Two years ago my sister asked me what was was doing to deal with AI in the gaming industry. I answered, not entirely facetiously, “trying to bring down capitalism”.

The point is of course that one – only one! – of the terrible things AI is already doing to our society is vast economic destruction. Capitalism is built on a fundamental principle of the rich paying their workers as little as possible while controlling them as much as possible. A significant automation that elides human salary will be applied as forcibly as possible and as swiftly and cruelly as possible. There is no human occupation not facing the threat of being eliminated: the only question is the likelihood of profit-making, the timeframe and the popular tolerance for it. (Weirdly some people have insisted their job is the special one which is safe, but I have seen no convincing argument that any job actually is. Feel free to try to convince me I’m wrong!)

The commercial arts are likely to be the first to go. We can see this by the fact that we are labelling things as human-made. A label is always a point of distinction. I remember in the 80s people starting using the term “disposable cups” for the new moulded plastic phenomenon; coffee then was only takeaway from McDonalds. Now we have “keep-cups” for the conscientious and adaptable (I have not been able to bring the keep cup into my life as yet). Human-made will be exceptional very soon and paying for it reserved for those who have space.

Which means games will stop being commercial art forms, except at their most base and most widely appealing – a chess set and a deck of cards will continue to sell, but everything else will be the domain of the enthusiast only. Like theatre, we will encourage people to step away from mainstream entertainment for something rough and ready and perhaps in a dingy community space. Like fine art we will have to rely on the government giving us grants and putting us in museums. If I were keen to preserve games, I think I’d start thinking about setting up game galleries: artistic salons which highlight the unique and the important. We can see this now with the popularity of things like Molly House and John Company. Certainly throughout history the chief way that games have been redeemed from being seen as louche, sinful and only for gambling has been to rebrand them as educational but I think here this is different: we must brand them as culturally significant or we will lose them altogether. The age of the arthouse game is here. It’s the only thing, I think, that will save us.

Some might accuse me of exaggerating, but we know technology can move very quickly and culture does the same in response. In 1825, there was one mile of railroad in the UK; by 1850 there was 6,000. In the space of two generations it changed the world. Along with the bicycle and the steamship it put mass transit into the reach of even the very poor. In 1837 the average difference between the birth place of husband and wife in the UK was 1 mile; by 1901 it was 100 miles. The gap between powered flight and the moon landing was 66 years. Some of us have lived through the digital revolution and the social media shift: in 2005, there was no real social media, almost nobody owned a smart phone, no Tea Party movement, and the idea of Donald Trump becoming president was ridiculous. By 2015, all of that had changed. Social media ran the world and was part of Trump’s ascension. We stand now on the verge of another explosive decade or two: despite the topic of this article it is hard to predict what 2035 will look like. But I think we can guarantee it will be vastly unlike where we are now, in every respect: culturally, socially, politically, commercially and maybe ludically.

It’s also worth noting that none of these inventions raised the ire of Luddites. Certainly the steam engine devastated the barge industry and reduced mining jobs but they weren’t existential threats of naked exploitation like early factories. Luddites were transformed into hating technology but they were nothing of the sort. (Although of course mass transit was not an unblemished blessing: it had devasatating effects when combined with colonialism, for example.) Similarly today if you point out the well documented job losses, capitalist dogmatism, mad financial speculation, government capture, health destruction, environmental threat, child endangerment, psychological damage, intellectual degredation, numerous deaths and general epistemological decay caused by natural language models and AI platforms you are called a “technological doomer”. One should be a tech optimist, as if this is possible in an era where nearly everything we use now isn’t something we can own, fails to work, treats us like the product and reports on us to the government. Worse: it will steal what we create, use it to create a fascimile and then sell it to our audience for less. And not a word of this is hyperbole.

For the early years, much of game design discourse in this area was plagued by the cultish early adopters, eager to prove that they were the smart ones for getting in early. (I remember someone telling me AI was a marvellous invention in most cases; I told him it was slowing down my software. He said I should never use software that forcibly included AI. I told him it was Microsoft Word. Just last week I saw him echoing my frustrations about Word. Early adopters have a flipside: there are also plenty of us who are accused of crying wolf just because we can see the wolf coming from further away.) Nowadays, they seem to have shut up because – as we explained – customers didn’t want AI. But also because the train lines are coming down, fast and hard, and it is true that humans get used to things very quickly. In many ways, the question has become moot. My job has already been taken by AI (see figure 1). The only thing stopping me being replaced is good will and customer insistence. How long can that last?

