Ideas (or... The Hard Work?)

 

Ideas are everywhere. They fall out of songs, headlines, idle conversations. They’re cheap - disposable sparks.

What matters is execution. Taking that spark and burning it into something complete. Anyone can say “post-apocalyptic wasteland.” The originality isn’t in naming the wasteland, it’s in the details: the tribes that rise, the rituals they keep, the broken thing they worship.

Gimmicks and novelty fade. What lasts is texture. The little contradictions and sharp edges that make your version stand apart from the hundred others.

So don’t hoard ideas. Don’t worship them. They’re easy. What’s hard - and worth doing - is the slow, stubborn work of shaping an idea into a world your players will want to play inside. 

Table Culture: High Trust, Low Trust

 

I owe thanks to S. John Ross—his mentoring sharpened my understanding of a truth I’d been circling for years: the difference between high trust and low trust games, and how that difference shapes not just design, but table culture. I'm sure he'd disagree with me on my own conclusions, but I consider him the Godfather on this subject.

Mechanics: The Ticking Clock

 

COUNTDOWN CLOCKS WITH TEETH

Countdown clocks are nothing new, and it's a well known drama device in stories, but credit where it’s due: I first saw countdown clocks in an RPG in Index Card RPG (Runehammer Games). The simplicity hooked me—the application keeps me coming back.

World Building: Music

 

Some worlds are forged in the long dark of history, hammered from myth and superstition until the shape feels inevitable. Others are scavenged—plucked from the ruins of pop culture, stolen from the junk heap of forgotten media, polished until they gleam like relics. And then there are the strange ones. The worlds born from something smaller. A scrap. A fragment. A single line from a song, cut loose from its melody and left to drift until someone—maybe you—catches it.