work! IGRC is far more interested in the Nordic larp tradition than other forms.
OSR: Old School Revolution/Revival/Renaissance. Our definition will probably start fights, so go to Wikipedia for a hopefully more neutral take.
PbtA: Powered by the Apocalypse, the meta-platform pseudo-concept not-a-license game design framework that arose with the publication of Apocalypse World.
Player agency: A player’s authority over their character’s actions and feelings at the table.
Trad: A conventional RPG with a central facilitator with control over the world, players with control over their characters, resolution systems mostly concerned with material outcomes, frequently focused on tactical combat. Modern Mythology has a good article that differs from this a little but is still worth reading.
X-Card/Safety: You don’t know everything about everyone at the table, and sometimes subject matter or play style can be upsetting in a way the participants did not opt in for. John Stavropolous created the X-Card, one of the first explicit safety tools. The Indie Game Reading Club has also covered safety.
Games and RPG products referred to in this episode.
These are affiliate links to DriveThruRPG, where hopefully we can earn enough pennies to defray the cost of acquiring these games. The Indie Game Reading Club does not accept free or promotional copies of games! If it’s not available in PDF from DriveThruRPG, we link to the publishers or retailers where the games are available.
Apocalypse World
Avatar Legends
Blades in the Dark
Cowboy Bebop
Dragonbane
Escape the Dark Castle
Fire in the Lake (COIN)
John Company
Masks: A New Generation
Monsterhearts
Mothership
Mutant: Year Zero
Stonetop
Tenra Bansho Zero
The Burning Wheel
The Slow Knife
Torchbearer
Urban Shadows
Wanderhome
Zombie World
Contact Us
As always: If you have questions, comments, ideas or complaints, email us at hello@indiegamereadingclub.com!

https://indiegamereadingclub.com/e3-its-always-trade-offs/

#always #synopsispaul #player #world #slowknife #urbanshadows #apocalypseworld #game #indiegame #readingclub

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Post-Con Deep Dive #2: Elder Mythos I don’t often write ...