RPG writers are especially vulnerable to this because like most writers we spent the first thirty years of the internet uploading as much of our work as possible. For the short term, I expect more and more we will just have to retreat. I’m not even sure I dare write games in Microsoft Word right now. Certainly not Google Docs. It feels too risky. Everything I do seems to enrich others and steal from me. But at the same time, I’m not sure – being poor, being disabled, being neuroatypical – that I can find alternatives like a keep cup. It is immensely depressing to be reaching perhaps the high point of my career only to see it on the precipice of being able to make any kind of money – but it is of course much more depressing for the young starting out. Again, others may say that is doomist, but I would say they will see the wolf soon enough.

This may be why we’re seeing zines creeping into the public eye again: they can contain games that cannot be owned or stolen. We’re also seeing more and more that people crave shared experiences and connection and passive media fails to give them that. They want to DO things, and do them together. And they want to feel things and touch them in their hands. Even if these things are the new keep-cups, they will have value to humans. Humans will certainly never stop gaming: I own a facsimile of a deck of cards made from the fibres of beds and walls in a WW2 concentration camp, and cell walls have had games carved into the stone. Gaming, uh, finds a way.

But selling games for money? I’m not so sure. I have so many wonderful ideas for versions of The Score. But I’m not sure there’s enough money in making them…and it might be better to make them as cheaply as I can and give them away as PDFs to print and play. Last year, I spoke at DevCon, the annual Australian meet up of designers, and I was asked a question and the asker said “but don’t just say ‘it depends on your definition of success'” – because I had said that a few times already. But I think it is going to be increasingly important because I think less and less will we be able to always align success with sales. Like the Bohemians, we will have to choose more and more between making games and eating food. Be ready for that choice: that is my message for now.

Science loves taxonomy, and science is always finding taxonomies fail. It is, indeed, the nature of taxonomies that they fail, because nature abhors straight lines and clear classifications. But we humans like them and they can be useful, and there are lots of them to find. I work in animal training so I encounter lots of taxonomies of the world, and one fairly robust one has some nice implications for thinking about game design.

In a nutshell, animal behaviouralists break all animal behaviour down into three categories: Foraging for the things it needs to survive, Hazard Management, to stop other things from foraging them, and Social and Reproductive activities, with their own species.

You can pretty much straight away see where this is going in game design: most game play urges really do come down to these three things. We need to get resources, cards, cubes, money, area on the board, pieces, information coming in. We need to manage the things that want to make us lose our resources or push us back on our tracks. And between it all we have a social space where we try to read and anticipate what others are doing (or work with them in a collaborative game). You can use this to analyze your game, as a lens, to see what might be wrong with it too. If players feel confused about what to do, then it probably means you haven’t made it clear that the resources are important or how to get them, or that the hazards can be avoided, and how to manage them. If players feel like the game is too hard then it’s either because they can’t forage enough to feel nourished, or they can’t manage the hazards coming at them. If a game feels too easy then either make it harder to forage or harder to manage the hazards. Social elements are often things that happen around the game rather than directly through it, but there are also plenty of mechanics that heighten those things. If you want to bring them to the fore, you need to make the mechanics drive player interaction. Happy with multiplayer solitaire? You can leave social mechanics to the side.

In my book I talk about how Tim Clare coined the elements of games being Identity, Goal and Law: who am I playing, what do I want to do, and what is stopping me from doing it? Who am I is the first element of the social aspect. I am noughts, you are crosses – that is a social position. What do I want is Foraging. And what is going to stop me is Hazard Management.

Now when it comes to starting the design process, this is probably too simple to be helpful. We all know that a game is an exercise in turning one resource into victory against some restrictions. Clarifying that does not give you anything to go on when you start designing! It’s too bare bones. But it might help you if you get lost in the weeds and can’t figure out where to go next, or which thing to change.

It might also help you understand what kind of games you like to play, and what kind of players you have at the table. Some players LOVE to forage. They want to build an engine that produces all sorts of goodies. They want to have that turn where they get all the wheat or all the money. Some players also like foraging but they want to really work for it. Like can they find that extra inch of game space that gives them one more wheat than anyone else? Still foraging. Some players HATE hazards. Everyone has risk aversion and loss aversion but there are some players who cannot stand it. They’d rather get a +1 than a reroll because what if the reroll is bad? They’d rather give an opponent +1 than lose a point. To them, fun means hazards need to get managed, hard. On the other hand, some people love the thrill of having a crazy ride with hazards. They want the thrill of the danger. There are some who want party games where everyone feels like they’re mostly on the same side, and some who want social games where betrayal is the only course served, cold or otherwise. I suppose you could think of these as axes: Abundance vs Threatened. This is usually a taxonomy you can read off your play(testers) pretty quickly. And these axes also give you levers to pull, to try different options.

