Jay Dragon (& Friends)

Hierophant (Draft 4)

I've added a new draft of the Hierophant for Seven-Part Pact! This new version of the Hierophant has new rules for the temples (to reflect them as centers of faith for the entire populace of Isha), new rules for cults and prophets, and a new creation/apocalypse myth. It's available in the same Google Docs folder as everything else.

I'll be getting surgery on October 15th, so this is probably my last Patreon post before then. I may end up doing some posting while I'm stuck in bed, but I ...

Possum's Essentials Issue #2 (Truths)

I've got a lot going on. In two weeks (October 15!) I'll be getting bottom surgery. I'm extremely grateful for all the amazing people who already donated to my recovery fund. If you missed the chance to donate, I would love if you instead gave support to Dahnoun Mutual Aid, a Palestinian mutual aid organization helping to distribute supplies in Gaza.

In...

Let's Keep It On The Down-Low

Hello my dear readers, fans, friends, and foes,

I've been in Alabama at Auburn College as a visiting writer, and I've been working on a new article. It's gonna be really big and explosive when it comes out, one of those real passionate calls to action that I know is gonna get everyone to start talking. I would like to release it early for my patrons (and I know that having all your eyes on it asking me questions about it will help me clarify my thoughts), but I also know that it's gonna...

Design Diary — Avery's Feedback In Detail

Here's Avery's suggested feedback notes from part one of her work on Seven-Part Pact. Thank you Avery for letting me share this with all of you!

Design Diary — Incorporating Feedback

At the start of the month, I received the first wave of design feedback from the Developmental Editor Avery Alder. This isn't the first time we've worked together, but every time I get to sit with her and talk to her about game design, I feel blessed beyond words. She is one of the principle reasons I got into tabletop games! Both in 2015, when I encountered Monsterhearts as a teenager and realized the transformative properties of tabletop RPGs, and also in 2018, when I attended a wo...

Design Diary — The Warlock, Revisited

Developmental editing is a sobering process. When you’re writing a game you get used to careless writing, leaving gaps that only you know for certain how to fill. For a game as broad as Seven-Part Pact, I cannot allow that level of ambiguity. The game is so meandering and so broad that ambiguity must be a tool used with specificity, not from thoughtlessness. But I’ve been working on her for so long that I’ve grown careless.

For the past month, the renowned game designer Avery Alde...

"Does Super Mario Bros. Have Any Rules?"

No! Yes! Well, maybe? Depends on what rules are! No, it depends on what a game is! Depends…

I knew I would be sparking some controversy by posting that online. It's openly cheeky and disruptive to how people think about rules in games. I'm proud of myself for managing to find a qu...

A Small Tip For Making Changes

Hi new folks! Before I get to the article, I just wanted to say wow; there's a lot of you who have joined — thank you so much! I'm extremely grateful for everyone putting eyes on Seven-Part Pact. Please be patient with me while I fix typos and make adjustments. Currently the game is being dev-edited by the fantastic Avery Alder, and I probably won't put out a new update until she's done and I've integrated her changes. If you want to see what else I've been up to, be aware that a paid ...

Toys vs. Rules

I've been fascinated by toys lately. I have a deck of magic cards (my Pistols At Dawn Battlebox) that I carry around with me everywhere; I call it my toy. Lately I've been thinking of "toy making" as an important part of my creative process, on par or even higher than my game design. But what is a toy? How do toys relate to games? What is it about toys that has so fully fascinated me?

Design Diary — The Sorcerer's Prentice

I'm reaching the point where Seven Part Pact, the core of it, barring any certain upheavals or revelations from playtesting (or feedback from certain developmental editors who will be assisting)......is done. I'll put out Draft 4 soon — it'll be very similar to draft 3.25.05, but with a big label on it saying "DONE FOR NOW!"

It's a terrifying feeling, and it's almost impossible to let go of my baby, especially considering all the work it has taken to get her this far. Th...

Book Games

I want to think for a moment about another way to talk about games, TTRPGs, and play. 