2026-10-21T03:26:42Z

Post-Con Deep Dive #2: Elder Mythos

I don’t often write negative reviews. Please understand this.
One of my Arcade regulars from last year’s RinCon asked me to run Elder Mythos specifically. I adore Mana Project Studio’s generic storygame Not The End, liked Cowboy Bebop, their upcoming Ghost in the Shell RPG looks nice, and I had backed this, so…sure, why not? I’m not a huge fan of the Lovecraftian Mythos but I enjoyed Lovecraftesque last year.
Elder Mythos
Available in PDF from DriveThruGames.
The physical box is available from Mana Project Studios.
The pitch is good: rather than playing an investigator or witness or victim of a Mythos conspiracy, everyone plays an Entity of the Mythos themselves: Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and so on. They even pull in some more obscure god-things from the non-Lovecraft authors who added to the Mythos. Each Entity has lesser and greater Designs they’re trying to fulfill on Earth. You pick a scenario – really just a list of locations in a time and place – and go to war with each other. This is not a game of sympathetic, or even flawed, protagonists. You play Evil and/or Unknowable.
The facilitator role is also interesting. Rather than drawing the characters through a story, the facilitator’s job is to help the character furthest back and hinder the character furthest in the lead. Because, you see, this is a competitive RPG. Sort of. It’s more a boardgame-RPG hybrid.
Each player gets two Action Points per turn and starts the game with five Plot Points. When the game is over, whoever has the most Plot Points wins. Players have a constrained list of actions they can take, each of which takes either or both kinds of points to execute. And whenever you take an action, you give it a little fictional positioning so the facilitator (the Entity Master) can judge advantage or disadvantage when it comes time to roll dice.
The actions the Entities can do are declare an objective (set a die on one of the locations, telegraphing your intent to take it over in the future), acquire an objective (actually roll the dice you’ve invested in a location, along with your normal pool which we’ll get to in a second), cultivate an unspeakable resource (every Entity has a couple critters specific to their oeuvre), acquire an unspeakable resource (just like objectives, you have to telegraph what you’re working on before you actually do the thing), or attack a resource (because this is PvP, you can reduce or destroy each other’s critters).
The game is notionally based on the Year Zero Engine (click through to read my piece at Rascal News!) but only in the lightest, shallowest way possible: you roll a pool of dice and if any 6 comes up, you’ve succeeded. If more than one 6 comes up, it’s a catastrophic success. Cute! You roll on another table and other stuff happens. You also earn a Plot Point for your catastrophic success.
Unfortunately, that’s all the Year Zero Engine tech you see. There is no pushing, there are no secondary economies invoked by pushing, and your stats never take hits that require engaging with a recovery action. The lack of pushing turns out to be catastrophic to the system. Read on.
Running The Math
Two other problems move the game from slow-but-playable to just plain broken. One is that there’s a general assumption that you’ll have cultivated and summoned a resource before you do anything else. This is because each resource has a Tier, and you add those right into your dice pool. Great! Now we’re at maybe 7 or 8 dice (you’re limited to 9, and while you’re putting dice on the map you’re reducing your pool – a whole different issue). But how do you get that first resource out?
Which brings us to the second problem. In most cases, rolls are opposed. That is, two or more players are rolling against each other but only the instigator, the player who spent action points, can actually win the roll. If you don’t win, you’ve just lost all those dice and all that time. Bringing out a resource gets harder the higher the Tier: a tier 1 critter gives the EM a base 1 die plus 1 die for that tier. A tier 3, yeah, that’s 4 dice you’re rolling against. And remember: you don’t have to just succeed but actually beat the EM’s roll. Getting the first resource out is ridiculously difficult and slow.
The only roll in the game that’s unopposed is when an Entity has been plopping dice into a point of interest, a location on the map, without anyone else showing an interest in it. Given the each player’s pool of 9 dice, smart play probably means you can’t spread around your dice too far. You can’t play spoiler to someone else’s future Acquire an Objective roll and your own Objective and cultivate and acquire a monster resource. But even if you’re playing smart and focusing on exactly one effort at a time – specifically, moving heaven and earth to get your first resource into play – it’s going to be an opposed roll with good odds of whiffing.
Oh no…they’ve started Running The Math.
It’s never a good sign when the players start running the math at the table. We took a bio break at around the second hour, and a couple of my players just sat there staring at the game state. “How do we win this again?” and “Wait, hold on, walk me through how to build a die pool?” and “Okay hold on here, I’m gonna pull up AnyDice and check something…” and so on. Here’s what we came up with:
Every time you put a die on the table, there needs to be a little narrative (a “zoom in”) attached to that. Doesn’t need to be a lot! Let’s assume 2 minutes. That’s pretty much just a splash of color.
