CHAINMAIL: 06.16.2024

Chainmail is a weekly newsletter dedicated to sharing the abundance of excellent content available in the TTRPG space. You'll find YouTube videos, blog posts, quotes from books, and many other forms of media related to improving your skills as game masters and world builders. Enjoy!

Blorb Principles - IDIOMDROTTNING

This is a really fantastic framework for understanding sandbox styles of play and how to run a sandbox of your own. It's one of those core blog posts that has left ripples in the community ever since it was written. It's not long, give it a read.

Storytelling and Role-Playing are Incompatible - The Tomb of Lime Gaming

A provocative title, but I think it gets to the heart of what makes TTRPGs special. What separates them from movies? Novels? Video games? What makes them unique as a medium? I think it's worth spending some time thinking about what makes our hobby shine and what ways we can design in order to highlight those special characteristics.

Game Design by Abstraction - Explorers Design

Really love this peak into the design philosophy of Clayton over at Explorers Design. He talks about how subtraction is just as important, or maybe even more so, as addition when creating a new system or hacking an existing one. We shouldn't just create new sub-systems in order to resonate with our chosen themes or intended design, we should also subtract systems that don't resonate.

I hope these resources inspire you! If you haven't already, the best way to stay up to date with everything hothead related is to join the discord. See you next week!