"Game" is a strange word, as it refers to a mode of engagement rather than an object in its own right. We can look at anything and produce a "game" from it if we want to. It has a lot in common with "art," which is another word whose invocation has more to do with how we engage with something rather than some quality possessed within the object itself. A rug can be art if I hang it in a ...

Design Diary — Building The Pyramid

There's a piece of advice I often give people when they're working on their crowdfunding, and it's also extremely true in game design — as growth scales linearly, effort scales expontentially. If you're not a math nerd, let me explain what that means.

It's easy to assume that adding new things to your project will result in a linear amount of growth. You ran your first Kickstarter, and working with one artist was extremely easy, so you may assume that working with three art...

Seven Part Pact 3.25.05 Update

Hi all, there's a new update to Seven-Part Pact. It's available for Rapscallions and Tatterdemalions at this link. I know I say this every time I finish an update, but I think this may be the last one for a while. I've got a lot of shit I'm working on (I'm hoping to share a board game I've been working on, and also more from the Wanderhome expansion!) and I need a goddamn break from Wizards. Anyway...

Reflection on Board Games as Poetry

Occasionally I've remarked that board games are similar to poetry in the way TTRPGs are similar to prose. I'm still not confident in this claim, and I don't think it's universally applicable. I would even say that most people's instincts go the other way, and would assume the opposite. But I want to lay out my claim here. Perhaps on my Medium I'll give some examples and do a whole proper article about it. For now, he...

The Palette Grid

While I’ve been working on a new game lately (Seven-Part Pact, as if I’m ever working on anything else) I ran into an issue with a lot of safety tools and how they’re implemented. Specifically, I found myself wanting to include Lines & Veils, but being really dissatisfied with how Lines & Veils approaches difficult topics. So (as I often do when working on games like...

New Updates to Seven-Part Pact

Hi all, happy new year. I've got a ton of stuff going on, and amongst them is my continuous tinkering with Seven Part Pact, my strange and enigmatic Wizardgame. I've been working on a new update for 3 months now, and I've been putting off posting that update because I've needed to make various changes. Rather than delay further, I figured — fuck it, here's what I've got.

If you're a R...

Design Diary — Thinking About Metaphor

This is hardly a blog post. It's really more of a series of rambles from an overworked girl trying to get some thoughts she's been carrying around on paper. This isn't really explicitly about Seven-Part Pact, but I think the eagle-eyed amongst you can deduce why my work on Seven-Part Pact is prompting me to write it.

So here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about. It’s not really an article yet but it’s a sketch of one, perhaps? An advantage of being on the Patreon is th...

Design Diary: Using Every Part of the Meeple

Hi new Patrons! This is a design diary, a series of articles I write (mostly-weekly) to provide insight into what I'm currently grappling with. They tend to be focused on Seven-Part Pact, but they may branch out as my interests continue to percolate.

So I’m normally a Tabletop RPG designer, but I’ve been doing forays into board games lately as part of my work on the ongoing sprawling wizard project currently called 2024-11-19 02:46:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Design Diary: Triangulation & The Sorcerer

I spent all last weekend playing Seven-Part Pact with my friends. It was a miraculous experience, and I’m so grateful to my buddy Taylor Moore for setting it up, renting the AirBnB in upstate NY, and bringing his telescope. The aurora borealis shined upon our play session, and one of the players was a professional chef, so we ate like queens. It was really wonderful, and it was fascinating — I was one of the only players without any AP/podcasting experience, and watching som...

Where Does The Game Live

I like to joke about two sets of hypothetical scenarios. I want you to read both sets, and compare: in which situations would you personally describe the player as “playing the game” and which would you perhaps wonder if she’d be better off playing a different RPG or making her own?

Here’s the first set:

• A Dungeons & Dragons GM runs up to you and excitedly tells you about her new campaign. It uses all the mechanics of D&D but it’s set in...

