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radiantfracture

December 2025

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$radiantfracture: The word Weird. superimposed on a blueblack forest scene with odd figure circled (Weird)$

Hey, I posted my game! You can find it here.

Playtests welcome. It is a solo storytelling/journalling/story creation horror game. It uses a simplified version of solitaire to drive the story.

[ETA] From the writeup:

And yet the sun rises.

Weird. is a horror game about a flawed protagonist confronting their worst nightmares.

I, a troubled character, am alone on the longest night of the year.

You, a storyteller, use prompts and the inevitability of card order to tell a story for me, driven by fear and fate.

I am tormented by unfinished business, which, as you know, is a great way to become the target of supernatural forces.

Enjoy bringing about my nearly inevitable and almost certainly miserable end, but also maybe final moment of grace, redemption, or transformation, in Weird.

* * * * * *

Title-wise, I went with Weird, as an archaic synonym for fate, styled with a period: Weird.

I liked the suggestion of Patience quite a bit, but this isn't really a game about being patient. I'd want waiting, duration, something like that, in the mechanics somewhere. Actually, maybe I'll try to make such a game, since I still seem to have Game Fever. Maybe it's to play in waiting rooms.

As predicted, the game jam I made has not posted to the Itch calendar, so I am the only person who knows about it or has submitted anything. But I tried!

( Thoughts on the possibilities of this mechanic )

* * * * * *

Qua writing tool, I find the game a pretty decent method for creating something between a detailed outline and a rough story draft.

§rf§

$radiantfracture: A yellow die with a spiral face floats on a red background, emitting glitter (New RPG icon)$

Hey, I made a little game jam, mostly so that I had a jam whereat to submit my own game:

https://itch.io/jam/winter-solstice-haunting-ttrpg-jam

Make something and I'll try to round folks up to play it!

$radiantfracture: A yellow die with a spiral face floats on a red background, emitting glitter (New RPG icon)$

I am nearing completion (fingers crossed) on a little winter solstice horror game that uses solitaire as its mechanic.

You will not be surprised to learn that this is is pretty much a solo journalling game with prompts. However, the solitaire mechanic does impose (I hope, anyway) a kind of melancholy fatalism.

I have been calling the game Solitary for obvious reasons, but of course there are many many many many games on Itch alone already called Solitairy. Any thoughts on an alternate title?

§rf§

$radiantfracture: A yellow die with a spiral face floats on a red background, emitting glitter (New RPG icon)$

Hey, I'm making weird little games again. For the TTRPG Bookmark Game Jam on itch.io, I submitted a little bibliomantic solo game here.

There are some fun ideas in the jam already. If, say, you're in need of a bookmark that gamifies attention drift and daydreaming, I recommend checking the games out.

If you feel inspired, I invite you, too, to make a gamified bookmark and tell me about it. They don't have to be games -- the bookmark could be an asset, as folks call them, like encounter tables or pseudodice.

I'm fooling around with a couple of other ideas, but I'm delighted to have finished something.

§rf§

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

Hey my game jam is over! I'm announcing the results a little early.

Folks, that was brilliant. 32 people signed up, and there were 10 entries in the end! (Plus one after the deadline.) I ended up giving awards to four games instead of three because I liked so many.

It is damn difficult to be in charge of judging things, but I do feel like the small prize encouraged people to enter. It's so nice to win a thing.

Here are the four cup-of-coffee winners (couldn't stop at three in the end). I had lots of criteria, but it came down to -- how easy was it to tell a story that I loved through the game? All of these games helped me build a story that I wouldn't have come up with on my own and that surprised, delighted, and moved me.

Monster in the Wilderness - ursula - a beautiful abstraction of the themes of Beowulf (or that's how I read it) - gorgeous
A Moment too Late - ToriBee - You are a time-travelling tortoise who always arrives too late for the Major Historical Event and has to piece things together from the aftermath - Crept up on me!
A Game of Tower - yhlee - Fantasy, surrealism, and personal growth via confronting your lies about yourself - delicious
Kintsugi - elusis - A supple yet strong spine for stories of damage and repair - poignant

There was lots of fun and story to be had in all the games, though, and I recommend reading / playing the others.

{rf}

PS what is a good name for the cup-of-coffee prize and/or winner?

$radiantfracture: A child contemplates a map and a vista. Text at the top reads "so many games." (RPG icon)$

Four signups for the game jam! I am delighted. (Okay, one's me.)

What's the jam, you ask? WELL LET ME TELL YOU.

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam (tiny prizes!)
Runs Nov 1 - Dec 22
Results released Dec 31

Make my birthday wish come true. Create a small TTRPG (table-top role-playing game) on the theme of fracture, breakage, and/or repair. Win a cup of coffee!

