Inept Writes Games

Welcome back to Worldbuildify!, the series where we examine a non-interactive property, like a book, a tv series, or even something more abstract like a concept album or a painting and discuss how we’d turn it into a ttrpg. Why? Because sometimes it’s fun to play in a world we’ve become immersed in, and sometimes the process of trying to adapt something gives us ideas for other projects. Such is the case here. Today, we’re turning our gaze to the ABC TV series Glitch (2019) by Louise Fox and Tony Ayre. It follows six individuals who have been brought back from the dead (the Risen) through some sort of occult science, the human connections they left behind and are trying to reconnect with, and the implacable undead hunters that reality sends to put them back in the grave.  Review It’s a great show (for the first two seasons). It’s picked interesting characters, each defined by different periods in Australian history; you have “John Doe”, a British criminal and local highwayman*, Pa...

Worldbuildify! is a new series where we’ll be taking a non-interactive property; a book, a movie, a concept album, a series of nightmarish paintings daubed on the walls of an abandoned house, etc, and looking at what we would do if we were tasked with creating a ttrpg setting based on that property.  In this, our first foray,  we’ll be looking at Gareth Hanrahan ’s The Sword Defiant for a couple of reasons. 1) Gareth is an author who straddles both literature and ttrpgs; Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, 13th Age, The One Ring, Traveller, and a tonne more on the ttrpg side, and several book series on the lit side; and I think he’s extremely cool and inspirational - there’s a really big section of the ttrpg world that wouldn’t exist without him. 2) As part of his Black Iron Legacy book series, he created a ttrpg adventure called The Walking Wounded , which was exactly what we’re going to do here, taking the world of his book series, and making it gameable, and reading that was th...

Or, As Little as Possible, As Much as Necessary In a recent conversation with a friend of mine elbow-deep into their latest WIP , the topic of worldbuilding came up. More specifically, about when and how to worldbuild in the context of writing settings for a gamebook. My view? As little as possible; as much as necessary. This is a fun phrase, but it’s also pretty trite, so let's unpack it. We’ll also talk a little bit about what draws me as a GM to a particular system’s setting, and how I adapt setting guides into my storytelling and play, and what sorts of lessons we can draw as designers from that. To be clear - we’re working from a philosophy here that prioritises time at the table over time in prep - if you enjoy reading a tie-in novel to get you in the mood, for example - this won’t necessarily be useful to you. Here’s a (partially) rhetorical exercise: When I’m running a game, 90% of that setting’s lore is functionally useless. What does the snake kingdom of Najara have to do...