Old Men Running The World

Old Men Running The World

The TTRPG viewed THrough monocles, addled by port.

  • Hot Under The Collar For The Cold War: Dr Malcolm Craig on his classic RPGs redone for 2025

    Jim’s note: this was actually in the last TEETH RPG newsletter, but I figured I would cross-post because the Kickstarter has now gone live and it looks fantastic. Malcolm Craig is an erudite creator and has plenty to say. If you missed this before, go read!

    Malcolm Craig is a senior lecturer of American history at Liverpool John Moores, but his interest in both the Cold War and in RPGs runs much further back. Now, nearly twenty years on from his original indie releases of Cold War RPGs, he’s releasing a new edition. Having been intrigued by this prospect when we talked the Jon Handiwork a few newsletters ago, we were glad to find that Malcolm was also up for a little chat.

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  • Designer Notes: How Do Aliens Do “It”?

    I’ve released a new game zine! You can grab How Do Aliens Do “It”? here, which is a pay-what-you-want-or-not Carved from Brindlewood game about Alien teenagers in a repressive, information-scarce society gather to share what each of them knows and try and work out how doing “it” works, and how they feel about that. It’s a playful game which tries to approach big stuff lightly, and I’m really happy with it.

    And for those who want to know the process, here’s the designer notes (which are also in the game)…

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  • A Reading: Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Black City: Second Edition

    Jim’s note: I wrote a version of this for the TEETH newsletter last year, but with Our Golden Age looming somewhere in the uncertain space of development, I thought I’d return to it. One thing I’d say: I am a lot closer to getting UVG to table than I was when I wrote this, and what has changed is the work I currently want to do to get a game into play, and also a desire to dabble in something weirder. Anyway…

    I casually mentioned over on the TEETH Discord that I might give UVG:2E (UK stock) a quick read-write up, and so here it is. To be clear: we’ve not run this as at the table, but I always read more books than we have time to run games, and so I feel it’s absolutely okay to spend some time talking about that first part. The reading of books, I mean.

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  • What I’d Tell You To Try If You Told Me Your Game Sucks

    Look, ma, I can do clickbait titles. I’m a real boy content generator now.

    I wasn’t going to call the article that. It’s very much what I’d use if I was 20-30 years younger on Youtube and forced to try and engage with that hellscape. Instead, I am on a blog: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. I don’t need to do it. I am, because while the blog is a lightsaber, it is a lightsaber made of shits and giggles.

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  • Previously On: Mothership

    Jim’s note: this was previously posted on the TEETH RPG newsletter. (Sign up! Share with people!) I’ve added some subsequent thoughts to this, because we played it even more since I wrote this. My promise to “write about Mothership” became something of a joke on the newsletter, taking me a couple of years to reach this incomplete conclusion. But at least it’s a start, eh?

    Mothership. I Finally Wrote About Mothership.

    I was poised to write something about Mothership a while back, but a couple of things gave me pause. Firstly, my group really wanted to play another game of it. We weren’t sure we were “playing it right”, and felt like we needed to give it another shake, just to make sure the wrinkles weren’t ones we’d put there ourselves.

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  • Why DUNGEONs, Though?

    Jim’s note: An older, lesser version of this article originally appeared via the TEETH RPG Newsletter!

    This week, for reasons unclear, we played Heroquest on Tabletop Simulator.

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  • DIE RPG: Designer Notes

    These originally occurred in the DIE Arcana beta. I’ve tweaked them a little to give any perspective born of bringing the game to completion.

    The early drafts of DIE RPG were mostly written in a mode which Grant described as Uncle Kieron leaning over to you in the pub and ranting enthusiastically. Some of that remains in the final book, as one can’t purge that level of avuncular horror that easily.

    However, one thing I don’t talk about explicitly is what I was trying to actually do. And so this is basically me answering the question “Hey, Kieron, wtf you doing here, man?”

    My primary aims were to:

    1. Support the themes of the comic in a different medium.
    2. Be as accessible as possible.

    These broke down in a few areas.

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  • Feng Shui: A Hard-Bitten Cop And Some Game Rulings That Changed Me Forever

    Jim’s note: a version of this article was originally published in the wonderful, the singular, and the dramatic TEETH RPG Newsletter! Subscribe for these reasons.

    I had planned to write about setting-agnostic rule systems, system-agnostic settings, and the way in which we sometimes hack one game to work with another title’s adventures. I admit that some of the reason for this was that I really like saying the word agnostic. What a beaut! Agnostic. I relish it. This proposed essay, if I ever write it, and let’s assume that I already have, links to something about vibes in dice rolls in a later newsletter, building up a sort of coherent commentary on RPGs as sampled and adapted literature and the quilts of meaning that we build out of related cultural materials. {I am actually working on this, soon. – jim}

    As you can see, great stuff is already happening in my imagined future.

    But in the present something more important arrived from the past: I remembered a game of Feng Shui.

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  • An Imagined Atlas Of Imaginary Atlases

    Jim’s note: the New York Times last week ran an article on one of the very greatest contributors to TTRPG history, fantasy atlas-maker Karen Wynn Fonstad. You can take a look at it here. This kicked me in the mind with an overpowering Proustian rush and I returned to my copies of her atlases of Pern, Middle Earth, and the Forgotten Realms. Then I remembered I had already written about fantasy atlases on the TEETH RPG newsletter. And THEN I realised I could post it up here. And you can read that, below.

    I own a surprising number of atlases. Some are straightforward atlases. You know the sort: large-format hardback books containing maps of the world. Others, like The Times Atlas Of World History, which I somehow own multiple editions of, are also grand acts of generalised erudition: formidable slabs of publishing achievement that have been iterated over decades of republishing to explain something with maps. In this case, the general history of the human race.

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  • An Interview With Citizen Sleeper Creator, Gareth Damian Martin

    Jim’s note: this interview is from the TEETH Newsletter back in 2023, but with TTRPG-adjacent Citizen Sleeper 2 imminent (yes! At the end of the month) so we thought it timely to repost here on Old Men.

    Who is this person? Why, it’s Gareth Damian Martin, the writer, game designer and artist that some of you will doubtless recognise from Citizen Sleeper, a game that could hardly blend our interests any more concretely: inspired by the dice-pooling magic of Blades In The Dark’s role-playing systems and combining these sleights of dicery with the satisfying solo crunch of the digital game. Not played it yet? Then do so, right after, or perhaps even before, reading this. We talk to Gareth about the connection between tabletop RPGs and digital games and their – inevitable? – slide back towards an RPG of their own, Cycles Of The Eye.

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