You can submit games that are active, LARPS, lyric games (mostly meant to be read) or any other small-scale game, and the game can be short -- some of the most fun / silliest / most surprisingly profound games are one-pagers or bookmark-scale or business-card-sized games. Solo, pair, or group are all great.

This jam comes with a tiny prize! Up to 3 (three) of my fave games will receive $10 (Canadian) so that the designer can buy themselves a congratulatory coffee.

More details and the jam submission page here: itch.io/jam/fractured-birthday-game-jam

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

Okay, I'm going to do it!

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam
Runs Nov 1 - Dec 22
Results released Dec 31

It's my birthday. I would like there to be more small weird TTRPGs (Table-Top Role-Playing Games) in the world. Make my birthday wish come true. Create a TTRPG on the theme of fracture, breakage, and/or repair. Win a cup of coffee!

This jam comes with a tiny prize! Up to 3 (three) of my fave games will receive $10 (Canadian) so that the designer can buy themselves a congratulatory coffee.

More details and the jam submission page here: itch.io/jam/fractured-birthday-game-jam

Some Examples of Games I Like

I like spooky games, horror games, and games about feelings.

Ten Candles (beautiful doom ritual)
1000-Year-Old Vampire (roll & write delight)
This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation (quirky, smart, critical)
Quietus
Pull Me From the Earth (Q&A excellence)
Star Crossed / Dread
Brindlewood Bay (love the crime-solving mechanic)
The Quiet Year
Debrief

Other Things I Like in Games

Collaborative storytelling
Queer & trans content / vibe
Solo journalling games, other writing games, other solo games
Unusual and / or witty mechanics (esp. physical objects)
Low-prep, improvisational games with a few rules to anchor play
Games about feeeeelings but also about story
Gamification of hard real-life activities or experiences
Games with aspects of ceremony or ritual

My Games

I think my most successful games are these, if you want to see the kinds of things I make:

You Are a Beacon (solo journalling game)
Getting There (2-player Q&A storytelling mini-game)
The Fledgling and the Vale (2-player Q&A story game)

$radiantfracture: A child contemplates a map and a vista. Text at the top reads "so many games." (RPG icon)$

Hey, it's the one-year anniversary of the first little one-shot TTRPG I made, Fundamentally Unlovable Creature Killer in Trouble.

It's really more of what I guess you'd call a lyric game -- a cross between a joke, a poem, and an exercise in self-care -- but this modest little oddity started me on game-making and it ended up as a pretty good fundraiser (though I was pants at organizing that end).

Ahhh, I can't wait to get back to thinking about games in January.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: A child contemplates a map and a vista. Text at the top reads "so many games." (RPG icon)$

The Lost Journals is a blog of journalling game playthroughs. The author is posting journal entries based on my journalling game You Are a Beacon!

I don't know her at all (I don't think!), but she is a wonderfully lyrical writer and is making quite an amazing thing out of my little game.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

Hey, it's creators' day on Itch.io, meaning the site doesn't take their cut of the sales today, so it's a great day to get a few indie TTRPG games at the most benefit to the game creators.

For example, check out Métis game designer and educator Taylor Daigenault's This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation, which I and the crew played recently and found very entertaining, with zero prep. Yes, it appears to be about ducks, and it is, but also it's about labour, and faith, and whatever else you care to make it about. We laughed a lot.

Or maybe you want something to do with your tumbling block tower and you'd like to own the legendary catastrophic romance game Star-Crossed from Bully Pulpit.

Or if you're too broke for those, for a mere $2.04 (US) you can own Corvyn Appleby's astounding Pull Me From the Earth, a 2-person Q&A game about a murderer and a bog body falling in love. (Which game I have reviewed elsewhere on this journal.)

(It is true that I, too, have some games on Itch.io, and it is further true that I do need to make 77 more cents in sales in order to be able to initiate a payout because Itch doesn't do payouts until the combined total adds up to $5, but honestly I'd be just as happy if you bought the duck game, or any one of thousands of others.)

{rf}

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

Does anyone know a fun indie TTRPG with competitive elements? All the ones I know are delightfully co-operative...

It doesn't actually have to be super indie, but it does have to be something a student could read and come to grips with over a couple of weeks, so not all of D&D for example. (Though D&D isn't actually competitive, now that I think of it -- combative but collaborative.)

So let's say the main criteria are that it is a game with story and/or character, but also there are competitive elements between the players.