You can also use this as a wider length to think about beliefs, values and conflict, whether that’s in games, about games, or anywhere. A taxonomy of conflict – or rather places where healthy conflict breaks down into unhealthy, painful stuff – is one remarkably similar to these three things. These are Care, Control, and Respect – and they line up with Forage, Hazard, Social.

Care is the point of contention where someone feels like they or someone they value isn’t being cared for. And this isn’t a left or right position; one can see Care being a sticking point when folks feel like immigrants are taking the jobs of hard-working locals. Care can also be about an idea: not enough is being done to Care about justice, or free speech, or the rule of law. The conflict arises because the person sees these things or these resources as important, and wants to forage and store them up. The flipside of Care is the Control sticking point. The person wants themself or some other group to be able to do something, to have an impact, or they fear they will lose control. The need to be able to act on ones environment stems from a fear of the environment being hazardous. Valuing control is the valuing of managing those hazards. I want to be able to do thing X, and I feel worried that I might not be able to. Finally we have Respect, which is the social one. I want you to respect me, or respect a hierarchy of some sort which I feel I am somewhat a part of. This can be respecting everyone, too: everyone gets a fair go. The duck at the back that hasn’t got any peas, let’s make sure we throw one to him too. Of course, each of these can also be inverted: I can be stuck on a belief that something is NOT worthy of respect, that a thing should not be foraged for or is in no danger of running out, or that, having given up control, you should as well.

It’s definitely not that case that how someone plays games will reflect where they encounter conflict or their political views! I am someone extremely averse to not being able to tamp down hazards in my games, and love a good forage, but my politics are broadly accepting of risk as the price of freedom, for example. Nor is all human behaviour nothing but foraging, managing hazards and socialising. But we’re all animals. Huizinga was wrong – we are not the only species that plays. And so we all also forage, manage and socialise.

EDIT: Someone suggested a third kind of playstyle, so now we have this:

Last week, someone asked me what the difference is between a toy, a game and a puzzle. The short answer is a game usually has a goal and a struggle to it and is interactive. A toy is interactive but has no goal or struggle. A puzzle has a goal and a struggle, but isn’t interactive (or the interaction is purely one way). But it also made me think something else: how do people learn this?

Ratatouille is a film about a rat that becomes a chef but it has in it a discussion of a concept that is beyond what we might expect from an animated film. Pixar is of course always good about going above and beyond: the Inside Out films are radical in how they depict emotional psychology, quite against what everything else in our culture says, there is that famous Marxist speech in A Bug’s Life, and so on. Rataouille turns on a debate about artistic process. Remy the rat is told by chef Auguste Gusteau that “anyone can cook”, which allows him to believe in himself and become a chef too. The “villain” of the film is Anton Ego, the food critic, who finds the idea that “anyone can cook” offensive. The disagreement turns on the idea of craft: Ego believes that the saying anyone can cook implies that cooking is easy. That it has no craft, no skill, no quality. He would agree that anyone might learn to cook, which is what Remy believes Gusteau means: that although he is the sworn enemy of any chef, a rat can become a chef, if he learns the craft.

One thing we’re extremely aware of – and suspicious of – in this world is gatekeepers. Liberal politics, post-modernist art, anarchist and Marxist politics, structuralist philosophy, all of these modern things share an overlapping distrust of systems as barriers to access. One could argue that this is more about modern consumerist thinking leaking in to our brains, that the constant emphasis on accessibility and approachability of things is something that arises from a world of push-button products and instant gratification. Coca Cola famously put its vending machines everywhere because they wanted to ensure that the moment someone wants a Coke they are only a minute or so away from getting one. Thus you get people writing entire books about how cooking is ableist (it isn’t) because it takes work to cut up garlic.

Similarly, critique has become taboo. Partly because the internet is so hostile and so full of criticism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater (while at the same time leaving almost all critique to the manosphere crying about wokeness). I think also the hyperscrutiny of social media also makes us weary of critique which also explains the previous problem: we are so constantly exhausted by every part of our lives being measured and evaluated that we cannot bear to have something else come along and tell us we’re not good enough. At the same time, we’re learning that maybe we’ve never liked being wrong, or failing. As I discussed in this blog a few months ago, training people through constant correction of errors might be killing desire to learn.

All of that said, game design is an art and a craft, and we should take it seriously. We should learn this discipline. And we should talk about learning it, without fear of being accused of gatekeeping. And we should also talk about the whole process – how we learn about games, what does that look like.

