Hi Reader,

Welcome! Please, come in. Have some hot cocoa. It’s raining out. On the table, I’ve got paper, crayons, safety scissors, and Elmer’s glue. (It dries clear!)

Tonight, we’re doing crafts. And the craft project is: Make a world that has you in it.

When you were younger, did you ever see Richard Scarry’s ”Best Rainy Day Book Ever”? I'm dating myself. It was this kids’ book with all these paper crafts in it. You would color in the drawings, cut them out (in theory) and fold them into 3D shapes. Then you have stores along a city street, with cars and buses driving along it, and little animals doing jobs or just walking to work. It starts out as black and white pages, and it ends up being a whole world.

We never did cut out those pages. I think that’s why I remember them so clearly.

Regardless, I loved the book’s generous offer: It was like, this book isn’t complete until you make something out of it. Here, please, do.

I love this about games, too—their generosity. They make room for the reader. They give the reader a kit.

Gorgeous pictures and vibrant text don’t make for a complete game book—not until the reader uses it. Until they pour their imagination into it, it’s just raw materials and instructions.

The best games are doubly generous. They don’t just give the reader a kit to make houses and cars, or even origami dragons folded along predetermined lines. They say, "We think, if you follow the instructions and cut along the lines, you'll end up with something from your dreams. Here's the kind of kit we're offering"—the game's themes and ethos—"but we can't tell you exactly what it'll look like, because this spot here is where you slot yourself into it." The kit gives life to the reader’s dreams and helps them live into those dreams, so that even when the game's over, they're seeing the dream more clearly.

For my money, tabletop role-playing games are more generous than video games. But the affordances are different. The magic of video games is technological: a box that lights up with moving pictures that you change and remix. The magic of tabletop RPGs is, I suppose, literary: a book with pieces of fiction that you use to tell a story. It's also easier to see, in a tabletop game, how incomplete it is until the reader uses it. Because the stories you spin are unique to you.

There's been a lot of ink spilled over Baldur's Gate 3, including step-by-step instructions on how to reach one or another juicy cut scene. And people get big feelings over seeing and hearing that story play out. But you can't even give step-by-step instructions to reach a particular scene in a TTRPG, because nobody knows the scenes you'll play out, or even the characters you'll play.

I talk a lot about making a world with you in it. I don't know why this is so important to me, but I know a lot of people don't feel like the world as we get it has room in it for them. If a game can do something moral and not just aesthetic, maybe it's by changing that feeling.

Those are the kinds of games I want to make.

Whoof.

That’s a lot, right?

That’s a lot. That’s a tall order.

Fortunately, all I have to do is make the kit. Then you cut out the pages and put the pieces together.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S. Defy the Gods is all about this—changing the world, making it fit you. Imagine messy romances, thrilling fights, unforeseeable transformations, and a podium from which to challenge the gods. Doesn't that sound wild?