Seizing that first Tier 1 resource seems pretty vital to getting literally anything else out.
You only get 2 Action Points per turn.
“Cultivate an Unspeakable Resource” costs both and Action and Plot point. And you only start with 5 plot points. There are other game effects that generate plot points, all of which require you make rolls. But for starters you can invest only 5 dice into Cultivate.
One zoom-in for each Cultivate action, so let’s say 4 minutes. Yes, you could absolutely get it down lower. But the zoom-ins were at this point the only interesting content to the game.
Let’s also assume, charitably, that your Entity will use a +2 stat. Every Entity in the game either has a single +2 or a couple +1s. That’s the basis of your die pool.
Now let’s build a pool with a better-than-even chance of succeeding. The odds of getting at least one 6 – never mind a “catastrophic success” – breaks 50% at 4 dice. That’s two Cultivate actions plus the Acquire an Unspeakable Resource action. If everyone at a four person table is making the exact same play you’ll get your first 50/50 chance after about a half hour of play.
Oh…but remember this is a contested roll. The GM is also rolling, at this point just 2d6 (1 as a base and 1 for a Tier 1 critter – the higher the tier, the tougher it is). So that 50/50 chance? It just dropped. But let’s set that aside because the GM only has a 30%ish chance of actually getting a 6 (therefore requiring two 6es out of the Entity player, a 13%ish chance).
You might maybe beg an extra 1d6 off the GM if you set up your narrative so that your efforts have a clear advantage. See, the zoom-in mechanism actually has a point! Not only does your narration need to reflect your Entity’s manifestations, it also needs to be setting up a clear advantage. Gods help you if someone else makes a compelling case for interfering, therefore giving you -1d6.
Aaaaand in conclusion, if you fail to make that 50%ish roll and/or the GM makes their 30%ish roll, you lose all the dice you invested. That’s a half-hour gone and no advancement toward getting anything physical on the board. Start over!
That 10 point list is excruciating, right? Imagine talking through it at the table. Imagine extrapolating those numbers to “almost a sure thing” levels for the first Unspeakable Resource! Once you’ve hit 4 dice and a 50%ish chance, every die after that is another 10%ish. Again leaving aside any contested rolls, you’re gonna be a good hour away from making your first 80% roll. Given you lose all your dice when you fail, the cost of failure is catastrophic.
More likely, because it looks easier, a player will choose seize one of the spots on the map and then try and get an Unspeakable Resource on the table. The odds, unfortunately, are the same for this play. It just isn’t costing you Plot Points. And it assumes nobody else will put their dice into a location, therefore turning the roll into a contested thing. Oh! And! If your roll to acquire a location is contested, only the active player can even win it! And, again, lose all the die and more specifically all the time that went into that.
Not a math problem but: the Italians got real high on their own design supply when they did the initiative cards. Tons of gorgeous original art but come on folks.
The shame of all this is that for our first couple of hours, we were getting some pretty neat fictional stuff into play. We chose Lovecraft Country 1922, the OG, spooky New England. Apocalyptic visions gripped Boston as Cthulhu and Hastur struggled over the city, a little girl witnessed bad things at Falcon Point but later was struck by a god’s blessing and then turned into a salt statue, a gentle old woodcutter emerged from his retirement outside Arkham and traveled to the big city only to become someone’s sacrifice. But at hour 2, when everyone had had two or three chances to make moves and set up rolls, and one player got lucky while everyone else whiffed, we ran the math.
For the record, I think Elder Mythos is salvageable. I think the rules can be fixed such that, for example, getting your first resource into play is even possible. Maybe you start with your lowest Tier creature ready to rock? There are no rules for moving your resources from location to location; it appears your Cult or Spawn or Deep Ones or whatever can’t move to a new location, another oversight. Could YZE style pushing be added back in somehow? That would add a lot of texture and much better odds of actually doing anything. Simply remove the opposed roll to bring an Unspeakable Resource into play?
So much stuff in the box. Everything is beautiful. Dice are fun. Fricken’ silver ink! And nothing works.
Competitive games uniquely require very tight math to maintain fairness. While every Entity comes with a custom power and their own Designs they’re trying to fulfill to earn Plot Points, they’re in no way balanced against each other and sometimes require a specific other Entity be in play to score. Hastur and Cthulhu for example have a mutual beef, therefore they can both score one of their Greater Designs if they’re both in play. This game’s math is not tight. The math is not even functional enough to get through a session with anyone doing anything with any regularity.
Right now, I can’t recommend anyone play Elder Mythos. Mana Project produces gorgeous stuff and this box is no exception. But it’s a game-shaped object until we figure out how to fix its engine.
While You’re Here
Don’t forget! Our next episode of the Indie Game Talk Club drops this week. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