This year I was asked to teach an aspect of tabletop game design and it reminded me that when I was younger, that wasn’t a thing. I remember when Erick Wujcik, a Palladium designer and one of my great heroes and someone who found me in the early days of the internet and became my friend, wrote to tell me that he was flying to Singapore to do a guest lecture on RPG design, and it was one of the first such things in the history of the world. When I got to university, I was thrilled to have access to proper, deep libraries and I combed every shelf I could for things about games and especially about TTRPGs and they did not exist. Nobody wrote anything about games, anywhere, at all. There were books about mathematical game theory, which has almost nothing to do with games at all, and in some cases I could find The Compleat Gamester, or books about that tome from the 17th century. Oh how my heart leapt as I misread that title, only to crash as I realised it did not say the Complete Gamemaster.

The one exception was Shared Fantasy. This was a sociological study of the RPG hobby, conducted between 1978 and 1983 by American sociologist Gary Alan Fine. It was an excellent, deep and scholarly look at things and provided a really solid history – but only up to 1982! It was now 1995 and so much was changing. I decided it had to be up to me to write a history of the hobby, which I did in my first publication in RPGs when I put out my zine Places to Go, People To Be, which still survives online! And is still update in its French spin-off version. We wanted to be scholarly too, and tell the history of RPGs and also pick up where Interactive Fantasy left off, another of the few great leading lights.

The other ur-text of the time was I Have No Words And I Must Design, by Gary Costikyan. Originally published in the late 90s, the version there datees from 2002. Costikyan defined what a game was in that essay, and its an excellent definition but what’s most important I think is that nothing else existed besides that. We were voices crying in the wilderness, saying that game design was a discipline. That you could do it well or you could do it poorly. And there were very, very few of us.

And then, of course, everything changed.

World of Warcraft made video games cool. I remember the day that computer games were said to have made as much money as Hollywood films had that year – at last, this strange eldritch thing that nobody did, might become something that people had to pay attention to. Then Magic the Gathering came along and made tabletop games make money – so much money people really had to care. From 2000 to 2010, gaming went from barely a thing to dominating everything. Then along came social media too and kickstarter and things took off. And of course, along the way, starting around about 2005, academia started paying attention to video games. Not tabletop still – still not much. But then the actual play movement arrived and things shifted again. RPGs became big business. In 2015, RPGs were still nerd games that nobody took seriously. In 2025, they are on stage at the Sydney Opera House. (Not all boats were lifted, of course, but it did change the nature of the subject).

Along the way, we’ve created a kind of lacuna, however, of knowledge. Because people like me, who grew up in the 80s and 90s, we tended to study games because that’s one of the few ways you could encounter the hobby. We tended to be game nerds who dug out the old stuff and got into every obscure thing. And now, we have game design courses and we’re building towards an academic syllabus, and we recognise things like Molly House being art. People who came into the hobby since 2020 have scholarship to acquire. But if you came into things between 2005 and 2020, you had neither version. And I don’t know how you can get it, since you are likely too old to go back to school.

Sometimes I assume folks know what I know. But they don’t. And so I think about how to pass all this on. We do have somethings. The Ludology podcast. Increasingly more academic works. The wonderful new stuff coming out from CRC press. My shelf is now filled with academic books and new how-tos – although some of the latter, to me, are entirely absent of actual scholarship, and want to ground game making in entreprenuerial practices, not ludological. There’s a sense of building towards financial success and being a big brand, not mastering a discipline. If we’re not careful, that will dominate. We want a world of ludologists, not gurus.

We find ourselves, then, much like the cooking world. All of us want the world to know that Anyone Can Cook. But in Rataouille, Gasteau’s mindset is part of his marketing to sell his sauces and his cookbooks, and Anton Ego has, after all, a point: that sometimes, what we call lack of gatekeeping is in fact just marketing in a mask. Anyone Can Cook is an inch away from “and all you need are these magic beans, which are on sale today”. It is an inch away from knowing Gasteau is a good cook because he sells so many cans of sauce, which in the movie becomes the business model of his inheritors. Keep making the same things and selling it in a jar. It is consumerism that turns everything into a club where the only requirement is you buying in and wearing the badge, and that must flatten out all skill and all craft into being worthless or worse, devalued. And that not only leads to bad games which drive people away, it leads to game players not understanding the field either. People who don’t get why Monopoly is a bad game, just that it isn’t popular. Education is a golden key that opens up all gates, but we can’t let that key be commoditized and sold off.

With kindness, with openness, with a seat open to all – this is how we must teach, always. With a sense of collaboration, not of dictating from above. Without the weird hidebound ideas I see in some game designers who should know better. But we must really teach. And people must be willing to learn. We cannot say that just because Anyone Can Cook that any cooking is good cooking. We must have a critical voice. We must say that anyone may cook, but one must learn to cook well.

