Into the Portal #1: Now Entering

Welcome to the new place! Take off your coat and put down your stuff, hopefully we'll be here a while. After literally years of musing about migrating off of my longstanding Wordpress blog and onto something a little more modern, I have finally gotten myself set up on Ghost, complete with the domain I've been camped on for a good minute. And this is not only a blog, but a newsletter to boot, for anyone who prefers reading my rambling in their inbox.

While Bluesky is a great spot for me to whip off the thoughts of a moment, I want to get back into writing a bit more at length, and not just during the end-of-year season when I usually pick my blogging habit back up for a month or two before Christmas. I want to really dig into my development as a TTRPG designer, and my Portalier Press work, and this seems like a great way to do it.

So... Our new digs! It's fairly simple right now, partly by design and partly to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Plans are in motion to take this site to the next level: a proper Portalier Press logo, for one sorely-needed thing, and expanding the Pages out a bit more. But for now, this gets the ball rolling.

Why Into the Portal? Why a blog name at all, given the my name's right there on the domain? First off, it sounds cool. But more seriously, long-term I don't really want this to be a personal blog, though it's definitely starting out as one. I want this to grow into a home for TTRPG writing from the Portalier Press team as a whole. The blog is anchored at my personal domain right now, but I have dreams of a bustling team with all sorts of thoughts, opinions and expertise to share.

And so, Into the Portal, because I want to invite all of y'all to peer into the portal of our development process, and be forever haunted by the shit you see. (But in a fun way.)

What's next for the blog here? First steps will likely be lightly updating and porting over my favourite posts from the old blog – the Creative Check-In, the Markus posts, etc. – as I work on some new material to post here. Development diaries, thoughts, link lists, and of course any games as they're ready to fuck around with. Plus I'll probably try to do one of these big check-ins every month, as well. So... keep your eyes peeled! And maybe subscribe as well, if you're worried about missing anything.

Summer break was a bit of a breakthrough for Portalier Press behind the scenes. While it's been steadily simmering in the background of a lot of other things, it's now starting to feel like 2025 is the year we'll actually, properly, start putting ourselves and our work out there. I don't ever want to be the guy who talks a big game and never releases anything, so it's exciting to be on the road to sharing some actual games with y'all.

On that front, I pulled out a few smaller games I'd rough-drafted (usually in my Notes app) a couple years ago, and started kicking them into shape: Fae Gothic, The Box, Storybuilders, Eternal. I re-released Lasers & Feelings hack Fae Gothic via Bluesky, and some folks were kind enough to check it out. The Box (which I also teased on Bluesky) and Storybuilders are pretty much ready for ashcan release, and Eternal – which, unlike the others, was more of a concept than a full draft – is shaping into something really fun. These are all small TTRPGs of a few pages, mostly GMless single-session experiences of different vibes, and I'm proud of all of them for different reasons.

On top of those, there are two smaller games I'm developing alongside the brilliant Megan MacKay for Portalier's slate, both of which have also been drafted for ages and just need some care to get them ready for prime time. It's really exciting to be inviting Megan properly into the fold to build fun things at Portalier, as time allows, and to play in the game space together after being co-writers for so long in other forms.

(I'm also fucking around with an exciting concept I can only really call an epistolary combat micro-ttprg, so we will see if that one comes together...)

Beyond those, Portalier Press is cooking a handful of more ambitious projects. The newest on the slate, mid-size TTRPG Unbecoming, is slowly starting to take shape; I haven't spoken publicly about this one yet, but I think it will be really fucking cool if it comes together. Two others have gotten stalled out just before the 'drafted and ready for playtest' stage: Devil's Hollow, our Wickedness-inspired GMless TTRPG about monster hunter siblings at the end of the world, and Junker's Peace, our post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley-esque TTRPG about making a quaint little home on a junkyard planet. I suspect this is a combo of ADHD block on finishing things combined with playtesting-related yips; one major initiative is to push past that to get both to the table for some sort of ashcan release in '25 or '26.

And then, as always, there are a handful of exciting ideas that are somewhere between concept and viable draft that will either fix into something really cool, or dissolve into theoretical dust. Hopefully more on those as they start to find their form.

Finally, there is the shell of what will be a Portalier Press-specific page on this site that will hopefully be built out into its own website, with its own domain, once we have more released projects out in the world. For now, portalierpress.com and portalierpress.net (plus a couple of other related domains) redirect to that page, as we start to establish it a little more.

It's an exciting time! Looking forward to building something really cool here.

In the last few months, I've been eagerly adding to my TTRPG collection. And since I somehow ended up the rare Millennial with little practice taking photos, I figured it might be nice to kick off this new blog with getting some exercise on that front: grabbing pics of these absolutely fucking gorgeous games.