https://indiegamereadingclub.com/post-con-deep-dive-2-elder-mythos/

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4 Steps To A Good Player 46 years into this thing and I’m still ...

2026-10-17T03:12:53Z

4 Steps To A Good Player

46 years into this thing and I’m still learning! Man what a life. A quick reflection:
Ran Inevitable at the pub game last night. Offered it as the start of a 3-shot but I think I won’t continue it. In attendance: my cohost’s wife filling in for a no-show, the sister of one of my regulars (who was totally baffled by showing up for the finale of Deathmatch Island last month; I told her to come start a new thing), a couple new guys, brothers I think of one of my regulars. And one guy who, sure enough, showed up thinking I was offering D&D. I really need to come up with a more unambiguous way to convey that my games aren’t D&D. Not gonna lie, I also want to sell tickets. The ambiguity hasn’t bitten me in the ass yet!
You know the thing where 10 happy messages will not quite cancel out one unhappy message? Yeah, that’s not what I learned 45 years in. I know that one. Cohost’s wife played a grumpy old man Mystic and had a good time! The two brothers played a Roamer and a Balladeer and had a good time! Little sister (she’s not “little,” she has a 15 year old) took the one required Errant Knight and was completely at sea about being the one in charge. And a “but I thought this was D&D” guy played a Shadowjack…and also had a good time. Shadowjack player and I agreed the system qua system is quite simple, that all the juice is in the setting and lore and vibes. But of course I kept thinking about the Errant Knight’s player, thrown in the deep end. It made me sad, despite the other players having varying degrees of a good time.
What do I do now?
One of the brothers, the one playing the Roamer, had never played an in-person RPG before. But he’s played Baldur’s Gate. He’s even “designing a one-shot” at home with zeeeero experience outside BG3 online! Love the ambition. And he seems like a smart, self-aware guy. And yes he had a ton of fun, but in debrief he also said “I feel like the good stuff here is in playing more sessions and really getting into the setting, learning about these NPCs, all that.” Smart! But also: “Yeah in BG3 I’m really into messing with the systems and the builds.” Which there really is none of in Inevitable. You get 3 Reputations and 3 Abilities and that’s it.
My first game in my Indie RPG Taster Series at the pub was Zombie World, which is a bit chewier system-wise. Then we ran a 3-shot of Deathmatch Island, which doesn’t have much system but you have to put your hands on at all times. And there’s regular in-game advancement. None of those things exist in Inevitable. In fact, given Inevitable’s scene-level conflict resolution style (not unlike Deathmatch Island!), your awareness of character, situation, plot, all that does all the lifting.
So I guess I’ve always known it but it was a good reminder: awareness of character, situation, plot, stoooory, whether before, during or after play? That stuff doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone. Grown ass adults can spend a lifetime reading and watching shows and not really care about the underlying structures.
My poor lost Errant Knight player was, of course, so worried she wasn’t playing as well as everyone else. And she wasn’t, but not because of the play-acting aspect. That shit’s at the end of my “good play” list, even if it’s the most visible. And that’s my real takeaway, thinking through my good play list. I think it’s this, in order of priority:
Situational awareness. Understanding that whatever is going on in the fiction is your decision space. And “what’s going on” isn’t a snapshot, it’s situation in motion. Where we came from, where we’re going, context.
System awareness. Understanding where you can use the system to project agency. But without #1, you have no idea why you’d want to project agency. Which is why I’m putting this at #2.
Character awareness. Understanding interiority as a thing. Playing in a principled way toward a character’s needs, desires, fears.
Play-acting. Outward expression of your character’s interiority.
Yeah I think that’s my list.
Note I’m not saying mastery. Mastery comes with time and interest. When I say awareness I mean exactly that. Do you even know what the situation/fiction/SIS is? Do you even know where and when you can put your hands on the system? And so on.

https://indiegamereadingclub.com/4-steps-to-a-good-player/

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Guest Appearance: Ludological Alchemy Episode 3 of the Indie Game ...

2026-10-16T03:25:20Z

Guest Appearance: Ludological Alchemy

Episode 3 of the Indie Game Talk Club drops next week, but if you’re eager for more great indie gaming talk before then, my guest appearance on Luke Crane, Christopher Badell and Sam Roberts’ podcast Ludological Alchemy just dropped.
I had such a good time recording with this rogues’ gallery of big gaming brains, but also? What an intimidating cast to try and keep up with. Luke is the mad genius behind The Burning Wheel and currently a games professor at NYU, Christopher Badell‘s claim to fame is Sentinels of the Multiverse (game and comics) and cofounder of Greater Than Games, and Sam Roberts is a cofounder of Indiecade as well as a games educator and and … well, just go look at his website.
Anyway, give it a listen and let me know what you think: https://ludologicalalchemy.substack.com/p/the-hypothesis-volume-3-episode-05

https://indiegamereadingclub.com/guest-appearance-ludological-alchemy/