If that is a gate, then I will keep it.

Any good award is always going to be a terrible exercise. If the judging is any good at all, then the nominees are going to be all incredibly deserving and even then they’ll exclude by sheer bad luck people equally talented. This goes double for the winner. That said, after five years of not winning a Freeplay award, I sure as hell am not giving back mine. But I will say that I accept my latest award, The Mate Award, with enormous humility. The Mate Award…

… recognises an individual that has contributed to the Australian Tabletop Industry. The winner will have shown leadership through collaboration and sharing of knowledge and skills to others. The purpose of this award is to promote open and honest dialogue, community spirit and good relationships.

And I have a lot to say about this.

But first, a quick story. About seven or eight years ago I was at a convention and a very lovely local company mentioned to me that they would be happy to do a deal on producing materials for games. I immediately ran to every other Aussie designer at the con and told them about this amazing offer, and also threw it up on the web. I was then very embarrassed when the company contacted me to say “no, Steve, we only meant that offer to be for you, because we like you and what you do.” I like that story because it amuses me a bit that I often feel like I’m not at all special (thanks to my parents having extremely high standards of me and being disappointed if I did not reach them), but also because my first instinct was to bring everyone along. This to me has always been the core of appreicating “nerdy” things – not to shut people out, but to bring people in, to have a wonderful source of enjoyment that you are ready to show to others. And so I want to teach everyone else everything I know and bring them along into playing games and making games. What I can do is special, but not in the sense that it is shut off to others. As an underated Pixar film argues: “greatness can come from anywhere”

So in this sense, I have done a lot to help the local tabletop community. Since I moved to Sydney a decade ago, we’ve seen a slow but now massive shift towards supporting and connecting that community, and it keeps growing with each passing year. I’m proud to have played a significant part in that. I’m proud that people have seen this change and come to be a part of it.

BUT

Everything I do is impossible.

I have enormous chronic health and disability issues, and have, over the last decade, slowly been pulling myself out of desperate poverty and low income. I don’t have access to anything like the physical or financial capacities of the average game designer, amateur or otherwise, and that of course effects my emotional capacity as well. And this remains true even as things have been greatly improving in these areas over the last decade. Now I can, sometimes, afford my own accomodation when I go down to PAX, but this is very new. I can afford to print off a prototype myself, but this is very new. The first time I purchased a $40 guillotine, I didn’t eat lunch that week to cover the cost. Getting to PAX until very recently was done by being lent money for the trip and staying with friends (and of course, running panels because that’s the only way I could afford to go).

But people have been generous. In some cases, even strangers have been generous. In one case, due to a weird mix-up, I stayed at the house of the parents of a stranger, who only knew we were fellow game designers. (Thank you, Stefan, and thank you to Stefan’s parents!) My first booth was a free offer from an amazing designer who was happy to let me sell my games in return for working to sell his, though we didn’t know each other well. My first design teaching work was set up and promoted by someone who first helped me see my own skills twenty years ago, when I was also a stranger to him. Jamie Stegmeier was nice to me in a brief email discussion about kickstarters. The moment I went to my first PAX, I met the TGDA people and saw the work they were doing and that gave me the hope that I could actually publish in Australia, and set me on my course to put Relics out.

And all of this assistance is echoed in all the smaller costs of everything else. I have borrowed lifts and borrowed print outs. Borrowed booth time and borrowed warehouse space. Traded labour to get into events for free. Traded work in kind to get editors or proofreaders or artists. And most of all, I have borrowed courage, and traded strength. Yes, every time I see people with fancy prototypes and impressive booths and amazing designs and somehow magically attracted audience I feel like a terrible failure and wracked by professional jealousy…but I also am inspired. I see people fighting the incredible odds stacked against them, and sharing the wins and the losses. I see old hands not giving up despite it getting harder every year, and new arrivals daring to strive even though they know the same. I see the untrained pushing themselves to learn and the old guard keeping their skills fresh. I see genius flash across design ideas like white lightning, pure and perfect. And I get to tell people that I see it, which to me might be the thing that fuels me most of all.

I would not go so far as to call them my tribe or my family. I’m not someone who easily feels at home anywhere. But even though I always dread putting my work out into exposure, I always get restored and lifted up by being amongst my fellow artists. We are all doing the impossible, facing the impossible, and the one thing we have, the one superpower we can rely on, is we can share that battle. And when I began in tabletop, that was barely the case in this country, and now that has changed.

