Downcrawl is a tabletop roleplaying toolkit that lets players build and explore a weird, wondrous underworld together.
Evocative prompts help frame your stories of dangerous journeys through forgotten labyrinths, strange folk trading dangerous fungus, and subterranean cities so far from the surface that that sun has become mere legend.
Revised and expanded from the original edition (a DriveThruRPG Platinum seller), Downcrawl 2E features new rules for solo or collaborative play, and an optional deck of idea cards that makes sparking weird underworld adventures easier than ever.
Get the Downcrawl Worlds rules
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Originally a blog series unfolding across each week of 2021, “50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon” is now a 600 page book celebrating the first half-century of interactive fiction. Fifty games, one from each year starting in 1971, are profiled in depth, with analysis, maps, excerpts, author interviews, and more.
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A sequel of sorts to Downcrawl, Skycrawl takes the same core rules for helping tabletop gamemasters improvise an open-ended, exploration-themed campaign, and moves it into a setting of floating islands, airship pirates, and endless skies. The setting of the Azure Etern is an infinite, weightless, air-filled volume, where “villages cling to small rocky spheres lit by sentient suns, brave souls sail far beyond the reach of gravity toward far-flung delves and enchanted clouds, and strange skybeasts swim wild through vast and distant twilights.”
Skycrawl is built to be compatible with any fantasy roleplaying game system.
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Subcutanean is a unique novel for print-on-demand or ebook platforms that changes for each new reader. Telling a queer coming of age story about parallel realities and creepy impossible basements, the novel is written in a bespoke format for variant text. Custom software collapses hundreds of variants of scenes, sentences, or words into a single unique telling of the story each time a copy is ordered, which is then typeset, uploaded, and sent to the user. Successfully crowdfunded Halloween ’19 and released on the palindromic date of 02/02/2020.
To promote the release, a pair of custom Twitter bots were created to tweet out two different versions of the novel in parallel.
Listen to the audio book of seed 01893 or read it on Wattpad, Tapas, or Royal Road.
Follow the project on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, or Goodreads.
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This accessible academic textbook chronicles the legacy the adventure game genre has left behind on the contemporary gaming landscape. A generation of designers grew up playing these games, which are rarely studied today as a comprehensive body of work, and their DNA lives on not only in the work of contemporary auteurs but also in the form of dozens of daughter genres, from visual novels to walking simulators to escape rooms to puzzle platformers. We make the case that the genre has always been defined by outsiders, from the hackers who birthed it in the 1970s through to the queer and radical makers reinventing it in the 2010s. We also consider its potential to impact the next generation of games, from mixed reality’s de-emphasis on action through the reinvention of the form in games like Kentucky Route Zero and Her Story.
Published by Bloomsbury Press. Hardcover release: February 2020. Softcover release: 2021.
Publisher’s Website – Amazon – Review
Chapters 2 and 4 expand on material originally written for my disseration.
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