  2024-10-07 16:01:54 +0000 UTC View Post

Seven Part Pact October Update

Hey folks! Finished up the next round of updates on the Seven-Part Pact, available at the same link as last time for Patrons $10 and up (and also anyone who wants to buy the post outright through Patreon) in a new Gdocs folder (should be pretty obvious, it's the one labeled "3.24.10."

New updates include:

• Rewrote Mariner, Hierophant, and Sorcerer Domain games!

• <...
  2024-10-03 02:25:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Play Communities (part 1): My History of Play

I went upstate recently and visited home after a couple years in Philadelphia. I played in a LARP at my summer camp for the first time in ages — dressed up as an old vampire and read tarot fortunes for the kids in-character. I met up with old friends and hung out with them, and after a little bit it was like no time at all had passed. That’s the thing about playing with old friends — it doesn’t matter what game you play, it’s about how you play together. And even at my sum...

Design Notes: Ages & Challenges in Seven-Part Pact

I’ve been struggling for a while now with a central conflict between two desires buried within the Seven-Part Pact. One desire was to make the game as much of a sandbox as possible for experienced players, something that can serve as a repository of endless creativity and explosive challenge. The competing desire was to make it possible for less-experienced players to sit down and integrate into the game at all, which would necessitate a tight tutorial experience and successive gat...

Design Diary: Balancing Spells

The Grimoire in Seven-Part Pact is a really interesting and very dense text. It’s a 99% fictional description of a huge variety of spells, and then players interpret those spells into mechanical Impact. The Grimoire is written in a comprehensive and technical style, but obviously it still leaves a tremendous amount of ambiguity. Magic can be used at every scale of the game, from “I’m helping a local farmer find a good spot to dig a well” to “destroying an entire empire in a single i...

Design Diary: Flip It Turnways

The Seven-Part Pact patreon docs are out — lots of people are checking them out, I'm getting a lot of good feedback, I'm running some playtests, all is well. However I quickly spotted a pretty major problem. The Sorcerer, the Great Lord of Magic himself, is built all wrong! He's certainly better than he was when he was the Librarian (see my previous Design Diary) but he's still not clicking together right. But I think I've found a solution. Let me go into how he's set up, the issues, I...

Villain School Pitch

I've had an idea for an LCG for the past couple of months (ever since I was on a train with a couple friends of mine heading up to NYC to celebrate their birthday and I was complaining about a TTRPG that uses cards in a way that I felt could be a lot more compelling, and I started pitching how I would go about implementing / representing those mechanics) and while I don't really have time to actually put together a whole LCG to test this out, I wanted to at the very least record my ideas for ...

Seven-Part Pact Exclusive is Available Now

Hello everyone! After six months of non-stop toiling, I've finally finished the third draft of the Seven Part Pact! You should upgrade your tier and check it out, if you're interested in it.

The seven greatest wizards in the world convene upon the isles of Isha, their powers aligned in the service of an ancient Pact. Each governs their Domain, wielding power beyond comprehension, seeking to balance the responsibilities of their power with their selfish heart's desire. Will ...

2024-08-22 22:24:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Design Notes: Two Wizards Enter, Two Different Wizards Leave

I'm back from Gencon, and ready to get back into Seven-Part Pact design. On the long drive home with Ruby, I had some important breakthroughs around the game, specifically around the two most powerful Wizards in Seven-Part Pact. For those unfamiliar, the lineup of Wizards is:

• The Necromancer, Gate-Keeper, who has GM authority over death and the dying.

• The Hierophant, Flame-Keeper, who has GM authority over companions, common folk, and faith.

• The War...

  2024-08-09 16:14:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Design Notes: Seven-Part Pact and Queering

I'm writing this design diary inbetween two of the most stressful possible weeks of my life. Possum Creek is having a rough time (something which I'll be able to talk more about after Gencon), and while through gumption and wit we've been able to string together some possible solutions, it's taken an enormous emotional toll. And, while all that's been going on, I've been touring around Yazeba's and preparing for the biggest con of the year. I can't believe we're even gonna be able to make...