I found an intriguing list of just such games, but it's from 2006 and all the links are dead.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: A child contemplates a map and a vista. Text at the top reads "so many games." (RPG icon)$

Today I underwent an RPG design rite of passage. At last I, too, have made a Honey Heist hack.

It's also a wizarding tournament game because why not.

The game was inspired by an observation from

sabotabby in the context of writing queer characters that the protagonists of her Sleep of Reason series were "disaster wizards."

The game is free on Itch.io. Honey Heist is free, so the hack is free.

...If "Honey Heist hack" just sounds like a coughing fit to you, all you need to know is that Honey Heist is a dead simple yet ludicrously playable two-page TTRPG that Grant Howitt created for a con in 2017. It mixes an absurd premise (you are real bears trying to commit a heist) with simple yet compelling mechanics. The usual outcome is to fail hilariously.

[eta]( Fun Mechanics )

There are, I don't know, one million hacks of it out there. And now there are one million and one.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: Gouache portrait of my face with jellyfish hat (Super Jellyfish 70s Me)$

Today I sense intuitively that you would like a tabletop role-playing game that lets you use a collaborative poker hand to create a fix-it final episode of a beloved semi-eternal TV show. I can feel it.

(This one is dear to my heart.)

May I introduce you to Headcanon?

As always, it can be had for free or for the price of a cup of coffee, which I will use to buy a cup of coffee.

* * * * *

( Show notes. )

* * * * * *
This is the game I've worked the longest on -- about two months, all told, I think? I didn't work on it the whole time, but I kept fiddling with it.

I'll probably still be adding to and revising Headcanon for a while, so this is a little more like a beta test than a full release, but I got it to a done-like place last night and thought, what the hell -- I kind of want to see it out living in the world.

But that means if you play it or even read it and have suggestions, they're a good thing, and welcome.

K. pointed out that the mechanic isn't inherently a two-person one. I think one could make a fun, sillier, more fast-paced game for five players. Might do that next.

Anyway, cheers.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: A child contemplates a map and a vista. Text at the top reads "so many games." (RPG icon)$

I mean, of course there are.

What's next, out beyond journalling games, in the field of making games from things you didn't know could be games? Reading games. Games played while reading a book.

I feel like there's a particular challenge in designing a reading game -- it needs to be something that will enhance rather than detract/distract from the reading experience, and reading is predicated on focus, concentration, the not-doing of something else.

You don't want a game that breaks flow, or even clogs up those interstices between stretches of flow. What you want is more like something that rises up when flow naturally dissipates itself, and maybe just says "take note of what you're thinking now, notice where you've drifted, mark down that current in case you need to follow it later" -- and then releases you back into the stream --

For some folks, no game would work, because undivided focus is too precious and too easily fractured. I might be like that -- not sure.

But something that keeps you latched on (umm like a lamprey I guess if we're staying with flow) when the reading is not so scintillating -- that could be useful. A game that makes note-taking or word-noticing into a slightly more formalized practice.

Or even just a quick game that launches you into the reading process, gets you started, as when you count down from 100 to fall asleep. At some point dreaming or reading takes over and you don't need the ladder of numbers or rules any more.

Mostly I don't need a game of reading. But a little game played like a string of beads you run through your fingers as you read -- what a lovely thing, especially if the reading needs a little scaffolding to get itself done.

And of course I think about how it could be useful for teaching, for making the process of academic reading and note-taking feel less laborious, to give the person time to learn the skill by opening time out a little with the game.

There was a bookmark jam that had lots of reading games.

What would a good game to be played while reading look like? What would make you want one? What use could it be to you?

{rf}

$radiantfracture: In B&W, a man with touseled hair wrestles an alligator. Text reads "Wresting with my Muse, obviously" (writing)$

Perhaps what you have been longing for all this time without knowing it is a set of instructions for how to use the quadratic formula to write poems.

If so, you are in luck. You may have it here.

It's called Quadratic Engine, as specific formal processes (such as N+1) are often called "engines" of experimental poetry.

You can have this engine for free, or you can throw me two American dollars*, which I will waste on locally made vegan ice cream with mini eggs blended in. (Yes. I know mini eggs have dairy. The ice cream crafter knows it. We all know it. She makes it on sufferance once a year because we beg her for it.)

This is an oddity, but one of my own particular small treasures. It is one of my favorite processes for rapidly producing a poem draft with evocative formal and emotional relationships.

It's a writing prompt more than a game, though the process of deciding how to interpret the formula's mathematical terms each time has a playful quality.

I find the quadratic formula a highly productive formal prompt -- like writing haiku or other small formal poems.

If you try it, let me know if it works for you. (And if you have any suggestions for additions to the file, let me know.)

