Author: Kieron Gillen

  • 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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  • About A Girl (Underground) and Protagonism

    I played Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross’ Girl Underground a couple of years back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) Portal Fantasy game , where the group play a girl who arrives in a fantasy world, meets some chums, travels across the world, learns some lessons and eventually clicks their ruby slippers and goes home.

    In short: it’s a Wizard-of-Oz-’em-up.

    It’s an excellent game. This article isn’t going to be about that.

    It’s going to be about the one element which didn’t quite work for me, and where that took me.

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  • Gates, Chests, Keys & More: The Elements of an Adventure

    I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.

    DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.

    However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.

    In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”

    This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.

    1. Gates
    2. Chests
    3. Keys
    4. Signposts
    5. Smoke Machines
    6. Menus
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  • Welcome

    Firstly, Happy New Year.

    Secondly, welcome to Old Men Running The World.

    Over the years we have each amassed a bunch of RPG writing which has no decent home online, and should have one. We’ve become aware that we both basically talk RPG stuff each and every day, and we think doing some of that talking in public may be worthwhile. We’re also aware that we both have Hypergraphic Tendencies, and a safe platformn for that overwhelming impulse also seems like a good idea. We have things we’d like to say, and so a place to say it seems reasonable. This is that place.

    (When editing DIE RPG, and cutting another huge and sprawling essay that really was extraneous, Grant Howitt liked to say: “Kieron – you have a blog.” Well, no, he didn’t have a blog, not a real one. But now he does. So you can and should blame Grant.)

    We’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to post, but we didn’t want to overwhelm the site at launch, so picked a handful of articles to give a taste of our flavours and obsessions. But this will grow and change. We probably will write something about a game other than Trophy Gold eventually, for example. Jim has a whole lot of interviews he’s done with interesting figures in RPG. Kieron really does have a bunch of old DIE RPG stuff to do, too. And there are some new thoughts we want to pull together into an essay shape for publishing here.

    Some of our stuff for this place will probably appear via our respective newsletters first. Or it might not. But it is the relative ephemerality of the newsletter that has, in part, inspired this place. So it will appear here eventually, and make this place a home and an archive.

    In short, we’re here, we’re thinking in public, because we think thinking in public is both fun and occasionally useful.

    Thanks for popping in.

    Kieron & Jim.

    [image credit]

  • 7 Things Which Will Make You A Better Player In Any RPG

    This was first published via Kieron’s newsletter, a while back.

    One of the things which I’ve been chewing over since getting back into RPGs is that there’s so much advice for GMs and so little advice for players. I keep thinking over why – though the whys aren’t what I’m about to write about. This is prompted by seeing some folk believe that there was no such thing as general player advice, and all advice is system/genre specific.

    Which got me thinking. Do I think that’s true? As the list below shows, I don’t.

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  • Trophy Gold: Another Review

    This review was originally posted to Kieron’s newsletter . It’s been edited slightly, as there was a whole section about how folks often unsubscribe to the newsletter when I wrote at length about RPGs, which clearly isn’t needed here. A note on content too – I don’t trace the genealogy of mechanics at all. This was written as an entryist review to speak to a curious audience mostly unaware of the indie rpg scene of the last decade and change.

    I’ve been searching for treasure for a long time. I have my freeform player-narrative games. I have my doomed horror games. I have my classical adventure games, in various traditions. I have a whole bunch of games that do great things which are entirely separate from all the things that D&D did and does. But I didn’t have a game which found a precise spot I craved satisfied two core things at once.

    In short, I had an itch. Trophy Gold scratches the itch. It scratches the itch firing a crossbow bolt through it. It is intensely co-operative. It is intensely merciless. It was exactly what I needed.

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