Trick's Tales

A collage I made inspired by this essay. What my mother and the trees taught me was this - there are 3 places to touch the divine. The cathedral, the theater, and the forest. The cathedral sparkles. There's exquisite suffering in Catholicism. And I really admire it, how aesthetically rich that suffering is, the way they dramatize it, the way they bring excruciating death to life. I love the gold, the scale, the awe, the detail, the light, the dazzling array of beauties reaching beyond one's tiny human form. To experience it, one had to shut themself off, contort themself; simmer in doubt, shame, guilt, fear; wonder and awe at the blood and sacrifice, the wine and incense, the dread secrets. The cathedral's music, soaring high, high, arced by the gay music director, then silenced by a new bishop. At least that was my experience of it. If you don't grow up in a cathedral, you cannot possibly imagine (I imagine) the shame dug into your breasts and the fuzzy disappearance o...

Some of my blog is directed at people like me who exist in the indie dev or OSR scenes, but I want to address Dungeons & Dragons for a bit. This is Part 1 of the Play Something Else (If You Want) series.

I write this in comfort in Vienna, warmed by a space heater in my long-suffering Austrian boyfriend's apartment, debating in the GM Supergroup about whether gaming and game design is resistance. We read this article by Lin Codega as part of the conversation. It's a sweet perspective, and certainly one that I have considered before. Utopian imaginaries have their space in tabletop roleplaying, from the explicitly utopian worlds of solarpunk (check out the Applied Hope solarpunk gamejam entries here ) to the cozy games of queer found families such as Our Traveling Home , which includes within the rulebook the instructions that "while the stakes are high, this game will always have a happy ending. The queer romance will resolve happily, and everyone in the family will get to have a happily ever after." In fact, utopia studies scholars have written an entire book on the intersection of utopia and tabletop roleplaying, although I confess that I haven't read it and am...

I'm about low barriers to entry, where it takes less than 30 minutes to learn the rules. I'm about story gaming x OSR. I'm about emotions, performance, telling a story, the players as characters and audience. I'm about deconstruction, finding the limits of the hobby and pushing on them. I'm about experimentation, breaking the norms of my own manifesto. I'm about deeply-considered worldbuilding. I'm about embracing that feeling of strangeness that you encounter when you travel, when your assumptions about how things are are turned upside down. I'm about undertold stories of underrepresented people, writing in the nooks and crannies between the genre/culture heavyweights. I'm about anthropology, history, political science, linguistics, comparative psychology, decolonial studies, and maybe a dash of heterodox economics. I'm about breaking the rules of physics, vernacular architecture, tropical fruit, magical realism, pulling on one thread and seeing...

This is a GM-less, comedic, collaborative storytelling game for 3-5 people that's heavily inspired by Fiasco. Has been used to run stories of undersea scams, horror in the alpine woods (featuring a llama farmer), a call me by your name knockoff with identical twins ("call me by my brother's name), and the killing of the human embodiment of climate change.  Will post the Word Lists and Twist Table (necessary for play) later.

“No hay tierra para los ancianos”, dijo la voz que resonó desde la boca oscura de la puerta grande. El viejo se encogió de hombros y se alejó de la puerta, escuchando como se cerraba detrás de él. No esperaba nada de esta comunidad. Ser viejo en esta época era un pecado – el robo del aire y agua de los niños que no tenían culpa por el estado del mundo. En el pasado, él gritaba y maldecía las pisadas de los que lo rechazaban. “Yo no hice nada!” él pisaba y gritaba. El suelo debajo temblaba mientras la ira corría por sus piernas y pies. Las puertas nunca se afectaban por la furia del hombre, y con el tiempo y el viaje, él se convirtió en un viejo y comprendió sus defectos. Su existencia en las épocas anteriores era bastante. Sus años finales en este estado fueron apropiados. Los escombros en el suelo en esta área eran llanos por los pies de miles de viajeros que pasaban por ellos. El polvo se asentó alrededor de sus dedos de pie, y las espirales y las arrugas estaban negras de la mugre. ...