You do not need to know any math to use the engine. (And you do not need to know how to drive.)

While I'm waiting for my bigger little game to take final form in my brain, I thought I'd release another, uh, little thing you can use for stuff.

{rf}

*But actually, honestly, donate it to something else. Send it to Texas or Ukraine and just have Quadratic Engine as an indirect reward.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

This is only my second painting for the various February challenges I usually get excited about, but I like my Pan. The reference was a photo of Cecil the Faun, who has four winsome faun personae who lift my spirits.

(Cuter if you click on him)

I used the new gouache paints I got for Christmas, and I do think they have richer, denser colour, and therefore can do more nuanced things (though this was a fairly fast painting whose nuance must be mostly accidental).

They are a bit tricky to figure out -- when the pools of paint dry, they tend to become brittle and to break off into chunks -- probably because they have much more pigment in them than the old cheap ones. It does mean I often chase little balls of pigment around the tray with my brush.

The super secret mission of this painting was to become cover art for one of my games (because that's what I'm excited about lately, obvs) so I threw some text on that sucker:

And now it's the new cover art for The Fledgling and the Vale.

Obviously I need to be using better software to put these graphics together, but I haven't landed on a free application that works smoothly for me / will work on my increasingly cranky Macbook.

Mind you, nothing at all about today was smooth (but in ways so petty that they can't be described effectively.) Anyway, at least this painting happened.

I like the idea of doing original art for the games when I can, because then like -- at least the person got a picture out of the deal?

{rf}

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

Goodbyeeee January.

Today I made soup and a game.

Soup first. K. went to the store yesterday and asked if there was anything I needed and so I explained about the run on Campbell's chicken noodle soup ("soup for the very basic"), and while she couldn't find any in the store, she dug up a can from the back of her cupboard, and then said "I could make you chicken soup."

"I could make me chicken soup," I said. So I have.

Whenever I set out to make stew I get soup and whenever I set out to make soup I get stew and I don't know how this can still be true, but I have more or less made five cans of concentrate of my own and stuck them in the freezer.

Only I am now out of the Hawaiian Kitchen Goddess Dry Rub & Seasoning mix that I use for anything I want to taste Not Disappointing.

I used the last of the carrots that

jasmine_r_s sent, because I have the sort of friends who send you emergency carrots.

The game of course I didn't make only today -- I've been working on it for a few weeks and some folks have been kind enough to look at drafts.

The title I landed on is The Fledgling and the Vale.

It's a little queerer than the other games, which is pleasing.

The game jam challenge was to use works published in 1926 (coming out of copyright in the US this year). As some folks already know, I chose Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, a deeply weird and enjoyable novella.

Lolly Willowes is often read as a queer text about found family and community. It’s also legible as a text of independence and empowerment without partnership, and of reconnection to the spirit of place. The game is meant to make all those directions possible.

F&V is the first extended two-player game I've made. It has a little bit of a card-game mechanic, in that you have a hand of two cards to choose from each time you play a prompt (a question you ask the other player). I started by using a full hand of cards, but that felt unwieldy, like you'd constantly be checking the card meanings, and two felt right. (I'm only guessing based on my solo playthroughs, of course.)

Tonight at midnight was the deadline for the game jam. It might do a little more molting, iterating the details a bit, before it feels completely itself, but I'm pretty happy with how far it got.

If you like two-player dialogic games about magic, community, place, and desire, it can be had for free or pay-what-you-choose here. There's a PDF and a plain version that is meant to be maximally accessible for screen readers.

Of course now I am excited about the next game, which uses still more card mechanics in a way I find entertaining.

On the itch.io analytics page, the first game you make shows up as bars of vivacious fuschia. Each game thereafter shifts one shade more purple. That means, with good fortune, one day I'll see the bars turn blue, and green, and so forth. I mean, if they use the whole spectrum. I'd like to see that rainbow as a sign of achievement.

{rf}

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

I’ve been thinking about how much I like question-and-answer as a game mechanic. It’s a gentle yet powerful way to get deep into story without the players having to perform actions that feel more like performance or improvisation, things that might feel difficult or vulnerable, a barrier to play or story.

By question-and-answer mechanic I just mean that the game is written as a series of questions. That mini-game I made is a very simple example. The games that inspired it, In the Air Tonight and Big Fight Feel, are more developed versions. Pull Me From the Earth, the game I'm talking about here, is one layer more complex.

But in essence, all these games are just sets of questions. On the page, they hardly seem like games at all, and yet they work.

If you and I enter into the contract that we will ask and answer these questions with sincerity and attention, magic happens.

