How do you find inspiration, when the muse isn't giving it to you out of the blue? Find the things you're excited about in a design, and work from there. A short article by Stras featuring two games that didn't start with the core of a mechanical idea and how to work through that to find inspiration and excitement for them. Read More
There’s a strategy we have here at Off Guard Games: Minimum Viable Playtest. Whenever John and I get a game idea, we talk about it for a bit, and see how excited we are by the prospect. What catches our fancy varies. Sometimes it’s a piece of the setting, or… Read More
There are two questions I commonly get about Forged in the Dark games: What is the essence of Forged in the Dark? What makes FitD games, FitD games?What do you do first when designing a hack? I've heard a number of answers to the first (It has phases! Or ... it mechanises the crew sheet!)... but I've argued against those in my own way—by making hacks for my home table that disprove the theory. Read More
One thing that John pushes me to do when we design games, is to think about the world beyond the scope of the current adventure. To get Scum and Villainy off the ground, we just needed to know the streets of Rin, and the spaceport where the Stardancer was locked down. That's enough to run an escapade, and have a great first session. To make a game, you want to paint a world in both broad strokes (there is a Hegemony) and in painstaking detail (this person's sister was kidnapped by the Counters guild). But there's a different scope to look at a setting from, one that looks at painting enough rules to set up a world where you can tell multiple different stories. Read More