Hi Reader,

Welcome! Please, come in, make yourself at home. On the table, next to some humble, xeroxed character sheets, is a tiny ceramic pot holding a lush orchid.

I've been thinking about the densely packed experience lately.

Like movies. Even though they're today's prestige storytelling format, even a great movie is just two hours (okay, two and a half) of light and sound. But in that time, it takes you on a rollercoaster. When it drops you off at the end, you feel richer—not twenty dollars and a tub of popcorn poorer.

A single comic book issue is ink on paper. It's 20 pages as wide as your hand. But it's packed with contrast, gesture, pacing, and acting. It dances your eyes across the panels. If it's, say, Bone issue 16, it might floor you. And I read it in black and white!

Even a short pop song can feel epic. Julien Baker's "Rejoice" is less than four minutes. Just her and her guitar. But it builds into a hurricane of pain, grief and exultation.

So.

How do we pack a hurricane into a tabletop role-playing game?

Start with the book: You get 200-odd pages, maybe filled with colorful artwork, hopefully with evocative graphic design. Get clever with it. Mikey Hamm splashed in-world PSAs throughout Slugblaster. Another Mythworks game, The Wildsea, brilliantly sets its text and painterly art in a landscape-oriented book, echoing the course of your chainsaw ship across the top of an endless forest.

But RPG books are wormholes, TARDISes. They're Alice's looking-glass. You open one up and tip forward into something more—an experience.

Broader than a movie, deeper than a novel. In a precious four hours a week—or a month—you and your friends chat, eat, pick up where you left off, navigate the rules, get into character, and somehow tell stories you keep telling the rest of your life.

It's alchemy. It's games at their best.

We need to aim for it all the time.

I often salivate with envy at board games—their enormous boxes full of wood, cardboard and plastic components that introduce dimensions of touch, juxtaposition and spatial awareness. They have me fantasizing about dice, maps and tokens. Fall of Magic vibes.

But an RPG's essential trick is building a theater in your mind. While terrain and minis power wargames, in my experience they can only amplify an RPG.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I just think about the world contained in a grain of sand. How a medium's constraints don't limit its potential effect.

Maybe don't waste it. Use the medium for everything it's got. Trust the players to go there with you. Don't waste page-count on fluff or game-time on grind when you could be changing someone's life.

That's what I tell myself anyway.

Cheers,
Chrys

P.S. I won't say Defy the Gods will change your life, but I won't say it won't. Funded and cruising toward its first stretch goal!