To get granular, we could notice different ways the questions can be offered to the players: in a prescribed order, in an order chosen by the players, or randomized using a tool like dice or cards. Each of those methods will create different affordances. Randomness allows the most player surrender, which can give a sense of safety; a prescribed order imposes a certain narrative; a flexible order lets players adapt the flow of questions to the story they're telling.

(Do you have a preference, or an intuition about your possible preference?)

Working on that solo journalling game has made me notice how a question makes a strong prompt. I think a good prompt offers just enough specificity to start the imagination going, and then as little as possible that blocks that momentum. For example, say I write this:

You meet six moon fairies. They take you on a journey down the river.

That’s a pretty good prompt, but by the end of the sentence the event's already over. What about this:

You meet six moon fairies. Where do they take you? Do you ever get home?

Just that question mark pushes the energy beyond the end of the sentence, whereas the period stops it.

The second prompt is a little more vulnerable because it’s less defined, but I think it's also more likely to spur something really rich for the player.

I think letting in metaphor and meaning slippage is important, too, because that's invention happening before you consciously invoke it. So

A ghost overturns your car. What do you do?

--Fun, but what about

A ghost upsets something essential. How do you recover?

It's potent to add a slightly unexpected second question, one that swerves a little or raises the stakes, like “do you ever get home?” That invites the player to think about a story that's less safe, and therefore more vulnerable and with more possibility of going somewhere deep.

Speaking of deep, let me tell you about this game where you play a bog body in love.

Q&A really comes to life in a two-player game, particularly when the players ask each other the questions in turn (rather than pulling the card and answering for themselves). Something about invoking the cross-exchange, the formalities of real conversation, gives another layer of momentum, and almost always careens you towards some kind of intimacy.

( Review: Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two )

{rf}

All quotations taken from Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game by Corvyn Appleby, copyright 2020, downloaded from https://corvynappleby.itch.io/pull-me-from-the-earth in January 2022.

$radiantfracture: Gouache portrait of my face with jellyfish hat (Super Jellyfish 70s Me)$

Finally did my first little gouache painting with the new paints I got for Christmas:

I asked for some one-notch-nicer paints than the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel set I was working with (like, a tenth the price of anything else). I think the colour of these new ones is definitely denser and richer.

The pointillist lights came out a little more dramatic than I meant them to, so I just ran with it.

As usual, I'm posting while waiting for a pot of stew to cool -- this is gumbo, sort of, though gumbo no actual Cajun cook would recognize.

{rf}

*You can tell (or maybe not, ha) that it's painted after the Garrick Sangil photo I used in the cover art of the journalling game I made.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

(An ocean of your own making?)

Have you ever played a journalling game?

I hadn't until I started exploring indie table-top RPGs. I just wrote one for a game jam. That was a great way to engage intensely with a new form.

(It's the twilight of early morning just now, that luminous indigo of night washing out of the sky before the day's true colour shows.)

In a journalling game, obviously enough, you write a journal, usually as a character, though you could certainly make a real-life journalling game (and um now I want to because it would be perfect for my classes).

(Short hiatus while I jot some notes about that)

(I can hear the gulls crying like the ghosts of every morning.)

( Here find a few thoughts on this flavour of game. )

My entry in the game jam is here, free or with an optional suggested price.*

I really like it! It feels like the first mature game I've written, in that it has longer gameplay and deeper engagement than the little games I've made so far.

[ETA] Oh, right, the game concept! Here it is:

Somewhere and somewhen, on the edge of the vast deep, you keep the light shining, even as you prepare for a catastrophic storm.

In this solo journalling RPG, you play the keeper of a lighthouse station. You maintain the light, collect information, deal with the sea and its strange gifts, and prepare for the coming storm. When the storm comes, the journal ends in your witnessing of nature’s raw power.

(We were promised a sunny day, just one, and I think, by this new fresh blue, it has arrived.)

{rf}

*Don't feel shy downloading it for free.

Page generated Jan. 6th, 2026 04:49 am

radiant fracture

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December 2025

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Weird. (a game)

Winter Solstice Haunting TTRPG Game Jam

Frivolous question - solo horror game

Bookmark game

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam Results!

Game Jam Update (Tiny prizes!)

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam (tiny prizes!)

my gamiversary

Use of a Beacon

Itch.io creators' day!

In search of rampant competition

Disaster Wizards

Headcanon: The Game of the Eternal Show

There are reading games!

A poetry engine (formal writing prompt)

Art! Pan!

(no subject)

Question & Answer Taken Deep – Pull Me From the Earth (Game Review)

First painting of the year

Perhaps you would like to live on the edge of the vast deep (game writing debrief)