Did I help that happen? Sure. But every day I walk into the fire of the impossibility of being a game designer, and the only thing that keeps me going is other people’s support. Nothing I have done in the last ten years could have happened without all of these people who didn’t just show me that things were possible, they gave me the help and power to do them. There is no Tin Star Games, and no Steve making things at all, without the TGDA and the ARC, without the amazing help of people at PAX and Freeplay, without the industry fellowship, without the Sydney design community, without a million strangers.

I humbly accept this award, but it is backwards. It takes a village: give them the award.

The World Well is a world-building game designed to create worlds specifically for TTRPG and similar games. It does this is by creating a series of important points of contention and mystery and then having those points be battled over by Factions, made more potent by Fractures and wracked by sudden Falls. This session makes use of the expansion which focusses on using the system for a single city and otherwise our only other ideas to start with were “The Boer War” and “time travel”.

You can get the World Well now on our itch site and the City expansion by subscribing to the Patreon.

Nobody knows where – or when – the city came from. Although there are a few flashes from some far-imagined future, the dominant powers date from the British Empire at the turn of the 20th century – which seems natural since all of history must be leading to that eternal bastion of liberty and truth. Those inhabitants call it Pantempolis: the City of All Time.

At the centre of the city lies the Station, which holds the Gates: twelve gigantic vaults that with careful attunement lead to fixed times and places throughout all of history – Rome under Julius Caesar, Britain under Queen Victoria, Prague under Rudolph II, the Aztecs under the Triple Alliance, the Zulu under Senganzakhona, the Tonga under Momo, Babylon under Hammurabi, China under Wu Zeitan, Mali under Mansa Musa, Vedic India and the Iriquoi Confederacy. Some speculate that other gates might be possible but this is considered a fringe belief (or fringe science). Beyond the walls of the city lies the Timestorms, great roils of thunder and lightning, water and earth, that only the brave or foolhardy dare to explore with their timeships. These folks can reach other times, if guided by a Navigator, and bring back wealth, knowledge and other invidiuals from across time. This gives the Navigator’s Guild great power in the city. Most folks travel to and fro via the Gates. Both systems are heavily tracked, taxed and recorded but of course the rich can get around such things.

Of course, being able to cross the timestreams leads to many problems. The city is guarded by the Paradox Police, who uphold all the laws but one more than any: non debes duplicare – nobody may exist more than once in the city itself. Many find themselves in the city unable to pay for their journey to it, or arriving by accident, and these folks pay off their debts by serving the PP. Of course, many say that the Paradox Police, or their masters, go back in time and arrange for you to arrive penniless. But that’s a very cynical thought. To help people assimilate to the city you are supposed to wear an item of clothing, typically a hat or helmet, from your originating time and place, and new arrivals will be given stand-ins at the gates until they can buy their own. You are also supposed to mingle across time, but some folks insist on building enclaves only for their historical period – New Rome is very snooty, and Victoriana grows larger every year. Many of the more recent citizens (as in those whose history is more modern) look down on tthe anient ones as being primitve, but wealth cuts across all such groups. Some speak of a time which will be beyond all time and will come rushing into the city and erase everyone or replace everyone, but this is foolish superstition. A much more pleasant superstition of the city is that the last digit of your birth year is a horoscope for your nature and fate. On the festival of Gates, Fates and Dates new arrivals are welcome to the city and there are parades, and ceremomies in the Polyopticon, a fine observatory-cum-tea-room where one can view any period of history you might imagine.

Sometimes, people get erased from time, or die before their time, especially since many Pantemporians like to brag they have killed their own grandfather. No amount of historical meddling can seem to change this. In this case, a practice of soul-carrying exists, where a subject has the spirit of the deceased or erased placed along side their mind, usually permanently. The poor are paid handsomely if they volunteer for this, but it is a rare and dangerous process, reserved for the desperate or the powerful.

Factions

The richest family in the city are the Vigeronts, who claim their family history goes back through the Hapsburgs and Merovincians to Alexander the Great. They have invented retrochronostic fermentology, allowing them to take things like alcohol and pickled foodstuffs and un-ferment them, bringing out an incredible new taste. They like to suggest that this made them rich but in fact they are rich because they meddle with time. So much so that they show off by not aging or aging backwards, using retrochronostic engineering and timeloops to avoid change. If this goes awry, a soul-carrier will be used to hold the person until the mistake can be rectified. A lot of this is illegal but they effectively own and control the Paradox Police. Their weakness is that they are ruled by their obsession with geneaology (theirs and others) which they must always establish to be pure, and show this off. They also like to show off by recruiting the most powerful figures from history and reverse-aging them. In some cases – and nobody knows why because retrochronostic technology is a closely guarded secret – de-aging these people reverses or unmakes the things those people did in history. This allows the Vigeronts to pretend they are humanitarians, unmaking great crimes or slaughters.

