In The Mansion, we use a 14-card deck to stretch dread across a session. No timers. No checks. No illusions.

Just a slow build.

And something that shouldn’t be here is now in the room.

open.substack.com/pub/saffronq...

You find a glass orb that glows when lies are told nearby.
Only problem: it also glows when you lie to yourself.
What do you do with it?

You don’t need to know every rule to run a great game.
You don’t need a voice for every NPC.
You don’t need lore that makes sense.

You just need care, imagination, and snacks.

Everything else is gravy.

Snyder’s version is slick, stylized, and immediate. It's a ride. You buckle in, you scream and maybe laugh, and that’s okay. But 28 Weeks Later isn’t a ride. It’s a gut punch.

It's what I am for with the Mansion.

Okay, okay. I like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. I do. The first few minutes are iconic in their own way. Sarah Polley wakes up. Suburban chaos. The neighbor girl in the bedroom. It’s effective.

But it doesn’t crawl into your gut the same way.

The opening of 28 Weeks Later is one of the most horrifying and effective intros in the infection genre. There’s little gore, no exposition dump. Just slow tick of tension, and the unmistakable feeling that everything is about to collapse.
And then it does.
#28YearsLater #horror

On the rare occasion when the Mansion lets me out, I'm working on another project...

Remain Someone Still (it's a working title, ok)
A #ttrpg framework about identity, survival, and the slow erosion of self. 👇

What's the weirdest thing your party has flirted with?
I need to know for... reasons. #ttrpg #rpg

I like fantasy cities that aren’t clean.

Give me moss on the stones. Weird street food stalls. Chalk sigils on brick walls that no one will talk about.

Give me the kind of place where the rain whispers the memories of the city.

“Fear is a compass here. It only points toward what’s about to find you.”

New design blog is up: how The Mansion builds horror through feelings, not numbers.

#ttrpg #gamedesign #pbta #ttrpgdesign

i think this is one of those games that's goign to have a HUGE effect on TTRPGs going forward even in its current form, and if it gets the chance to be really polished and tightened up, i could see this being one of my favorite fames ever written. fantastic work!! please go support the author!

Important thing I've learned #ttrpg

If you don’t name a tavern right away, your players will.
And I promise they will call it “The Moist Beaver” or something equally cursed.

Just name it. Save yourself.

Writing the Mansion, my PbtA game, is like assembling IKEA furniture with half the pieces missing, and also some of the pieces are emotional damage. It's fine. #ttrpg #gamedesign

This is my editor, Ari. Her notes mostly consist of “sit on that a bit longer” and “needs more birds.” On the next round, "forget it".
She’s never been wrong.

There’s a house at the edge of everything you fear. It’s quiet there. The kind of quiet that gets louder the longer you sit in it.

You’ve been there before. Not this house exactly, but one like it. A hallway that stretched too far. A door that didn’t belong. A flicker in the corner of your eye. /1

The GM section for Daggerheart is really good, despite running games for a decade now i felt i got a good amount of useful information out of it, and a lot of advice that i think will be very useful in running daggerheart, hopefully in the near future.

What if magic wasn’t rare, but just kinda... inconvenient with all these components and rituals. People moved on. Technology worked better. Magic is old tech with dust on it.

And then the players find a way to switch it back on and experiment.

I feel we need more content like this.

I used to have 5 indoor cats living with us in an apartment. It was glorious. Moving to another country forced me to leave 3 of them at my mother-in-law.

🐈 Now I live and design games surrounded by two cats, a daughter, and one looming existential crisis.