Flashback to a time where I hastily invented a bunch of label names for rooms in a haunted mansion. The rooms were for specific characters, I was rushing to get placards printing, and it was an event set at Christmas — so I just named the rooms after spices. The Cinnamon Room, Saffron, Ginger etc. I was annoyed at myself because I’d no time to think more deeply about the names. I really like thematic connections and hiding clues and I didn’t have a chance to do that.

After a conversation with a friend today, I realised that I should write down the RPG rules system I use for the audio-RPG Flotsam and a couple of other games. Over the years I’ve used fewer and fewer rules in my games, as we prefer not to get in the…

Here’s One Simple Trick That Might Surprise You. Or something like that. An easy thing to do, but absolutely invaluable to me when I’m writing: Read your words out loud. If you stumble, rewrite them. I use this all the time, and it makes a huge difference to my work! …

We open on a forest. In that forest is a person. They are wearing rough, homespun clothing. They have pointy ears. Therefore magic exists. At least, in the mind of your viewer. Magic exists, so do dragons, there are probably goblins, people hit each other with swords, they ride around…

I’ve written before about how we use something called moment-based design. The idea is that you have a set of things that you want to happen, moments that you feel are critical to your story or to your game. …

I wanted to set down some thoughts about story theme as we at Talespinners use it in computer games, because it’s been coming up in conversations with our mentees. …

A one-page tabletop RPG — I had a bit of time this weekend, so put together a one-page tabletop RPG in which you are a cadet in the King’s Musketeers, as a sort of companion piece to our larp All for One. It’s mostly an exercise in trying to make mechanics feel fast, loose, and a bit like gambling. You can download it for free over here.

Lightweight collaborative character creation for larp — This is a method for generating larp characters that we’ve developed at Crooked House over a couple of decades to address issues we were having with our own events and in attending others. I go into the reasons for some of these design decisions in this article. It supports a…

It’s common to conflate immersion with realism, certainly in larp. To think that players aren’t fully immersed in an experience if there’s something which will break the reality of it. In larp, this often materialises as having to make sure props are convincing and authentic, or you ruin the player’s…