The Chrononumerologists are a loose collection of amatuer scientists and scholars who study time and the time storms and would dearly like to know how retrochronostic technology works. They are aware that the guards of the Gates can change the gates to go anywhere and anywhen they wish, and that Navigation is not some in-born talent and anyone with a timecompass can do it, and anyone with good enough mathetmatical models can predict the timestorms too. Their expertise means they can cast horoscopes and appear to be extremely accurate, which suggests they can maybe even change history on a personal level with their detailed knowledge. They are well-regarded but lack any organisational power, and suffer from internal division. Without a set agenda, some want to use their knowledge to build a better world, others simply want to invest in historical real estate markets and get rich.

The Causeless are a semi-religious secret society who believe that true power is to have no cause. To enter their ranks you must first find a member and then prove you have killed your own grandfather and survived the ensuing paradoxes, a process that proves you have a divine power above that of others. They believe that if they can figure out where the city came from they can destroy its cause and thus make it unmoored from time and divine like them. Their beliefs in this divine transcendence mean many wish to join their ranks, but as more and more join, they are becoming more reckless. The Causeless know each other and often cluster in shared districts of the city, and thus keep their membership secret, but more and more their actions are easy to spot as they leave chaos and mistakes in their wake.

The Unfinished began as a loose collection of people who felt history had cheated them: snatching away victory or life at the last minute, killing them when young, robbing them of every chance, or worse – some shenanigans caused their entire timeline to vanish or end prematurely. Slowly, these folks found their stories resonating with the poor of Pantempolis, and now the Unfinished argue that the work of the city is Unfinished: it is supposed to be a place to right history’s wrongs, starting with the rich ruling over the poor.

Fractures

The Sixers – Residents of Victoriana have found evidence that anyone whose birthdate ends in a 6 is likely to be a criminal, and have campaigned for the city police to let them exile everyone born with that date from their entire district. This includes plenty of well-off sixers who would lose their livelihood and standing and so they have been campaigning for the city to establish districts for each digit. Lord Neveryoung is an unscrupulous local figure of Victoriana who doesn’t believe the 6 suspicion but is very happy to use it to his own advantage to rise in power and reach the ranks of the ultrawealthy, who have denied his entry on account of him being the son of a tradesperson and thus not of noble blood. Meanwhile, Mr Fatechanger is a rough-hewn figure of no-clear-time who claims for a small fee he can change your birthdate by slipping back into your past, and seems to be legit. Is it legal? Depends if you get caught.

The Bloodstorm – Timestorms always happen far beyond the city, until now. All of a sudden a tiny localised bloodstorm has appeared at random times inside the Telecommiseum. This was once the city’s first aetherial wave station (before that technology was erased from history) and has since been repurposed as the premiere sporting ground of the city, where various bloodsports take place. The storm – believed by some to be drawn to blood and brutality – swallows up athletes and throws them across time, and also deposits other athletes from time into the arena, often to perilous results and terrible injuries. Some Vigeronts have welcomed this as a new and exciting way to find great heroes they can de-age, with one young scion believing he can use it to help remove violence from the timestream. The city hospital has deployed agents for the folks who end up being heavily wounded but one of these agents isn’t healing them at all but stealing the Potentiality of new arrivals for his own nefarious purposes.

The Big Freeze – the Paradox Police have got wind of a terrorist attack being planned on the Day of Gates, Dates and Fates and in order to stop it from happening and uncover the perpetrators they have cancelled time in some streets of the city. Since they are bought and sold by the Vigeronts and corrupt themselves, the time freeze also allows them to plant whatever evidence they wish, which is complicated by the fact that there is a member of the Causeless who is trying to make the terrorist attack happen and kill himself in the explosion so there is no cause of it, and he has found the frozen time areas helpful for covering his tracks. The PP have also used this threat to declare the Unfinished a terrorist organisation and any members can be arrested. Molly Jones, a well-known Unfinished is helping her friends lay low.

Falls

With this new purge against the last-digit-horoscopes, many are suggesting it is all just a silly fancy and should be abandoned. But there are many in the city who feel that even if it is silly it would be giving it up for the wrong reasons. Others want it to maintain power or just their business selling fortunes and jewellery with your year on it. So as it falls, some intensify it all the more, to the point of clannishness and over-emphasis.

There have been a few scares and small terrorist actions in the public squares where meat is traded, normally procured by grabbing pork futures. This has made it too risky to be a future-butcher and the city has had to go back to importing meat. At the same time, the vast fields of grain and barley that grow across the rooftops of the city where they are easily exposed to timewinds so grow fast have become suddenly unmanagable. It is getting harder and harder to predict the timewinds and grow a sufficient harvest in a way that also makes money and isn’t sending some people broke. This will force the city to start importing grain too, leaving them terribly dependent on a history they have been very careless towards…

You can get the World Well now on our itch site and the City expansion by subscribing to the Patreon.