A group of stunning, very different games, a number of which I have coveted for a while and others more recent discoveries. DIE RPG and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast have been games I've been eager to explore practically since I heard of them: DIE's thematic character classes and Yazeba's innovations on roleplaying & storytelling both got me salivating when I first read about them. The Thousand Year Old Vampire also enticed me from its stellar reputation as one of the best solo TTRPGs out there, and Stewpot's approach of tackling character through a collection of thematic storytelling minigames sounded really cool.

The Wildsea caught me mostly on basic premise and the art, plus the fact that everyone on Bluesky was talking about it, while I hadn't heard of An Exquisite Crime or Icarus before I stumbled upon them while I was browsing online, and both sounded really interesting. And Wilderfeast was also one I only heard about by stumbling on it; I picked it up expressly as a possible influence for Junker's Peace, as I was curious to see how they approached cooking & recipes given that Junker's also plays in that space.

I know I'm going to need to set aside a proper day to really look through the bulk of these, which is both enticing and difficult to do with the various projects I'm juggling. It's been helpful that I've commandeered my mother's old tablet as a TTRPG reading device, which has helped me start ripping through DIE RPG. I've also had some luck reading through Thousand Year Old Vampire and Stewpot, as well as recently starting back into Pasión de las Pasiones, which sounds incredibly fun.

With all of these amazing games (and a bunch more on my shelf), I really hope I someday get the chance to play all of them! Though, with my collection getting broader and deeper and my play group three years into a committed D&D 5e campaign, we'll see how long it takes me to pull the trigger on playing something new.

I'm also eager to read through Slugblaster, as I recently got utterly addicted to My First Dungeon's Slugblaster actual play. Like, 'listen to an episode before bed and accidentally woosh past my bedtime to cram a second episode in before sleep' type addicted. I'll admit, I picked it up largely because my colleague and friend Carolyn Page is among the cast, and I consider myself a card-carrying member of her hype crew, but the whole endeavour is so fun and charming, and the system so clean and fresh, that I couldn't turn it off. (Sometimes to the detriment of my sleep... on worknights......) I'm very curious to crack open the game book and see more about how the game works on the page. In the meantime, I'm dying to listen to the final two episodes, and I'd recommend the show to anyone.

Have you picked up anything new in the TTRPG space lately? Play anything new and fun in recent weeks? Or hell, have you played any of these and got tips for me when I can finally get one to the table?

"Rules in Practice, Part One" [Modern Mythology]: The beginning of a blog series looking at the roles & interactions of system and style in playing TTRPGs, including how the 'interpretive layer' is a major reason why every table can play the same game differently. I haven't read the follow-up posts or the recommended readings cited at the bottom, but based on this first post, I'm looking forward to it.

"Austin Walker's Realis finds the magic in language" [Rascal News]: I don't know if I've fallen as hard in love with a game from an interview, from a description, as I have Realis. A character being defined by a broad statement they choose, and then having it whittled down to a powerful, specific statement through failure and experience... As a word-loving writer, this game hooked me at square one. I'm dying to read through it in depth and get it to a table.
Additional Reading: "Realis ditches traditional character sheets for prose poetry" [Rascal News], "In Realis, Surreal is the new Real" [Rascal News]

"The Seven-Part Pact: The Joys of Being Overwhelmed" [The Many-Sided Newsletter]: Brian Flaherty of Many-Sided Media writes about the experience of playing the mysterious, mythical The Seven-Part Pact, the new brain-shattering TTRPG from Jay Dragon that encompasses "seven 30-page codexes—each containing their own domain-specific mini boardgame for each of the seven wizards—and the gargantuan 200+ page Grimoire of world-altering spells". I am terrified to ever play 7PP, and yet – like Brian talks about here – I imagine if I do, it's all I'll ever think about again.
Additional Reading: "The Seven Part Pact: the First Actual GM-Full Game" [Kieron Gillen], "The Lazy Professor's Guide to Organizing a Seven Part Pact" [Dr. Em Friedman]

"Immersion and Authoring: Two Pillars of TTRPG Playstyles" [ThoughtPunks]: A basic primer on the idea of players' immersion and authoring in TTRPG, offering a useful lens for looking at a game and how it frames the relationship between the players and the game.

"Design Thoughts: Welcome to the Silly Goose Convention is maybe a Bad Game" [moreblueberries]: It takes a lot of guts to dig into the, well, guts of a game you've made publicly and talk about its design flaws. But every time I see a designer do it, it's so interesting (and helpful!) to see how they re-examine their work and solve the problems they encounter. This post is a quick and simple breakdown of game designer Elliot Davis seeing a handful of specific problems in a game he made, and finding clean solutions that help clarify the game's intent and play.

"Women’s Histories in Historical Games" [Historical Games Network]: Not explicitly about TTRPGs, but an interesting look at how historical game worlds can allow players to explore issues of gender without games being about those elements.