Five Years After is the next game by me coming from Tin Star Games. It deals with apocalyptic events, uncovered in a reverse chronological fashion. This is a session report of a five-player game run at Go Play Brisbane in 2025.

Five years after the event, the world has changed…

Zutroy lives on an isolated farm, where he’s been able to stay out of things and, it seems, enjoy a good lamb casserole. But then Captain Crackle shows up and indicates the farm belongs to them now. Crackle is a masked warlord who drives a cyber truck with a huge electricity transformer on the back. Elsewhere, Fletcher walks through his warehouse filled with mowers, realising he only has one of working engine between them. Lily, a one time high court judge packs her bags to leave the city for good. Captain Crackle visits Hannah who runs the meat network of out of the old morgue and for the first time ever she is late with a delivery. Crackle tells her not to let it happen again or he’ll take her son for his army. He leaves on Jessica’s boat and tells her he will no longer be allowed to go on her expeditions up and down the river: he needs her by his side now, to be sure he can get where he needs to be.

Five months later is when we knew it was over…

Jessica is called into meet Judge Lily, who has taken on the role of head administrator of Brisbane after the armed forces have abandoned them and the government has gone on extended leave. Jessica is asked to use her psychic gifts to protect them but she says they can’t change the future, nobody can. Fletcher is also there and he silently assents to Jessica’s punishment instead of doing what he feels is right. He says he’s a pilot and he definitely has a plane that can go get help. Hannah is by the judge’s side, too. She bears the news that the food stores are all gone. Lily doesn’t have the time or capacity to see that Hannah’s organisation skills might be good but her mind is broken, and Hannah weeps alone after the meeting. A figure in a mask accuses the judge of failing them all. On his farm, Zutroy watches the zombies eat his sheep and looks in his fridge: there is only cat food. Chunky Lamb Casserole.

Five weeks after, the city was in chaos…

As the city burns, Lily sits in her apartment alone. She always told herself she was self sufficient but she knows she needs others. She runs into Hannah who is bleeding but rebuffs all offers of help, assuring the judge that Lily will never not be able to rely on her. Hannah never needs help and never makes mistakes. Lily and Hannah call Jessica, the famous psychic for advice, if it’s true that the Whitsundays are a safe haven, but her powers have abandoned her. Zutroy uses his mower to mow down zombies and a few sheep by accident (there’s plenty more where that came from), surrendering to the bloodlust. Fletcher runs to an airfield and hammers on the door. It’s his sister’s office and her plane and her pilots licence but he finds her dead. She had a map on the wall of the islands off the coast. Fletcher takes her hat and goggles. He’s a pilot now, it seems.

Five days after, we had no idea how bad it was…

Sirens wail and the military and the cops patrol the city but a wedding can’t stop just because there’s some health emergency. It’s a big beautiful posh affair with food provided direct from paddock to plate by Zutroy. Jessica comes for reasons she can’t explain, only to meet Hannah who knows someone who has a clue about Jessica’s mysterious childhood … someone who is acting strangely and biting people. The secret is lost, Zutroys best friend is devoured, Hannah discovers good and bad people alive suffer. Everyone looks to the celebrant, Judge Lily Toomes for guidance and she finds herself at a loss. A few survivors rush into the car park with the bridezilla in the lead. She grabs her wedding car and when others try to get in she tells them it’s her special day not theirs and leaves them to die. Some smash the glass windows cutting her face but she drives off triumphant in her ribboned cyber truck.

Five hours after the first moment, we began our destruction…

A hush falls over Brisbane at night. Jessica appears on the news telling them about a future of blood, where the masked bride brings death. She is ridiculed. Fletcher is watching the news and doesn’t see his cat run away. Hannah tells her parents she hates them for sending her to boarding school and leaves on bad terms. Judge Lily quits being a judge saying she can’t handle the pressure of deciding people’s fates. Zutroy borrows Fletcher’s best mower to tidy his lawn but the bride to be tasting his menu says it’s not good enough and he should do better. He finds a new kind of mushroom to add to his dishes, not noticing the effect it has had on his livestock.

Five years later, Fletcher visits Zutroy and takes his mower back and uses it to complete his makeshift plane, which they combine with Jessica’s boat to make it a sailplane. Lily doesn’t leave: she tells Hannah she’s sorry she never checked in, but if she comes now, she and her son can maybe reach safety with the plane.

Outside in the darkness, between them and the river, electricity crackles.